BOMB Issue 108, Summer 2009 by BOMB Magazine

Drawings On Site: Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen May 9–October 11, 2009

Body in Fragments August 21, 2009–February 14, 2010

Joaquín Torres-García: Wood Constructions September 25, 2009–January 3, 2010

Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil October 30, 2009–February 14, 2010

Photo: George Hixson

A neighborhood of art in Houston’s Museum District

T HE M ENIL C OLLECTION Open Wednesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–7 p.m. 1515 Sul Ross Houston, Texas 77006 713-525-9400 Admission and parking are always free

Also on view throughout the year: a rotating selection of works from the permanent collection, including ancient, Byzantine, Oceanic, Surrealist, modern and contemporary art; painting, sculpture, and works on paper at the Cy Twombly Gallery; and the Dan Flavin light installation at Richmond Hall. Visit our website for a complete exhibition and program schedule.

www.menil.org

contents editor’s choice

BOMB Number 108 SUMMER 2009

artists on artists Michael Combs by Rob Fischer Dan Wolgers by George Negroponte Xaviera Simmons by Adam Pendleton

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BOMB SPECIFIC by Carrie Moyer

Blast from the past winter 1994 Dan Graham by Mike Metz

THE WICK by David Kramer

interviews

on the cover: Joe Bradley, Schuperman, 2009, grease pencil on canvas, 100 × 112 inches. Courtesy of CANADA, New York and Peres Projects, Los Angeles, Berlin.

ART harry Dodge stanya Kahn by Michael Smith Dodge and Kahn’s comedy takes the form of high art in lowbrow drag with mythic accoutrements, fringe weirdos, and activist slants. They talked (offcamera) with fellow performer Michael Smith about charged fragility and being abducted by the moment.

LITERATURE Jacques Roubaud by Marcella Durand In The Loop, Roubaud’s most recent novel available in English, the selfproclaimed anti-memoirist probes the precision of his memories with mathematical zeal. Yet he generously reminisces here—on his involvement with Oulipo, his experience of several 20thcentury wars, and more.

MUSIC bill Callahan by Jon Raymond Novelist Jon Raymond calls Callahan’s early music as Smog, “gorgeous, literate, and bleak-hearted.” Celebrating his new album Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle, Raymond taps into Callahan’s passion for boxing and influences like DC hardcore and the Meat Puppets.

contents Film GUY Maddin Isabella Rossellini Guy Maddin, consummate Winnipegian experimentalist, and Isabella Rossellini, his Scanditalian muse, on what else but their dream-life, mothers and fathers, classical drama, and, yes, melodrama!

ART Carrie mae Weems by Dawoud Bey Carrie Mae Weems has a muse, an avatar, an alter-ego. Photographer Dawoud Bey and Weems discuss how her guide—this stand-in for history— bears witness to race, class, and migration.

L ITERATURE Nam Le by Charles D’Ambrosio D’Ambrosio wrote of Nam Le’s prizewinning story collection, The Boat, “This book journeys across time and space, history and continents.” The authors roam across the literary terrain of Hemingway, Greene, and an asymptotic ocean.

ART DIKE Blair JOE Bradley Artists Dike Blair and Joe Bradley set the record straight on irony and sincerity, kitsch and the sublime, anarchy and aestheticism.

theater Nature Theater of Oklahoma by Young Jean Lee Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška, founders and directors of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, are not from Oklahoma, but their troupe’s name reveals plenty about their inclusive, playful, and daring approach to their medium.

First Proof bomb’s Literary Supplement Lou Reed cover portfolio Frederic Tuten Tara Goedjen Hildebrand Pam Dick Colum McCann Raphael Rubinstein Alan Gilbert Adam Simon and Matthew Sharpe First Proof is sponsored in part by the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation. This issue is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. The Artists on Artists Series is sponsored by the W.L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts. BOMB Supporters include Foundation 20 21, the Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative, the Thanksgiving Fund, and BOMB’s Trustees.

BOMB (ISSN 0743–3204) (USPS #773–130) is published March, June, September, and December for $22.00 per year by: New Art Publications 80 Hanson Place, #703 Brooklyn, NY 11217 718–636–9100 generalinquiries@bombsite.com Periodicals postage paid at Brooklyn, NY, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER Send address changes to: BOMB, Subscription Department P. O. Box 23024 Jackson, MS 39225–3024 USA Newsstand Distribution Newsstand circulation through Disticor Newsstand Services. For more information: Call 718–636-9100 x106 Email laura@bombsite.com

BOMB is indexed in Humanities International Complete. The entire contents of BOMB and BOMBsite.com are copyright © 2009 by New Art Publications, Inc., and may not be reproduced in any manner, either in whole or in part, without written permission from the publisher. All rights are reserved. BOMB SUBSCRIPTIONS To order, call 866–354–0334 Subscription Department P. O. Box 23024 Jackson, MS 39225–3024 One year/four issues PLUS one free US: $22.00 Canadian: $30.00 International: $42.00 Subscribe online at BOMBsite.com.

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BOMB BOMB STAFF PUBLISHER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Betsy Sussler ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Mary-Ann Monforton SENIOR EDITOR Mónica de la Torre

PROOFREADERS Georgia Cool Nicole Steinberg CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ART EDITOR Saul Ostrow

CIRCULATION CONSULTANT The Mag Consortium: Laura Howard

ART Tina Barney, Ross Bleckner, Cecily Brown, Adam Fuss, Joe Fyfe, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Abby Goldstein, Stuart Horodner, Anthony Huberman, Judy Hudson, David Humphrey, Roberto Juarez, Shirley Kaneda, Nell McClister, Amanda Means, Olu Oguibe, Bruce Pearson, Lucy Raven, Clifford Ross, and Mimi Thompson

WEB MANAGER Ben Handzo

ARCHITECTURE EDITOR Carlos Brillembourg

CREATIVE DIRECTOR, ONLINE SPONSORSHIPS David Goodman

ARCHITECTURE Diana Agrest, Deborah Gans, Donald Shillingburg

CIRCULATION & DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATE Alexis Boehmler

FILM AND THEATER Jon Robin Baitz, Liza Bear, Lawrence Chua, Leon Falk, Bette Gordon, Carlos Gutiérrez, Linda Hoaglund, Romulus Linney, Craig Lucas, Mark Magill, Richard Maxwell, Evangeline Morphos, Susan Shacter, Paula Vogel, and Mac Wellman

MANAGING EDITOR Nick Stillman DIRECTOR OF MARKETING & SPECIAL PROJECTS Paul W. Morris

ASSISTANT EDITOR Lena Valencia ART DIRECTION & DESIGN Everything Studio Special Projects: Abby Goldstein FINANCIAL CONSULTANT Howard Seligman WEB CONSULTANTS Fred Krughoff Rick Frankel BOARD OF TRUSTEES Tim Nye, Chairman Cary Brown-Epstein Paul Cantor Rosemary Carroll Frances Dittmer Eric Fischl Klaus Kertess Heather Kirby Michèle Gerber Klein Edward Tyler Nahem George Negroponte Ellen Phelan Betsy Sussler BOARD OF ADVISERS Gabriella De Ferrari Andrew Fierberg Nicole Klagsbrun Alexander S.C. Rower David Salle Melissa Sandor Ira Silverberg Madeline Weinrib INTERNS Galina Arnaut, Mary Dwan, Richard Goldstein, Brittnee King, Katherine Sanders, Sage Savage, Shoshana Shmuluvitz, and Himali Soin

MUSIC David Byrne, Anthony Coleman, David Krasnow, George Lewis, Alan Licht, Mike McGonigal, Tim Nye, Vernon Reid, Marc Ribot, Ned Sublette, Julia Wolfe, and John Zorn WRITING Esther Allen, Robert Antoni, Deborah Baker, Tom Bolt, Carmen Boullosa, Edwidge Danticat, Deborah Eisenberg, Daniel Flores y Ascencio, Alan Gilbert, Francisco Goldman, Kimiko Hahn, Matthea Harvey, John Haskell, Amy Hempel, A.M. Homes, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Kushner, Jonathan Lethem, Jaime Manrique, Patrick McGrath, Brian McMullen, Mary Morris, Silvana Paternostro, Caryl Phillips, Robert Polito, Minna Proctor, Francine Prose, Daniel Shapiro, Nicole Steinberg, Lynne Tillman, Colm Tóibín, Frederic Tuten, and Benjamin Weissman EDITORS AT LARGE Gary Indiana and Glenn O’Brien CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Adam Bartos, Sarah Charlesworth, Sally Gall, Nan Goldin, Ben Handzo, Aric Mayer, Elliot Schwartz, and William Wegman PRINTER WestCan Printing Group, Printed in Canada

READER Justine Wegner

BOMB

contributors

Michael Smith Michael Smith is a performance/video/ installation artist. The Voyage of Growth and Discovery, a video installation made in collaboration with Mike Kelley, will be exhibited at SculptureCenter in Queens this upcoming fall, and with West of Rome in Los Angeles in the summer of 2010. Smith lives in Brooklyn and Austin, where he teaches at the University of Texas.

Marcella Durand Marcella Durand’s most recent collections of poetry are Traffic & Weather and AREA, both published in 2008. She is currently working on translating Michèle Métail’s Les horizons du sol/Earth’s Horizons, a history of the geological formation of Marseille written within an Oulipian formal constraint.

shorts—includes the features The Saddest Music in the World, Brand Upon the Brain!, and My Winnipeg. He is the recipient of numerous distinctions, including the Telluride Silver Medal for Life Achievement in 1995 and the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award in 2006. Maddin is also a writer and Distinguished Filmmaker in Residence at the University of Manitoba.

Isabella Rossellini Isabella Rossellini is an actress, filmmaker, author, philanthropist, and model. Her most memorable performances include her role as Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet and as Perdita Durango in Wild at Heart, both directed by David Lynch. She has starred in a number of Guy Maddin’s films, including The Saddest Music in the World, My Dad Is 100 Years Old, and, most recently, the installation loop Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair commissioned by the Rotterdam Film Festival earlier this year. She is the screenwriter, co-director, and star of the Green Porno films available at the Sundance Channel online.

Jon Raymond Jon Raymond is the author of The HalfLife, a novel, and Livability, a collection of stories, two of which were made into the films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. He is an editor of Plazm magazine, and his writing has appeared in Bookforum, Artforum, The Village Voice, and Tin House, among other publications. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Dawoud Bey Dawoud Bey’s career began in 1975 with the Harlem, USA photographs, later exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, including a survey at the Walker Art Center. His book Class Pictures was published by Aperture in 2007 and an exhibition of the same title is touring US museums through 2011.

Guy Maddin Guy Maddin’s filmic output to date—nine feature-length projects and innumerable

Charles D’Ambrosio Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of The Point and Other Stories; Orphans, a

Michael Smith photo by General Idea. Marcella Durand photo by Richard O’Russa. Jon Raymond photo by Emily Chenoweth. Guy Maddin photo by Electra Goncharova. Isabella Rossellini photo by Jody Shapiro.

collection of essays; and The Dead Fish Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/ Faulkner Award. He is a 2008 Lannan Fellow and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Dike Blair Dike Blair lives and works in New York City where Feature Inc. represents him. His first solo museum exhibition opens in September 2009 at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina. Blair is an occasional writer and teacher. His book Again: Selected Interviews and Essays was published by Whitewalls in 2007.

Joe Bradley Joe Bradley is an artist based in New York. His work has been featured in group exhibitions such as Abstract America at the Saatchi Gallery in London and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He is represented by CANADA in New York, and Peres Projects in LA and Berlin. Eat at Joe’s, a solo exhibition of his new work, will open at Peres Projects in Berlin this coming fall.

Young Jean Lee Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment will tour to over ten venues in 2009. Her collection of plays Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays is just out from TCG. She will direct her next play, a weird adaptation of King Lear, at Soho Rep in January 2010. She is the artistic director of Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company and the recipient of the ZKB Patronage Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel as well as a 2007 Obie Award.

Dawoud Bey copyright Bart Harris. Charles D’Ambrosio photo by Holly Cundiff. Dike Blair photo by Sjoerd Doting. Joe Bradley photo by Ben Handzo. Young Jean Lee photo by Gene Pittman, courtesy of Walker Art Center.

BOMB

BOMB’s 28th Anniversary Gala & Silent Auction

Thanks to everyone who made the evening such a success! Visit bombsite.com to watch videos of toasts by Clifford Ross, Marina Abramovic´, and Lisa Phillips, and for more party photos from this fabulous event!

April 17, 2009 The National Arts Club, New York City Honoring: Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed Alanna Heiss Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham 10

above: Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed; Elan Gentry, Alina Kohlem, and Sandy Rower; Betsy Sussler and Alanna Heiss; Helen Remmel and Heather Kirby. below: Marina Abramovic´; Michèle Gerber Klein and Christian Cota; Karin Waisman, Carlos Brillembourg, and Tim Nye; Lisa Phillips, Laurie Simmons, and Carroll Dunham.

photos 1-5 by Daniel Simon. photos 6-8 by Jonathan Ziegler, courtesy of Patrick McMullan.

Patrons LEADERS $40,000 and over

PATRONS $1,000 to $2,499

Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative Foundation 20 21, Sustaining

Shelley Fox Aarons & Philip E. Aarons Ann & Steven Ames Anonymous Anonymous Claudia Aronow Mary Boone Carlos Brillembourg, Archive Project Cecily Brown Rosemary Carroll Janice Gardner Cecil Cheim & Read Paula Cooper Jennifer Clifford Danner & William Danner Foundation for Contemporary Art Foundation for Fairer Capitalism Linda & Anthony Grant Carol Greene Amy & Ronald Guttman William Talbott Hillman Foundation Barbara Jakobson Cecily Kahn & David Kapp Nicole Klagsbrun Charles Mary Kubricht Ursula & Paul Lowerre Sylvia Plimack Mangold & Robert Mangold Edward T. Nahem Jean Pagliuso Dawn M. Palo Ellen Phelan & Joel Shapiro Nancy Delman Portnoy Marla Prather & Jonathan Schiller Kimberly & Jean Putzer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn Jane L. Rosenthal Clifford Ross Toni Ross David Salle Fred Sherman Per Skarstedt Melissa & Robert Soros Susan S. Stanley Michael Stout Mimi Thompson & James Rosenquist Karin Waisman & Carlos Brillembourg

SPONSORS $20,000 to $39,999 Bertha & Isaac Liberman Foundation Heather M. Kirby National Endowment for the Arts New York City Department of Cultural Affairs New York State Council on the Arts The Thanksgiving Fund The W. L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation DONORS $10,000 to $19,999 Bank of America Bloomberg Helaine & Paul Cantor Frances Dittmer Family Foundation Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Dorothy Lichtenstein Tim Nye The Reed Foundation, Americas Alexander S.C. Rower PUBLISHER’S CIRCLE $5,000 to $9,999 Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Americas Lawton Fitt & James McLaren Barbara Gladstone Michéle Gerber Klein David Teiger Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation PUBLISHER’S COUNCIL $2,500 to $4,999 Estrellita & Daniel Brodsky Giuliana Bruno & Andrew Fierberg Melva Bucksbaum & Raymond Learsy Chatham Importers, Inc. Mr. & Mrs. Gustavo Cisneros The Daniel & Estrellita Brodsky Family Foundation, Americas Frances Dittmer Empire Merchants Cary Brown-Epstein & Steven Epstein Agnes Gund Stephen M. Holl Mahnaz Ispahani & Adam Bartos Jill & Peter Kraus The Lurie Family Foundation Minagawa Art Lines Pannonia Foundation Fern & Lenard Tessler Madeline Weinrib Angela Westwater, Sperone Westwater

bomb’s ARCHIVE PROJECT BOMB expresses its deep gratitude to the following donors for supporting the digitization of BOMB’s archival interviews—over 900 and counting—free on BOMBsite.com. This is a work in progress, to be completed by the end of 2009. New York State Council on the Arts: Eric Fischl Heather Kirby Cary Brown-Epstein Paul Cantor For information on how to become a donor, contact Betsy Sussler at 718-636-9100 x 103. bomb PRINT CLUB The following artists generously donated their talent to the BOMB Print Club. Steve DiBenedetto Joanne Greenbaum Sharon Harper Oliver Herring Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle Paul Pfeiffer Brian Tolle To purchase a print or become a member of the BOMB Print Club, please contact Mary-Ann Monforton at 718-636-9100 x 105. bomb Portrait project The following artists generously donated their talent to the BOMB Portrait Project. Adam Fuss Robert Polidori Clifford Ross Laurie Simmons Fred Wilson

BENEFACTORS $500 to $999

BOMB Artists Draw, 2009 Gregory Botts Joe Bradley Echo Eggebrecht Eric Fischl Karl Haendel Adam Helms David Kramer Keith Mayerson James Nares Danica Phelps David Salle Billy Sullivan Jason Tomme Kara Walker

The HeyDay Foundation Judith Linhares Marian Goodman Gallery Lief D. Rosenblatt Arlene Shechet & Mark Epstein Philip Lyford Sussler Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia William Wurm FRIENDS $250 to $499 Laurie Chemla Carmela Ciuraru Jane & James Cohan Catherine J. Douglass Galerie Lelong David Goodman Alice Judelson The Kitchen Club Suydam Lansing Barbara London Anthony McCall William R. Peelle, Jr. Susan Penzner William Rees Jane Rose Martine Rubenstein Jill Stuart Lauren Watkins Raúl Zorrilla

BOMB GALA BOMB extends heartfelt thanks to the artists who generously donated work to BOMB’s 28th Anniversary Silent Auction and Gala Benefit, 2009: Vito Acconci Ellen Berkenblit Paul Bloodgood Robert Brinker Alejandro Cesarco Michelle Charles David Clarkson Patricia Cronin Carl D’Alvia Steven DiBenedetto Tony Fitzpatrick Charles Goldman Joanne Greenbaum Vicente Grondona Josefina Guilisasti Rachel Harrison Mary Heilmann Leslie Hewitt Judy Hudson Jacqueline Humphries Alfredo Jaar Bill Jacobson Rashid Johnson Roberto Juarez Shirley Kaneda Jane Kaplowitz Deborah Kass Mel Kendrick Charles Mary Kubricht Guillermo Kuitca Louise Lawler Cristóbal Lehyt Kalup Linzy Chris Lipomi Josephine Meckseper Marilyn Minter John Newman Lorenzo Pace & Anthony Crisafulli Roxy Paine Bruce Pearson Joyce Pensato Tristan Perich Paul Pfeiffer Martha Rosler Clifford Ross Jackie Saccoccio Peter Saul Richard Serra Arlene Shechet Ward Shelley Cindy Sherman Gedi Sibony James Siena Roman Signer Ned Smyth Nancy Spero Pat Steir Catherine Sullivan Mickalene Thomas Alan Vega Lawrence Weiner Matthew Weinstein

Editor’s choice life and “commercial art” of Joe Shuster, illustrator and co-creator of Superman. Yoe wrote the book after discovering Nights of Horror, a ’50s porn magazine, whose unsigned illustrations he immediately recognized as Shuster’s. After Shuster sued DC Comics for the rights to Superman— which he’d sold for a pitiful $130—and lost, he was destitute. It was then that he illustrated the 16 issues of Nights of Horror, all packed with voyeurism and BDSM (bondage-discipline dominance-submission sadism-masochism). When the Brooklyn Thrill Killers, a violent group of teenage neo-Nazis in the mid-’50s, cited Nights of Horror as their inspiration, nearly every copy of the magazine was destroyed and it became the centerpiece of a Supreme Court trial on indecency.

Blank Spots on the Map by Trevor Paglen Dutton, 2009 Ten years ago, during my first-ever trip to Long Island, I was arrested in Montauk for federal trespassing. Local lore accepted it as fact that Montauk Air Force Station and nearby Camp Hero were operating sites for government tests in mind control and time travel, known as The Montauk Project. When my thrill-seeking gang of friends and I slid through barbed wire into Montauk’s Air Force Station, gun-brandishing authorities pounced all over us seconds after crossing the fence. It’s the closest I’ve been to “the black world.” In his third book, artist and “experimental geographer” Trevor Paglen unfurls his research of an American geography entirely off the map—one of confidential satellites and secret prisons—that he calls the black world. Having been in the works for seven years, Blank Spots On the Map parallels Paglen’s other pet project: collecting patches (with bizarrely hermetic iconography) given to Pentagon officials involved in black world missions, beautifully documented in his quasi-artist’s book I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me. Blank Spots is a chatty travelogue of his efforts to pry open the government’s black holes with a series of (sometimes less than productive, but always fascinating) meetings with participants in secret government projects and through photographs of governmental satellites which he recently exhibited at Bellwether Gallery in New York. Paglen persistently equates his satellite photos with the early

photographs of the American West by Muybridge and Watkins—documents that officialized previous geographical blank spots, at least to white men. In a nation where frontier exploration is emblematic to identity, it’s ironic that our secretive government of the present prefers that citizens like Paglen not explore what is unknown. Predictably, authoritative obstacles lurk for every mountain he hiked, down each dirt road he followed. Paglen is the terror generation’s Robert Smithson, only the world he shows hiding in plain sight has become even more sinister and secretive than that of Smithson’s ’60s. —Nick Stillman is managing editor of BOMB. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster by Craig Yoe Abrams ComicArts, 2009 The notion of secret identity is celebrated cross-culturally; worldwide, the entertainment and service industries exploit its implicit escapism, that very human urge to live out something beyond the ordinary, out of the grasp of the everyday. Secret identities have wandered through time, from the monstrous masks worn in animist tribal rituals to SecondLife avatars. They crop up in Shakespeare’s plays, The Twilight Saga series, and Mad Men. Their appeal is their romantic ambiguity—the tension between opposing personas within the same character. This potent theme fuels Craig Yoe’s book Secret Identity, which explores the

Trevor Paglen. Nine Reconnaissance Satellites over the Sonora Pass, 2008, C-Print, 60 × 48 inches. Courtesy of Bellwether Gallery, New York, and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.

The drawings in Secret Identity are pure camp: Shuster’s women are impossibly voluptuous, as tall as Amazons. Nights of Horror’s cast of high-heeled vixens and fedora-wearing mystery men are foils to the Superman characters: vampy versions of Lois Lane and her sister Lucy as well as Clark Kent look-alikes brandish shackles, whips, cages, even red ants. We could interpret Shuster’s fetish art as an expression of hostility and revenge toward the industry he helped

Joe Shuster drawings for Nights of Horror Vol. I and Vol. II. Courtesy of Abrams.

Editor’s choice make massive. But by drawing a parallel between the secret identities of Shuster and Superman, Yoe suggests a deeper meaning to his drawings. As Shuster assumed his own secret identity as a fetish artist, his Superman characters gained new identities as actors in Nights of Horror. In the repressive atmosphere of the ’50s, his BDSM art articulated the darkness and ambiguity of sex, illustrating what Susan Sontag wrote about camp: “The most refined form of … sexual pleasure consists in going against the grain of one’s sex.” —Shoshana Shmuluvitz is an English teacher and an editorial intern at BOMB. Version Fest, Chicago Having just celebrated its eighth incarnation last April and May, Chicago’s Version Fest is a ten-day mash-up of curatorial projects, public interventions, musical events, and academic forums. The festival spans the burgeoning artist neighborhood of Bridgeport and animates the area’s longstanding cultural centers and newer galleries. In part, Version Fest represents the success of a Chicago art scene not overrun by developers, as the neighboring Pilsen community has been. The NFO Expo, a kind of non-commercial art fair, collected work by dozens of artists and organizations. Interactive booths featured work such as Daniel Mellis’s National Identity Renunciation Bureau—where individuals eschewed their nation without disavowing United States citizenship in affidavits signed by the artist—and Joe Baldwin’s Mobile Garden, renderings of gardens on flatbed trains attached to Chicago’s L train system that play on the local tradition of green roof gardens (Mayor Daley’s green roof initiative for Chicago was the first of its kind). The collective Free University offered workshops and events on topics such as alternatives to standard academic models, particularly interesting in light of the recent surge of museum-based educational programs. Version Fest’s events culminated in Chicago’s first art parade, run along the same streets where the more conventional Art Chicago opened the following week. It was a nice statement to the city whose cultural priorities have been more tourist than artist-focused. Overall, Version Fest emanates a genuine civic dialog, with a lack of pretension and an earnest desire to activate through art. —Melissa Potter is a Chicago-based artist and teacher who has exhibited at venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts and White Columns, where she was in the exhibition Regarding Gloria. She is founder of the feminist art collective Art364B and a two-time Fulbright recipient.

Ugly Duckling Presse It’s tough being a bohemian these days. Money is tight, rents are still high, and most of the good jobs for writers are in academia. Yet the Ugly Duckling Presse collective has managed to channel last century’s avant-garde bohemianism into the present while creating one of the most dedicated and energetic independent poetry publishers around. Its members share the responsibilities of running the press, although specific tasks—website, publicity, bookkeeping—are assigned to those with the relevant skills. Individual editors oversee particular book series like the Dossier or Eastern European Poets series, but any editor can propose publishing a manuscript, provided funds can be found for it. Being a bohemian in the 21st century means applying for grants, pooling time

and resources, utilizing the Internet, and developing a marketing plan—all of which Ugly Duckling Presse has done. It has a nifty annual subscription service whereby $100 guarantees receiving everything the press produces that year, usually between 25 and 30 books, chapbooks, artists’ books, magazines, broadsides, and postcards, most of them with a handmade element frequently involving some combination of letterpress and collage. With initial roots in Dada-inspired strategies of the absurd, Ugly Duckling Presse became more widely known with the publication of Eastern European and Russian writing such as Tomaž Šalamun’s Poker and Arkadi Dragomoshchenko’s Chinese Sun. Among its bestsellers is Nets, Jen Bervin’s ethereal book of erasures of Shakespeare sonnets. Just as meticulously produced is Ellie Ga’s Classification of a Spit Stain, an imagetext project that organizes and analyzes photos of expectorate residue from around the world. The press recently launched a Lost Literature Series that includes a facsimile reprint of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s late-’60s journal 0 to 9. With a focus on emerging, forgotten, and translated writers, Ugly Duckling Presse concocts its literary communities both on and off the page. —Alan Gilbert is a critic and poet based in Brooklyn. We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry by Daniel Kane University of Iowa Press, 2009 The era is largely the 1960s—the Beats and New York School are active and on both coasts, poets and filmmakers are meeting in productive, transformative ways. In

above: Image from Ellie Ga’s Classification of a Spit Stain. Courtesy of Ugly Duckling Presse. below: Joe Baldwin. Design for Mobile Garden, 2009.

Editor’s choice We Saw the Light, Daniel Kane distills these relations, referencing letters, social networks, historical group formations and interactions between these men (and they are usually men)—whether as audience, scriptwriter, actor, collaborator, or even “houseboy.” Along the way, Kane performs close analyses of particular films and poems, making thoughtful and provocative hypotheses. Whether writing on how Kenneth Anger’s frank sexuality dismantled what Kane calls Robert Duncan’s “modernist shame,” how Stan Brakhage’s fragmented lyrics influenced Robert Creeley’s decentered stuttering texts (Pieces), or how Robert Frank’s layered images of the quotidian encouraged Allen Ginsberg’s radically disjunct accumulations (Wichita Vortex Sutra), Kane assigns filmmakers, and film itself, a special position. He argues not only that experimental cinema influenced poetry’s structure, materiality, and content, he radically suggests that experimental film catalyzed a postmodern dispersal of identities. With its reassessment of the possibilities of language; its resistance to narrative; its associative montage; and its ability to layer, refocus, dissolve, and focus again, film is positioned by Kane as powerfully anti-hierarchic. Montaged, “a launching pad for associations” (in the words of John Ashbery), a field for ludic antics, film suggests that order is a construct and that the medium in itself is a political gesture, opposed to possession or prophesy.

About this period of lively collaboration, Kane writes: “What a scene.” To this we might add: What a conclusion! With passion and an eye to the contemporary, Kane draws lines in and out of history to trace a movement in which technology transforms the mystical hero into a “contingent arguable.” —Abigail Child is an internationally recognized filmmaker and writer. She is the author of five books of poetry and one of criticism: THIS IS CALLED MOVING: A Critical Poetics of Film. She has had retrospectives all over the world and has received Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Radcliffe Fellowships, and most recently, the Prix de Rome, 2009–2010.

Graffiti Kings: New York City Mass Transit Art of the 1970s by Jack Stewart, Abrams, 2009 Subway Art: 25th Anniversary Edition by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, Chronicle Books, 2009 What does it mean to paint your name someplace you’ve been—a heavily trafficked location or a highly visible object, like a train, that perpetually traverses an entire city? What should this be called? Expansionism? Territorialism? Vandalism? Childish defiance? Desperation? Jack Stewart, painter, muralist, art historian, and author of the doctoral dissertation that has posthumously become the remarkable book Graffiti Kings highlights why such an act can only be defined as one thing: art. Alongside the publication of Subway Art, the remarkably lush 25th anniversary edition of Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s iconic book of early ’80s New York City graffiti photos, Stewart’s claim is proven irrefutable. But Stewart also believed that “the dangers, the risk of injury or death, as well as the thrill of being chased by the police, were the most important ingredients upon which the subway phenomenon (graffiti) fed.” So if one gives credence to graffiti’s anti-authoritarian impulse, how then to reconcile these two books that package the risk and electric zeal of this defiant urban sport as a consumer item? This has always been its contradiction, and these two books don’t shy away from heavily documenting the illegal phenomenon. In Graffiti Kings, Stewart identifies the tag “Pray” as one of the oldest and most widespread in New York City. It was a direct and universal command, and the moniker is certainly apropos, for the images in both Graffiti Kings and Subway

Kenneth Anger. Film still from Fireworks. Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.

Art are visual representations of prayer in all of its forms—exultations, lamentations, meditations. Each image—especially in the oversized Subway Art—proves that this demonstration of existence is compelling and necessary, and thus just as worthy of being witnessed, studied, and celebrated as any religious text. —Matthew Aaron Goodman is the author of the 2009 novel Hold Love Strong. Bobbie Oliver Working for Isamu Noguchi in the 1980s, Bobbie Oliver saw the time this artist took to study a stone before altering it in any way. She extends this temporal knowledge to the painted surface, attracted to paint’s alchemical properties and open to the information that the materials give up when they are ready. Some paintings seem like maps of a mysterious world, others resemble stained walls made beautiful from time and accident. Her method of rubbing, printing, and blotting creates what she calls a “tactile universe,” full of texture and drifting atmosphere. Like the early 20th-century Canadian painters known as the Group of Seven, Oliver responds

above: Image from Subway Art, 2009. Courtesy of Chronicle Books. below: Bobbie Oliver. In the Garden, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 63 × 68 inches.

Editor’s choice

to the natural world with a heightened sensibility. Her paintings often vibrate with their intentions, full of what Oliver calls “a state of becoming with the potential for self-revelation.” They usually exist at either end of the color scale, like warm and cool Petri dishes, with their organic shapes blooming in washes of pink or blue/ green. Time spent in Italy, Pakistan, and India have expanded Oliver’s strategies for addressing abstraction. Memories of their physical landscape and tempo fill her canvas. Pushing “pretty” colors into a strange register, Oliver tosses the organic and synthetic together to create a floating stand-off. Like Willem de Kooning’s announcement that Larry Rivers’s painting was like pressing your face into wet grass, Oliver erases the line between the painted and the paint. —Mimi Thompson is a painter and writer living in New York City. Treeless Mountain So Yong Kim Oscilloscope Films Brenda Wineapple, author of the new Emily Dickinson biography White Heat, recently spoke on “nudging narrative,” the massive effort needed to create a “biological narrative” out of the messy stuff of life. So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain effortlessly does just that. Kim’s second feature film is a gentle sidelong glance at truth before it slides away. The camera lingers on little details—a cheek laid against a windowpane, a baby-blue princess costume drying next to a blue wall, and interstitial shots of clouds rushing to cover the sun, suggesting the characters’ emotional weather. Shot in the director’s hometown of Hunghae, South Korea, Treeless Mountain

was a hit at the Toronto Film Festival, MoMA’s New Directors/New Films series, and it won the Berlin International Film Festival’s Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (for “works of quality that touch the spiritual dimension of our existence”). The plot may be glancing, but there is a strong narrative drive: sisters Jin and Bin, ages six and four, are left by their troubled and distracted mother in the care of an older aunt, an ornery alcoholic. They are left to fend for themselves, and resort to catching and roasting grasshoppers to eat or sell to neighborhood kids. The cinematography is intimate and stays close to the girls, as if literally watching over them in the absence of their father, a “bastard” who has disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leaving their mother to seek him out. Jin and Bin’s prized possession is a red plastic piggy bank; their mother has promised to return by the time they fill the piggy with change. The girls lug it from place to place, the burden growing heavier as it fills toward the inevitable moment when they will learn what they may have suspected all along: mom isn’t coming back. —Montana Wojczuk writes a film column for BOMBlog and edits the web-journal booksthatsavedmylife.com. Sun City Girls Singles, Volumes 1 & 2 Abduction Records, 2008 & 2009 The Sun City Girls were two brothers from Michigan and their friend Charles. With origins in a suburban basement, where Alan and Richard Bishop’s Lebanese grandfather would host all-night jam sessions alternating strong coffee with stronger Hookas and mix versions of Arabic

Still from So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain. Courtesy of Oscilloscope Films.

classics with ’70s rock, the trio’s name is hardly their most anomalous feature. Beginning with a series of cassetteonly releases in the early ’80s and on through approximately 50 full-lengths (one at 78 rpm), the Sun City Girls effectively disbanded when Charles Gocher died of cancer in 2007. Their avant-whatever recordings careened from psycho-delia to drunken karaoke, from noise to folk, from confusing field recordings to demented storytelling. But there were constants that survived the bedlam: a rejection of deterministic Western music structures, a relentlessly inclusive attitude toward disparate sources, and a punk revelry in chaos. Although typically associated with West Coast indie groups such as Caroliner and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, the Sun City Girls’ anarchic fusion of culturally unrelated musics is better considered alongside avant-garde jazz of the late ’60s and ’70s. While the Art Ensemble of Chicago assimilated African traditions like communal percussion and mythology into free jazz, the Sun City Girls delved into the music and mores of, among other cultures, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the Wild West. Once they were the house band on an Indonesian tour boat en route to their next gig at a small Buddhist monastery in Bangkok.

Released by the Sun City Girls’ own Abduction Records, two new collections with the deadpan subtitles Singles unearth hopelessly obscure and previously unreleased material, the most recent being Napoleon and Josephine, a disparate collection of curios from 1985–1997. You’re Never Alone with a Cigarette is the better

Album covers for the Sun City Girls’ Singles, Volumes 1 & 2.

BOMB of the two, capturing the band during the 1988 studio sessions that produced their most acclaimed record, Torch of the Mystics. Notably absent is Torch’s chanting in improvised tongues; instead, mystical jams bridge written musical ideas and fits of singing grow into extended solos and improvised structures. “100 Pounds of Black Olives” opens the record with a burner. On this overcaffeinated pseudoraga with a strong Arab accent, Richard cascades through an Eastern pentatonic mode on electric guitar over Charles’s 1776-style colonial drumming before closing on a crescendo straight from late Coltrane. The record concludes with “The Fine-Tuned Machines of Lemuria,” overlapping a bass vamp and trebly guitar with Alan’s soaring Moroccan reed instrument, nodding toward the East New York Ensemble De Music, just one of the Sun City Girls’ predecessors in the esoteric genre of folk music for impossible cultures. —Corey D’Augustine is an artist and plays in the band Tough Slutting. His solo show at Real Art Ways in Hartford will be up through August 23.

By drawing a picture of the worlds they inadvertently shared—Columbia University in the wake of the Trilling era, and after the launching of the Beats, New York cinephiliac culture—so rich in the ’60s that it hurts to imagine what was lost, that and the whole post-’60s intellectual culture of the city generally—Lopate judiciously restores the context for Sontag’s difficult legacy, one muddied by recent revelations of illness and personal strife, arriving at a verdict for her accomplishment more generous, ironically, than a critic such as Sontag herself might have levied. —Jonathan Lethem is the author of eight novels, including Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude, and the upcoming Chronic City.

adopt the pseudonym Leon Trotsky, called it “my first glorious glimpse of civilization.” The great migration to the US and Palestine in the 1890s as a result of the Russian regime’s antipathy toward their minority subjects brought a glut of talent to New York’s Lower East Side, some lucky enough to persist in their vocations here—Jacob Gordin as a playwright in the Yiddish theater, for instance—but most destined to work as tailors and seamstresses in what Sarah calls the lost generation. But as Lopate aptly points out, it is in the next generation—her son Ezekial dominates the second half of the novel—that “lost” takes on its implied pathos. —Betsy Sussler is editor-in-chief of BOMB.

By the Waters of Manhattan by Charles Reznikoff, with an introduction by Phillip Lopate Black Sparrow Books, 2009

When Skateboards Will Be Free: a memoir of a political childhood by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh The Dial Press, 2009

Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) writes prose like a poet, indeed he is one, with his rock-hard choice of words styled into deceptively simple sentences. Deceptive because when juxtaposed, each sentence accelerating into the next, they relay condensed lives, jammed with emotion, kin, and striving. Lopate’s tender and eloquent introduction sets the record straight for this under-acknowledged literary master:

When a child is raised according to political doctrine, political decisions and personal habits become one and the same. When Skateboards Will Be Free, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s account of his formative years in Pittsburgh and New York as the son of two fervent members of the Socialist Workers Party is interspersed with relatively calm scenes from his adult life (bike rides through Manhattan; office romances; trips to Bed, Bath, & Beyond), and brief technical explanations of the party’s history. Sayrafiezadeh patiently describes his neurotic mother, brief encounters with his absentee father, and his fraught relationship to the party in a compassionate, calm voice that many reviewers have misidentified as deadpan. Unflinchingly dedicated to the Socialist Workers’ cause, his college-educated mother chose to live in poverty, dragging her son with her from one Eastern seaboard slum to another. All of Sayrafiezadeh’s anecdotes begin as carefree childhood memories that end in

Notes on Sontag by Phillip Lopate Princeton University Press, 2009

Who’d have guessed that Phillip Lopate’s Notes on Sontag would turn out to be a characteristically Lopatian occasion, a golden opportunity for his signature marriage of eagle-eyed erudition and vernacular ruminations and asides? Lopate makes of Sontag’s long, thorny career an opportunity for a sort of flâneur’s stroll in the manner of his earlier Waterfront—so call it “A Journey Round Sontag.” It’s a measure of Lopate’s deep-seated confidence in his own means that he can drag Sontag into the arena of the personal essay without it seeming an act of hostility toward a modernist mandarin who always condemned the confessional impulse as the least interesting tool in a writer’s kit.

… the shocks of fortune laid out and the aftershocks allowed to register in the reader’s mind, with no attempt to milk emotion. Reznikoff‘s tribute to his mother, Sarah Yetta, whose resilient character occupies the first half of this slyly packed novel, is a Jewish immigrant’s story. As it happens, Reznikoff and my grandfather were born in the same Ukrainian boomtown of Elisavetgrad. Lev Bronstein, who grew up just outside of the city and would later

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BOMB trauma. Eating bagged lunches on a bench in a scuzzy, pre-gentrified 1970s Bryant Park en route to the Empire State Building, a four-year-old Saïd covets his friend’s grapes, which his mother has banned from his diet as a result of the ongoing United Farm Workers strike. He throws a tantrum and runs off into the crowded park under his mother’s seemingly careless gaze, gets lost, and ends up getting picked up by the cops. This arc applies to the memoir as a whole; lighter tales of his mother’s eccentricities and parenting gaffes during his early childhood are followed by horror stories of anti-Iranian racism in junior high and his mother’s severe depression upon quitting the party. What sets When Skateboards Will Be Free apart from other broken home memoirs is Sayrafiezadeh’s story of his struggle to parse the deeply ingrained Socialist Workers Party politics from his personal psychology, something foreign to those raised in an environment where discovering a political consciousness carries about the same weight as picking a favorite band does for the “normal” American child. —Lena Valencia is an assistant editor at BOMB.

copious vomiting and the introduction of a splendid character called Georgina, who sends Eilis into the new world with sound advice about what to wear for immigration, and how to properly apply her cosmetics. Once settled in a boarding house in Brooklyn and employed in a local department store, Eilis gradually adapts to American life and finds it to her liking. She also finds love. There is no melodrama here. Eilis is a quiet character but she is no saint, nor is she weak or frightened. When she faces the great predicament that will define her future, and indeed her identity, we are utterly engaged. Eilis is an unforgettable character, a girl created with great keenness of insight and sympathy. She is the heart and soul of this fine novel. —Patrick McGrath’s novel Trauma recently came out in paperback. He has been a contributing editor to BOMB for 20 years. Pep Talk The New Anonymous

BROOKLYN by Colm Tóibín Scribner, 2009

Brooklyn is Colm Tóibín’s seventh novel and it is as close to perfect as a novel can get. It is the early 1950s and a young Irishwoman called Eilis Lacey is about to leave her home in County Wexford to travel for work to America. In the early pages, close attention is paid to the small detail of Eilis’s daily life—to work and churchgoing and boys and clothes, and, of course, to family. This is Enniscorthy, a town where faith and family bind the community and everyone knows everyone else’s business. It is with mixed feelings that Eilis leaves. The voyage across the Atlantic is a suitably traumatic rite of passage, involving

The 96-page pilot volume of The New Anonymous identifies its stark black-andwhite self as an “annual literary journal that not only publishes all work anonymously but also blindly screens and edits its

submissions, i.e., the entire publishing process is anonymous from beginning to end. We hope to create a safe house where writers can not only question the creative process but also play.” T.N.A. #1 contains 15 good stories and poems, and nine inexplicable pages of zany fake ads (I’m not sure these help). The real hook, for me, was “Interview with Someone,” a prudent conversation between an editor and an artist, both unidentified, about artmaking and identity. Full disclosure: I am not affiliated with this publication, and I have no idea who makes it. (The copyright page tells us it was printed in the United States, so that perhaps narrows it down.) Submissions to The New Anonymous, an inspiring, new embodiment of democracy at its best, are encouraged on the journal’s website. Speaking of inspiration, in January L.A. writer and curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer began self-publishing Pep Talk, a series of artfully handmade motivational anthologies aimed at artists. “I asked some people I trust [to send me texts that] turn them on, keep their practice on track, and get them working,” she writes in the introduction to the premier issue, which is spiral-bound to evoke a college course reader. The cover image—a hand lighting a cigarette lighter— is a nice nod to Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires, the 1964 artist’s book that inspired a thousand artists to treat the book as an experimental medium. Although the handmade edition of 50 is sold out, Pep Talk #1 can be enjoyed in its entirety on the publication’s website. Don’t share this with too many friends, though. If Pep Talk gets too popular, it’ll run into copyright issues. The elusive second issue (unseen by me, I’m sad to say) takes the form of a poster, while the third and latest issue—covered in butcher-brown paper—centers itself on the artist Dan Graham, and includes a new work by the artist. “Each Pep Talk may take its own form and have its own angle,” the website reveals. “In general, Pep Talk hopes to be a resource or reference that can be used to light up.” Keep it coming, everybody. —Brian McMullen recently curated Greetings From the Ocean’s Sweaty Face, a boxed set of 100 postcards, for McSweeney’s.

BOMB

BOMB by Michael Smith

Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn

art harry dodge and stanya kahn The problem with most time-based work is that it takes time to watch. Years of television did not prepare me for viewing video art. But every so often, I see something that holds my attention and interest. Together, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn have produced a group of funny, poignant, and sometimes quite disturbing videos that continue to engage me, even after repeated viewings. They are like intimate day-in-the-life portraits of mythical fringe characters wandering through segments of a magazine-format TV show. Both Dodge and Kahn have backgrounds in performance, where they honed their improvisation skills before live audiences. A similar process shapes their videos and imbues them with a charged fragility, not unlike witnessing a vulnerable stand-up comic work the room. In their scenes filled with wall-to-wall talking, it’s not always apparent how much the material has been edited and carefully reworked. But when viewed together with the videos emphasizing sound effects instead of conversation, one senses an incredible amount of time logged, both in the editing room and in their behind-the-scenes partnership, with a lot of back-and-forth, discussion, and lots of silence fueling their rich, layered narratives. I met Harry and Stanya around 2002 at Bard College, when they started making videotapes together. They were partners back then, both earning their MFAs. At the time of our interview in Los Angeles, they were on hiatus, and working on their own projects. I’m pretty sure neither of them was getting ready for the next upcoming sitcom season. While editing this piece I was reminded of characters inhabiting their videos; neurotic people doing pedestrian things like waiting, walking, talking, paying the rent, or videotaping; individuals, alone and together, figuring out how to negotiate their place in the world. —Michael Smith Michael Smith: I have a feeling the community you come from is very different from the art context in which I first saw your work.

and Cabaret was opened just as Macy’s was trying to use ACT UP’s SILENCE = DEATH slogan as a way to sell motorcycle jackets. Our goal was to achieve a sense of artistic excellence, whatever we thought that was. It’s not that we just wanted to go out and entertain friends, even though there was a lot of that—Stanya and I share an interest in comedy, so we were drawn to each other’s work and to being in communication with an audience.

Stanya Kahn: We met in 1992 in San Francisco, where there isn’t really a big, ubiquitous art machine. People created clubs in basements and there were a lot of fly-bynight spaces. It was a self-sustaining ecosystem of lowrent studio spaces and performance venues. That made it possible to have your main source of information and “training” happen in a community, as opposed to coming out of art school and tracking right into a gallery.

SK: I would just jump in and add— MS: —You guys are doing very well about not jumping in on each other.

MS: When I arrived in New York in the mid-’70s there was an active downtown scene that operated like a vast network. There was public funding and artists opened a variety of small spaces, giving the scene the appearance of a big alternative machine, even though many spaces were lofts and storefronts where people also lived. In the ’80s, there was a shift: venues became more specialized. I floated around, gravitating to where there was support. As funding to individuals dried up, spaces supporting dance and more theatrical work were able to hold on, but raw, process-oriented performance and video suffered.

SK: I’m really trying! I would add that there was an elaborate network of communities in San Francisco who were pointedly interested in developing a language to talk about being outside systems of legitimization. Some of the people who I learned to do performance and dancing and stuff with were also anarchists. They were running basement printing presses and record labels, being hardcore frontline activists, doing civil disobedience, and all kinds of sabotage. None of those things was disconnected. So the first performances I did were with big groups of people that amounted to protest— illegal occupations of public territory. I was cultivating relationships with people who were actively interested in being in a conversation that opposed what they saw as the establishment. And at that time, in our minds, the art

Harry Dodge: I had almost no contact with broader culture except to protest it. The performance space I ran with some others called Red Dora’s Bearded Lady Coffeehouse Still from Whacker, 2005, color video with sound. Total running time: 7 minutes, 7 seconds. All images courtesy of the artists and Elizabeth Dee, New York.

BOMB world was absolutely part of the establishment.

MS: It’s interesting, then, that you deal with so much ambiguity in your work.

MS: It wasn’t until the early ’90s—with economic collapse and an incredible amount of AIDS-related death—that activism and identity politics entered the art world. Then the art market put language around it and figured out how to package it. You entered into the art world in the early 2000s, at a time when it was exploding. What were your expectations?

HD: Even though both of us were deeply passionate about our community in San Francisco, neither of us created work that was didactic in spirit or form. We shared the desire to twist issues, to address them obliquely, to traffic in gray areas or in-betweeness. SK: Performance in particular was a form in which I felt I could expand past rhetoric. I was doing heavy academics as an undergrad and then filtering all this information through the body into kinetics, images, and language that was freed up from having to adhere to stable references.

HD: What’s your understanding of how it was exploding? MS: Just in terms of money. Was it exploding in terms of ideas? I doubt it. (laughter) I wanted to talk about your community because I know from personal experience how the reward systems are very different in distinct communities. One doesn’t normally differentiate between a performance art world and a video art world, but as long as I can remember neither video nor performance artists made money through art, so they must have been getting some kind of support. SK: For me, live performance transitioned into making video, and I feel like I’m still fully living in both worlds. Moving through time and space across the screen is barely marketable in the art world. The relationships that have been the most significant for me, in the art context, have been with writers and other artists. That’s been awesome. We don’t necessarily experience a heavy market as videomakers—

HD: Here’s a paradox: I felt like in our most recent piece, All Together Now, I gave myself permission to communicate with people who were already interested in art. I wasn’t acting as a liaison to art haters, like I sometimes have.

HD: (diabolical laughter)

MS: What a shock!

HD: The move to video was a surprise, a revelation. I started a feature film right when the words “independent film” were blowing up. I thought I could get money directing and use the money to make more experimental stuff, like Cassavetes. I was not only naïve, I had energy to blow. But that industry is wrong-minded; I felt uninterested in commercial viability and the film industry’s conventions. If I was going to have a good life, I was going to need to find a way to sell the stuff I really wanted to make.

MS: That one had more of a narrative flow that I think people could relate to. They may be baffled or disturbed by the ambiance of the whole thing, but the structure seems relatable. SK: That’s funny, Harry is saying the opposite. HD: You see that piece as more narrative than the others? Maybe it’s our use of some conventional film grammar: shot, countershot, composition, light. As we edited, we wrested ourselves from an obligation to make bridges to audiences that weren’t art audiences. We thought, It doesn’t matter if this is entertaining, if it gets long and dry; this is how we want it to be.

MS: I remember when I first started performing and used “avant-garde” as an adjective. I didn’t understand the history and I wrote a ridiculous press release about doing “avant-garde humor.” This critic really took me to task, and my immediate response was, Asshole! Now I have a better understanding of what avantgarde means. He was right.

MS: I guess what I mean is that one could look at it like a film. There’s a stream-of-consciousness humor in the shorter pieces that All Together Now doesn’t have. When I saw it I could imagine you guys working with a tight storyboard to develop the tone of the piece.

SK: It was a spotty sense of history that made me feel like I needed to diverge from my insular San Francisco network. I moved to New York because I realized that my mode of working was stuck in some black-and-white thinking: there was an outside and an inside and that was that.

SK: That dovetails into a conversation about working

Still from All Together Now, 2008, color video with sound. Total running time: 26 minutes, 34 seconds.

art harry dodge and stanya kahn portrait of a tough, kind of proud woman. Much of what is heard and seen in the background both defines and complicates what is going on in the foreground, not so much who she is but what she is doing and why. SK: Whacker is a good example of asking with a performative scenario whether we can use literal references to create a poetic address of how we experience ourselves in this world. I never want people to just stop their interpretations at what literally happens in a scene. HD: Mike’s work does the same thing. Your props, costumes, sets, even the way you move your face, Mike. It all reads as symbolic or substitutive, like you’re not intending realism or an escapist lapse into narrative entertainment. You’re using all kinds of narrative conventions, but it’s in those resistances and subversions that the message is sent out. I want to keep people on their toes but to also offer little gifts and pleasures—to engage without allowing passivity.

with the conventions of language and storytelling. People taking things literally when they’re intended as abstraction is an ongoing challenge for us. I’m curious about how to make things understood the way I meant them to be. The word “character” comes up a lot; like for the Valkyrie in Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out. It’s a word that I don’t assign to what I’m doing. I experience it more as a complex of symbols, experiences, and actions.

MS: Stanya, you were saying you don’t like the idea of character or overt symbolism, and still you’re using a mythic character like a Valkyrie, which allows the viewer to draw connections. Lois, this marginal fuckup in Let the Good Times Roll develops some sort of relationship with Dave, who, by the way, is creepy. (laughter) Him constantly lurking, always controlling the camera, is really unsettling.

MS: What I really respond to in your videos is place: neutral spaces. Is it home or just some brown interior? There are a couple instances where people are in a motel room or just a totally generic empty space filled up by language, filled up by their personalities. Maybe you don’t assign the word “character” to what you’re doing, but I’m sorry, I see them as characters. Even if they are hooded, quiet, or ranting.

SK: When I’m rebuffing the word “character” I’m rebuffing the self-distancing process implied by the traditional theatrical reading of that word. I see “character” as a metaphorical space, a state of being for myself.

HD: That could be a semantic issue. The “characters” first exist as ideas. I’m glad you mentioned location. In Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out it was a clear decision to have architectural spaces as functional cues—references, like characters.

MS: Is there a connection between all the characters? Is it actually one character and sometimes they’re just having a better hair day? (laughter)

SK: One of the things that’s been exciting for me is finding ways to put the body in particular spaces to point to a broader set of social meanings. And then to mediate that meaning, performatively. In other words, it’s not just this character standing in front of the dam. It’s citizens next to infrastructure.

SK: You could say that they’re one impulse. Maybe not one—they’re a set of recurring impulses. A combination of social anxiety, personal melancholy, and this unending cycle of exuberance and enthusiasm for finding ways out of those things.

MS: It’s a complicated organizational problem you guys must come up against, especially with so much improvisation during production. You’ve got these locations and storylines, and you fill them with jokes, sounds, or action. The question becomes how much to leave in during postproduction. Maybe this is a way for me to understand what you mean when you talk about abstraction. In the process of editing out an incredible amount, you leave a trace or hint of something, like a dam representing not only a place, but possibly a policy. I think my favorite tape of yours is Whacker. It just kind of happens: this ambient Still from Nature Demo, 2008, color video with sound. Total running time: 9 minutes, 19 seconds.

HD: This is what reminds me of your work, Mike. MS: Yup, you’ll find those conditions and feelings in my work. Can’t seem to get away from it. Maybe now I’ll be able to get more mileage with more of the same, with this recession. HD: It doesn’t seem like a stretch to insist that each thing in a film also functions on a metaphorical level, that there is a text and a subtext. If you’re insisting that there

BOMB not even be a text, I could buy that, and that might be a weirder proposition. Another thing that occurs to me about the impulse of the personifications is that they have to do with concretizations of exuberance on the margin. A way to wield power without actually having it, to bombard a space with so much truth that power is the result. So while Lois is always saying, “Well, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” she’s also keeping the camera on her for hours. That’s power.

talking, talking, filling up space, busy, busy, busy. The outside eye records silently. HD: There are also references to surveillance in All Together Now. But, there are also references to a more conventional film eye. MS: I was on the plane coming here viewing your work, and the attendant came by and said, “What are you watching, looks interesting.” To avoid a complicated conversation, I just said, “Video art.” Recently I was on another flight and this guy across the aisle from me was watching a medical operation. I couldn’t believe it—a gory operation, (laughter) something gynecological.

MS: All of these characters have insightful moments— dignity, too. SK: I’ve been reading Brian Massumi. He’s a contemporary philosopher who’s influenced by postautonomia Italian anarchism. He describes this idea of being abducted by the moment: instead of trying to capture a moment with knowing and naming and concrete things, allowing yourself to be captured by the moment and to understand it experientially first.

SK: Whoa. MS: No flight attendant asked what he was watching. That says something about your work. SK: Yeah, “video art” still doesn’t explain it to people.

HD: We’ve talked about that a great deal—working with the is of a moment, its present tense—how to find it, use it, hop on like a magic carpet.

MS: I happen to come from a generation of artists that was interested in reaching people; people who grew up with the same cultural references as me. In fact, I thought I noticed an Elmer Fudd reference in your work.

MS: It really goes hand in hand with the idea of improvisation. SK: That’s why what he was saying resonated so much with me. Now capital has gotten into our every moment.

SK: Really?

MS: That’s my iPhone. (laughter) I don’t know how to use it yet. I’m never sure if I’m getting a phone call, a text, or a low battery warning.

MS: Yeah, with the horns. You mean you weren’t quoting when the Valkyrie was reading the poem in front of the hospital?

SK: That’s what I’m saying. We have these hefty little wafers that come into our personal spaces. Our identities are constructed on where we go online, which products we plug into. It seems like we have no power left because capital has figured out how to move with our every physical potential. But Massumi says individuals can have power by being abducted by the moment and retracking it. Live the language and find a different way out.

SK: No, that’s an actual Viking Valkyrie poem translated from Old Norse, which doesn’t even exist anymore. HD: That shit is ancient.

MS: And channeled through Elmer Fudd?

SK: That’s a really good reference point. There’s a Looney Tunes episode where Elmer chases Bugs into the city from the country, but there are no cars around, just massive, mammoth buildings. And then they run into the theater, and perform, right? So Bugs puts on the helmet and braids to perform the opera, but there’s no audience except for the pursuing Elmer, who of course becomes completely smitten. I love that it all takes place in an emptied-out city. Here, infrastructure is a ghost of power, leaving the toil of human desire in the foreground. In some ways we’re like Elmer and Bugs, performing and engaging in this space where there’s a question of whether a spectator is there or not. We’re going to show the piece to the people, but during the process they’re not there. So there’s this cycling of energy between us—two people generating language and stories and trying to make meaning.

HD: It’s like a portrait of this force. SK: Spaces that are undetermined and moments inside of power. MS: I want to talk about inside versus outside. In Let the Good Times Roll there’s all this improvisation that goes on between Lois, the camera, and Dave, the camera guy. It was interesting to see how their relationship changes with location. Once they were inside, they established a connection and it felt like we were outside, looking in on them, while also watching Lois through the lens of Dave’s camera. The improvisation in your videos is really great: talking,

art harry dodge and stanya kahn

HD: Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out was kind of a personification of a postheroic impotence about artmaking. It was a video question: what’s possible if you’re just hanging around with your video camera? We’re specifically interested in making a character out of the camera eye. We announce the current of camera, its presence in the present.

the camera in the computer and all these kids and people all over the planet doing performances in their rooms, there’s a different kind of film grammar. SK: Also in All Together Now we had people holding cameras, viewing themselves and each other. There wasn’t only surveillance but also self-regard. Sometimes I think it didn’t quite do the things we wanted, which were to talk about people’s relationship to technology, whether it’s the little camera in your computer or the way people represent themselves on Facebook and MySpace, with a picture—people almost don’t live without selfrepresentation in image form anymore.

MS: I thought it was great how you’re waiting for something to happen. SK: And the Valkyrie kind of ridicules it: “Oh, you mean like a Rodney King thing?” We’re consciously—if trashily— borrowing from both cinema and video art and trying to make a third space, with the camera always in the frame, so to speak.

MS: By the way, I didn’t mind being manipulated by the scene at the end of All Together Now. I was touched seeing these little kids dressed in white, looking innocent and pure, adding a little sense of hope to the piece.

MS: The Bugs Bunny cartoon space? (laughter)

SK: No. Yes! As characters, I relate to them. Daffy Duck was deeply influential to me—the way he was struggling in every frame. Just really hard. Tons of stress right next to total enthusiasm; just full-on power, a willingness to do almost anything. At the same time, he’s close to a nervous breakdown.

SK: That’s been a criticism of All Together Now. We struggled with its sentimentality while we were cutting it. Those kids are also wearing psychedelic flowered shirts, I just want to add.

HD: Technology forms our performances as well. There was a lot of stationary camera at the beginning. Now with Stills from Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, 2006, color video with sound. Total running time: 26 minutes, 5 seconds.

MS: Very stylish ones.

SK: All the characters are stylish. Check out those blue

I was on the plane coming here viewing your work, and the attendant came by and said, “What are you watching, looks interesting.” To avoid a complicated conversation, I just said, “Video art.” peeps. Check out the foragers in their jeans and purple shirts. Style is part of the strategy to upend something. Style is inherently cynical in some ways, and the willingness to go there is a little cheeky on our parts, in an intentional way. It says we are participating in a certain sign system like fashion and aren’t pretending there’s a way around it. And by doing so, we hopefully keep this distancing effect.

improvisation, and that means if people didn’t think the joke was funny I had to pull something out of my ass that second to shift the energy. That’s what’s so different about television. Performance is a live body experience, and you’re constantly recalibrating yourself to be in a relationship with other psyches in the room. You have to be in multiple states of mind at once: you’re remembering your text, you’re remembering your dance steps, here comes the song, but, uh-oh—those guys look a little stiff in the front row. So let me throw them a little something to get this jiving.

HD: One of the choices for understanding All Together Now was as a portrait of an organism. The foragers were supposed to be the lymph, the circulation. And then there were these generators—the builders, the people with the white masks—they were the red blood cells. The blue people were the annihilators, the break-it-downers, the fragmenters. The whole thing can be thought of as a portrait of fecundity.

MS: We really work from very different places. I think one reason you captured people’s attention so immediately is that there aren’t a lot of good performers in the art context. In general, art audiences are incredibly open to unintentionally sloppy performances, with references and humor so inside that sometimes I feel like I haven’t been invited to the party. You’re really good at what you do and understand that it takes more than an idea to present something before an audience. You’re also incredibly funny.

SK: The white people were constantly filtering, like a bacterial fungus or something. So you could tease out this biological metaphor as a super-efficient system. Or you could look at it more literally as a community model, which is interdependent but mutually autonomous. Cells of people interacting, nonhierarchically.

SK: Thanks, Mike. You are, too. A good collaboration has personal chemistry. Every now and then you find a person whom you feel not only understood by, but whom you can also make meaning with. The choices in our videos are specific, at least for me, to the social and chemical relationship we have with each other. Humor especially relies so much on shared understandings, especially jokes steeped in concept and language.

MS: This brings us back to talking about collaboration. You’re always presented as a duo, with Stanya in front of the camera and Harry behind it. SK: I’ll tell you, a pressure we’ve had to actively resist is having the focal point be either the performer or the person behind the camera. We’ve really pushed against those ways of delineating.

MS: In Nature Demo I can feel you trying to till this thing and get it going. I liked it. How about the scenes with you sleeping? I wasn’t sure if you were giving up or attempting to become one with the embankment.

HD: We both perform, direct, write, find moments, unpeel the videos. And so much is done in editing, where we both labor a lot. MS: I had a long history of doing solo work and because of this, became the face of many projects. You must have done a good job making it clear to the people showing the work that you were a team.

SK: That was me being tired and laying on the ground while we figured out the shot. HD: We don’t just shoot life and then edit it, though. It all comes out of a moment reserved for generating performative video. Yeah, we tape a lot but it’s very crafted and prompted and repeated.

HD: We came to videomaking mainly through the lens of being performers. We acquired tools like camera skills and editing only when we realized we needed them.

SK: Or it’s like, I’m hungry, let’s get donuts, but the camera is still running. So, in fact, I ordered donuts, but I was the Valkyrie.

MS: Maybe that accounts for your unique eye, especially for place. I came to video through TV, so I think of it as a fixed thing.

SK: We’re coming to video not from the spectator looking at a proscenium space, but from the performer needing that space to be fully expanded—so that anything could happen. My own performative practice was steeped in

MS: Did you eat all those donuts?

SK: I was really hungry. And I enjoy donuts.

MS: Impressive, lots of icing.

art harry dodge and stanya kahn HD: Creating an energized moment is one thing, but then you have to somehow take it back to the editing studio and reinvigorate the moment with your editing choices. So the basic chunks of our process come from live performance, but are then filtered to death through this lens.

comedians. Carlin, especially, right? Harry, you seem to share a certain body language; I see a connection. HD: George Carlin is a huge influence. Mine ran from Liza Minnelli to Steve Martin to Gilda Radner. SK: I’m always resisting making the list of the names, only because I always leave people out. Jerry Lewis, Madeline Kahn, Richard Pryor, Gene Wilder, Carol Burnett, the Second City Theatre, the whole first Saturday Night Live cast, Buster Keaton. See, this is why I don’t do the list.

SK: Which is, ironically, the polar opposite of live performance, where everything is real, everything’s authentic. Trying to reinvigorate the flat space of video and the moving picture involves a bunch of artifice in editing … adding tons of sounds that were never there. The irony is that we try to recreate the feeling of live performance through massive artifice, sometimes removing all of the naturally recorded sound from the tape and rebuilding the entire thing from fake sound.

HD: I liked Bette Midler a lot—her nose and that she could sing so well. She was smooth on stage, a natural. I wanted to be that way. She was also foul-mouthed, which I still like in a person. It’s important to swear and say asslicker when you can fit it in.

HD: Twenty layers of sound.

MS: I worked in clubs a lot in the ’80s. Only once did I do an open mic at a comedy club in New York. The late ’70s. It was horrible. I did two minutes of my baby character. As they say in the biz, I was dying when the MC got up and said, “Looks like that baby ate too many paint chips,” and without missing a beat said, “Now put your hands together for the next act!” Ugh. Did you ever perform in comedy clubs?

MS: Your soundtracks are great.

SK: There are birds chirping, there’s a foot moving through dirt, a rock scraping. And time completely changes. Editing creates the timing; if you cut a gesture a second before the hand completes it, it’s more interesting than if you let it flow. HD: At first, when we started using jump-cuts, I thought, We’re really fucking with convention; this is going to be totally disjointed. We wanted to make a smooth monologue, and we did, and no one knew that there were twenty edits in one minute of dialogue. If you do them right, edits disappear. I think that’s really magical.

SK: Once, in New York. It was in this little shithole comedy club in the East Village called Mars Bar. I didn’t come from the comedy context of performing. Comedy can be formulaic and I was too weird for it. But some comics did the things that I’m the most interested in as an artmaker, things with language and gesture, the device of the joke, pulling up the corner of the rug and showing the shit underneath.

SK: Editing can actually be closer to the way a mind works. People are constantly making millions of edits in their minds, thinking about and looking at multiple things at once.

MS: How about you, Harry, did you ever perform standup?

HD: Maybe the edit carves out that space of ambiguity or in-betweeness.

HD: I tried a couple of times. It was just insistence and absurdity—it was a no-go.

MS: I’m a little more elemental and concrete. Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking about brick-wall comedy lately. That lone figure in front of a wall, working the room, looking for one little nibble to play off and develop. Not so different from Lois in an empty space, yammering on and on, looking for her comfort zone as she makes sense of her surroundings. Going to comedy clubs was very important for me before I first started performing, especially in the early ’70s in relation to the performance art scene. On one hand, you had the comedy club, a minimal setting with one lone comic desperately trying to fill it with laughter, and on the other, the white cube filled with gestures, actions, and/or language by artists examining their relationship to the audience and context. I know both of you were very much influenced by certain

SK: That’s partly why improvisation was so important for me; sitting around and thinking up jokes was such a frustrating process. The funniest things were when I could just respond in the moment. HD: Weirder, bulkier, unexpected humor. SK: Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of comedy records, and the thing that’s blowing my mind is how I can listen to these records—all on vinyl—and just be dying laughing. I can’t even see the guy. It’s the delivery, and it’s so beautiful. People who can pull that off on record, people who can talk—Lenny Bruce, Steve Martin, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin—I’m so moved by that; I’m really interested in what can happen in audio space.

BOMB by Marcella Durand

Jacques Roubaud

Photo by Ben Handzo, 2009.

LITERATURE jacques roubaud Not many writers write from both the right and left brains, but Jacques Roubaud bridges that chasm much like an expert martial artist—in a way that makes it seem simple. Or not. Roubaud is an encompassing author. He writes through a full spectrum of the “simple” (i.e. his poetry for children) to mind-bogglingly dense pieces underpinned by mathematical concepts incomprehensible to many left-brained creative folks. After all, the title for his first book was a mathematical symbol—graphic and discrete, yet to explain what it means would take more words than I have been allotted. Then there’s his life. Child of French Resistance parents. Member of Oulipo, short for the Ouvroir de Litterature Poténtialle, commonly translated as “Workshop for Potential Literature.” Inventor of the “clandestine hunger strike” during his tour of duty in Algiers and translator of Lewis Carroll. University professor of mathematics, but not “a very important one,” as he says, “I didn’t want power!” Survivor of tragedy—World War II, the early death of his wife. Writer through prodigious memory, therefore inevitably grappling with Proust, with whom one senses Roubaud has a wary relationship. But Roubaud himself is now a revered figure in French literature—a postwar writer who, thanks to the ongoing invention of “constraints” demanded by Oulipo, always seems cutting edge, as evinced by some of his books available in English: Hortense in Exile; Hortense Is Abducted; Some Thing Black; The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart; The Great Fire of London: A Story With Interpolations and Bifurcations; and, most recently, The Loop. Either Roubaud allows the wiring and the plumbing to show, or draws over it a perfect veneer of simplicity. Strangely, sometimes jarringly, his language can veer toward the winsome, a light joke, silliness, croissants, figs, even while he struggles with an engulfing darkness, delivering a stream of words to explode grief, to versify death. He approaches the past with a multitude of linguistic and formal tools, and while he told me that he wrote to destroy memory, I didn’t sense any kind of satisfaction, or resolution. Instead, he seemed to grieve the loss of these memories even as he, like Jean Tinguely, set in motion the destruction of his own creation. How and to where do you move forward, I wanted to know, once you’ve gotten rid of your memories? Whither to? —Marcella Durand Marcella Durand: You have a new book out, The Loop, which is the second volume of a larger project to come out in English. There are four more volumes?

of a very long book by Thomas Pynchon, but it’s only 1,320 pages—nothing! So, that volume will contain five branches of the project (one of which is in two parts).

Jacques Roubaud: Yes. The word “project” is ambiguous because I call this “the minimal project” that replaced a “bigger project” that I had to abandon long ago, in 1978. Although the “minimal project” is indeed quite huge, but …

JR: Yes, the third part is not a book on mathematics, but one that explains, in a way, my discovery of and my travels with mathematics. That’s why the book is called Mathematics: with a colon. My vision of mathematics is that it’s a unified thing, and so it should be singular. The title in French is Mathématique:. It has a numerical structure, as do the other branches of the project, but there are no mathematical constraints in it at all. The only formula in it is this: I recount a time I went from my place in Paris to the Gare Saint-Lazare to buy the British Times. I saw that on the front page of The Guardian there appeared a formula, a very famous one for mathematicians because it is the one that intervenes in one of the oldest unsolved problems of mathematics:

MD: I would love to have seen the original project!

JR: There have been seven books published from the “minimal project.” Six of them were published by Éditions du Seuil in France. In October they intend to publish the whole thing in one book.

MD: You mentioned a mathematical volume?

MD: How long will it be?

JR: I’m trying to reach 2,009 pages, because it will be published in October, 2009. The publisher says it’s the longest book ever; they’ve just published a translation

BOMB But to know the dates is important because I’m moving chronologically and I have to be sure I’m not remembering things ten years off.

Fermat’s Last Theorem. I looked at it and thought, Something must have happened! I bought a copy and found out that the theorem had been proven. I was so excited I spent the whole day phoning my mathematician friends, since the news was not known in Paris yet. So, from time to time I try to give my readers some information on things like the problem of Fermat.

MD: And what have you discovered about memory as you’ve written through it? JR: When I was trying to write my big project, I read a lot about memory. I studied the school of scientists doing “ecological memory” and also … of course, I’ve forgotten the name … Ulric Neisser. These people were not interested in neuroscience or in introspection. Instead, they asked a lot of practical questions like, “What is your first memory?” They reflect on the answer and sometimes discover that it’s impossible to have such an early first memory. One scientist, Marjorie Linton, made an experiment that inspired me. She tried to transcribe all the different memories she had, which came to about 8,000. After that, she said, “When I tried to add another one, I found that it would be one I had already written down and remembered a bit differently. That’s when I stopped.”

MD: What does the title of The Loop mean in terms of the structure of the book, its bifurcations and branches? JD: I write every night. I never correct, I never go back—I just go on and on. Everything I speak about is, in a way, linked to the old abandoned project. I want to say something about it, but I digress as soon as I start saying something, because I remember something else that I then begin to explain, and so on. So the structure is a bit meandering. I begin The Loop with a very old childhood image of snow in Carcassonne, where snow is very rare. I’m in my room and it’s very cold outside. At night there’s frost on the windowpane—I write and make pictures on it. So that’s the image: there’s an outer and an inner space, memory and the present. That’s the first image of the book, which at the end, returns to it.

MD: Did she have an end date? I mean, she creates new memories every day, so— JR: It was just the memories of her past. Wonderful! In the ’60s and ’70s I also read a lot about what was called “the art of memory” in Classical Greece and Rome, and then in medieval times up to the Renaissance. It was such a precise mnemonic technique that the practitioners of the art were able to learn Homer by heart and recite it backward, too. You chose something that you knew very well—your house or the path you took to go to school when you were young—and if you wanted to remember something, lines of a poem or a page of a book, for instance, you placed them there in these spaces you knew well. You associated lines of the poem with various distinct places in your house or on your path.

MD: I also thought of this book as extending the invitation in The Great Fire of London that the reader trust that events are true as they unfold in your writing. JR: And if they’re not true (I make mistakes), at least the events are told truthfully, as I remember them. MD: There you talk about renku, an endless sequence of haikus—a perpetual form. JR: The difference between The Loop and the haiku and the renku forms in the The Great Fire of London is that there the writing goes on and on, but it never goes back. In The Loop, my memory changes all the time, but from time to time it also goes back. But when I return to a memory, I do not come back to the same point—the memory has changed.

MD: So it’s spatial memory, like an architectural structure or a landscape. JR: Yes, and there were treatises on how to do it, and you had to train. You see, in the 16th century, for instance, books were very large. If you went from one place to another, it was very difficult to bring your whole library with you—especially when you were forced to flee because of religious difficulties or things like that! A famous example of this is that of Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition.

MD: But the act of writing makes it true, no? You almost establish the past as a continuous present. JR: Yes, it’s a kind of continuous present, but what’s important is that I speak about things I remember, essentially. However, as I go along, my memory gets worse. Now it’s getting worse very quickly—I don’t know how I’m going to go on. When I started, in 1985, I had forgotten many things, but I had a really good memory of the chronological framework. And for the last three or four years, I’ve been losing that. I phone old friends of mine and ask, for instance, “When were we working in Dijon?” And my friend will answer, “I have completely forgotten and I don’t care to remember at all!”

MD: His library was burned.

JR: With him! It was all in his mind. He had spent eight years in prison and had theological discussions with Cardinal Bellarmine. He had to prove, by discussion, that he was not a heretic. Everything he knew was in his mind thanks to the art of memory.

LITERATURE jacques roubaud Macintosh. But, in fact, the four main colors—black, red, blue, and green—were not chosen by chance. In the ’60s and ’70s, I read a very interesting book by Berlin and Kay. They had studied the way the color spectrum was represented in the languages of the world. Some languages have only black and white, and between them, there are vast shades of gray. The first new color that appears after black and white is red. And then appears blue. In a lot of languages, the sea is green or blue, but you can’t decide. After that, green appears, and then any other color.

So when I wanted to do my big project, I would have done an art of memory. But as I didn’t train in it when I was a child, in The Loop I have abandoned that aim completely and have decided to speak only about my own memory. There are no generalizations. My own memory, how does it work?

MD: What did you discover about your own memory?

JR: I tried to recover some very important memories of my childhood. When I found an isolated and condensed memory in my mind, I wrote it down—I discovered very quickly that as soon as I did that, I lost it. I didn’t lose it exactly, but when I tried to find it again, what I found was what I had written. You see, it’s exactly like when you are on the beach and you take a very pretty pebble that’s been in the water and it’s brilliant and then it dries up and there’s a film of salt over it and it’s not beautiful anymore—it’s finished. The gleam of it, the light of it, is gone! As for memories, it’s exactly the same. By working like this I destroy my memory.

JR: Eskimo, the ancient Greek—that’s why Homer says that the sea is wine colored. MD: Oh, so they only could say colors by comparison, by metaphor. JR: When I decided to write with colors, I chose to respect the evolution of how colors appear in languages. But La Dissolution is not part of the project. It’s the volume where I begin to understand that I’m losing my memory. I was not aware of that before! I knew I was losing memories, but now I’m losing the complete frame of my memory.

MD: So were there any memories you didn’t write down because you were afraid that— JR: I wanted to destroy my memory, because of some sadness in it. I’m very different from Mr. Marcel Proust, because he wants to recover the past, but the past cannot be recovered.

MD: You refer more in your book to the Provençal troubadours from the 12th century. They also practice an art of memory—

MD: What do you mean by that?

JR: When I speak with friends of mine my own age, they cannot place the events of their life within the events of the outside world. They confuse them. It’s more than personal memories—something global begins to disappear. For me, this began to happen when I reached the fourth book, called Poetry: I began to be conscious that I was forgetting the thousands of lines of poetry that I had learned when I was younger. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d realize suddenly that a line was missing in a poem by Baudelaire. I was able to recreate a false line that had the correct rhyme and number of syllables, but I knew it was not good! When I wrote La Dissolution, I still had sufficient control over my memory to explain how it was disappearing. Now it just vanishes.

JR: Yes, they never wrote their poetry, it was transmitted orally. When the troubadour poetry was transcribed, it was beginning to disappear. MD: I’m interested in how you go on. Where is your infinite project now? JR: Another volume in the project, La Dissolution (Dissolution), was published last year. Éditions du Seuil didn’t want to publish it because it was written in nine different colors—it’s a system that’s very complicated to print. I start saying something in black. Then I write something in parenthesis that appears in red and starts further on the right. If I open another parenthesis inside the red section, I begin even further on the right and write in blue. If there’s another parenthetical remark within that, it appears in green. If that continues, then I use brown, gray, pink … When I’m done with the asides, I then close all parentheses and go back to the point in black where I had left off.

MD: What sort of languages?

MD: Where do you fit in French literature? You talk about the troubadours and the Surrealists—what other poets have been important to you? JR: I did as everyone did in my generation: after Victor Hugo, I discovered Baudelaire; after Baudelaire, Rimbaud; after Rimbaud, Apollinaire; and then Breton, Éluard, Aragon—the Surrealists. For ten years I wrote Surrealist poetry. It took a long time for me to understand that it was dreadful. I decided to leave Surrealism completely and to do something that would be anathema to the Surrealists: I was going to write sonnets, sonnets for André Breton. (laughter)

MD: Is this based on any color spectrum or theory?

JR: I chose nine colors that I could find easily on my

I tried to recover some important memories of my childhood. When I found an isolated and condensed memory in my mind, I wrote it down—I discovered very quickly that as soon as I did that, I lost it. I didn’t lose it exactly, but when I tried to find it again, what I found was what I had written. So my first book is a collection of sonnets. I used mathematical models, of course—that’s what I was living with. I had discovered the Japanese game of Go because of my thesis advisor. The first time I went to see him some friends of mine warned me, “On the desk, you’ll see something that you don’t understand: it’s a board with black and white stones. If you ask what it is, you’re done.” So during the years I worked with him, I played Go. Some friends and I—Georges Perec among them—realized that there were not many Go players in France, so in 1969 we recruited players by writing a treatise called “Petit traité invitant à la découverte de l’art subtil du go” (Brief treatise inviting one to discover the subtle art of Go). It’s still in print because it has a lot of jokes that Perec and I wrote in it. So that’s how the game of Go was in my first book of poetry. People were much surprised by it.

JR: I was the first member who was elected outside of the founding group. The first time I was in a meeting and could speak and understand what was going on, Queneau and François Le Lionnais asked me if I knew whether Georges Perec would be interested in joining. They were interested in him because he had used rhetorical figures from the lectures of Roland Barthes in a book of his. Perec was a friend of mine, so I told them about the sort of Oulipian things he was doing with Marcel Bénabou. It was what they called LSD (Littérature Semo-Définitionelle): You take a sentence: Le presbytère n’a rien perdu de son charme ni le jardin de son éclat. (The presbytery has lost none of its charm, nor the garden its brightness.) For each significant word, you go to a dictionary, and you put the dictionary definition in place of the word, so it becomes something a bit bigger. You go on, and it becomes bigger and bigger, and then you begin to reduce it again, so you arrive at: Prolétaires de tous les pays, unissez-vous! (Workers of the world, unite!). It’s proof by literature, a demonstration “of the lexical equivalence of sharply divergent statements,” and they called that LSD! Queneau and the Oulipians found that very interesting. That’s how Perec—and Bénabou two years later—became members.

MD: And when did you meet Raymond Queneau?

JR: When I had nearly finished writing the book, I thought, I’d like to publish it, but if I send it to a publisher, they’ll be horrified because the title is the mathematical sign ∈ and nobody writes sonnets anymore … What to do? I knew that Raymond Queneau was an amateur mathematician. I sent him my manuscript and after two weeks he answered, telling me to come see him at Éditions Gallimard, where he worked. So I went and we had a long discussion about the type of mathematics I was doing, category theory, which was new at the time and represented a completely different way of looking at mathematics than the preceding structure of Bourbaki. After nearly an hour, I said goodbye. As I was leaving he said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you, I like your poems very much and I will present them to the comité de lecture of the prestigious Éditions Gallimard.” When Queneau said something, everyone agreed, so I was published. The second thing he did was say to me, “You know, things you do—writing with constraints—are very similar to things I do with some friends. We have a group called Oulipo; come and see us.” I went to a meeting of the Oulipo, which was secret at the time. They were quarreling about something that they called the “Dossier Cape.” Oulipo was six years old, and they wanted to publish some of their work. I don’t know why they thought they’d publish with a British publisher, Jonathan Cape. They couldn’t agree on what to put in the dossier and their quarrels had been going on for over a year! At the time lots of Oulipians were great drinkers. In fact, one of the members of the Oulipo, Paul Braffort, who was not living in France at the time, was elected twice because they had forgotten the first time; they were drunk. (laughter)

MD: Do you still regularly attend meetings?

JR: Yes! I’ve been to more than 300 now. There’s a meeting every month, even if only one member of the Oulipo is present. Once Harry Mathews was the only attendee; he sent us the minutes for the meeting, including a list of the wines that had been drunk. MD: I interviewed Harry Mathews once and he listed every book he’d read that year—that part of the interview was several pages long! How are new members chosen? JR: There is a very important rule for us: you cannot be a member of the Oulipo if you are a candidate to be a member of the Oulipo. (laughter) If one of us has read something that seems interesting, then we all read it, discuss it, and try to come to an agreement—the decision must be unanimous. It takes a long time because the older members don’t want to read new things. I remember the election of Anne Garréta. We had read her novel Sphinx, a book in which she does something we hadn’t done: a kind of semantic Oulipo. It’s a love story, but when you read it, you cannot tell if the protagonist is a boy or a girl, since she took out all the words that could indicate gender. When you read the book you decide the characters’ gender for yourself. The critics did exactly that: to some, it’s about a boy meeting a girl; to others, it’s a girl meeting a boy, a boy meeting a boy,

MD: Not very good mathematically!

LITERATURE jacques roubaud or a girl meeting a girl. We thought this was wonderful, so we wanted to invite Anne to be a member. We faced two difficulties: some of the founding members were misogynists and anti-boche, because of World War II. Yet one of the founders, François Le Lionnais, was neither, although he had been in a camp.

a work for a catalog of an exhibition at the Musée de la Prehistoire near Paris and I chose a very difficult constraint. I worked on it for months. I decided to invent a new form after studying the work of artist Jean-Paul Marcheschi. His work is based on an archetypal image: the Black Pharaoh, a huge statue he made. The poetical form is based on a card game called Pharaoh, inspired by a card game played in ancient Egypt. It’s related to the shuffling of cards used by poker players, magicians, tricksters, and detectives.

MD: Oh, he was?

JR: He had been in the resistance and was captured, so he spent time in a terrible camp, at Dora, where they were preparing the V2 that would send bombs over England. He had decided, against the other members, that there should be a woman in the Oulipo, so he promoted Michèle Métail.

JR: Yes, it’s getting more and more sophisticated. They use computers and mathematical structures to have more and more shuffles and more ways to cheat and to do magic tricks. I used that system of shuffling the cards to define a poetical form that shuffles rhyming words— I called it the “pharoëne.”

MD: Whom I’ve been translating for years. JR: Wonderful! She was the first female member, a long time ago.

MD: Are you ever tempted to do a form that incorporates chaos theory or fractals?

MD: There is Michelle Grangaud as well.

JR: If it is used seriously, it implies infinity, because you have a structure inside a structure inside a structure, and so on. It’s not the direction in which Oulipo goes—we try a finite number of structures, and very small numbers, too, and even with that we can do very difficult things. But it’s not necessary to be aware of them. You see, there are three very different ways in which Oulipo works. In some cases, you have to know the constraints in order to enjoy the book. If you don’t know that there is no letter E in Perec’s A Void you miss the point. In another book of Perec’s, Life, A User’s Manual, there are lots of constraints, but you don’t need to know about them to read the novel. The third kind of constraint is a secret one which the reader is invited to try to discover. It’s a bit like a detective novel.

JR: Yes, yes. When it came to electing Anne Garréta, we had a new president called Noël Arnaud, who had retired in the South of France. We sent him her book, and after months of not hearing from him, one of us phoned to ask what he thought about it. “We sent it to you six months ago! Please have a look at it!” So, after a very long time, he went, “Well, of course, I haven’t read it but it looks good so let’s invite her into the Oulipo.” (laughter)

MD: Detectives?! (laughter)

MD: Is she the most recent member?

JR: There have been lots since then. We elected, just before coming to New York, Daniel Levin Becker, who’s American and 25. He’s the youngest member. We have a problem finding new mathematician members. You know, for Le Lionnais, any human activity using language could be an ouvroir, and therefore an Ou-x-Po, with x being anything. There is a group for painting, at least three for music, and a very interesting one called OuBaPo, which is about comics.

MD: Translating Michèle Métail, I’m plagued that there’s one more constraint that I haven’t figured out. I think I’ve gotten them all, but then … But, just to go back, there’s one question I forgot to ask you. You were talking before about connecting your personal memory with global events and then going back into World War II. Did you find many divergences between what you were—

MD: Someone was showing me a comics version of Queneau’s Exercises in Style. JR: Yes, it’s very good. There must be mathematicians in Oulipo. I am an example; Claude Berge, a founding member, was a world-famous mathematician who didn’t write at all, he only proposed structures for us to use.

JR: What I remember is what I learned from my parents and grandparents. My maternal grandmother was a member of the Resistance, and her name is on the list of people who saved Jews during the war.

MD: Now, in The Loop you write that every time you finish a constraint-based project, you say, “Never again, I’m done with it!” How do you start again developing constraints?

MD: You had some trouble getting memories out of your mother, right? JR: Yes, she did and didn’t want to talk about her youth. It was quite difficult to extract some of her memories.

JR: Ah, it’s terribly tiring! For instance, I have just finished

BOMB

MD: And remembering World War II?

JR: “Boners” were mistakes done by students. I loved that book! It had things supposedly written by children while doing their school papers, such as: “The Duke of Marlborough never started a battle without the firm determination to win or lose.” There were hundreds of them, probably most of them invented, but they were good! (laughter)

JR: There are three essential books for me to understand what happened at the camps: If This Is a Man by Primo Levi; The Human Race by the Frenchman Robert Antelme; and Painting at Dora, a small text that Le Lionnais wrote when he came back from deportation. To survive in the camp he decided he had to exercise his mind, so with a few friends he gave lectures to the people there waiting in the cold for the Nazis to send them to work. He tried to reconstruct from memory the paintings in the Louvre. It’s a beautiful text! I met Primo Levi once. He was a friend of Italo Calvino, who was a member of the Oulipo. We were both at a meeting in Torino after Calvino’s early death; it was a few months before he himself died. He was a very nice man, very soft-spoken. At dinner he recounted a terrible experience he had just had. He had been invited to a high school in Rome to speak about his experience during the war, and he said that the students could not understand why he and his friends had not taken the Nazis’ guns and killed them. They knew only the Rambo movies. He could not make them understand that it had been impossible to resist. A few months later, I heard that he had committed suicide.

JR: During the Algerian War. I didn’t want to do it, but I didn’t want to be an objector either. So I refused to become an officer. As I was a mathematician, I was part of a special group that was present during the first French nuclear explosion, in the Sahara in Algeria. We were to study the winds and the meteorological forecasts, and decide whether to have the explosion or not.

MD: That must have been an unbelievable experience.

JR: It was frightening.

MD: What year was this?

JR: 1961. It was really frightening—we had a book about the effects of the explosions with data taken in Hiroshima. We had to calculate what the fallout would be one mile away and two miles away and five miles away, and were very careful. I had to serve a second time in Algeria, and I really wanted to get back to Paris. So I decided to go on a hunger strike, but privately, so no one should know. After a while not eating, I swooned during a drill, so they sent me to the hospital, where they couldn’t find anything wrong. I was sent back, and I swooned again. This time they decided I was mad, so they sent me to a hospital in Algiers. There a doctor thought that I’d better go back to Paris, where I was referred to a very famous doctor—Dr. Lacan! I was released thanks to him—a narrow escape! I went out into the street in uniform and met my daughter. All the children waiting for soldiers to be released would chant, “La quille! La quille!”—soldier slang equivalent to the British “Demob!” I am the inventor of the “clandestine hunger strike,” my very first constraint.

MD: It’s awful. It’s hard for my generation, even, to understand … We see the malaise, but— JR: Yes, but those books give us an inkling. It’s been pointed out that there were a few novelists in France who were with Vichy and in favor of the Nazis, but virtually no poets. The poets were usually in the Resistance. I’m very proud of that. MD: World War II casts a long shadow. My father was about three years old during the war in France, and he’s still affected. He remembers the Americans giving out chocolate. JR: Yes! After the war my father was in the parliament assembled by de Gaulle to reestablish the institution of the Republic. That’s why we moved to Paris, which was a tragedy for me—it was so cold; I didn’t like it. There was nothing to eat during the first years. My father went to Germany with the French troops, so he met some Americans there. He came back home with some rations that the GIs gave him. I remember some tiny capsules of cod liver oil. I loved it!

MD: When did you serve your army time?

MD: You must have been desperate.

JR: He came back with paperbacks, too. I was beginning to learn English at that time, and there was a book I never forgot, it was called The Pocket Book of Boners.

MD: Of boners?

Listen to Roubaud read poems in French and English on BOMBsite.com.

BOMB SPECIFIC Minor Arcana

Carrie Moyer

For the past several years, I have been looking for forms that are nearly representational, that hover somewhere between abstraction and figuration, and generate the preliterate force of the Venus of Willendorf. I troll the web, bookstores, and museums looking for ritual vessels, sculptural prosthetics (headdresses, masks, armor, and weapons), and ethnographic oddities that can be morphed into fearsome and/or sexualized silhouettes. Recently I’ve found myself transfixed by Oceanic, Inuit, and pre-Columbian objects, similar to those collected by André Breton and the Surrealists. Is the world really such a finite place, filled with a fixed (and paltry) number Mantrap, 2009, taped paper collage, 5 × 5 inches. All images courtesy of the artist and CANADA, New York.

of things to look at? Or am I susceptible to the same aesthetic charms that so radicalized the early modernists nearly a century ago? This thought, with its insinuations of cultural myopia and art-historical patrimony, both horrifies and delights me. These days I start work by making small collages based on shapes preloaded from a long-accumulated image bank. The black-and-white taped paper collages become the genesis for large paintings. For BOMB Specific, I’ve sprinkled digital fairy dust onto these altogether modest works to bring them closer to the paintings they inspire.

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Torch, 2009, taped paper collage, 8 Ă&#x2014; 4 inches.

BOMB SPECIFIC CARRIE MOYER

Barbute, 2009, taped paper collage, 7 Ă&#x2014; 4 inches.

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Rapa Nui Smashup, 2009, taped paper collage, 5 Ă&#x2014; 3.5 inches.

BOMB SPECIFIC CARRIE MOYER

Today’s Woman, 2009, taped paper collage, 5 × 3.5 inches.

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By Jon Raymondâ&#x20AC;¨

Photo copyright Tully Grader.

Bill Callahan

music bill callahan Back in the early ‘90s, the record label Drag City had a pretty incredible touch, pulling together a stable of artists including seminal groups like Stephen Malkmus’s Pavement, Will Oldham’s Palace, David Berman’s Silver Jews, Neil Hagerty’s Royal Trux, and Bill Callahan’s one-man band, Smog. They were a disparate bunch of dudes that made American music frightening again by tapping into its most tangled roots. Callahan was the most emotionally raw. I remember catching a Smog show in Philadelphia around 1992, and watching Bill on the payphone afterwards. He was neat and clean-cut, but it seemed like something heavy was going down; whether it was emotional, spiritual, narcotic, or what, was unclear. Judging from his early oeuvre—gorgeous, literate, bleak-hearted albums like Julius Caesar, Wild Love, and Red Apple Falls, among others—a person could easily have assumed his plaintive baritone was too harrowed to last. Thus, it’s especially gratifying to see Callahan having emerged recently from behind the Smog moniker still in full command of his music and his voice. His latest album, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, is a suite of lyrical, open-hearted songs that, while still darkly funny and deeply riven with doubt, also dapple with a new, natural sunlight. —Jon Raymond Jon Raymond: For the last 15 years or so, a refrain from one of your songs has been a regular visitor in my head. It‘s from the song “37 Push Ups” from Julius Caesar: “37 pushups/In a winter-rate, seaside motel/I feel like Travis Bickle/I‘m listening to ‘Highway to Hell’.” God, I love that song. That image has been stuck in my mind for over a third of my life now. Where did it come from?

I read Dr. Sax after that and never considered Kerouac again. But On the Road goosed me into a road trip across the country with one suitcase and a cat I was delivering to a friend. The cat stayed under the seat the whole trip except when I got to Las Vegas she got out and rode on the back ledge of my Plymouth Volaré and looked at the lights of Vegas. JR: It‘s funny how Kerouac is such a gateway writer for people. He might be kind of silly as a stylist, but he sure springs people out of old lives. Who came next after Kerouac for you? And who came after Scorsese?

Bill Callahan: It actually came from real life. I was planning on making a go at doing music as a job. My lease ran out in Maryland and I was looking around for a place to stay that didn’t need a year’s lease because I knew I wasn’t going to stick around long. I looked at some amazing old apartment building with 30-foot ceilings. All furnished with tons of furniture but shared bathrooms. It was a hotel for down-and-outs. I was going to take it. It would’ve been awful, I bet. But a friend offered to let me stay on his couch. He liked me. His wife hated me. She hated everyone. I stayed on his couch for a month or two while I worked looking after a mentally disabled woman. I walked in on them having sex next to my couch one day. That was the last straw for the wife; I had to go. I started drinking a lot to get the image of my friend’s butt cheeks out of my head. I found that seaside motels were real cheap in the winter, so I moved to one. I used to be enthralled with Taxi Driver and some other Scorsese movies. I‘m over them now. Except Casino is still pretty good. And Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is one of my favorite movies, ever. But the rest? Meh. I had a boombox and a few tapes. Back when I was a kid the radio would play whole albums by bands. Not new ones. Older ones. I‘d taped AC/DC off the radio. So, really, that‘s one of the few purely autobiographical things I‘ve written. It was too perfect to change or add to. A couple weeks later I quit my job with $8,000 saved up and moved to California after reading On the Road.

BC: Kerouac was a blip. Not a major thing. I can‘t say as I remember what came next, exactly. I mean, the exact next thing. As for Scorsese, I became disillusioned with all the biblical-themed stories. Like Taxi Driver. Scorsese is obsessed with Christ figures. It‘s boring. There are many other stories besides biblical ones. Rocky feels more real to me. It‘s the story of a young fighter and also of a young actor trying to make a great movie. There‘s that shot of Christ on the cross at the very beginning above the boxing ring but it feels like it‘s saying: Think not of Christ‘s struggles, think of the struggles of these men in this ring right here before you. JR: Are you reading anything great right now? Or have you in the last six months? BC: I‘ve been going through Ian McEwan’s novels. Reading On Chesil Beach right now, which is good. An excruciating tale of a virginal couple‘s wedding night. It’s hard to find a book that deals explicitly with sex, naming names and all that, without it feeling forced. And I‘ve been reading James Salter. What do they call him, “the master of the American sentence” or something? It‘s

BABIES CAN’T talk, so they have a lot of time to think; they’re mulling over the history of the family line. that’s why they cry so much. true. Those things are like buckled belts. There is a line about a dog in Light Years that has stuck with me: “He slept in a fruit crate on his back like a bear.”

BC: You can maybe guess that I don‘t believe in reincarnation. But I do think we‘ve seen everything that has gone on. Or at least some of it. From our own family lines. I think that’s what babies are working through for the first year or so of their lives. If you can’t talk, you have a lot of time to just think, so they are mulling over the history of the family line. That’s why they cry so much.

JR: I wonder if you could tell me a little about your religious upbringing. For whatever reason—the cathedral on the cover of Red Apple Falls; the synagogue on the cover of Dongs of Sevotion; the title itself, Dongs of Sevotion; and, to me, a recurring sensibility of, I don‘t know, spiritual intensity in your songs—I think of you as a God-fearing artist. Were you raised in any kind of tradition?

JR: That’s funny. I cried all the time as a kid, to the point where my mom took me to a psychic to see what was the problem. The psychic said, “Tell him he is safe in his new life,” which is a sentiment I’ve actually taken a lot of comfort in, whether it really means anything or not. So, you‘ve written in the voices of a lot of different characters over the years. I‘ve noticed in interviews that people sometimes seem to confuse you for the characters. Have any characters recurred over the years? Has anyone made it into more than one song?

BC: I am not God-fearing. I wasn‘t raised to be. Thank you, mom and dad! JR: Did your folks have any kind of religious orientation, though? I‘m always so curious about people‘s religious backgrounds, even if they were totally lax. BC: In my memory, they never really brought up the idea. When I first heard about religious stuff it was from the street. I was interested in cathedrals and such, the covers of some records, because I was interested in this idea of “reflecting God‘s majesty.” Putting it in stone. Encapsulating big empty spaces. Cathedrals just seemed like big power chords to me. Or the biggest Marshall Stack you’ve ever seen. That’s what they were built for. They’re reverb units.

BC: It‘s usually one character per record. So, the character appears in all or most of the songs on one record and then is gone. Though it makes me feel weird to talk about. Because I don‘t really think in clear terms of characters. My albums as a whole could be seen as one character with many voices. JR: That‘s really interesting. I‘ve always thought of you as a “literary” musician, the same way I do about Leonard Cohen or Lou Reed. If it’s too weird we totally don‘t have to talk about character anymore, but now I‘m curious: does this character you follow in the songs surprise you very often? Or do you keep the reins pretty tight? And if it does surprise you, is there a good example of that?

JR: I’ve been trying to lead somewhere with the religious stuff because I feel like the last couple albums suggest, to me, anyway, a spiritual evolution in your work. When I think of a song like “Blood Red Bird,” for instance, which always struck me as Symbolist poetry or something—scary, severe, maybe vaguely Catholic at its root—versus some of the newer songs, like “Rococo Zephyr,” where you seem to be singing from the point of view of a river, I can‘t help but think the new stuff comes from a less dreadful, more animistic place.

BC: I’ve got a friend whose opinion on music I value. I sent him Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle and he said it was like a novel, while Woke on a Whaleheart was a collection of short stories. I really don‘t know what‘s going on when I write! I‘m a blind sailor listening to the seagulls’ wings to know which way the wind is blowing.

BC: I was reading a bunch of French poetry when I wrote “Blood Red Bird.” I believe more in a collective unconscious that shapes us. Murders and other crimes are handed down through centuries to be our own burdens. Animism might be the religion I would pick if I had to pick one. But not really.

JR: Okay, one more question on writing. That image in “My Family” of the mom in the bathroom smoking pot, her ass squeaking on the tub, and the dad in the study watching porn: where did that come from? It’s such a precise and subtly harrowing scene. I’ve always been curious about the life it implied.

JR: I have a friend who had a past-life regression a few years ago and witnessed the murder of a son by his father deep, deep in her family line. She came to see that the entire history of her family had been one of intergenerational male violence. I don‘t think I have a question here.

BC: Where do such things come from? I don‘t know. You‘re a writer, what sort of answer are you looking for here? I wrote a lot of stuff at that time from a sort of frozen teenager point of view. Or a zombie teenager. That was the perspective I was going for. Songs have

music bill callahan to have a function. They have to be for someone, I think. For an audience or an individual.

lyric in a second. Hüsker Dü, Meat Puppets, Slovenly— they all had real distinct voices. You don‘t get that so much anymore. Or if you do, I don’t know about it.

JR: I guess I was thinking about how images sometimes hold other images, if that makes any sense. How stories have stories. Like your answer about “37 Push Ups.” I find it amazing how that image just opened up into all those other images. From a seaside motel to a cat watching the lights of Las Vegas at night. That‘s a lovely thing. I look at various things I‘ve written and they look to me like these quilted ragdolls full of pins and sticks and stuff, and I recognize that all the little pieces come from somewhere and have their own sources. I think some people have the idea that the imagination is this wellspring of rainbows and unicorns and images and voices that just rise up fully formed, but I‘m more of the school that imagination is about putting things together in different ways. I don‘t find that any less magical or mysterious. So I guess I was wondering if that sound of an ass squeaking in a tub might send you off on some tangent. And I‘m totally with you about songs, or stories, or novels needing a function. The point is, I think, that you‘re giving something to someone, and it should be something they‘ll get turned on by or take solace in or something like that.

JR: You grew up in Maryland, right? What were your neighbors like? BC: I grew up in several small towns in Maryland. My neighbors were my friends. I‘m not sure how that always seems to work out when you‘re a kid; that my parents happened to move to a house between my two best friends. Maybe less discriminating when a kid. I didn‘t even like one of them very much. He told me there was no generation gap between him and his parents. And he said that we left our garbage cans out by the road for too long after it had been picked up. This ten-yearold kid was concerned that we were disgracing the neighborhood. We just used each other to play ball with. But I would try to get him to listen to music. He couldn‘t care less about it. He said he liked the Carpenters because that was the only band he could name. The couple across the way was a severely depressed German woman and her Japanese husband. Behind us were the severely depressed Georgian woman married to a Hungarian. There were a lot of depressed female neighbors, I guess. And foreign, unfeeling men. JR: So American! You totally grew up in America. Do you have any idea what those kids are doing now? Are you on Facebook?

BC: Oh, well, “My Family” is much less rooted in my personal life than “37 Pushups.” It‘s an amalgam of several families I‘d heard about. I‘m always talking about how much work it is to write, but I think I‘m going to start lying and say it‘s easy. Just to piss people off.

BC: It‘s funny, Jim White was on tour with me, drumming, and we had a Thanksgiving off, which we spent with my parents. Jim said after that they were quintessential Americans. I don’t use Facebook. I’m not sure what the friends are doing now. I know that the guy who didn‘t like music disappeared and resurfaced in a Def Leppard T-shirt the next year. A couple of them joined the army and got disillusioned by it.

JR: I‘ve seen you refer to hardcore music from the ‘80s as the last of true Americana. Did you ever consciously choose to write in an American grain? Or did it just happen that way? Or is it even the case? BC: If there is something distinctly American about what I do, I can‘t see it. Maybe there is. I certainly feel very American and love living here and being American. I was thinking of those hardcore compilations with Reagan Youth, D.R.I., Minor Threat, etc., as a contemporary version of the Harry Smith anthology. Most of the hardcore records were recorded and produced in similar fashion to each other; mid-rangey and flat sounding. Most Harry Smith stuff was also recorded in a similar fashion to each other. There‘s something blurry and so distinct about both periods of that recorded music. Maybe I’m full of shit.

JR: What music did you listen to in fifth grade? BC: You don‘t have much access at that time, so I was always listening to the two albums my parents had: Wings at the Speed of Sound and that Nilsson/ Lennon album Pussy Cats. What brought my dad to buy that? Decades later I returned home for Christmas to find that my dad had bought Orange by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. I never asked why he had it. But I was listening to a lot of classic rock and trying to figure out how they made records that sounded like that: real theatrical. A bit later, in seventh grade, I was lucky enough to have access to one of the few no-playlist radio stations in the country, WHFS in Maryland. I learned so much. I used to read Trouser Press and call into the radio station to talk to a DJ if they needed some info, if they said they didn‘t know where someone was from or something, or to make a request. I kind of like that real

JR: Yeah, I think I know what you mean. For me, the Meat Puppets embody pretty much everything I love about America. The open spaces, the weird visions. BC: I loved the Meat Puppets. They were so slippery and unpredictable. I loved those SST bands that were writing in idiosyncratic ways. You could tell a Minutemen

BOMB ignorant stage of music listening. When you don‘t know that the Stranglers are heavily influenced by the Doors. You just don‘t make the connection. You listen only to what is there, without thinking of history. My music appreciation has probably deepened since then, but also maybe lost something … the ease of it. But still, when something hits you, it hits you big. It just is fewer and farther between.

They sing only about feet. They might have one song about smoking pot. They sound like Minneapolis ‘80s funk. I liked Horse Plus Donkey. Two of them played on my last record. But they sort of broke up or are on hiatus. They are a band that really seems to be just doing what they want to do, without much outside contemporary influence or guidance. A band called Harlem is good, too. And The Strange Boys.

JR: You were close to DC, I take it, and the whole DC scene. What was the first show you ever went to?

JR: Do you watch The Wire? Everyone loves The Wire so goddamn much.

BC: I used to hitch a ride with my sister to whatever she was going to see, if she would let me. First show was XTC, Joan Jett, and Jools Holland on one of those rotating stages. I remember it just sounded like white noise to me. I saw the Minutemen, the Stranglers, the Fall, and the first Bad Seeds tour. I liked a Baltimore band called Reptile House—the singer then became Lungfish. Tons of anonymous hardcore shows in VFWs. The DC scene felt kind of guarded to me. It could have been a youthful illusion. The Dischord people were like hallowed royalty. But I was just watching from a distance. My first time in a recording studio, I went to Don Zientara with a friend of mine. He‘s the guy that recorded Minor Threat and tons of Dischord stuff. We saved up enough money to record two songs but were so nervous and downplaying it that we just made up the songs in the studio. Don hated us. He wouldn‘t listen to our mixing suggestions. He‘d just say, “No, I know how this type of song should be mixed.” So, I got a four-track after that.

BC: I just started watching it since everyone I‘ve ever met has told me I have to. I do like it. I like that Bubbles guy. I hope he doesn‘t die. He seems kind of marked for death, though. I enjoy it but I haven‘t been knocked on my ass by it yet. Still on the first season. I‘m more excited by Twin Peaks, which I completely skipped in real life. JR: Yeah, I watched a few episodes and I was like, This is just a cop show. But now I know I was wrong and I have to find time to watch it all. Are you watching it now? What are your feelings on Lynch in general? BC: I got the Gold Box Edition of all the Twin Peaks DVDs. I’m still on the second season; trying to hold on to it forever. But I can also rewatch episodes quite happily. I love Lynch. Hated him at first! Saw Blue Velvet when it came out and didn‘t like it much. Somewhere around Lost Highway, it all clicked and I loved everything from before and after since. He‘s definitely on a trajectory headed to a higher plane, I think. The way he mashes humor and horror and melodrama and real tension into one big thing is a higher consciousness, a more complete language. It must be the Transcendental Meditation. I think he is starting to see and portray all sides of everything in everything.

JR: Do you ever fool around with a four-track anymore? BC: No. It‘s not in my routine anymore. I know how to handle engineers now. JR: Does new technology affect your recording decisions much?

JR: That‘s an excellent theory. I hope you‘re right! I remember pretty vividly the first time I first saw Blue Velvet. I think it was the day after my prom, and although me and my friends hadn‘t gone to the prom, we had ended up with some coke. So we went to see Blue Velvet on coke. Kind of an echt-’80s moment, I guess, in retrospect. Anyway, I remember the incredible spell of discomfort the movie put on me. I felt like something strange and dark was really happening. I felt similarly seeing Mulholland Dr., which I thought was weirdly amazing. But that last one kind of went off the rails for me. I felt like he needed an editor.

BC: The equipment I record on and with was all made between the ‘50s and ‘70s. Recording technology began going down an unnecessary path in the ‘80s and never came back. I was reading the liner notes to Cat Stevens’s Back to Earth and it says, “This album was recorded using Aphex Aural Exciter.” It was from 1978. Then I looked at The Eagles’s The Long Run from 1979. It says, “This album was not recorded using Aphex Aural Exciter.” Little did they know that digital recording was about to come along and make their squabbling over the Aural Exciter into a piece of dust. JR: You live in Austin now. Are there any bands that really blow your mind there?

BC: I think the last one, Inland Empire, is pretty sprawling but it‘s like the Big Bang. I liked the freedom of it, the boundarylessness. I think he‘s going to make something out of the parts. He has a short film called Quinoa, about

BC: There are some bands I like. There‘s a band called Foot Patrol. The singer is blind and has a foot fetish.

music bill callahan how to cook quinoa, that is pretty hilarious. Something amazing happens in it but you have to see it. I don‘t want to spoil it for anyone. JR: I have to find that one! We just started eating quinoa, the miracle grain, in our house a couple years ago, and I‘m a true believer. You eat that stuff and you actually feel the energy in your cells. If you were to couple that with TM, God knows what you could do. BC: It‘s the only energy food that actually has an effect on me. It completes me. JR: If you didn‘t make music, what do you think you‘d do? BC: I think I would be a boxing journalist, traveling different places and writing for a newspaper. JR: Do you follow boxing? Do you have favorite fighters? BC: I follow as much as I can. But I don‘t have a TV anymore, so it‘s gotten harder. I might have to start going to strip clubs to watch. That‘s the only place that shows fights in Austin. I am more a fan of a good fight, a good story, than a follower of individual fighters. But I do like Manny Pacquiao a lot. And I dislike Ricky Hatton because he‘s always talking about what a great sense of humor he has. Just because you say things that are supposed to be funny doesn‘t mean you have a great sense of humor. Just because you’ve shown your ass on HBO specials doesn’t mean you have a great sense of humor. James Toney was funny. Big guy with a weakness for food. Real character in him. Bernard Hopkins is remarkable for his winning streak and his almost passive style of boxing.

JR: How‘d you get into boxing?

BC: A friend had done something horribly wrong to me. I wanted to punch him in the face the next time I saw him and knock him out. So I started watching other people do it. It turns out it was not a horrible thing, so much. It was a comedic twist thing. Or almost like a miracle-type misunderstanding. So I calmed down and no longer wanted to punch him in the face. But I was left with this beautiful thing, a love of boxing that stimulates me so much. I’m writing this epistolary epic poem called Letters to Emma Bowlcut that will come out on Drag City. It is the story of a boxing fan. I try to explore what I love about fights in the book, among other things. People don‘t think they like boxing but if I show them the right tape, with the backstory of the fighters, they get hooked. I don‘t consider it a sport. That great Joyce Carol Oates book On Boxing really explains it well.

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trapeze. I might be in disguise, behind the fog machine, blowing smoke. I might be hiding with the bunnies on the bleachers.

An-My Lê and MICHAEL ALMEREYDA Co-produced by Art:21 Michael Almereyda: I wondered how much Timothy O’Sullivan you’d actually thought about while you were taking pictures? An-My Lê: I’m sort of a living 19th-century photographer. I think it’s about not describing the action but describing something before it happens or after it happens.

Trevor Winkfield Maggie Paley: Tell me more about your colors. Trevor Winkfield: I have a horrible confession to make. I think I was absent from college when they were talking about color. I had to invent my own sense of color.

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blast f ro the pas m winter t 1994

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BOMB WITH Isabella Rossellini

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Isabella Rossellini in My Dad Is 100 Years Old. Photo by Jody Shapiro. All images courtesy of Guy Maddin.

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BOMB A cinephile would have to delve deep into the industry vaults of spooled monochrome to find a more beautiful ongoing collaboration than that developed by director Guy Maddin and actress Isabella Rossellini. The best comparisons would, no doubt, include the sensual ennui of Monica Vitti reified through the lens of Antonioni or the baroque stare of Liv Ullmann captured in the snow-globe world of Bergman. Few images are more exciting or iconographic than the female form, frenzied or subdued. While this cinematic tradition has been explored in Roland Barthes’s ode to the face of Garbo—which he compares to “mystical feelings of perdition”—it is Jean-Luc Godard’s glib observation that is the most quotable: “The history of cinema is boys photographing girls.” In contrast to the patriarchal tradition that enjoined the elder, virile artist with his female ingénues, the Maddin/Rossellini relationship is a thoroughly postcoital affair. From their first collaboration in The Saddest Music in the World (2003) to their most recent loop Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair (2009), they have consistently traded gendered representations of masculine power for a bunco scam of sexual aporias. As a director and an actress whose bond might very well be called “epicene,” resistant to the psychology of the domineering male artiste but also shedding the habiliments of dowager feminism, their creative romance resides in androgyny. But sexual transgression is only half of the story. In the Maddin/Rossellini world, sexual identity can never be separated from genealogical identity, conjugal pleasures from the congenital curse. If Rossellini’s artistic passions toward the world at large have always appeared as heirlooms of a visionary father, director Roberto Rossellini, then Maddin’s visions of the world in miniature have equally proceeded from an impassioned and overbearing mother. In the 2005 Maddin film My Dad Is 100 Years Old—scripted entirely by Rossellini—the actress lovingly narrates her father’s artistic heritage as she is shadowed by his omnipresent naked belly. Maddin’s subsequent films, Brand Upon the Brain (2006) and My Winnipeg (2007) have, in turn, featured “Mother” as their central character. Conceiving of elaborate paeans to domesticity with dramatizations of Oedipal longing, Maddin designs beautiful, bleary netherworld—often silent, sometimes surreal, always melodramatic—from the Vaseline-smudged chiaroscuro of his camera eye. When Maddin and Rossellini produce something together upon the screen, they appear rarely as two separate artists but much more like atmospheres. Hers is the scorched radiance of the sun and his is the crenellated chill of a snowdrift. —Erik Morse Isabella Rossellini: So, Mr. Maddin, I have you in my interrogation chamber!

GM: That’s something Fred Astaire would do to meet Ginger Rogers. I wish I were that smart. No. Its master was simply taking it for a walk, and you were talking to its owner, a man who remains only a mustache in my memory, and the dog was holding your hand in its mouth. I do remember pretending not to recognize you. I struck up a chat with you and the mustache and slipped my own hand inside that same Labrador mouth, the one that held your hand.

Guy Maddin: Yes, Isabella. I remember getting to interview you a few years back. I know this is your chance for revenge, but please, no hooding or forced nudity. Remember there are protocols against that now. IR: I’ll let you remind me of that if it comes up. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking lately of how we met, in Central Park, way back in 2002. Did you set that up? It sure seems convenient for you how it all worked out.

IR: That was a sneaky move. The men back in Rome would never stoop so low. GM: I couldn’t care less. I was happy. I remember the dog’s tongue, which seemed as long as a hall runner, had wrapped itself in between and around all your fingers, and mine too, and then the dog and mustache at some point went away and we were left crouching on the walk, our

GM: I swear I set up nothing. How could I? I was merely strolling through the park when I saw you petting that big Labrador. It was natural that I would start petting it too.

IR: You didn’t hire the Labrador for the occasion?

film guy maddin

fingers all tangled up and glistening with drool.

read that almost three decades after your father’s death you still thought often and tenderly of him. He died way back in June of 1977, exactly three weeks before my own father. That made a temperamental connection with me; I felt we would understand each other.

IR: That’s when you mentioned you had written a script for me! GM: And you ended up working on the picture The Saddest Music in the World. Couldn’t have worked out better if I’d hired a skywriter! Strange how someone else’s dog brought us together, considering how important dogs are to you, how many you have, and how often you’ve walked your own in Central Park.

IR: There was certainly something that clicked between us right away. I’d like to think it was more than our dead fathers. I know we are both comfortable with watching melodrama—perhaps that’s your Icelandic heritage. Your motherland has all those sagas that are told in broad, violent strokes. I’m Scanditalian, a perfect mix of Ibsen and opera! We both watch melodrama without cringing, and see the world as melodrama. I’ve seen you behave very melodramatically, especially on set.

IR: Yes, I’ve always had my own dogs and, more recently, puppies that I help train for the Guide Dog Foundation. Every June the foundation sends me a pregnant dog and I act as midwife to the litter—I keep one puppy and ready it for service. I have one named Jamal right now. He’s doing just fine.

GM: Yes, the first movie we watched together, before you signed on to Saddest Music, was The Unknown, with Lon Chaney—we both loved it. Lon plays a man in love with a woman who has been traumatized by the groping hands of too many men, so he has his arms amputated in a miscalculated attempt to please her. Very self-castrating! Pure Grand Guignol melodrama! Opera without singing! It’s like that movie was shot where Iceland and Italy intersect. I’ve since watched the movie with other people and never got the same feeling from them. That movie went down so easily for you—it was like watching you drink a glass of water. So few people understand what melodrama is. It’s not real life exaggerated, as so many people feel. It’s not the truth exaggerated. Exaggerating the truth would deform it, make the art dishonest. Really good melodrama is the truth uninhibited. In our dreams, where our emotions are uninhibited, if we are lucky, we get to do and experience all the things we repress during civilized waking hours. In our dreams we get to possess the one after whom we lust, strike the one we hate, steal, wail out loud, and remove our clothes—all in front of a public which wouldn’t tolerate this unrestrained behavior in the daylight world. In our sleep thoughts we get to be as childish as we long to be! We dream the truth about our feelings, sometimes in a discombobulated way, but these are real feelings

GM: Do these puppies ever remind you of your own childhood? I know your parents split up when you were just five, and off you went to live in a Paris hotel, right? That’s a change every bit as sudden as being sent off to guide dog college. IR: Yes, we three kids went to live with my mother in the Hotel Raphael in Paris, but since she had to work in movies, we were often with our nanny. After a year my siblings and I were sent off to Rome to live with my aunt. There I saw my father at least every weekend and my mother whenever she wasn’t working on a picture. We were happy puppies. GM: Long before I met you I’d read your memoir Some of Me. I was struck by how frankly you spoke of your love for your father. Your writing voice is unique. I know a ghostwriter was initially hired to compose this book, but then let go after the editor read your superb notes. As a writer you are sometimes still a young daughter; sometimes the worldly sophisticate people expect you to be; sometimes you’re as bawdy or clinical as a sailor or scientist—and frequently you’re all of these things simultaneously. The real revelation for me was when I Still from My Winnipeg. Photo by Jody Shapiro.

Isabella Rossellini and Mark McKinney in The Saddest Music in the World. Photo by Jody Shapiro.

BOMB churning themselves up. In a good melodrama the same disinhibition occurs. You see, these are not exaggerated feelings, they are repressed feelings liberated. There’s a big difference! If you look at melodrama in this light you won’t cringe. IR: I know from watching the films you make that violence is not what holds your interest, though. People and things that are no longer here haunt you; you want to put the feelings they produce in you up on the screen. You thought I was just as haunted as you when we first met, but I’m not. I believe some people are just born haunted—you are one such person. I don’t mean to belittle your ghosts. It’s a good thing to be so in touch with the past, with your place in the grand flow of time. I’ve never met anyone more obsessed with calculating his precise position in some big, abstract arc. It’s kind of sweet.

I had a series of dreams about my father for about seven nights in a row shortly after he died. He was still alive and talking to me in them, but every night he was a little worse off. On the first night he was very tired, on the second night he was bluish in color, on the third night he was starting to decay. He wanted to borrow some of my perfume to cover the smell of his rotting. With each passing night his ridiculous condition worsened, yet he also became more stubborn, more reluctant to die. In the end he died in my dreams just as he had died in life. Over the years, my father has returned in occasional dreams, but with his health restored. Once I dreamt that he had not died at all, but had gone to live with a family he liked better than ours. I hated the feelings I was left with all day after having these dreams. With my mother, the dreams are completely different. She had cancer for nine years before she finally died. In my dreams I approach her, a figure reclining on a couch or bed. She is in her forties and very beautiful. She is healthy, but always half-asleep and so languid. She opens her eyes with great effort, begging to be left alone, only to shut them again. She literally fights through her sleep to say, “I want to be alone,” just like Garbo. Then she returns to sleep.

GM: By day I’m just following through on a bunch of questions of intense love and longing that are raised in my dreams almost every night. But, oh, Isabella, it’s not so sweet. I think there’s something wrong with me. It’s true. I can’t stop thinking of the unstoppable tide of time. It’s practically made me a necrophiliac. Let’s say I pick up an old baseball card. I read on it that Yogi Berra was born in 1925. I instantly know that that was the year of Babe Ruth’s big bellyache; the year my Aunt Lil worked as a chambermaid while my mother was nine and still on the farm; I’ll realize that Berra is 84 now and that when my grandmother was 84, I was seven—which is when my brother died! My musing always brings me back to some death or sudden removal, someone or something I loved that is no longer with me. No matter what I pick up—be it a baseball card, a paperback, or even dog droppings—I’m always back in this sad, but sweet, state of recollection. It is way more sweet than sad, by the way. I just assumed that since you too had had this sudden removal at such a young age, you were wired the same way. My long-gone brother remains a mystery to me, but I feel I’ve somehow gotten to know my father better through all the dreams I’ve had of him since he died. I’m no mystic; it’s possible that I have just started to get to know him through the better access to memory that dreaming sometimes offers. Do you ever dream of your parents, now that they’re both not only divorced from each other, but dead? Wait, the idea of Isabella Rossellini dreaming of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman makes for quite the star-encrusted dream program.

GM: That’s uncanny! Have you ever seen Necrologue by Matthias Müller? It has exactly the same sad and weighty tone as your dream of your mother; shockingly, the film even stars your mother! The filmmaker takes a shot of Ingrid from Under Capricorn and ever so slowly, by stepprinting the clip into the slowest of slow motion, he opens her eyes, awakens her from sleep, and then just as slowly returns her to it—it takes about five minutes. So strange to hear you describe your mom in the same way Müller presents her.

IR: I think the dream paparazzi might be very disappointed by the unsexy inventory of maiden aunts, old school teachers, Starbucks baristas, and vacuum-cleaner salesmen that people the dreams of their favorite stars. There are not many conventional tabloid photo ops in the subconscious. You or David Cronenberg might like to lug your cameras around in my nightscape, though.

IR: That’s so odd. I must see it.

GM: I’ll send you a copy. I’ve had it for a few years but I thought you might be too uncomfortable looking at your mother represented this way until I just heard your account of that dream. Such a strange coincidence!

Isabella Rossellini in Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair. Photo by Jody Shapiro.

film guy maddin Speaking of which, as with your later dream of Roberto, where he has found a more suitable family for himself, as a child I found out my father really had one of these secret families, another whole life. A real-life character out of Wakefield, but with kids. I spied on them through the window as they dined, marveling at their familial harmony. Then I discovered, with horror, that my mother had the same secret family. Not just one but both of my parents had parallel lives elsewhere, together, with happier and better kids: a Mr. and Mrs. Wakefield, although I don’t think Nathaniel Hawthorne had this in mind when he wrote that great tale of deadbeat paternity. Both my mom and dad were much happier one block away. Still, they had to return regularly and grudgingly look after us, their dreary, inferior children. Or, at least, they did in my dreams, for this scenario wasn’t really a part of the waking world, but a recurring dream of mine that perplexed me for many adolescent years.

me whenever I watched her in Detour, made way back in 1945. I lured her up to my hometown and put her on screen as my mother. I was working with the same mad zeal that possesses Dr. Frankenstein in his lab, except I was godlessly trying to resurrect Ann Savage. She’s much more gorgeous than Karloff. In the film I also attempt to raise buildings that have been demolished, to reoccupy my childhood home, to shame the city of Winnipeg for changing even a single thing since my childhood. The whole thing is one big wish fulfilled for a very young child! Except that when you think back to our working definition of melodrama, you realize the movie is actually a melodramatic documentary. Everything I describe in the city is done so with childish, uninhibited feeling. These

IR: Are these perplexed feelings the kind you are trying to reproduce in your movies? For all their bizarreness, they do orbit around loss and betrayal, things all of us have felt at one time or another. GM: Yes, it’s strange. When I started making movies I was in my late twenties and thought I was making really hip stuff. It was cheeky and looked underground. But, the more I think of it, I was writing stuff that would more naturally come out of a much older man, an elderly man contemplating all the things that have gone before which he can only revisit through sudden accesses of lucid memory, Proust-like! Admittedly, this older man was a very horny one, and his boner seemed to be the divining rod that found the narrative thread for the director whenever he lost it. But there was definitely a delirious representation of loss in the movies. It was so obsessively represented, in fact, it was almost a celebration. Now that I’ve finally finished the book version of My Winnipeg and gotten it into stores, now that I’m done with all this self-indulgent consideration, I think I see what I’ve been up to all along. It’s positively puerile in a way. When my brother Cameron passed away I remember asking my other brother Ross if Cam was going to come back to life. He didn’t know what to say, so he just told me, “Yes, he’s coming back.” I ran upstairs to console my mother with the news that her son would soon be coming back, and alive, too. She corrected me, though I don’t think I’ve ever been able to let go of this childish notion of resurrection. I’m not religious, so it’s a secular resurrection. I find it in my movies all the time. People forgetting their loved ones are dead, people forgetting they’ve been dumped, people going back home again after a long absence—these are all forms of resurrection, ways of reviving feelings for people and places that matter most. With the film My Winnipeg I even became obsessed with casting Ann Savage, the long-retired film noir femme fatale whose ferocity seemed to push through all the decades of her inactivity. She lived and breathed fire for

are my unrepressed longings brought to light and packed into 80 minutes, except in a documentary form, but using the same methods as the director of a good melodrama might. IR: I love My Winnipeg, but I’ve never thought of it as a melodrama. That’s interesting. GM: I think I’m just developing these takes as I go, but I’m pleased with them. Why shouldn’t there be a place for a documentary that eschews objectivity and inhibition and just lets desire flap in the breeze like a giant flag at Perkins? The movie would seem as large a distortion

above: Ann Savage in My Winnipeg. Photo by Jody Shapiro. below: Still from My Winnipeg. Photo by Jody Shapiro.

BOMB of Direct Cinema’s old correlatives as the most heinous propaganda, but unlike propaganda it would be, at heart, completely true!

other’s flesh but don’t know why, or to what end, whether mortal or sexual. The lust is almost entomological—it’s almost as crazy as with the insects you portray in your Green Porno films! I want to borrow all the mad love from Kleist and those amazing shorts of yours and weave them somehow onto this philosophical text. I still find myself wishing that my undergrad philosophy courses had more crazy sex in them. You have more Green Porno films coming out, don’t you?

IR: Well, armed with this new clarity of purpose, what are you up to now? What’s your next project? GM: I want to get back to dramatic fiction and make a feature film. I’m describing this next movie to myself as an autobiography of a house. It might even be narrated by a house, who knows? I want to embed within a story of a large family the powerful feelings held latently within the architecture of a home. Everybody’s home, if he or she is lucky enough to have one, is jam-packed with powerful emotional signifiers. Even a homeless person, shuddering beneath a cardboard lean-to, has a perception of that shelter as a home—at least that’s what Gaston Bachelard, the author of that post-war philosophical bestseller, The Poetics of Space, would assert. I want to expose for the viewer, using melodramatic implements of excavation similar to Bachelard’s philosophic ones, the overwhelming and mysterious values both active and dormant in each room of this giant house. Film and philosophy don’t always mix so easily, although they obviously can, but the home is a locus of pure feeling and I’m happy to let philosophy stand aside and let classical drama take over. After all, it’s as ancient as philosophy, and as durable. If you read Euripides’s plays now, over 2,500 years after they were written, they are as easy to ingest as soap operas, and they’re beautifully composed and tell us all about our families now. I’m hoping you’ll star in the film, Isabella. I think you’d make a great Medea! I know in real life you are the most wonderful mother, but you have to admit you’d be one sexy monster of a mother on screen! You have that Scanditalian edge on Joan Crawford!

IR: Yes, some just came out this spring; they’re up on the Sundance Channel site. Four more are coming out this fall. GM: I just adore them! Everyone should be exposed to your Green Porno, from kindergarten kids to debauched old men. They’re under a minute in many cases, but they’re packed with so much erotic allegory. When you chose the sex lives of insects for your subject, you had yourself a wild frontier of moviemaking. Insects mate so savagely, sometimes so counterintuitively. At times they remind you of the mad love of humans, and at others they are just inexplicably alien. I’ve always identified with your male black widow spider. You are almost always the male in these sexual reenactments, by the way—I love the joy you put into all that masculine humping! Except with this spider there is no humping. The female spider is too terrifying, so the male collects his sperm on his, well, sort-of hands, and speeds past the female in a cowardly dash, smearing his seed on the female before she suspects anything. I’ve often felt like that’s what we

IR: I just played a mother in a film. Joaquin Phoenix is my son in Two Lovers! GM: That picture is destined to be a classic. And it’s Joaquin’s last film, if you’re gullible enough to believe what you hear of his retirement. IR: He is so sweet! One of the great impostors of Hollywood! A very nice man to work with. GM: So I need you to play another kind of mother in this autobiography of a house. It’s called Keyhole. It’s actually a crime film about a family of gangsters holed up in a big house, but there’s been a fissure along gender lines and everyone trembles in fear and loathing within a house divided. In the backstory, you’d be the adoptive mother of an Amazon warrior. I want to adapt Kleist’s Penthesilea of the ‘30s, an incredibly intense play about the literal battle of the sexes, between the armies of the ancient Greeks and the Amazons. The beautiful Penthesilea and Achilles hate each other so much they transmute the hatred into lust, naturally. They are constantly tearing away at each

Guy Maddin, Winnipeg Sleepwalks, 2006, preparatory collage for My Winnipeg, 3 × 5 inches.

film guy maddin a veritable harem of females, and outside of this harem lie many “peripheral” males waiting for the sultan of the harem to leave or weaken for a second, so they can sneak in for their shot at copulating. I’ve always been one of these peripheral elephant seal males. IR: There you go anthropomorphizing again. You’re like Walt Disney and his ducks. But you’re not alone. We have a friend in common who couldn’t get it out of his head that he was an anglerfish; or at least one as we portray him in the Green Porno films. The male anglerfish attaches itself to the side of the female and slowly loses all his functions except the continual production of sperm. He is reduced to nothing but a set of genitals that impregnates the female whenever she desires it. Likewise, our friend feels he has no brain, no other organs but the One.

men are basically doing out here in the great mating ritual marshland. Your little sexual lessons are as cruel as real life, and hilarious too. IR: I’ve never thought of them as allegories. I just read up on all these fascinating ways that insects mate. Now, with the latest batch, I’ve done sea creatures as well. There are so many ways to mate and they’re all so much fun! I try to distill what charms or intrigues me about each and then try to personify it. I dress up in a stylized mantis or squid costume and go at it. I’ve been lucky that people like them so much. You’ve always bemoaned what a late starter you are, Guy, but I too have always been a late starter. I started modeling at 28, I started acting in my thirties, writing in my forties, and now I’m directing in my late fifties. I love it. I’m even hoping to get my masters degree in biology in the next few years.

GM: These movies of yours really take you on a frightening ride of introspection. That’s what I want to expose the kindergarten kids to; more children should be aware of the fathomless terrors of sex! Let’s show the world together, Isabella, the plangent hauntings of every home and the empty, but horrifying, attics of sex!

GM: So I can star you in Keyhole? And I want to get your friend Geraldine Chaplin in there, and her daughter Oona! And my new friend Luce Vigo, the daughter of Jean Vigo! Perhaps I can resurrect more than I can handle by engaging these mesmeric talents! I even know Judy Wyler now, daughter of William, though she’s not an actress. I must be on the verge of some occult formula which will unleash memory upon itself and show us the unblinking eye of truth in cinema once and for all!

GM: I’m glad you love it, and seem to have no regrets. I still regret not learning to skate till I was 18. That kept me out of the National Hockey League. The shame of not skating as a child in Winnipeg—incredible! Is it true you were almost killed by an elephant seal while shooting the latest Pornos?

IR: Yes, I was standing in front of one and talking into the camera. This male weighed, I don’t know how many tons. Apparently he spotted a female nearby and charged at it. I was standing with my back to this stampeding slab of muscle and had no idea it was coming. If you look carefully, you can see the cameraman reflected in my sunglasses, running for his life. The bull just charged right by me in his pursuit of a mate; he just missed me by what seemed a few inches!

IR: It was over before I knew I was having it.

GM: Even that statement seems like a snippet of sexual allegory. Everything that comes out of your head, Isabella! You told me something else about these seals that I like. There is one dominant male who basks in the center of Paul Butler, Séance, 2006, preparatory collage for My Winnipeg, 3 × 5 inches.

IR: Perhaps you’ve gone mad?

GM: I’ll tell you how mad I am, how mad to resurrect: I have an unshakable fantasy of persuading the great Olivia de Havilland—who’s 92, just like my mother—to shoot an extra scene to be tacked on to the end of her 1949 masterpiece The Heiress. I would return to the stillsurviving Heiress set on the Paramount lot in Hollywood and have her walk down the very stairs she climbed 60 years ago after bolting her front door to Montgomery Clift. After descending these steps, she would then unlock that front door and look outside for a second to see if, by some miracle, Monty is still there. Then she could climb the stairs all over again and go back to bed. This scene could be shot so simply! I must do it; if I don’t I shall regret the missed opportunity forever. Talk about regrets! O, tortures!

GM: That’s a thrill not many people can report having.

IR: Okay, sign me up.

Watch Maddin’s Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair on BOMBsite.com.

BOMB by Dawoud Bey

Carrie Mae Weems

art carrie mae weems

Mourning from the Constructing History series, 2008, archival pigment print, 61 Ă&#x2014; 51 inches. All Weems images courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

BOMB In 1976 I had been making photographs for a couple of years. I had certainly been looking at a lot more photographs than I had actually made. From looking at photographs in books and magazines and going to exhibitions of pictures by Mike Disfarmer at MoMA, Richard Avedon at Marlborough, and haunting whatever other places there were to see photographs in New York in the early 1970s, I had begun to educate myself, with the intent of adding something to the conversation through my own pictures. The artist Janet Henry, who was from the same Jamaica, Queens neighborhood that I lived in, had gotten a job in the Education Department at the Studio Museum in Harlem, then located above a Kentucky Fried Chicken on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in a large second floor loft space. When Frank Stewart, the museum’s staff photographer and photo teacher, left to do a commissioned project in Cuba, Janet called me and asked if I would take over the class. On the first day of class a few students straggled in. One of them, a seemingly shy woman with big expressive eyes, introduced herself, “Hi, my name is Carrie. Do you think I could be a photographer?” she asked, holding her Leica camera in her hand. That began what has now been 33 years of friendship and camaraderie with one of the most brilliant people I know. From the very beginning, Carrie Mae Weems has had a sharp intelligence that was looking for a way into the world. From her early documentary photographs to the more expansive and materially varied recent works, she has consistently set out to visually define the world on her own terms and to redefine for all of us the nature of the world that we are in. After all these years I still anticipate her work with a fresh sense of wonderment, knowing that her restless search for the deeper meaning of things will yield a continuing rich trove of objects and images. On a Sunday morning in May I called from my home in Chicago to reconnect with my dear friend while she was traveling in Seville, Spain. —Dawoud Bey Dawoud Bey: We’re doing this interview while you’re in Europe, and of course I’m wondering what you’re working on there; I know you were in Rome previously, and now you’re in Seville. What’s going on over there?

began to bring a shift through the introduction of a textual voice into your work. Since that work you have deployed a range of strategies in realizing your ideas. I’m wondering if you could go back for a minute and just talk briefly about where you were in 1976 when you had decided that the camera was going to be your voice. What influenced you and who were your models at that point?

Carrie Mae Weems: When I first decided to return to Rome, I wanted to relax a little bit because I was working very hard and I knew that I needed a mental break before I had a mental breakdown. I decided to leave the country and come to a place that I knew and felt comfortable in. I also wanted to finish some aspects of the work that began in Rome in 2006. So I’ve been standing in front of all these monuments and palazzos, thinking about questions of power. I’ve stayed because I’m working on an exhibition here that opens in October, and wanted to see the space and start preparing the work for the exhibition and the catalogue.

CMW: We were young. (laughter) It’s wonderful to have the benefit of hindsight. I think often about planning retrospectives—I’ve got one coming up this fall in Seville at the Contemporary and one at the Frist Center for Contemporary Art in Nashville in 2011. They give me the chance to look back over the work, over my history. The thing that surprises me most about the early work is that it’s not particularly different from the work I’m making now. Of course I was trying to find a unique voice, but beyond that, from the very beginning, I’ve been interested in the idea of power and the consequences of power; relationships are made and articulated through power. Another thing that’s interesting about the early work is that even though I’ve been engaged in the idea of autobiography, other ideas have been more important: the role of narrative, the social levels of humor, the deconstruction of documentary, the construction of history, the use of text, storytelling, performance, and the

DB: Your work has had a very grand sweep since we first met in 1976. I would say you began in a kind of documentary mode, turning your camera on aspects of your surrounding world that allowed you to visually talk about the things that you were seeing and the things that had value or meaning for you. Your Family Pictures and Stories brought those observations closer to home in an autobiographical way and also

art carrie mae weems just in the last year with the election of Barack Obama, for the most part African Americans and our lives remain invisible. Black people are to be turned away from, not turned toward—we bear the mark of Cain. It’s an aesthetic thing; blackness is an affront to the persistence of whiteness. It’s the reason that so little has been done to stop genocide in Africa. This invisibility—this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time—is the greatest source of my longing. As you know, I’m a woman who yearns, who longs for. This is the key to me and to the work, and something which is rarely discussed in reviews or essays, which I also find remarkably disappointing. That there are so few images of African-American women circulating in popular culture or in fine art is disturbing; the pathology behind it is dangerous. I mean, we got a sistah in the White House, and yet mediated culture excludes us, denies us, erases us. But in the face of refusal, I insist on making work that includes us as part of the greater whole. Black experience is not really the main point; rather, complex, dimensional, human experience and social inclusion—even in the shit, muck, and mire—is the real point. This is evident in video works like In Love and in Trouble, Make Someone Happy, Mayflowers, and Constructing History. But again, these ideas are rarely discussed. Blackness seems to obliterate sound judgment, reason.

role of memory have all been more central to my thinking than autobiography. It’s assumed that autobiography is key, because I so often use myself, my own of experience—limited as it is at times—as the starting point. But I use myself simply as a vehicle for approaching the question of power, and following where that leads me to and through. It’s never about me; it’s always about something larger. In Family Pictures and Stories, I was thinking not only of my family, but was trying to explore the movement of black families out of the South and into the North. My family becomes the representational vehicle that allows me to enter the larger discussion of race, class, and historical migration. So, the Family series operates in this way, as does the Kitchen Table series. I use my own constructed image as a vehicle for questioning ideas about the role of tradition, the nature of family, monogamy, polygamy, relationships between men and women, between women and their children, and between women and other women—underscoring the critical problems and the possible resolves. In one way or another, my work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition. I’m determined to find new models to live by. Aren’t you?

DB: There was a wonderful article in the New York Times two or three weeks ago about Mickalene Thomas and her work. CMW: Right, I haven’t read it but I keep hearing about it. DB: There’s a wonderful point where she talks about your work, and it being absolutely formative to her own sense that she could do this, that she could talk about what she wanted to through her work. Even though it’s a second-hand kind of relationship, which is very different from the community in New York that we came out of, surrounded by people like Frank Stewart, Adger Cowans, Lorna Simpson, Shawn Walker, Beuford Smith, Tony Barboza … I honestly don’t know what I would have ended up doing in the absence of that community of support.

DB: Can you talk about some of the earlier relationships that shaped you? I know how important those early relationships were to my formation, and I think yours, too—to realize that there were indeed black people who were out there making this work. There had been black artists making work for a very long time, but of course they were largely invisible— we didn’t know but maybe one or two. So to discover a whole community of them to whom we had access was just amazing. It was like, We’re not invisible, there are others like us. We were in fact part of a long and rich tradition, and it’s not merely located in the past.

CMW: It’s been critical to have some of these artists as mentors and fellow travelers. My first encounter with black photographers was as an 18-year-old, when I saw the Black Photographers Annual. I remember standing in the middle of the floor flipping the pages, seeing images that just blew me away, like a bolt of lightning. I truly saw the possibility for myself—as both subject and artist. I knew that I would emulate what they had begun. Shawn Walker, Beuford Smith, Anthony Barboza, Ming Smith, Adger Cowans, and, certainly, the phenomenal Roy DeCarava. Of course, this comes back to you; because you were one of my first teachers. You too showed me the possibilities, showed me a path—I love you for it. But

CMW: It’s fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility—this too is part of the work, is indeed central to the work. The stuff that I’m doing right now has so much to do with this notion of invisibility. Even in the midst of the great social changes we’ve experienced Carrie Mae Weems, 1976. Photo by Dawoud Bey.

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above: The Capture of Angela from the Constructing History series, 2008, archival pigment print, 61 Ă&#x2014; 51 inches.

below: Untitled from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990, silver print.

art carrie mae weems

above: Matera from the Roaming series, 2006, digital C-print, 73 Ă&#x2014; 61 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

below: Jewish Ghetto from the Roaming series, 2006, digital C-print, 73 Ă&#x2014; 61 inches.

BOMB I also learned to create a path; finding my own nuanced voice on that road toward self-definition, as well as defining/describing a people and our historical moment. Sometime in the early 1980s, traditional documentary was called into question, it was no longer the form; for my photographs to be credible, I needed to make a direct intervention, extend the form by playing with it, manipulating it, creating representations that appeared to be documents but were in fact staged. In the same breath I began incorporating text, using multiples images, diptychs and triptychs, and constructing narratives.

boyfriend gave me my first camera for my 21st birthday and it changed everything. In the mid-’70s I started thinking about returning to New York, but I loved San Francisco, so I lived bi-coastally for a long time. I came to New York to figure out how to study and be connected to the art of photography. I had nobody to introduce me. It’s possible that Jules Allen, who was also living in San Francisco, told me about the Studio Museum. I don’t know how else I would have found out about it. As soon as I came back to New York in my early twenties, I went there to take classes.

DB: I’m also thinking about the Studio Museum in Harlem and the way in which that institution looms very large in this conversation. It’s been there since 1976, and as I think about the artists who continue to come out of that institution, I can’t imagine where else those artists would have emerged from in its absence. That was obviously the rationale for its existence; there was no other place that could have provided that extraordinary level of support.

DB: There are some things that I want to ask you that are more specific to your work. Things I haven’t actually asked you but have thought about for some time. One has to do with an aspect of your work in which you are, conceptually, both in front of and behind the camera. You’re the subject and you’re the photographer. Certainly the earlier Kitchen Table series introduced that idea quite forcefully. More recently there’s a recurring figure that has been appearing in your work; what I would call a silent witness to history. This woman, although we can’t always see her face, seems to be a kind of omnipotent presence, signaling perhaps that what she bears witness to is more highly charged than what we might think. She seems like a witness who, through witnessing, almost carries the weight of each place. This woman—this avatar—who is she? What’s her function in relation to places and the narratives you’re constructing?

CMW: The Studio Museum was home for us. Many of my most important relationships were formed there. Of course, meeting you was of singular importance in my life; meeting Ed Sherman, incredible. We’re still in touch to this day. It was a place that offered opportunity, a place for engaged social dialogue, not just about photography, but around the arts in general. When I lived in San Francisco before moving permanently to New York, I would fly to events at the Studio Museum. I remember Michelle Wallace’s talk on her book Black Macho and the Myth of the Super Woman: there must have been 500 people there, folks standing in the rafters. Debates went on for weeks after. It was a place not only for artists but for the black intelligentsia in the city. Now, Thelma Golden is there re-engerzing the place. Listen, the Studio Museum is my home away from home. It’s where I go to find out what’s going on in African-American—and African—culture and art. As much as we attempt to work in a number of other kinds of institutions, it’s still the Studio Museum that first and foremost recognizes our contributions.

CMW: I call her my muse—but it’s safe to say that she’s more than one thing. She’s an alter-ego. My alter-ego, yes. But she has a very real function in my work life. I was in the Folklore program at UC Berkeley for three years, working with Alan Dundes on the strategy of participant/ observer. I attempt to create in the work the simultaneous feeling of being in it and of it. I try to use the tension created between these different positions—I am both subject and object; performer and director. I only recently realized that I’ve been acting/performing/observing in this way for years—the work told me. The muse made her first appearance in Kitchen Table; this woman can stand in for me and for you; she can stand in for the audience, she leads you into history. She’s a witness and a guide. She changes slightly, depending on location. For instance, she operates differently in Cuba and Louisiana than in Rome. She’s shown me a great deal about the world and about myself, and I’m grateful to her. Carrying a tremendous burden, she is a black woman leading me through the trauma of history. I think it’s very important that as a black woman she’s engaged with the world around her; she’s engaged with history, she’s engaged with looking, with being. She’s a guide into circumstances seldom seen. Much of my current work centers on power and architecture. For instance, I find myself traveling in Seville, Rome, and Berlin. It’s been implied that I have no place

DB: I don’t know if I’ve ever asked you this, but given that in 1976 you came to New York by way of California, what originally brought you to the Studio Museum community? CMW: Even as a girl of 14, I knew I was going to live in New York. I’m from Portland, Oregon, which was a very small town not long ago. It’s changed tremendously in the last 15 years. I knew that I was going to be an artist; what kind of artist, I didn’t know, but I knew that my comfort would be found in the world of art. I came to New York when I was 17 and turned 18 with a big, fine gay boy who took me to see James Brown. But I was young and ill-formed for the city; I went back to San Francisco. My

art carrie mae weems in Europe. I find the idea that I’m “out of place” shocking. There’s a dynamic relationship between these places: the power of the state, the emotional manipulation of citizens through architectural means, the trauma of the war, genocide, the erasure of Jews, the slave coast, and the slave cabins. Here I can see an Egyptian obelisk in every major square, one riding on the back of Bernini’s sculpture. The world met on the Mediterranean, not on the Mississippi—these things are linked in my mind. From here, Africa is just one giant step away. Spain is closer than Savannah, Rome closer than Rhode Island. Mark Antony lost his power languishing in the arms of Cleopatra; Mussolini established Italian colonies in Egypt; the Moors and Africans controlled the waters of Spain, leaving their mark in the Alhambra. Money was minted here, not in Maine. See what I mean? I’m not here to eat the pasta. I’m trying in my humble way connect the dots, to confront history. Democracy and colonial expansion are rooted here. So I refuse the imposed limits. My girl, my muse, dares to show up as a guide, an engaged persona pointing toward the history of power. She’s the unintended consequence of the Western imagination. It’s essential that I do this work and it’s essential that I do it with my body.

pictures that suggests that something is being witnessed. The most recent work, Constructing History, does this. DB: Over the years you’ve been particularly adept at not only merging idea with an engaging material form, but creating evolving material forms in the sense of process. CMW: The work tells you what form it needs to take. What’s important is knowing when to put your ego aside so you can see what the work wants to be. Being sensitive to the world around you and paying attention to your aesthetic tools … Once you know that you can make it, you get out of the way. There’s also economy of means. I’m not interested in stomping around the world with thirteen cameras, ten lenses, umbrellas and stands, and all that bullshit. I move around with an old beat-up camera, a fucked-up tripod, and as much film as I can carry. Then I just trust that I know what I’m doing with this little black box and that’s it’s going to be okay. I hate the idea of spending $100,000 on a bullshit photo shoot. It’s so stupid. I believe in using economy—but not when buying shoes. (laughter) DB: What have you seen in Seville that’s made you smile recently?

DB: How do you think about what the next piece of this conversation is as you construct this narrative?

CMW: This morning I was at Feria, a traditional fair that happens every year in Seville, and there were two little girls whose mother was pushing them in a stroller. They had on crazy-ass flamenco dresses. They were like three years old, wearing these amazing dresses—flowers and ribbons in their hair. Seville is a place where ideas about clothes, dress, presentation, sexuality, engagement, and tradition are so rooted. It was thrilling and lovely to see. I’ve been out and about, and, of course, keeping my ears open for music.

CMW: I’m a woman who’s engaged with the world. I feel as at home in Seville as in Spanish Harlem. (laughter) So I have these curious interests. I’m walking down curious paths trying to connect the dots. For instance, in Seville I wanted to see some flamenco dancing. I jumped into a cab and the first music I heard was Cuban music. I’ve been thinking about flamenco for years because I love the form. In Spain, the gypsies are the greatest dancers of flamenco. It’s more related to African dance and blues than the Spanish Cha-cha-cha. If I want to know something about the African influence on dance, then I need to know Mississippi and go to Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, because that’s how you connect the dots. I can’t connect them in my living room. So when I’m thinking about a project, I’m thinking about the dots; the way in which something starts small and radiates out to points of contact. If I can see things and understand them with my mind and body, I might be able to use them. It keeps me out in the world, even when I would prefer to be home, in bed and near my husband. DB: What about form? There’s the how, but there’s also the what.

DB: Talking with you over the years, I’ve been acutely aware of a particular cultural wellspring of references that run through your work and indeed through you, informing both the production of your work and the way you choose to be in the world. One of those strong references is music. A while back I was listening the poet Quincy Troupe read his work and just as clear as day I was hearing John Coltrane, who Quincy later confirmed as a strong influence. I often hear music when I look at some of your work, too, and even when I hear you speak. So I’m wondering what role music plays in your personal life, your creative and intellectual life; how you have drawn from it?

CMW: I think the how is the most difficult and rewarding. Sometimes my work needs to be photographic, sometimes it needs words, sometimes it needs to have a relationship to music, sometimes it needs to have all three and become a video projection. I feel more comfortable now without my muse. I’ve figured out a way of making

CMW: Music has saved my life, more than once. Abbey Lincoln is my favorite, I listen to her music often. She sets the tone—she’s a woman of yearning and of longing. Miles’s forlorn trumpet sets the pace and Jason Moran carries the melodic line. Like Monk, I’m spinning, but hum along.

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By Charles D’Ambrosio

NAM LE

I met Nam in Iowa, and for some dumb reason I’ve had to remind myself, over the years, that he’s not an American writer, that his journey and our meeting in the Midwest was an unlikely one, hardly destined by history or class or geography. Faith in the odds leads me to believe that I would have crossed paths with Nam eventually, on the shelves of a bookstore, as an encounter with sentences, but I’m also quite fond of the idea that the late Frank Conroy reached across time and introduced us. Frank himself would call this sentimental and suggest I strike the sentence—either that, or own up to the indulgence and thus avoid being coy. Sincerity is always problematic, but I side with the genuine, as I do with hope, if only because both are so vastly superior to the alternatives of deceit and despair. The sentence stays. I feel a solidarity with Nam’s work, but one that comes to me circuitously, from Camus and Merton, two writers who abhorred abstraction and fitted their lyrical passions to the complexities of their time. There are no heroes in Nam’s stories. They are full of average people who find themselves playing a role in a tragedy, people who’ve been thrust onto a stage that just happens to have the immensity of history as its scrim. They are absurd people, pitiful people, small people, moving through our history—Tehran, Colombia, Hiroshima, Vietnam— without power or any relevance beyond their suffering. This is a vision of history in which time itself has ceased to operate, history that is not a reclamation project. There’s a characteristic moment in every one of the stories in The Boat that captures the collapse of time, where you can watch as the stories strain against narrative. A single example suffices, from “The Boat,” in which all the world is reduced to the smell of “urine … sweat and vomit. The black space full of people, bodies upon bodies, eyes and eyes … here she could hardly breathe, let alone move.” This could be a description of anywhere, anytime—Darfur, Iraq, Guantanamo, the Twin Towers—in a world where the nauseating repetitions of history are little more than a record of our impotence, offering no orientation. And yet there are the old verities, stubborn truths that survive, insisting on themselves. In the interview, we begin with a discussion of “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” because chronologically it comes first in the book, but, in my experience, it reads well as the last story in the collection too. Or, to put my sense of things more precisely, the book forms a circle of understanding that can’t be fully grasped until we’ve returned to the beginning and witnessed, again, the struggle of the artist, who is not exempt from his time, as he tries to give form to the complexities common to all of us. —Charles D’Ambrosio 68

LITERATURE NAM LE dreaming about lions on African beaches, my guy dreamt about golden eagles—or were they, surely they couldn’t be, vultures?—on some unspecified golden beach. (I then tried to dignify that theft with another one: my epigraph ripped off Tennyson’s “Tithonus.”) Fast forward eight years and the first version of the first story I wrote from The Boat was inspired, in part, by Hemingway’s ball-grabbing Macomber story. And, to segue into your question, the burning drum in “Love and Honor … ” was, of course, a nod to the end of The Garden of Eden—a strange, moody novel that lives longer in the mind than its slightness and simplicity might first suggest. I like what you say about In Our Time being partly a book about writing—about the difficulty of it. I think all serious books are on a bedrock level about writing and the difficulty of it. Conventional wisdom (an unstable construction if ever you heard one) exhorts writers not to write about writing, but, of course, all good books honor this in the breach—are self-conscious in their bones. Words can’t dodge style; all serious writing has to reckon with the necessity of approximation in the face of arbitrariness, in the face of all the inevitable, unpredictable, rich failures thrown up whenever we try to trap experience and render it into language. You’re right to imply that sticking “Love and Honor … ” up front wasn’t an easy decision for me. I’m generally averse to the kind of vertical self-consciousness that spines that story, and I knew the arguments in it would invite simplistic reading, well-meaning dogmatism, as well as all grades of misconstrual. I knew they might cast the other stories as five-finger exercises. I knew some people would try to extract a meaning or message from the story that was never rigged to survive outside the story’s lifesupport system. I knew some people wouldn’t adequately consider why any such meaning or message might have been invoked in the form used—fictive, self-reflexive, intertextual, unreliably unreliable, exploiting vagaries of quasi-autobiography and inferred ventriloquism—rather than just explained. To me, it seems pretty clear “Love and Honor … ” can’t be reduced to manifesto simply because it’s not trying to say anything new; the only aesthetic preferences stated therein are fusty and old-fashioned: that fiction be judged as fiction, on its own terms, on its own merits. So why did I do it? Looking back, I reckon maybe I wanted to reserve all my rights. I wanted to pull out the sharp elbows and carve out as much space for myself as I could.

Charles D’Ambrosio: In his first book, Hemingway cut 3,000 words out of the culminating story “The Big Two-Hearted River.” Today we read that story in two parts, but in my understanding “The Big Two-Hearted River” originally would have formed a triptych. That missing third frame shows Nick Adams (Hem) elaborating his artistic doubts and ambitions and articulating his thoughts on writing. At the same time, those 3,000 words give the reader a set of instructions about how to read the book. You get to the end and you can’t help but reconsider the whole. It recasts the book, making the artistry self-conscious, explicit. In Our Time is partly a book about writing, about the difficulty of it. It seems to me that The Boat takes a similar but contrasting approach. “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” is a story for the ages. It stands alone, for sure, but it also frames questions that cast forward and complicate the entire book. Whereas Hemingway held the meta-business off to the end, and then cut it, you’ve included key questions, and raised them right up front. It’s really bold—as a reader, you finish “Love and Honor … ” and think, well, there’s no backing down now! Can you discuss the nature of this choice, its importance, any fears you may have had about its influence over the book?

CD: There’s no question in my mind that it was the right move. It makes all the various readings both possible and untenable, increasing the suggestive range of the book by undermining our desire for comforting absolutes. I’d feel like a chump insisting on one way of seeing. One of my favorites in the book is “Halflead Bay,” but the ballast the story might offer my reading because of its centrality and heft and subject matter isn’t quite … acceptable, I guess:

Nam Le: Oh, man, you move fast and you hit hard. Hemingway! Somehow you’ve slyly intuited that Papa’s a good place to start. When I was 15, I wrote a long story that totally ripped off The Old Man and the Sea; it was called “Desert Dance” and instead of the Gulf Stream it took place in some unspecified desert; instead of a guy Photo by Joanne Chan. Courtesy of Knopf.

BOMB I feel I have no right to favor or privilege that form of understanding over another. In a somewhat related matter, collections can feel like a drawerful of miscellany, a random gathering. They can leave us hankering for the whole, for some sense of the string binding it all together: an obsession or sensibility, maybe a style or a place, some kind of cohesion above and beyond the accident of time. The Boat reads like a book; ultimately, the stories sail under that flag, and that’s the encounter.

sense of trespass is so keen, I always write as if I were only trying out material, and in that sense the stories in both books felt like auditions. As I work I test certain sounds to see whether they’ll combine to make comedy or hit a particular note of sadness—or both, if I’m lucky. And then my drive is just to sustain that sound, to follow it and be true to it as it moves and decays over time. Or, I’ll write dialogue, then struggle to create a housing for it, some world that doesn’t damn the characters to their darkness, to silence or incoherence, and maybe even achieves the opposite, lifting them from their isolation—all because I want that dialogue (qua dialogue) to exist in a state of maximum, if temporary, relevance. I’m naïve that way. It’s a character flaw. And it doesn’t change from story to story, book to book. What changed is an appreciation of risk, especially in terms of a story’s resolution. I have an impulse toward completeness, which is a dullard’s habit, I think, and betrays a lack of trust—a well-meaning attempt to make life cohere because otherwise there’s just madness. That kind of thinking only has two outcomes, sentimentality or cynicism, neither really the stuff of art. Knowing the stories would likely get published put some of that to rest, and I could allow richer notes, I felt, because I could accept greater discord. Some people like to believe that being edited is a tense and acrimonious business but my experience of the process has always been quite the opposite. Carin Besser at The New Yorker encouraged me to let the stories be. Just be. A lot of the editing involved peeling away layers of personal anxiety, not in any therapeutic sense, but in the art—scraping off trace deposits left in the tone, removing lines of dialogue that were overly articulate, scorifying exposition that was false because it interfered. I became more confident of the difference between finishing the story and fixing the life, between aesthetic resolution and desperately panting after answers. Now I think of stories moving toward a feeling of necessity, of inevitability. When I finished “Up North,” for instance, I knew who raped the wife, but the character didn’t, and I thought: well, that is the story. Too bad for him, I guess.

NL: I can’t take too much credit for The Boat reading like a book—each of these stories I conceived as a separate, self-standing entity. I kind of like the idea of them being at odds with one another, mutually scornful, each convinced of the superiority of its own ethos, yet forced to assemble under the flag of my name. (And what a black flag that is! Were these stories’ protagonists their champions, it’s amusing—nerdily so, I admit—to think of how Ron in “Cartagena” would be hostile to Henry’s excesses in “Meeting Elise;” Henry, in turn, to Jamie’s languor and unironic sincerity in “Halflead Bay;” etc.) This said, when I learned these seven stories would be collected between cloth covers, I picked through them and culled certain redundancies, cultivated certain repetitions—all with a larger structure in mind. Which leads me as close to an answer as I’m likely to come: I write under not only the presumption that everything I write is deeply conditioned by everything I’ve already written, but that everything I write changes, retroactively, all those things I’ve already written. There’s your unifying element. Every new fiction gives new shape to the entire body of work, and that body of work is the only place and means I have to work out what matters to me. Which is why, before I set out to write something, I try to ask myself: Why? Where’s the reason more compelling than the simple pleasure of a calculated risk, or—even worse—the simple confidence that I’m up to it? I can’t tell you how exciting it is to hear that you were unsettled by “Halflead Bay,” that your frames of normative reference were shaken, because, in a sense, that’s the whole rub of why I write: to challenge old understandings, or consolidate them, or try out new ones—whilst actively misbelieving the very processes and principles of such understanding. It puts me in mind of a description of writing I heard somewhere: that what we writers do is create, every day, the very ground we need to stand on. I have a question for you. I’d be bloody interested to know what it was like in your case—whether The Dead Fish Museum reads, to you, more like a book than The Point. Did anything change in writing the latter stories insofar as you knew they’d find a home—most likely in the flagship of the Condenasty fleet—but quite probably too in book form?

NL: Nice throwaway tease there—I won’t be suckered into asking the question, but of course I’m interested, as a matter of aesthetic experiment, in the structural stress you would have exerted on the story by making the rapist’s identity known. (That is, beyond the trite effect of making it a different story.) The ending’s where a reader is most likely to find a story speaking to its own concerns— its “relevances” as you call them—and such a disclosure in “Up North” would have totally mucked up the careful, complicated network of relevances you’d built, conscribed them into the service of one overarching relevance (here, of the whodunit variety). A single question such as this seeks only its single necessity, and good writing—like life,

CD: That the stories in Dead Fish would likely find a home must have exerted some influence, but the exact nature of it escapes me. Maybe because my

Style is everything. Style is eye, window, and view. And, of course, when it serves its purpose, style is beside the point, is rightly consumed by subjectivity and subject. I guess—can’t help but give itself conflicting needs, can’t help but hijack its own inevitabilities.

more solid and settled in my biases, more inclined to both judge and reserve judgment, and unavoidably—often despite myself—I read as a writer. The last thing I’d ever want to do is privilege this “adult” kind of reading over the kiddie kind, the same way we tend to privilege adult emotion—hopped with its subtleties and contradictions, its off-tones and opacities—over the clean full-strengthed spirit of youth. What, I worry, if first love is the strongest, purest love? What if first reading is the truest reading?

CD: Early reading moves the prewriter in us and returns to shape us as our work seeks shape. Certain obsessions are awakened, and, later, it seems, specific moments get honored. Have you read Graham Greene’s essay, “The Lost Childhood?” He writes:

erhaps it is only in childhood that books have any P deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already […] No, it is in those early years that I would look for the crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its journey towards death.

CD: If Greene weren’t a great writer I’d be with you, rebelling against the reductive aspect of viewing an author’s world and work as an obsession. That would be like trying to make all the vast, varied work circle the drain of biography. No single fact, no matter how humongous, explains the resulting pleasure. Like you, I love the man’s work, and his obsession with obsession interests me as a quality among other qualities, not as one overwhelming idée to which all the rest is subordinate. Everything that makes Greene Greene, all the sentences and drama and characters, the patience and trust, the tone and mood of the work, all of that spins away from the obsession and enlarges the world, it generates life, which to my mind is just the opposite action of most obsessives, who narrow and fixate and finally kill whatever doesn’t conform. He’s an artist, and the others—I guess they’re just garden variety maniacs. Elsewhere, Greene calls his sense of preoccupation a “ruling passion” and perhaps that captures the spirit that speaks through his work more generously than the idea of obsession. To circle back, I found this line from your earlier reply tantalizing: “Words can’t dodge style; all serious writing has to reckon with the necessity of approximation in the face of arbitrariness …” Besides style, are there any other fictional elements or methods you rely on to address the problem of the arbitrary and bring a feeling of necessity to the work? For instance, plot or narrative?

Is there an analog in your life, an experience similar to Greene’s, a book that marks “the crisis”? NL: Graham Greene’s one of my favorite authors but I’ve always taken issue with his tendency to define writers by their obsessions. It’s true that much of what I love about his writing grows out of the deep Catholic patterning of his thought, but boy, how it shortchanges him—his humanity, psychological insight, mastery of prose—to think of his work as always attestable to this “obsession.” And isn’t this approach paradoxical? Isn’t the whole point of obsession the fact that it escapes apprehension? Writing, as you suggested, isn’t therapy. The page isn’t a crucible for writers to test their obsessions to see what’s soluble and what’s not. Still, what disturbs me most about the above passage isn’t Greene’s (intently provocative) assertion that he’d found his obsession at age 14—but more the follow-on idea that a reading experience so charged might only happen when you’re that young. I can’t think of any single book that marked a “crisis moment” for me but I do remember reading a hell of a lot (including a lot of Greene) at that age; I remember the beatitude of plummeting into books while reading under the bedsheets, under the kitchen table, while walking, even with one hand out while showering. Maybe the real crisis moment—the real end of innocence—came for me at the unmarked moment when I lost the ability to read with that kind of absolute, unreserved absorption. This has concerned me. I wonder whether, as a writer who no longer reads that way, I’m analogous to a chef who no longer has any cravings, a comedian who listens to jokes and determines what’s funny and what’s not without ever doubling over and pissing himself. Look, I don’t accept the notion that books have become mere mirrors of my adult self, but nor can I claim to keep myself out of my reading. I read as I am: older, more self-aware,

NL: The key word here is “style.” Today, it carries a cosmetic residue; we associate “style” with stuff that draws attention to itself. This, in itself, isn’t bad—we’re reading and writing at a time when for a work of art to not draw attention to its worked aspect, its artfulness, is blinderism at best and bad faith at worst. I don’t have a problem with this. I personally suspect it’s been this way from Aristotle onward but anyway, what’s material is that it’s this way now. For me, the interesting question then becomes how to draw attention to style without copping out, without becoming necessarily arch or defeatist or esoteric or ironic. Without breaching the dream-state that’s the sine qua non of fiction. Nabokov called what you’re referring to as “necessity” the “inner force of style”: the enlivening energy, the urge to precise

BOMB articulation, the thing in the absence of which style is arbitrary and a story nothing more than a proof of itself. I know I’m being nebulous. Part of this is because I resist your phrase, “besides style.” Style is everything. Style is eye, window, and view. And, of course, when it serves its purpose, style is beside the point, is rightly subsumed by subjectivity and subject. Perhaps the handiest definition of literature is language where style and subject are inseparable. Sentences have a wisdom that inheres in their structure, syntax, and constituent parts, and not merely in what they purport to signify. I get agitated when I see critics lauding writers for their “invisible prose,” as though style were only a window to be scrubbed out of sight. Beckett, in one of the great PR moves in all letters, switched from English to French in a reputed retreat from style, yet here’s a snippet from Molloy (translated with Patrick Bowles) that I recently happened upon in Harper’s literary blog: “I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too.” Anti-style? Aside from the slightest trochaic throat-clearing at “under,” the whole thing scans in bloody iambic feet! This is the super long way round to your question. And here, now, is the super unsatisfactory answer. To my mind there are no fictional elements (plot, narrative, language, character, structure, etc.) that can be considered either necessary or sufficient to address this problem of the arbitrary. Moreover, it goes without saying that mishandling any of these elements can be a deal-breaker. You ask how a feeling of necessity can be brought to a work. I can only answer for myself. Beyond the technical (as distinct from stylistic) stuff, what I look for is negative capability, is charge. An openness to accident. The sensitivity to follow its leads. Who knows how these things work? How many times have you tapped a cadence against the casing of a spent sentence, read and discarded years ago, only to discover there’s charge there yet? Courage. Sometimes I think that’s all that matters. The grim ecstatic faith that in the face of arbitrariness there can yet be grace in accidental sense, beauty in strange order, and that even certain defeat is not deterrent enough. CD: I agree that style is everything, so to me the surface is the hardest part of any story—but if it’s true that style is “everything,” then I think narrative or plot or character or dialogue, any of those “elements,” can’t be considered “not-style” or some other lesser category. Maybe it’s like Aquinas’s idea of divine simplicity, that the being of God is identical to the attributes of God. A story is simple, not composite, assembled from parts. I’m comfortable with the way “style is everything” sweeps up and includes the entirety of a fiction (style as well as what I called “the elements”) because I grew up entranced by the mystery of the Trinity. In fact, we were taught to distinguish ourselves from Protestants based on our

capacity to accept this utterly mystical truth. I guess I think of the things of fiction, in a William Carlos Williams way: “No ideas but in things.” And it’s the faith in those “things” that gives the work its openness to accident, the sensitivity to follow leads: a way for fiction to reach out, make itself available to the material. As for the arbitrary—oh boy, this could go on forever! Eudora Welty has a nice phrase: “No other saw life in an ordering exactly like this.” That says it all. NL: The way you described, way back when, Greene’s work as spinning away from obsession and enlarging the world—as generating life—this is, in a very real sense, the only way I can come at good fiction. That is, as a vitalist, a crackpot chemist of words positing the existence of some unknowable élan vital that distinguishes “life” from “nonlife.” I know this is, in one sense, an easy agnosticism, but it’s not as if I’m alone in this approach: philosophers and theologists have long animated their worlds with nonmaterial essences and forces, while scientists continue to honor the venerable tradition of plugging holes in their understanding with ether, dark matter, dark energy, cosmological constants, extra dimensions, and so on. I’m favorably disposed, I guess, to the idea that nothing of real worth can exist without a determining mystery at its heart. What’s interesting, looking back over our exchange so far, is that I’ve been so insistent on all this mystical, wishy-washy stuff with you. Interesting because usually I find myself firmly (and happily) ensconced in the technical when talking about writing. To me, a lot of public discourse is insidiously willing to overlook the technical elements of fiction to get to the whatever: the meat, message, marketable points of interest. Any discussion of whether the writing works gets sucked into the black holes of relativity, or de gustibus, or, worst of all, the fallacy whereby any flaw in the writing can be justified as a deliberate instantiation of the work’s intention, whatever that’s deemed for the moment to be. CD: Early in The Enchafed Flood, Auden says:

T he sea or the great waters, that is, are the symbol for the primordial undifferentiated flux, the substance which created nature only by having form imposed upon or wedded to it. The sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse. It is so little of a friendly symbol that the first thing which the author of The Book of Revelation notices in his vision of the new heaven and earth at the end of time is that “there was no more sea.”

I like Auden’s suggestion that the sea is unfriendly to writing, even for a visionary. And yet, without the sea, half our literature would vanish. Obviously, in

LITERATURE NAM LE your work there’s a hell of a lot of water. It figures evocatively in various stories: “Love and Honor … ,” “Cartagena,” “Halflead Bay,” “The Boat.” My interest here is semi-autobiographical but not really concerned with the facts of your life so much as the allegory of it—I want to know about the correspondence between the sea and your writing, rather than the sea and your life. Certain things move us; the sea moves you. NL: You’re right; the sea is an obsession with me and as such, to invoke prior statement, I don’t think I’ll ever understand why. All I know is that for me it taps into something deep and true, it draws from the dimension on which I’d like all my fiction to exist. For me it transcends both beauty and terror, or, rather, it somehow enables that asymptotic endpoint where they meet and cancel each other out, and that seems to me the most loaded point of all. Any explanation I come up with is likely to be as plausible (and personally persuasive) as it is indeterminative. I could riff on my family history, or the fact I’ve almost drowned a couple of times myself (and have, come to think of it, just finished the first draft of a story that involves a drowning), or the fact that when I had a bundle of borrowed money and a backpacking year in which to spend it, my first choice was a berth on a supply ship to Antarctica where I’d get to experience the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties (storms move me perhaps as much as the sea does). I could don my professorial hat and declaim how the sea overwhelms both mystery and metaphor, enervates pathetic fallacy, as these abstractions can’t exist outside human subjectivity, and the sea—ever-changing, ever the same, vast and all-accepting, omnicapable and indifferent—is nothing if not outside human thought and time. I could say my temperament is compelled by how the sea, like the sun, is the source from which all life flows, but because it’s here, within touch, we continually exert ourselves upon it; we bang up against it though we come off worse every time; we skate and pullulate on its sheer membrane and yet claim mastery over it—and I’m drawn to the romance and the absurdity and futility of this. If I were pushed to an idea of God, it would be sealike, and utterly beyond language, and therefore the ultimate desideratum for any writer. And dangerous, too. As you could probably deduce from the forgoing, I’m obsessed with the irresistible, if facile, parallel between the physical sea and the body of mystery it could be posited as protecting. Such that to plumb the physical depths of the sea—as to plumb the psychic, philosophical, epistemological depths in writing (or thinking, or living)—is to be crushed, not as a matter of conjecture or possibility but as a matter of mathematical certainty. And isn’t this an apt description of what we do? Stand on the shore, facing figments, throwing words into the water?

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by Rob Fischer

Michael Combs Combs’s choice of materials—carved wood, cast porcelain—distort even further what is an already palpable sense of animal exploitation. Like Christian Holstad and his crocheted campfire, Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are or Liza Lou and her carefully beaded Maximum Security Fence shown at Lever House in New York, Combs uses mundane, domestic materials. He has built a world where strong urges are not only felt, but closely observed. He uses his personal history as a structure for exploring themes of sexuality and masculinity, loneliness and solitude, as well as mortality, but there is also an underlying current in the work of quiet self-reflection. Although Combs grew up a hunter (as I did), we also grew up in communities where one’s participation was voluntary. Combs’s work resides in both Dada’s land of the offcenter and the ritualistic world of the hunting party, where masculine and feminine (hunters are borderline obsessed with apparel and accessories, including hunting-specific makeup, perfume, and brand names like "Realtree"), fellowship and solitude, and violence and contemplation reside. And in his humorous and troubling juxtapositions, he seems to purposely foster some confusion about his own intent, just as Dada linchpin Hugo Ball aspired to “Provoke, perturb, bewilder, tease, tickle to death, confuse.”

Michael Combs’s sculptures mix the Waspiness of traditional animal mounts with the taboo fetish sexuality of carved wooden birds wearing leather masks, emerging from leather strap-ons, and draped—flaccid—over Winchester gun stocks. With the feel of the Dada readymade, these long-necked birds and prideful mounted deer made from carved cedar and urethane foam represent wildlife at its most exploited. These are, after all, the herbivores, not the carnivores; the hunted, not the hunters. Combs grew up in Long Island in a family of commercial hunters, internalizing some ambivalence about an activity that he distorts and perverts in response. Descending from many generations of outdoorsmen and decoy makers, Combs has fostered an amazing deftness with a carving knife and an expert familiarity with the shape and gestures of wild animals. While Combs was expected to inherit a love of the sport, as an adult he has come to harbor mixed feelings for it. Attentive to the lurid and sometimes ludicrous issues surrounding hunting—life and death, beauty and violence—he often felt that he had a different relationship to the activity than many of his hunting companions did. In response to his outsider feelings to the family business and his sensitive reaction to the loss of life, he has created work that shares the distortion and exaggeration of George Grosz and Otto Dix. He builds unsettling relationships in his sculptures that create in the viewer an urge to construct a more normal relationship to replace the odd and grotesque juxtapositions. The Lodge, 2008, installation view, 30 × 30 × 15 feet. Courtesy of the artist and Salomon Contemporary, East Hampton.

—Rob Fischer is an artist who lives in New York. He has had shows at the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. He currently has work at the Corcoran Museum and has upcoming shows at the Los Angeles Hammer Museum and Franklin Artworks in Minneapolis.

The Artists on Artists Series is sponsored by the W. L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.

artists on artists MICHAEL COMBS

Field Day, 2009, wood and paint, 15 × 61 × 8 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

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By George Negroponteâ&#x20AC;¨

Dan Wolgers

Daydreamer, 2006, bronze. All images courtesy of the artist.

artists on artists dan wolgers an overall fuzziness. Allusion has played a significant role throughout Wolgers’s work: sometimes it’s played down, at other times it's abrasively in-your-face. He builds difference upon difference and then inventively fits them together in an essential and dynamic marriage. His objects can be both hermetic and emminently explicit. Because Wolgers’s many modes have been cultivated in a fairly public manner over many years, every move he makes is watched. He carries baggage in Europe, where his work is pressured by its own self-inflicted commentary, but the ploys of Wolgers’s youth are gradually receding; he is an artist shifting gears. His preoccupation with mass meaning could be turning inside out, purged by a therapeutic desire to reclaim the object. This is a defining moment for Wolgers. The stamp of an extraordinary sculptor’s touch has always been deeply embedded in everything he has done. These days, weight, form, and mass seep into one’s consciousness when looking at his work. Years of play have been boiled down to the basics. A new inwardness is unfolding for this artist, all of it derived from his prolonged search for a meaning fixed deeply in his own rich imagination.

Dan Wolgers is in his third decade of delivering snapshots of the improbable, a kind of shock therapy, to his native Sweden. His tough-minded and synthetic sensibility is fundamentally a conceptual practice but with something else thrown in at all times: it is exceedingly visual and jam-packed with humanity. Wolgers has vandalized, borrowed, intruded upon, carved into, joked about, and quoted anything and everything he can get his hands on. Driven by indignation and fueled by poetry, Wolgers’s has not been an ordinary voyage—imagine a very gifted craft artist turned ideologue. His work has covered some distance. Early on, in the late 1970s, Wolgers made small objects of wood or metal that were mechanically rigged to misbehave or function without a machine’s standardized rigor. Often they backfired. Sometimes they talked back and even kidded around. By 1989, Wolgers was making large installations with sound and photographs. In the early 1990s, sensationalist stunts took over for a period of time, embroiling Wolgers in both infamy and litigation. In 1991, he commissioned an advertising agency to make the work for his exhibition in Stockholm and attended the opening completely unaware of its shape, size, or content. The critics raged and so did the public. In 1992, when The Friends of Moderna Museet invited Wolgers to showcase his work at the Stockholm Art Fair, he parked his car (a Volvo, of course) neatly in the space the museum allotted him for the show. Later that same year, when asked to participate in a show titled Ecco Homo at Liljevalchs, he walked off with two of the gallery’s benches and auctioned them before the opening. A lone plaque with Wolgers’s name represented him for the duration of the exhibition. Two outraged Swedish citizens sued Wolgers for misappropriation and won the case. Wolgers promptly sold the notification of his verdict to a collector. In the current decade, Wolgers has been grappling with more conventional sculptural problems. His recent bronzes are head-sized forms that sit quietly on the floor. Their smoothness resembles female genitalia but their dark patina and tone of these objects gives them Untitled (The artist’s car blocking the showcase of Moderna Museet at the Stockhom Art Fair), 1992, installation view.

—George Negroponte is an artist currently living and working in Sweden. He is represented by the Jason McCoy Gallery in New York. Negroponte was president of the Drawing Center from 2002 to 2007.

above: Untitled (Polaroid camera twice natural size), 1980, enamel paint on wood. below: Torso, 2008, bronze.

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above: One Day and Back Then (Standing), 2008, color photograph, 30 Ă&#x2014; 40 inches. Images courtesy of the artist.

5678

below: From the series If We Believe In Theory, 2009, color photograph, dimensions variable.

artists on artists Xaviera Simmons

By Adam Pendleton

Xaviera Simmons

Recently, just before participating on a artists’ panel with Xaviera Simmons, I overheard her mention that her upcoming presentation consisted of over 100 images. I didn’t care so much about time, but even a brief explanation of each image seemed like a lot to get through. In the end, her presentation was no longer than anyone else’s; it included the work of William Eggleston, Joan Jonas, Stephen Shore, Paul McCarthy, and many others. Simmons had purposefully placed images of her own work in the middle of, say, Eggleston and McCarthy. Like Simmons, Eggleston is attuned to traditional questions of composition, color, scale, and finding beauty in the mundane. McCarthy is a formalist who puts forth the extreme surface of the objectively absurd. I liked how her own work—articulations of the “appropriativereal” and the “staged”—wound up situating her right in between these two strategies. Simmons, as an artist, doubles down. She captures the fiction/truth dialectic as well as anyone, disarticulating assumptions about the quietly composed and staged images she makes. She’s a Brecht of the photographic endeavor. In her work, Simmons is not so much documenting the performance before the camera, but the performance itself. In one image from the series If We Believe in Theory, Simmons captures a young girl in the woods dressed like Little Red Riding Hood. It’s an example of Simmons using the suggestion of performance to capture the explicit and contradictory nature of individuality. Her subject becomes herself, and also a dismembered characterization of what we’re accustomed to look at. Still, it is not simply Simmons’s understanding of the imagistic theater of photography that is useful, but her way of using form to acknowledge that image is at the center of the creative construction of collective and personal histories. Simmons is a lexicographer who fuses live material and conceptual conceit; she deconstructs and retains a relation to specific times and places. Perhaps paradoxically, she often achieves this through unabashedly excessive detail, like in One Day and Back Then (Standing), where her character stands in a field of sea reeds in blackface, looking out at us, wearing all black (including stiletto boots), ready for a night out on the town. As comfortable with taking a picture as she is with producing a theater piece or performing a DJ gig,

she makes work that is perpetually in flux. Often one of her images will seem like the precursor to another manifestation of her work. For the photograph Jaamburr, an 18th-century African American coinage meaning “free black,” Simmons photographed a college-aged man sitting up in bed, pen in hand, writing in a notebook. Newspaper pages cover his wall. The image reminds me of Electric Relaxation, an installation that Simmons exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston (and previously at Art in General in New York) where hundreds of jazz, hip-hop, and soul LPs were affixed to the wall in a loungelike environment where viewers could relax and listen to the music. The installation created a decidedly literary space, a text commanding a problematic read, like the paper clippings that could have represented a theoretical extension of or a literal opponent to a young man’s mind. —Adam Pendleton is a New York based artist. His work is currently on view in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum in New York, and he is presently one of the artists in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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a conversation:

Dike Blair

Dike Blair. Untitled, 1990, gouache, pencil, and spray paint on paper, 9 Ă&#x2014; 12 inches. All Blair images courtesy of the artist and Feature Inc., New York.

art dike blair and joe bradley

Joe Bradley

Joe Bradley. Abelmuth, 2008, grease pencil on canvas, 40 Ă&#x2014; 60 inches. Courtesy of CANADA, New York and Peres Projects, Los Angeles, Berlin.

BOMB Joe and I talk about his recent paintings in the interview below, but this is also an opportunity to revisit some of the things I’ve said in the past about his older work. In 2006, I volunteered to write the press release for his first show, Kurgan Waves, at his New York gallery, CANADA. Although that wasn’t Joe’s first solo exhibition, it was the body of work that I felt represented his breakthrough stuff and I wanted to get behind it. The paintings were comprised of several monochromatic canvases arranged to form abstracted rectilinear human bodies and torsos. Their construction felt shoddy, the individual canvases stretched on thin prefab stretchers and the paint application flatfooted. I wrote about these big “guys,” how they were including but transcending the binary operations of his earlier work: irony and sincerity, kitsch and the sublime, anarchy and aestheticism. I also said some things that, until this interview, I figured Joe was okay with. It turns out that my thoughts about those paintings as having elements of low-res game icons and being send-ups of Minimalism are not only unintentional but unwanted byproducts of those works. To his displeasure, my observations have stuck. Here, we try to unstick those bad memes, but probably create some new ones. Joe’s recent Schmagoo “paintings”—actually pictograms scrawled in grease pencil on untreated canvas drop cloths, which are sometimes stretched, sometimes not—are beautiful, funny, and compelling. They set up camp in my mind’s eye and refuse to leave— not that I want them to. —Dike Blair Dike Blair: I was just looking at images of your latest show at Peres Projects, Like a Turkey Thru Corn. I got to that one titled Turkey and stared at the thing for a while but couldn’t see the turkey.

body of work. I think a thoughtful title can sort of nudge the viewer in a certain direction. DB: One of the qualities in those last couple shows that I felt—and I’m thinking about the Lightnin’ Hopkins title for the Peres Projects show and the Twombly-esque look—is that there might be a nostalgic aspect to the work.

Joe Bradley: There were a couple of pieces in that show that were cribbed from this poster, which is a collaboration between me and my friend Valentina’s fouryear-old son, Leif. I wrote out the text for him on sheets of paper, he worked his magic, then she pieced it together on the computer. It was a family affair.

JB: Not consciously. Though I’ve had certain stuff from that era on my mind—Twombly, Guston, R. Crumb, the Hairy Who—I guess I’ve let it creep into the work. There’s a quality to some of that old blues music that I find really appealing too. Sort of a haunted, doomed sense of humor.

DB: So the T has sort of a beak-like thing … Oh, I get it. JB: Yeah, like T for “Turkey.” There’s a painting in the show called Ecstasy that was inspired by Leif, too. He gets a little overzealous with his Es. Sometimes a Leif E will have four or five extra horizontal strokes. (laughter) Just adorable.

DB: The canvas drop cloths you’re drawing those new pieces on are yellowish and dirty and look slightly antique. Those paintings you showed at Kenny Schachter’s that hung on that great Vito Acconci cage-like interior—they felt a little used as well. They had some early AbEx signage, palate-knife stuff, maybe like some Mark Tobey paintings found in the attic.

DB: From looking at the images, I think that one might be my favorite. It had some of the same qualities of what I’ll call the “smile painting” at your last show at CANADA. One stupid line that’s strangely compelling. Your last couple shows have titles, the aforementioned Like A Turkey Thru Corn and Schmagoo Paintings. You obviously like establishing some kind of mindset.

JB: Yeah. It’s the “distressed” look, like those jeans the kids are wearing that come already peed in with holes in the knees. With the Schmagoo paintings, I really wanted to be able to be careless … work on them for a while, crumple them up in a ball, throw them in the corner. It was a relief. I like the idea that someone could spill a glass of wine on one of these things and it would be no big deal. This thing (pointing at the recorder) is like a fucking elephant, it’s impossible to have a conversation. (laughter)

JB: Yeah, titles are important to me. I keep a list of them going. A lot of times I will have a title for a painting before I begin, and that will be all I have to go on. So it’s helpful for me as far as setting the tone for a particular painting or

art dike blair and joe bradley DB: It ruins everything. We were having such a lovely time.

you mean about things in print sticking to work. At some point I talked about ikebana and that won’t go away. I have thought about ikebana structures and used them in early work, so it’s my own doing. Hell, I put Noguchi lamps in some recent sculpture, so what am I complaining about?

JB: I know, I know. We should have requested a court stenographer. Or maybe we should just forget about it and keep drinking wine. DB: Well, speaking of wine and ecstasy, and “schmagoo”—which I now know is ’50s slang for heroin—what are the drug flavors to these things? I can’t quite put my finger on it.

JB: Were those the wall pieces, or sculptures? DB: The early ’80s wall pieces had a lot of japonaiserie, which I’m now slightly embarrassed about. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s daughter, Kiri, brought him to a show of those things and I was so excited. He hated them. He knew the history of things that I used simply because of a look. Pure aestheticization. In the mid-’90s when I first started making those carpet and light sculptures, I simply didn’t have a clue as to what they were or how to begin them, but I knew that I wanted a certain set of materials and a certain set of sensations. So to structure them, I went back to the ikebana. But in truth, I didn’t think about ikebana again after the first several sculptures. You’re not above aestheticization yourself. I think you get away with making highly aesthetized stuff that doesn’t come off as that because the objects are also aggressively stupid on one level.

JB: Pot, I guess. It’s the only drug I’ve ever had any luck working on. But, really, anything other than drawing while stoned is just too confusing. I’ll just spend half the day looking for the hammer or something. Mushrooms, too. I like the places my mind ends up on psychedelics. How about you—do drugs enter into your work? DB: I like alcohol. Much of the luminism in my work, or the attempt at luminism, usually has something to do with that first martini glow, or the glow of the bar. JB: I can see that in your gouache work, particularly the barroom still lifes. But the sculpture feels very sober and meditative. DB: Probably, and the gouaches that most directly reference that kind of inebriated light were from a particular period, from the late ’80s to the early ’90s. But there were photo and painting works on glass from those days that also went for a kind of glow. In My Last Sigh, Luis Buñuel’s autobiography, he writes this beautiful chapter on cocktails and bars and their power to inspire. Backtracking to Twombly, he played with the look of written language, but you seem more interested in pictograms.

JB: What do you mean?

JB: Yeah, I’ve shied away from including text in my paintings. Too specific. I’d like these to feel more like hieroglyphs. I love looking at Egyptian hieroglyphs even though I have no idea what the individual signs stand for.

JB: Well, I’m not interested in making anyone feel like a fool. In general, I try not to anticipate how people will react to my stuff. I think the way to go is to make the work you want to see, you know? Some people will like it and some won’t. I was standing in front of this Fontana painting at MoMA a little while ago that I thought was just beautiful. It was crowded in there, and after a while I found myself pretending to look at the painting while eavesdropping on what other people were saying. No one liked it. This Fontana that I had read as this quiet, totally elegant little affair was just pissing everyone off!

DB: Well, I won’t necessarily say it’s strategized, but, for example, scrawling something on a drop cloth that’s absolutely seductive. You pull it off because of an immense amount of practice and a particular sensitivity to materials. But they also look like monkey paintings and there’s some element of, “You fool— you’re standing in a room looking at a drop cloth with three grease pencil lines on it.” That puts an interesting anarchistic edge on a lovely painting.

DB: I think of your big men—individual monochromes hung vaguely in the shape of primitive figures—as referencing Minimal art from the ’70s, but also highly pixilated bad video games, perhaps from the ’80s? JB: The video game reference was completely unwanted by me, just a strange by-product. And although that body of work was definitely informed by Minimalism, as I started to get some feedback on it, I realized what people were focusing on—has that ever happened to you? Where you find that you’re stuck in a conversation that you don’t want to be in?

DB: Maybe a lot of this has to do with context or venue. Curating is always a kind of self-portraiture, and that show you curated at the Journal Gallery last year was really fun and irreverent. But you hang that show at the Whitney, and it feels like a “fuck you.”

DB: I’ve never been in the spotlight, but I know what

JB: I don’t know. I thought that show had a pretty friendly

BOMB My stuff is pretty romantic and can almost slip into sentimentality, and that’s simply an outcome of what happens when I make things, of who I am. I’d be insincere if I tried too hard to avoid it even though I’m not necessarily a fan of romantic art and certainly hate sentimentality, so I’m sometimes grossed out by my stuff. But the fact that I’m aware of its romanticism leads to decisions that are implicitly ironic. My emphasis of the decorative qualities of my work would be an example of that. Your sincerity/irony quotient is different from mine.

vibe. More of a good-natured ribbing than a “fuck you.” I feel like you’re stuck in the role of interviewer. It’s one of your moonlighting gigs, right? DB: I’m trying to write something for Roger White, for Paper Monument—have you seen that magazine? It’s really good. He’s a good painter, too. JB: Dike will go on the record giving Roger a good balllicking. DB: For the next issue he thought it would be great, or maybe a funny idea, if older artists instructed young artists on etiquette, a kind of Miss Manners for the art world.

JB: I find that oftentimes I’ll approach a subject with a certain degree of irony or distance, and then through the process of working and spending time with it, I come out the other end a true believer. For instance, when we first met, I was making paintings of lighthouses and sunsets that began as sort of a snarky revisioning of “bad” Thomas Kincade-style calendar art. I ended up really investing myself in the genre, and along the way discovered Marsden Hartley, Joseph Yoakum, and all these other great landscape painters. The project ended up becoming something way more complex and weirdly earnest than I had intended. DB: Why did you drop color and painting and go to the drawing on canvas? JB: I wanted to try something new. My studio practice was starting to feel like manual labor, just staple gunning all day long. I felt like someone else’s assistant! So I made a bunch of paintings with an inkjet printer that were terrible and ended up drawing directly on canvas.

JB: So what’s your advice, in a nutshell? DB: Well, I started an anecdote about how when I was young and obnoxious I violated rules of etiquette with an older artist, who displayed very good manners in not making me feel badly. However, the etiquette involved the telephone, so the advice is obsolete because of technology. So much for this sage’s advice. I need another approach.

DB: I felt that you had painted yourself into a corner with that vinyl work you showed in the Whitney Biennial, but I was confident that you’d work your way out. So drawing was the answer? JB: Yeah, it felt like a good endpoint for that body of work. After the Whitney, I decided to take a break from painting and focus on drawing. Drawing feels like a very direct way of thinking on paper. It’s a good way to generate ideas. With painting there are so many variables—how one color plays off of another, how the line between the colors works or doesn’t work, composition, blah, blah, blah. And more often than not, I’ll paint for six hours and end up with nothing, which I find maddening. So yeah, drawing seemed like the obvious solution. Then I also wanted to hang on to the physical—I wanted whatever I did to have the physical presence of a painting and that sort of scale. DB: When I’ve gotten stuck I go to the figure because it’s something I’m absolutely uncomfortable working with. I don’t know if I ever showed you that Epcot show that I did back in the early ’90s.

JB: I know the Japanese stuff was something that you didn’t want to hold onto, but there’s also kind of a haiku quality to your sculptures—is that off the mark? And with the gouaches, too—both have that sort of feeling of a frozen moment. DB: I titled the sculptures with haiku fragments for a while, until Bud Light started using haikus for their TV ads. Maybe we’re touching on the mixture of irony and sincerity that both of us are stuck with to some degree. JB: Yeah. I like the idea of a work of art containing both. Let ’em fight it out. DB: Sincerity may be optional in art, but I have to think that for anyone under 60, irony is nearly unavoidable. Dike Blair in his studio, 2003. Photo by Jason Schmidt.

JB: I’ve seen photos of that.

art dike blair and joe bradley you feel like you reach a point with a certain body of work that you smash it, then pick up the pieces; or does one series suggest another? DB: It does seem to go in steps, but I’m a formalist, so it tends to work that way. The change in sculpture came a couple years ago and was more of a design problem. I got sick of storing awkward shapes and repairing a sculpture every time I showed it. JB: Those more polished sorts of things? DB: Yeah. So I started doing the crate pieces where some amount of damage to the container is anticipated and even welcomed. JB: I love that idea. Sort of building damage into the work. I can’t stand the idea of things needing a conservator. Something that can have a little wear and tear and not be in a state of ruin is appealing to me. DB: I think Richard Prince’s hoods were somewhere in the back of my brain. If those get damaged, he just throws some Bondo on it, just like a dent in a car. JB: Yeah, I definitely thought of Prince’s work when I saw those painted crates in LA a year ago. He has a similar approach to paint handling—even his most painterly stuff has a super-controlled feel to it. I remember you touching on that in an interview for your 2007 show at Feature Inc.—did you call it “restrained expressionism”?

DB: Repressed expressionism. (laughter)

JB: You’re just too uptight. While we’re on the subject, I don’t respond to everything the guy does, but I love how he’s created this world for his work to live in. It seems like he could throw just about anything into the mix and make it work. DB: He does. I certainly used to envy Richard’s audience. Let’s face it, one of the nicest things that an artist can have is an audience’s expectation or image of what you do. Then the newer work can reverberate against it. In terms of tools of communication, it adds all these new clubs to your golf bag. Of course people want just a certain amount of change, but if you change too much, it can flop. That’s one reason I really admired your Schmagoo shows. They seemed to actively court failure. Is flirting with failure also a part of it?

DB: For me it was sort of a culmination of everything I’d done in the ’80s, and I finally felt I’d gotten it. So I started painting strippers and did the Gray Goo Lounge, a simulacrum of a strip club. It wasn’t great art, but it moved things along. A few years ago I got to a similar place. I’d been pairing paintings of botanicals and windows, and had been doing the carpet and light sculptures for about ten years; everything finally felt done. So that’s when I started painting women’s eyes. And the sculptures changed dramatically, at least to me. That’s a long way of saying that I’m incredibly uncomfortable with the figure and that’s where I go when I’m stuck because, if nothing else, it sort of shakes things up.

JB: Oh yeah, definitely. The entire thing is more exciting if there’s a distinct possibility that you’re going to make an ass of yourself. I’ve always admired the kind of commitment I see in an artist like Agnes Martin. She just honored this stripe thing to the very end, you know? I don’t think I can work that way, though. When I reach

JB: Well, I think it’s kind of a natural catalyst. The human body is the starship we’re all operating from. (laughter) Do above: Joe Bradley in his studio. Photo by Ben Handzo, 2009. below: Joe Bradley, Ecstasy, 2009, grease pencil on canvas, 81 × 63 inches. Courtesy of Peres Projects, Los Angeles and Berlin.

BOMB

Dike Blair, Untitled, 2009, gouache and pencil on paper, 24 Ă&#x2014; 18 inches.

art dike blair and joe bradley the point where I’m refining an idea, I tend to get bored. Maybe I’ll just keep starting from scratch and hope it all makes sense somehow. This is apropos of nothing, but do you read comics? Did any influence from comic books cross over into your adult life? DB: I painted quite a few still lifes that featured comics, usually Marvel. At some point in the ’80s, when I was in my third or fourth childhood, I saw a Jim Lee cover for an X-Men book, and it really staggered me. It was sexy and very Ukiyo-e. I started buying the books again. I don’t draw very much, or maybe my snapshots are my drawings. Anyway, I’ve always thought the best drawing is in comic books. So painting those brilliant covers was a kind of removed drawing or a homage to drawing. Does that make any sense? This was at the same time when there were all sorts of great graphic novels and underground stuff coming out, but I’ve always been more attracted to the mainstream books.

JB: It can be fun. In general I prefer working on my own.

DB: And nobody wants to own a collaboration.

JB: Yeah, of course. Collaborations sometimes seem more useful to the artists involved than to the viewer. But they’re nice because you get a chance to let go of your ego a little. You don’t have to take responsibility for every decision made, which can be a freeing experience.

JB: I collected Marvel and DC as a kid, then discovered Crumb as a teenager and traded all my superhero stuff for underground comix. I think some of the best artists working today are making comics. Rick Altergott, the guy who makes Doofus, is a total genius. Reading comics has definitely informed my work, particularly this new stuff. After I had installed the show at Peres, I was standing in the middle of the room and I realized that the paintings felt like individual panels from a comic book. Back to that repressed expressionism, your crates are getting this mannered, painterly look.

DB: You and Eunice did a show together at ATM, when it was on Avenue B more than a few years back, that seemed to presage both your and Eunice’s recent solo shows and the Miami collaboration. JB: Yeah, Joy to the Max. I liked that show. It ended up looking more like Eunice’s work than mine, in retrospect. I was the de facto editor in our combo. I was the guy saying no, no, no, no, no. Eunice will throw just about anything in there. Like I said, it was nice because it didn’t have to make any sense as far as my own body of work and my own practice or whatever.

DB: I’m throwing buckets of paint and resin at them. Most of that gets sanded off, there’s a lot of editing and erasure that’s very traditional, painterly— JB: This is all pretty recent, right? Is this something you’ve been denying yourself?

DB: I think we’re getting into trouble with this thing.

JB: Yup, we’re fucked.

DB: When I came to New York in the ’70s, I really looked up to a generation of artists older than I was: Mary Heilmann, Ree Morton, John Torreano, David Diao, and a bunch of other artists you probably wouldn’t know. I looked an awful lot at what might loosely be called lyrical abstraction and I played with it when I was a student, and I stunk. I also want to paint abstract gouaches. I’ve made stabs at it for 20 years, and it never quite works or feels right. It may just be a matter of the little homunculus in the back of my brain still figuring out how to paint them. But I still want to express that stuff. I saw CANADA’s booth down in Miami at NADA, where you collaborated with Eunice Kim. It was about the most exciting booth there. Do you like collaborating?

DB: Probably. Oh, no, we’ve still got another bottle. (laughter)

Dike Blair, (IN) in, 2008, Noguchi lamp, painted wood, carpet, framed gouache on paper, 70 × 26 × 111 inches.

BOMB

by young jean lee

Nature Theater of Oklahoma

theater nature theater of oKlahoma Nature Theater of Oklahoma is one of the best ensemble theater companies in the world. Their work is weird and unlike anything you’ve ever seen. I guess it falls under the category of "experimental theater," but despite the term’s dubious implications, it’s completely entertaining and moving and there’s nothing pretentious about it. Under the direction of Kelly Copper and Pavol Lisˇka—who have been working together for the past 14 years—they won an Obie Award last year for No Dice (2007). Their other shows are Poetics: A Ballet Brut (2005), Chorégraphie (2008), Rambo Solo (2008), and Romeo and Juliet (2008). This summer they will be working on part one of a ten-part bio-epic, Life and Times, which will premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna this September, and their Romeo and Juliet will finally have its US premiere at The Kitchen this coming December. They do more international touring than any other company I know, and they get rave reviews from press and audiences alike. One might think their success would incur jealousy within the theater community, but I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about them. This is probably due to the fact that Kelly and Pavol, besides being totally brilliant, are two of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. —Young Jean Lee Part I Young Jean Lee: Are there things you’re sick of talking about in interviews?

KC: We start out with some extremely basic question, like: What’s the least thing we can do and have it be a show? Will it be a show if there is no script? If we just stand there in front of a curtain? If we open the curtain, is it then a show? If we use only our phone conversations for dialogue but we’re wearing costumes, does that make them into a play? At the heart of our investigation is this wondering about the tipping point—when does it turn into theater?

Kelly Copper: We’re pretty patient with questions. Even the dumb question about whether we are from Oklahoma, which I know you won’t ask. YJL: Are you from Oklahoma? Ha ha. But actually you should remind me how you guys got that name. KC: We always said if we ever made a theater company it should be called Nature Theater of Oklahoma. It’s from the last chapter of Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika—the story of this poor guy, Karl, who’s sent away from his home in Europe (because he’s such a screwup there) and comes to America. He is always getting into these sad situations trying to support himself, and finally at the end of the novel he reads a sign advertising that the Nature Theater of Oklahoma is hiring: “We have a place for everyone, everyone in his place—but be sure not to miss the midnight deadline!” He goes there and says he has no experience in theater, and they give him a job as a technician. They give everyone who shows up a job, and it’s beautiful and angels are blowing trumpets and they put them all in a big train that rides off into the sunset bound for Oklahoma. You never know how it all ends. We also chose that name because Pavol’s story somewhat parallels Karl’s. He came on his own from Slovakia at 18, and spent his first year in America in Oklahoma. He actually lived across the street from where that first postal worker went postal and shot up the whole post office. That’s where the phrase “going postal” came from. There’s a plaque there now.

YJL: Can you give me an example of what you bring into rehearsal? KC: For Poetics it was a chart for each actor with a grid and mathematical coordinates and time signatures, indicating where they should go at what time. For No Dice, we brought in edited sound files of our recorded phone conversations to play with. Early in rehearsals we knew that we weren’t interested in hearing the actors accurately replicate the casual nature of the phone conversations. We needed something that could transform that material, so we asked them to find costumes in the back of the theater. (We were working at Downtown Art, a local youth theater, and they had a lot of great costumes.) We played around with different accents, and picked three that were the hardest for them, just to give them something to work against. Pavol and I got into the idea of finding a primitive acting style by watching a lot of silent films—in the very first ones you can tell that the stage actors are struggling with the particular demands of this new medium. Because these were before recorded sound, all the actors were using were their faces, their eyes, their bodies, so we studied that. We also brought in videos of street magic and developed a set of physical gestures from that. Those are the kinds of things we bring into rehearsal. Not all of it ends up in the show, but we learn what we need as we

YJL: What is your working process like, from initial concept to closing night? Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška. Photo by Pavol Liška.

BOMB go, such as needing something like accent or gesture to offset the vocal casualness of the recorded phone calls. Over the course of rehearsals, we always end up with a set of rules for the performance. In No Dice the actors had to: 1) Keep the exact language and timing of the recorded phone calls; 2) Keep the accent going; 3) Use eyes and melodramatic emotion to extract the biggest drama from the material; 4) Use one of the three sets of hand gestures we created; and 5) Be in one of thirteen paired positions on stage. It’s like you create the game of football and everyone learns the rules and strategies and then you just play the game every night. Pretty early in the game, shortly after rehearsals, we’re putting what we do in front of an audience. You saw act one of Poetics at Tonic maybe a week into rehearsals, right? It was just awful. YJL: Yeah, that was pretty awful, but I’ve never seen you do anything even remotely bad after that. Have you done secret bad things I don’t know about? KC: We did early showings of No Dice that included these long stretches of conversations between John Cage and Morton Feldman on boredom. For a while No Dice ended with a song by Stevie Wonder. Romeo and Juliet, for one day at least, included a sort of Hee Haw number with banjos. Also, in one showing we had a dance break for world peace where the Palestinian and Israeli flags magically turned into a giant American flag which triumphantly waved in the air while music played. Is that bad enough? We were trying to explore what it means to be American artists, going back to the transcendentalists’ questions about what American art or writing was as opposed to Europe’s. YJL: You make all of that stuff sound so good. I was there for the flag waving and thought it was excellent.

pay attention to the audio, etc. There are so many tasks that go on for such a long time that those things need continually to be refreshed. We do a little less of this now than we did at the start, but the idea was to incorporate some of that coaching from the realm of sporting events, and to send a sort of weird communication out over the audience—they are in the middle of something of which they are unaware.

KC: We always put up something really rough, and that early encounter with an audience always helps to shape it. After that we start to erase more and more. In rehearsals we add a lot of material, then we look at the structure and take away the garbage. Then we put it in front of an audience again. And that continues. We’re never done with any of the shows. We changed a big chunk of Poetics after we had performed it for a year; we changed a major element of Rambo Solo the day before we opened in Hamburg; and we continue to direct all the shows. No Dice is directed live, during the show, from behind the audience.

YJL: My ultimate fantasy is to be able to direct the actors while they’re onstage. Sometimes during a show I want to stand up and shout at them to stop, because they’ve gotten on the wrong track and it’s like watching a train wreck happen. My actors would hate it. Equity would never let me use any of their actors again. How are your and Pavol’s roles in the artistic process similar and different? KC: That’s a question we both hate to answer. It’s hard to say who does what. Sometimes Pavol’s giving all the actor and tech notes, but they are all mine because I write constantly during the shows. We always say that I do all

YJL: What do you mean you direct it live from behind the audience? What does that even mean? KC: Pavol and I work from a platform behind the audience for No Dice. We have a set of signals for the actors: basic stuff to remind them to breathe, remember accent, volume, articulation, increase the melodrama,

Video stills of Zachary Oberzan in Rambo Solo.

theater nature theater of oKlahoma the editing, although that’s always done in conversation, too. We live in a studio apartment. We work in one room and we work all the time. We’re all up in each other’s business and in each other’s workspaces. The one constant is that I know he will not put anything on stage that I can’t stand behind, and vice versa. We’re both really stubborn and hard to convince. It’s good, though; you can never be too in love with your own bullshit. Pavol deserves all the credit for being the driving force behind everything.

involved in listening to his phone calls. We started talking about the calls, and next thing you know we were 100 hours into this thing that became No Dice. Pavol’s got this wonderful quality as an artist where there’s just no idea that he will not try. And if that one doesn’t work, he’s got something else he wants to do. You never hit a wall. Often I’m coming into the work as a sort of outsider and I find my own way into this plethora of stuff and we make a show that neither of us expected to make when we started. Does that make sense, or does it still make me sound like a turd? YJL: No, that makes total sense. KC: He says he gets us into trouble and I fix it for us, which is really simplistic, but there’s maybe something in that dynamic that has the ring of truth. YJL: Do you like touring? KC: Ever since I can remember I wanted to live like circus people and now I do! I love seeing how the shows change everywhere we do them. There’s always a new space, new problems: it keeps everything alive. Pavol and I stop ourselves all the time with a feeling of “Can you believe this is actually happening?” We’ll be going on the train to open a show in Paris, and turn to each other with this look of “How cool is this! We’re going to perform in Paris!” We still remember when we had to pick up human shit in a theater we had rented in New York. There was a homeless guy who would come in and shit on the stage every night, and so with that in mind … everything seems totally amazing now. Every morning we try to actively remind ourselves that he could be putting on his uniform to go be a security guard at the Met, and I could be choking on chemicals in a darkroom all day—which was my last job before I started making my living as a theater artist. Things are great! I’m 38 years old and I love what I do most of the time. I am lucky that I get to make work all over the world with someone I love who inspires me.

YJL: I wish you would rephrase that because “driving force” is pretty general and makes it sound like you have a passive role.

YJL: Wow, now I feel like an ingrate. What is your relationship to the cast on tour? Are you guys like a big gang of buddies?

KC: Yeah, fuck the driving force. But all the same, he generally gives me a lot of credit for shaping and thinking about the work, and I give him a lot of credit for having that restless thing inside where he is always looking for the next thing. When he first started wanting to work on No Dice, I was in the middle of writing another play, and he was like, “I think the next thing we do should have no written script. Here.” And he bought me a tape recorder and wanted me to narrate a play into it. I tried once but it was really dumb, so then he just sort of gave up on me. Then he started calling people we knew and asking them for a story. He’s on the phone all the time and I’m trying to write this play still. Gradually I couldn’t help getting Fletcher Liegerot in Poetics. Photo by Peter Nigrini.

KC: When we started, everyone was hanging out together as a group of big buddies, yeah. That gets old really fast. You’re with the same people every day and night for months, so it’s more like a family dynamic, which is crazy, because Pavol and I never wanted a family! You realize at a certain point that you’re just recreating that whole thing with the company—there’s love, guilt, responsibility, rivalry—all that stuff. I try to step away every once in a while, and not overdo the time together. Also, we’re not big party people, which takes us out of the general company social circle.

BOMB and Sartre, and had musical numbers. My history teacher actually staged it for me. I met Pavol in my final year in college. We took a course together in Dadaist theater. There were only three students in the course: us and one other girl. We used to stage interruptions in class by passing mysteriously wrapped packages to each other across the conference table. We annoyed the shit out of that professor. Pavol had two more years to go of school when I got out, so I went to New York and found us the apartment where we live to this day.

YJL: How did you guys each individually get into theater? And/or how did you start making work together? KC: I started making radio plays when I was a kid. My dad has always worked as a radio personality, so when I was little one of my first toys was a tape recorder from Radio Shack. I’d do sound effects and make up stories. One of my favorite things was to invite my friends over—we’d all drink a lot of water and then put the tape recorder in

YJL: Does being married make working together easier or harder? KC: I’d say it makes it easier on the whole—I can’t imagine doing what we do for a living and having a spouse that didn’t understand that. It’s ridiculous enough to have to justify it to yourself. Can you imagine? YJL: What have been the biggest challenges (artistic and/or administrative) for you guys in making theater? If you’ve conquered any major ones, then how did you do it? KC: The biggest challenge is always what comes next. How do you not repeat yourself? How do you keep experimenting and how do you make sure that failure is always an option? I have to remind myself always that we can do this with no money in a basement somewhere. Otherwise the temptation is to keep chasing after the success you had with one show. For us that one show was No Dice. YJL: I know! It seems like it’s hard to tell when it’s happening to you, otherwise those other companies wouldn’t do it, right? Can you make a deal with me that you’ll tell me if my work ever starts to get like that? KC: Sure. You’ll tell us? YJL: Okay, but with the two of you keeping each other in check the way you do, I don’t see you guys calcifying like that. Is there anything you hope to accomplish by presenting shows for an audience?

the bathroom and record ourselves pissing. Then we’d all listen to it and just die laughing. I’m sure these tapes would probably fetch me like half a million dollars on eBay right now, if only I had held onto them. Also, my mom was into musical theater. She was in community theater versions of Godspell and so on. My dad had a lot of no-good friends always coming around who did cartoon voices for a living, or there was this guy who was a magician and would levitate Nerf balls. All this low-rent theater contributed to my later delinquency. In high school I made my first play instead of a term paper. It was 40 pages long, featured the Pope, Nietzsche, above: Zachary Oberzan, Anne Gridley, and Robert M. Johanson in No Dice. Photo by Peter Nigrini.

KC: I know that what we do is ridiculous, that no one would care tomorrow if we stopped making it, but I always hope that what we do changes people’s lives, that it alters consciousness, that it cures cancer and AIDS. I know I am failing miserably at any one of these goals, but I have to keep striving for big things when I invite all these people into a room. I have to believe in the power of that encounter. Pavol feels the same way. In his country, theater people were the ones behind the Velvet Revolution. It was Václav Havel and a bunch of theater people who were

below: Robert M. Johanson and Anne Gridley in an early work-in-progress performance of Romeo and Juliet. Photo by Peter Nigrini.

theater nature theater of oKlahoma changing the world, and they overthrew the government and started again. This is the tradition we’re always trying consciously to work from. We burned out once already, so burning out again is not an option. We stopped making theater in 1998 because it stopped being fun. So, now a big part of what we do is trying to track where the pleasure is, because if you lose track of that it gets ugly and pointless really fast.

I’m remembering—I wonder what Kelly does in the artistic process that you wouldn’t be able to do on your own. What are her superpowers, basically? She talked about yours. I’m also interested in all of the work that happens before you’re actually with actors; what’s that like for you and Kelly? Okay, now I have to cheat. (Looks at her notes.) I’m interested in your method of creating the shape of something: do you have an overall framework from beginning to end? Or is it that you’re just creating a bunch of disparate things that then come together? I’m interested in whether you believe in God and if you think there’s a possibility of an afterlife. Also, in whether you’ve ever had a near-death experience? Is death something that you ever think about? And what kind of music do you listen to? What are your favorite television shows? Is there anything that you think is really awesome about Slovakia that you find lacking in the United States? What was your favorite venue to tour at? What brand are your sneakers? If your apartment was so filthy that there were mushrooms growing in the bathroom, and you also had ten Odwalla bottles with, like, a quarter or a fifth liquid left in them and they had become so poisoned with botulism that the plastic of the bottles had puffed up, how would you rather die: by eating the mushrooms or drinking the Odwalla from the bottles? That’s it.

YJL: I think that is a good idea for life and not just theater. Track where the pleasure is. You’ve just changed my life. Part II Pavol Lisˇka: Ask me all your questions all at once. YJL: All at once? And I may never ask another one again? Do you want me to wait for your answer or not? PL: Just ask me questions. What you’re doing is the art form of asking the question: you’re free-associating questions and I will be listening and taking them in. YJL: But I already asked Kelly all the questions I had. PL: Ask anything you ever wanted to know about me as you’re looking at me here. We are on an island and we only have … I don’t know, a Motorola two-way kind of cell. You click and you can ask but you can’t talk. If I click the Motorola, I can talk but you can’t talk back to me, you can only listen. Then I can press listen, and you can talk to me.

PL: I don’t drink. My father is an alcoholic and I always rebelled against it. When I left Slovakia, I left for America to live in Oklahoma; I did not drink yet. Afterward I went to Dartmouth College and that’s where I started drinking. I drank heavily, all the time. And I learned that I’m an alcoholic. Once I moved to New York and we were making work, I still kept drinking. Then we got burned out, and I stopped drinking. When I drink, my brain takes a break and I never allow a thought to go to its completion. So I stopped drinking again for several years. Then we got back into theater. Ideas began to percolate in my brain when it wasn’t taking a break by drinking. We started making theater and then, after 9/11, I started drinking again. But I think 9/11 was an excuse for everyone to do whatever the fuck they want. We were making theater but not that good—I blame it all on drinking. I have a tendency to blame every problem that a human being has on drinking because I’ve seen my father, an extremely talented person, ruin his life. As a matter of fact, I’ve been receiving phone calls about every other day from him in rehab in the past month, but I haven’t picked up. I haven’t spoken to my father for about six years. He only calls me when he needs money. I know I have a predisposition toward alcoholism and ruining my life. I’ve chosen to erase that word from my vocabulary. As I have chosen to erase the word "burnout" too, because I got burned out before, and there were four years of darkness in my life. I decided that no matter how hard it’s going to get, there’s nothing else that I want to do than make work. To make myself feel better sometimes, I like shopping.

YJL: Okay, if I were going to do that, I don’t think my questions would have anything to do with theater. There are a couple of questions that I want to ask you, and then I’ll start free-associating after that. PL: See, then you’ll have time to prepare. Your brain is not going to be fresh for that. YJL: So you want me to start out with the free association? PL: Yeah. YJL: Okay, I guess I would be interested in knowing what you think about alcohol. And I would ask you if you think that you’ve found the secret to a happy life, and if so, what it is. I’m interested in what the biggest source of pain in your life is, and how long you’ve had the same facial hair and haircut, and how frequently you change it. And, also, if you’ll be changing it in the future. I’m interested in the extent to which fashion plays a role in your life and where you shop and how much space in your brain the clothing that you wear occupies. I’m interested in why you don’t want kids. I wonder if you ever get depressed. Oh, now

BOMB I love to shop for shoes. I have about six pairs of shoes that I love. One is Adidas; one is a pair of Levi’s that I bought in Austria. Whenever we go to Austria I love to go shopping for shoes at Humanic. Then I have really fancy Puma shoes that Kelly bought me for Christmas. I also have a red and white Diesel pair of sneakers. That was the first pair I bought after only wearing Converse for years: I wanted people to start looking at my feet and not at my eyes, because I wanted to be looking at their eyes, not them. I also have Kenneth Cole shoes. I got them for free because the guy who sold them to me, who was selling me a leather jacket, packed in the shoes also, but didn’t charge me. I have a Nike pair of sneakers that I bought for exercising when we tour. One of the favorite venues to tour was Kaaitheater in Brussels. We’ve done three shows there, and it’s the best because of the audience. Also Oslo. If it’s between Oslo and Brussels, I would say maybe Oslo because we’ve been there only once, so it’s maybe more special. That’s what happens: once you get what you want or you go somewhere twice, then you stop appreciating it. So probably Brussels was better, but I appreciate Oslo more because it only happened once. Kelly is much better at creating structure of the overall event. I’m good at generating a lot of material. I get bored very easily, so I keep skipping from one project to another. So I can make material for five projects in one month, and then Kelly’s job is to make one project out of those five different ideas for a project. But the most fun I have is generating material. I don’t have to be disciplined. Kelly is much more disciplined than I am. I’m disciplined in the fact that I force myself to work and I keep moving forward constantly without a break. And Kelly is able to look back, take the whole of the material and organize it. Without that we’d have no projects. There’s no hierarchy. I’m restless and that’s not necessarily a virtue. I surf channels on TV all the time. Some of my favorite channels are the Animal Planet and the Travel Channel. We didn’t have Internet so we got cable and that’s like heaven. Investigation TV—they have all kinds of criminals. I love all types of prison shows. There’s Lock Up, there’s Hard Time, there’s Lockdown … Prisons Abroad or something like that. To Catch a Predator is another one of my favorite shows. Survivor is fading in its popularity for me, now that we have cable. When we didn’t have cable, those types of shows that are on regular television were really important to me. Now I cherish prison shows and shows about sharks. I love sharks. Prison shows— sometimes they have marathons and I love it. I watch probably because I’m scared of that world. I’m definitely afraid of sharks. The biggest phobia I have is sharks. And probably prisons. So that’s why I love to watch: maybe I can learn how to behave in these worlds if I’m, by any chance, thrown into them. In prisons you can only wear the same clothes all the time, which brings me to the way I like to dress. I can only focus on certain parts of my body as far as fashion goes. Below the knee. Everything else stays the same.

I wear a black pair of pants, and an Oklahoma T-shirt. Then we get to the face, where there’s a handlebar mustache. I’m bored with the kind of mustache I have now. I had a different mustache before and a very flimsy Mohawk that I got rid of. It was too pathetic. I’ve been tempted to cut my mustache off. I have dreams that other people take away my mustache—and therefore my ideas and inspiration. I am a little superstitious. Unfortunately, one of the mustaches that I would love to try is the kind that Hitler wore. He ruined it for all of us. That’s yet another crime that Hitler has committed: taking away an option for mustached men. Right now we don’t have enough time to get bored. We’re pretty much constantly working on something new. Prior to rehearsal we generate a lot of material. We never have a goal in mind; we just have a process in mind. Rehearsals are scary because anything can happen: that’s where the project starts. Ultimately, we have prepared for rehearsals for a month and come in with all sorts of material. After two days, we’ve thrown out every single thing and started completely from scratch. Now that we know that this is how we work, we don’t spend much time worrying about what the project is going to be. We trust that somehow we’ll figure it out in the room. We don’t need to script the rehearsals. The best preparation for rehearsals is to watch a lot of television or maybe read a book, if you can find something that you haven’t read before that’s not predictable. It’s hard. I’d keep myself away from thinking about rehearsals by drinking a lot, if I still drank, I’m sure. And I’d love to smoke, I have to admit. I’m sure I forgot something, but that’s part of the experiment. YJL: Actually, I just have one more. This is just for personal pleasure. Which way would you rather die: eating the mushrooms or drinking the leftover juice? (laughter) PL: Eating the mushrooms. They’re just beautiful and they’re pure things. YJL: Even though they’re growing in a filthy bathroom in the filthiest corners? PL: Yeah, but they’re themselves. KC: And many, many mushrooms are magic, so you could have a really good time. YJL: Excellent.

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01. Akron Art Museum akronartmuseum.org

04. Newark Museum newarkmuseum.org

08. Real Art Ways realartways.org

10. ICA Boston icaboston.org

William Wegman: Fay May 16 – August 16, 2009

Yinka Shonibare MBE Party Time: Re-imagine America July 1, 2009 – January 3, 2010

Real Public: Four New Public Art Projects in Parkville and Frog Hollow. Artists: Satch Hoyt, Sofia Maldonado, Matthew Rodriguez, and Margarida Correia May 30 – September, 2009

11. Mass MoCA massmoca.org

Three Solo Shows: Beth Krebs, Corey D’Augustine, Chris Taylor Thursday, May 21 – Sunday, August 23

13. THE Andy Warhol Museum warhol.org

Rethinking Art: Objects and Ideas from the 1960s and 70s June 6 – October 4, 2009

05. Neuberger Museum of Art 02. Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati contemporaryartscenter.org Carlos Amorales: Discarded Spider September 27, 2008 – September, 2009

Sanford Wurmfeld/E-Cyclorama: Immersed in Color May 31 – July 19, 2009 neuberger.org 09. TANG MUSEUM skidmore.edu/tang

Christian Schmit: The Paper Mountain April 26 – August 24, 2009 06. The Parrish Art Museum

03. Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland mocacleveland.org There Goes the Neighborhood: Exploring Changing Communities Here and Beyond Maos and Cows: Selections from the Marjorie and Anselm Talalay Collection June 5 – August 16, 2009

Amazement Park: Stan, Sara and Johannes VanDerBeek June 6, 2009 – April 25, 2010

Jean Luc Mylayne June 28 – September 20, 2009 parrishart.org

12. Provincetown Art Association and Museum paam.org

14. Museum of Art / Rhode Island School of Design risdmuseum.org 15. Snug Harbor snug-harbor.org 16. Institute of Contemporary Art / University of Pennsylvania icaphila.org 17. Worcester Art Museum worcesterart.org 18. Mattress Factory mattress.org 19. Jacob’s Pillow jacobspillow.org

07. Wadsworth ATHENEUM wadsworthatheneum.org

maps, mileage, AND Fiction for Driving podcasts AT bombsite.com

20. Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival hvshakespeare.org

the wick David Kramer: parting shots

David Kramer, Untitled, watercolors, 3 Ă&#x2014; 5 inches each. Courtesy of the artist and Pierogi Gallery.

The Newark Museum presents A Centennial Commission by

Yinka Shonibare MBE Party Time: Re-imagine America

07.01.09-01.03.10

Party Time: Re-imagine America is a major new site-specific installation by Yinka Shonibare MBE, commissioned by the Newark Museum for its Centennial year. Shonibare’s longtime exploration of Victorian-era culture finds full expression in this theatric sculptural tableau, set in an actual 19th-century interior. Within the dining room of the Ballantine House, the Museum’s 1885 National Historic Landmark mansion, Shonibare stages a lavish dinner party in which an indulgent celebration of prosperity tips toward misbehavior and indiscretion. Join our Fan Page on Facebook: Newark Museum

newarkmuseum.org web

49 washington street newark, nj 07102-3176 973.596.6550

tel Yinka Shonibare MBE, ‘Flower Time I’ (detail), 2006, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, wire and hand-blown glass vase, 14 x 14 x 14 in. Yinka Shonibare MBE, ‘Girl on a Globe’ (detail), 2008, Mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile and globe, Overall: 86½ x 39½ x 39½ in. Copyright the artist. Courtesy the artist, James Cohan Gallery (New York) and Stephen Friedman Gallery (London). Photography Stephen White.

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