Bomb 125

Number 125 / Fall 2013 EDITOR’S CHOICE PICTURING THE UNSAYABLE: CARL E. HAZLEWOOD

by Patricia Spears Jones

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OPERATION MASSACRE BY RODOLFO WALSH

by Ellie Robins

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BETWEEN ARTISTS: THOM ANDERSEN / WILLIAM E. JONES

by Andrew Lampert

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LYNDA BENGLIS: BEYOND PROCESS

BY SUSAN RICHMOND

by Stuart Horodner

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BEYOND THIS POINT ARE MONSTERS

BY ROXANNE CARTER

by Alexandra Gauss

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SAVAGE COAST BY MURIEL RUKEYSER

by Stefanie Sobelle

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ANFANG GUT. ALLES GUT. ACTUALIZATION OF THE FUTURIST OPERA VICTORY OVER THE SUN 1913

by V. Vogler

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SARAH CHARLESWORTH (1946–2013)

by Betsy Sussler

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Sarah Charlesworth, Rider, 1983–84, Cibachrome with laquered wood frame, 15 × 20 inches.

Courtesy of Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.

ARTISTS ON ARTISTS FLORIAN HECKER

by Ben Vida

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BEN DURHAM

by Christopher Stackhouse

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MIYOSHI BAROSH

by Annetta Kapon

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INTERVIEWS 28 ART — STEVE RODEN AND STEPHEN VITIELLO Vitiello and Roden are often mistaken for each other. It might have something to do with their early interest in punk, Cage’s influence on their work, and their soundbased collaborations.

38 ART / THEATER — MY BARBARIAN

by Andrea Fraser Brecht’s estrangement, Artaud’s ritual theater, Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, and camp inform My Barbarian’s performance work: an investigation of what constitutes transformative cultural practice.

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CONTENTS

54 FILM — BEN RIVERS

by Coleen Fitzgibbon Rivers’s films involve loners and small, insular communities cut off from society at large. His latest, A Spell to Ward off the Darkness (2013), was made in collaboration with Ben Russell. With fellow filmmaker Fitzgibbon, he speaks of recreating utopian visions.

80 LITERATURE — RODRIGO REY ROSA

by Francisco Goldman Paul Bowles took Rodrigo Rey Rosa under his wing while he lived in Morocco in the 1980s and early ’90s.

Like his mentor’s, Rey Rosa’s exacting prose is equally at home with acts of violence and with beauty. Rey Rosa discusses his native Guatemala’s legacy of fear.

104 LITERATURE — GONÇALO M. TAVARES

by Pedro Sena Nunes The Portuguese writer’s series—the novels in The Kingdom and the short stories in The Neighborhood— are set respectively in an undefined Central European country beset by constant war, and in a mutable locale inhabited by famous authors. At their core is an exploration of history, literature, and evil.

ART — AMY SILLMAN 114

by R. H. Quaytman The two painters on Plato and Diogenes, calligraphy versus photography, the rude and the casual, cartoons and geometry, truth and deception, Eastern and Western perspective, shame, and whimsical critical thinking. Sillman’s first museum survey opens at the ICA Boston this October.

122 ART — PAULO BRUSCKY

by Sergio Antonio Bessa Translated from the Portuguese by Adam J. Morris Paulo Bruscky came of age as an artist during the military takeover of Brazil in the 1960s and ’70s. In his native Recife, he developed a body of work for the dissemination of messages—through mail art, newspaper ads, flyers, and public interventions. Bruscky’s exhibition Art Is Our Last Hope, curated by Bessa, opens at the Bronx Museum this fall.

138 MUSIC — JULIA HOLTER

by Ben Vida Upon the release of her new album, Loud City Song, the singer and composer on her interests in the poetry of Frank O’Hara, the operas of Robert Ashley, and Colette’s novella Gigi.

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INTERVIEWS

Film

David Lynch by Michael Saur Joshua Oppenheimer by Pamela Cohn

Art

Kalup Linzy by Lee Ann Norman Ragnar Kjartansson by Sabine Mirlesse Dannielle Tegeder by Annie Godfrey Larmon Alissa Nutting by Micaela Morrissette

Music Van Dyke Parks by Keith Connolly

FICTION

Shane Jones Catherine Lacey Álvaro Enrigue

POETRY

Michael Earl Craig Brandon Shimoda Tommy Pico

ART PORTFOLIOS

Chloë Bass Sean Mellyn

Editor’s Choice

From the New York Quotidian series, 2012, pigment print, 15 Ă— 10 inches.

Images courtesy of the artist and Skoto Gallery, New York.

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Picturing the Unsayable: Carl E. Hazlewood I met Carl Hazlewood in that most millennial of ways: Facebook. His daily postings of his and other artists’ works intrigued me; I had to “friend” him. What started as an interest in daily musings and pictorial renderings became a full-fledged 3D friendship. But Carl’s work remained mysterious—just what was he doing?

What had he done? And why wasn’t there more of it, or why didn’t I know more about it? Some of these questions will be answered in two exhibitions this fall: a solo show, Temporality and Objects: Installations & Photographs at Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, and in a group show, Unsayable: Wall Works at FiveMyles in Brooklyn.

Carl rarely makes “paintings,” though he started as a painter and is among a group of Guyanese visual artists who, since the ’80s, have gained international reputations. He co-founded Aljira, and has developed a curatorial and arts journalism practice, primarily focused on contemporary artists of color. But his art making was put on hold, in spite of his early success.

So what brought him back to art making big time?

Well, a personal crisis. His mother’s passing put things into perspective. He asked himself, “Do I want to reach the end of my own life never having done what I believe I was born to do?”

He has focused on his photography, installations, and constructions—most notably the Angels series, some of which I saw on display at FiveMyles in 2010.

These pieces consist of heavyweight paper, twine, mesh, tar paper—whatever materials he finds in his small studio. The interplay of the constructions’ folds, curves, colors, negative and positive spaces, and the materials’ weights give the Angels pieces a fierce delicacy and erotic charge. Carl has noted that, “while the work includes a range of formal, almost minimal structures, it can also occasionally surprise me with its suggestiveness; something about the folding, pleating, and cutting, can recall intimate experiences of skin… because we are live, sensual human beings, Eros, the positive principle of creation, is always somehow at play—at least metaphorically.”

I recently saw larger, constructed wall works, which are much bolder and more provocative. As with color and materials, scale informs Hazlewood’s current experiments. In many ways, he is using the vocabulary of minimalism to make works that advance his own idea of how to be “culturally black” in the 2lst century. He says of his photographs, “If they document anything at all, it may be the concrete poetry of seeing itself. . . definitely something which resists explication.”

As a poet, I too am interested in the ways in which being “culturally black” is stretched. Hazlewood found this quote by Rainer Maria Rilke to underscore his themes: “Most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art.”

— PATRICIA SPEARS JONES is a poet and contributing editor to BOMB. Her poetry collection Painkiller was published by Tia Chucha Press in 2010 with cover art by Carl E. Hazlewood.

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American Angel (True Blue) , 2012, paper, linen paper, cord, push pins, map pins on wall, 65 × 60 inches.

Angel (Wall Crawler) , 2012, tar paper, paper, push pins, and nylon cord, 72 × 48 inches.

Operation Massacre

by Rodolfo Walsh

Original news clippings accompanying the serial publication of Operation Massacre in Mayoría , 1957. Courtesy of Seven Stories Press.

SEVEN STORIES PRESS, 2013 On the evening of June 9, 1956, a group of men gathered in a basement apartment in Buenos Aires to listen to the broadcast of a boxing match. Some were friends of the host; some had simply come on a whim or at the invitation of an acquaintance; some were expecting news about a rebellion against the repressive military government that had seized power from Juan Domingo Perón the previous year. Just after 11 PM, the flat was stormed by police; the men—and a few passersby for good measure—were loaded into a truck and taken first to a police station, then, just before dawn, after interrogation but without explanation, to a field on the outskirts of the city. There, they were told to get out, walk across the field, and then stop. The realization that they were about to be killed dawned on them at different moments. Some never made it off the truck. Others managed to slip away from the inept officers, into the darkness and the ditches and, finally, long past daybreak, back into the city (though their suffering would not end there). The unluckiest were terribly injured but were never shown the mercy of a coup de grâce.

Perhaps predictably, but none the less despicably, these events were first concealed and then falsified by officials at all levels, from police officers to the highest-ranking members of the military. Rodolfo Walsh, at the time a young journalist and aspiring mystery writer, first heard of them in December of that year and, driven by a devotion to truth that would lead to his own murder by a military junta almost two decades later, 16

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began a private investigation. Operation Massacre, the fruit of that research, preceded by almost a decade Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which is wrongly acclaimed as the first true-crime novel. Walsh is dogged, yet constitutionally fair-minded (he was himself politically opposed to both the military government and Peronism), and masterful in his use of narrative to expose truth—and deception. He allows these events to speak for themselves of an outrage all the more devastating for its continued lack of recognition. For months, no known journalistic outlet would touch his story, though Walsh did persuade a radical organization to print a pamphlet. The ten thousand copies were snatched up immediately, and together with the series of articles that became Operation Massacre, published in Mayoría from May until July of 1957, they gave momentum to a legal enquiry that was soon quashed by the same military government that had committed the murders. It’s taken a further 56 years for the story to reach English-language audiences, in this edition from Seven Stories Press—also Rodolfo Walsh’s first appearance in English. It’d be too cheap to call this required reading for its relevance to contemporary issues of government dishonesty and violent military suppression of opposition. It’s more than that: it’s the introduction to our literature and history of a writer of almost inconceivable courage, suppressed only by death, and of the terrible events of a night that must not be forgotten.

— ELLIE ROBINS is a writer, editor, and translator based in Brooklyn.

Between Artists: Thom Andersen / William E. Jones A.R.T. PRESS, 2013 As someone who regularly buys unknown books because of their curious and enticing covers, the first thing I noticed about this publication is that it lacks an image. Well, that isn’t entirely true—the names Thom Andersen and William E. Jones and the series’ title “Between Artists” do appear on a purple rectangle floating atop a white background. Beyond that, there is nothing at all on the back cover or inner book flaps to describe the content or provide biographical rundowns of the authors. The absence of explanatory information in the service of minimal design basically assumes that you already know of these guys and care about what they have to say.

Those who are familiar with the formally daring works of these artist-filmmakers probably don’t need me to tell them that this book is a seriously smart dialogue between two deeply informed thinkers. Andersen and Jones each have documentary and found-footage informed practices that are based on in-depth research, and the sprawling discussion contained in these pages nimbly captures the full zest of their expansive scholarship. There is plenty of talk here about Los Angeles as a physical, mental, and historical site; hideous institutional architecture; gay pornography pioneer Fred Halsted; the revolutionary political stance and unlikely resurrection of Christ; the decline of celluloid filmmaking; and even catty commentary about the church-going habits of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Clement Greenberg repeatedly pops up, as do Straub and Huillet, Badiou, Žižek, William Morris, and other heady philosophers, critics, and intellectuals.

Of the two, Andersen appears to be having the most fun, however Jones gets more talking/page time with his nuanced analysis of hierarchical structures and surprising stabs at his former art school employers. If Jones has a sense of humor, it is bone dry, which is why Andersen makes such a great foil for his colleague’s highly opinionated tangents. While the breadth of their conversation will leave your head spinning, chief among the circuitous topics in this slim volume are repeated complaints about the nebulous object-mad art world, and its negation of unmarketable moving image works. Their griping authentically resembles the embittered exchanges you might experience at film festival dinners, or actually at any gathering of more than three experimental filmmakers. Still, the space given to such critiques is decidedly healthy, an exorcism of sorts that puts onto the page statements usually made in safe company behind the backs of witless gallery directors and museum curators.

— ANDREW LAMPERT’s new film El Adios Largos premieres at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival and will also play at the 2013 New York Film Festival.

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Thom Andersen, still from Get Out of the Car , 2010.

William E. Jones, still from Killed , 2009.

Thom Andersen, still from Los Angeles Plays Itself , 2003. Images courtesy of the artists and A.R.T. Press.

Beyond This Point Are Monsters

by Roxanne Carter

SIDEBROW BOOKS, 2013 I will boldly let the Gertrude Stein in me (there is one in all of us) describe the scene she invariably has her back turned to: two women are two women are mother and daughter and nearly bare there is a nice thing to say then that this “is only the appearance of difference.” So is the point of Roxanne Carter’s Beyond This Point Are Monsters, or one of the points in an infinite plane of points. Perhaps after more thought it’s only a minor one. But what lies beyond that? The title would have us answer: “monsters.” Carter might say: “television.” Her novel is divided into episodes, each with five scenes marked by their corresponding decimal point. It’s structured like a mathematically formulated TV script, or, say, like a blueprint of a house.

But this is just the screen, the first stage of the plan.

The show is not broadcast on a flat channel cascading us with that weird blue light as we sit removed in a tufted recliner, but it acts as a doorway into rooms of a house rendered carefully with air’s fingers—the same air I think Monet talks about when he talks about painting bridges, or rather not painting bridges but the air around them. It’s the air we are after here, the space that the walls enclose, “they make the shape that is needed, and receive.” They are a womb and everybody there (I can’t help myself) has a womb of her own.

Carefully and suggestively the two women emerge to us living in their house by the sea. They observe their world of curved shadows sometimes straight into our ear, sometimes seemingly through a narrator. Or, is the narrator a camera that lies, that adds ten pounds, 20

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that distorts our perception and makes small rooms look large, short people tall, and orange lipstick more mauve colored than is technicolorly possible? The narrator as camera defines itself as “light at midnight” but its ability to define the characters is filled with selfdoubt. If a camera can know it’s a camera, can it also know what it captures?

The daughter, the mother, and the narrator form a triangular vision. They observe themselves and one another, not always as tenderly as we observe them.

And yeah, so there we are, the readers, observing it all and often forgetting there is a narrator. We forget about lenses and cameras and the self-doubt that window-like observers have. We think we are the window, and somewhere along the line we realize that we turn that triangle into a pyramid, into a three-dimensional object. We walk through all the doorways and become a part of the show—though voiceless, line-less, soliloquy-less. We are caught in a space between flat surface and tunnel, of shadows and spotlights, desire and shame, mother and daughter. Though surrounded, we march in a realm beyond words, where air is a poet not personified yet. The world is transformed through the articulation of it, through observation, yet what we see is what it feels like to listen and it becomes hard to tell the difference between our own creation, what we observe, and what was a part of us but is now seen from without. Isn’t this what TV is all about? I often relate to the camera-narrator when it says, “there is more than i can see.”

— ALEXANDRA GAUSS is a writer and BOMB’s editorial assistant.

Steve Roden and Stephen Vitiello

Steve Roden, installation view of shells, bells, steps and silences , 2012, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

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Stephen Vitiello, World Trade Center recordings, 1999, World Trade Center, New York, NY. Photo by Johnna MacArthur. Courtesy of the artist and American Contemporary, NYC.

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ART — STEVE RODEN AND STEPHEN VITIELLO

Like a lot of people, I first heard about Stephen Vitiello’s work in 2000, in relation to his residency at the World Trade Center where he was using light sensors to generate sound. In 2004 we were both in the exhibition Treble at SculptureCenter. Regine Basha, the show’s curator, kept telling me that Stephen and I needed to meet, so we did, over lunch. Our respective works in the show were indicative of where we collide and separate in relation to sound. I’d spent several days in the basement using ice cubes and candles to trim the tops and bottoms off of 100 wine bottles that would eventually amplify the sound of 100 tiny speakers—as usual, my process was messy and far from precise.

Stephen, on the other hand, had hung several speakers from long wires in an absolutely elegant formation—his

STEVE RODEN We both came to music and art via the punk scenes on opposite coasts—you on the East, and me on the West.

STEPHEN VITIELLO Did your interest in music and art begin with punk rock or before that?

SR When I was 12, I was into Jimmy Hendrix. His was the first music I became obsessed with—my mom actually made me a Hendrix birthday cake! I scoured flea markets for bootlegs and rare releases. I was also into German Expressionism, particularly George Grosz, for his combination of cartooning and heavy-duty violence. (My dark angst settled in at age 13.) I’ve been infected by everything I’ve paid attention to, no matter how obscure.

One strong memory is of a group of flying bees in the early Gumby animations called the Groobees. They were a riff on carpenter bees and would build crates around everything: people, cars, dogs... the forms were like that Magritte painting of a coffin sitting upright. While working on Bowrain (2010), a large-scale installation involving hundreds of pieces of wood wired together, I realized that my aesthetic is pretty close to the Groobees’: visual decisions arise out of necessity or limitation, rather than vision. How about yourself?

SV I was obsessed with the Rolling Stones. My mother took me to see them when I was 11. My best friend and I would listen to side three of Hot Rocks over and over. As I got older, there were other rock bands, but things changed most dramatically (at least in my memory) when I started listening to the Ramones and the Dead Boys, and then British punk bands like the Buzzcocks and the Clash.

The one record from that era that I still go back to and enjoy just as much as I 30

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piece felt like it would fit comfortably in a Brunelleschi dome. When I got close to his speakers, I could see them moving, and I realized that while I couldn’t hear sound, it was definitely moving through the speakers.

I was blown away by the fact that his work put me in the situation of looking at sound rather than listening to it. Sound is simply one of many ingredients in my practice, but it is generally the focus and the primary material of Stephen’s work. Since we met, sound has played an enormous role in the conversations, performances, recordings, and installations we have worked on together, but most importantly, it’s what we have geeked out on together in hundreds of conversations like this one.

— STEVE RODEN

did back then is Television’s Marquee Moon. I started learning to play guitar with friends when I was 12 and then met The Stimulators, whose band members lived in that infamous building on East 12th Street. I’d go over for guitar lessons and could sometimes stay overnight if Allen Ginsberg, their roommate, was out of town.

SR Both of us managed to enter the punk scene at a relatively young age. At 14, I rode my bike to the Whiskey a Go-Go expecting to see a Hendrix impersonator and happened upon The Screamers.

When I got home that evening I painted a “No Left Turn” sign on my Hendrix shirt and cut off my long hair—a few days later, I dyed it black. Then I started a band with some friends, half of whom could not play instruments. We called the band Seditionaries after Malcolm McLaren’s shop, where the Sex Pistols met. We never met anyone like Allen Ginsberg, but we did get to hang out with The Damned!

The early punk scene was positive and full of idealism. In many ways we were a cliché, being critical of the government, society, the army, and religion—I wrote a song called “Jesus Needs a Haircut!”

Certainly we were naive, but for us there was value in making music that had no commercial relevance. Value for us was dependent upon integrity rather than the market.

SV For me, between the Stones and the Ramones there were lots of the predictable groups: AC/DC, Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy. I always responded to texture and an impression of sound and production, and almost never knew the lyrics, even if I listened to a record until it was scratched beyond use. By the way, so cool that you met The Damned. I remember meeting them as well; I was sitting in their dressing room until they finally, and

very politely, asked me to leave. There’s another flash memory of playing pinball with two of The Cramps. Being 14 or 15 made it easier for people to be nice to us.

The first band I played in was called the Offals. Our first show was reviewed in the New York Times. The reviewer said we were either “Awful or funny, depending on your tolerance level.” I just came across two scrapbooks from that time filled with photos, flyers, and newspaper ads that I’d passionately collected and assembled. It feels like more than a lifetime ago, but I recognize a part of who I am in those books.

So while most of my references before my early twenties were musical, it seems like art was important to you from a much earlier age. Did you have any vision at the time that your future might be laced with both?

SR As a kid I always wanted to be an artist. On the other hand, I probably never would’ve started working with sound (or text, performance, video, and film) had I not been part of the punk scene. Starting a band without any technical knowledge of music offered us the freedom to just dive into a medium. When I made my first film in 1988, or released my first CD in 1993, So Delicate and Strangely Made, I didn’t feel that I was unqualified to work in these mediums. It wasn’t about being a genius as much as about being comfortable experimenting. I still can’t read music or play an instrument. When I was the lead singer of Seditionaries, all I needed to know was how to yell very loudly into a microphone.

SV I identify with punk leading to a future in art. Also, working with Nam June Paik gave me the sense that I could step out in any number of directions. In 1994, Nam June asked me to document a month of Fluxus performances at Anthology Film

BOMB’S THEATER INTERVIEWS ARE SPONSORED IN PART BY THE SELECT EQUITY GROUP FOUNDATION.

Performance view of Post-Living AnteAction Theater (PoLAAT): The Audience Is Always Right , 2010, ARCO Madrid 2010.

Photo by Becky Snodgrass. Courtesy of the artists and Pensart.

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My Barbarian

by Andrea Fraser I met Alex Segade, one of the three members of the My Barbarian performance collective, my first day on the job at UCLA, where he had also just started as an MFA candidate, in the fall of 2006. A few months later I met Malik Gaines and Jade Gordon, the other two members of the collective, when Malik invited me to participate in “Talks about Acts,” a symposium he organized for LA><ART. That was the beginning of what is by now a half-dozen years of exchanges about performance, art, theater, teaching, Brecht, Boal, Bourdieu (our three Bs?), and so much more.

My Barbarian has brought tremendous energy, commitment, scholarship, invention, and an extraordinary range of talents, tools, and traditions to a project of developing a new model of critical practice at the intersection between the visual arts and the expanded fields of theater and performance. I was thrilled to record this discussion with the trio this past summer in their Glassell Park studio in LA as they prepared for their first solo show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

— ANDREA FRASER

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ART / THEATER — MY BARBARIAN

ANDREA FRASER Since this conversation is going to press, my first question is: What do you think about the press you’ve gotten so far? A lot of it seems to focus on “excess,” “antics,” “kitsch,” and “camp”—with “hints of intriguing conceptual issues.” Sorry to throw this at you!

actually, at UCLA. I did writing at CalArts before that.

AF So, how were you different from other rock bands?

AS And Jade got an MA in Applied Theater at USC.

AS For one thing, there were three lead singers, which was tricky.

AF Applied Theater?

JG Two of whom didn’t play instruments.

ALEXANDRO SEGADE Some of my favorite writing has used what we do and extended it to other conversations, like Shannon Jackson’s essay “Just-in-Time” for The Drama Review or José Muñoz’s book Cruising Utopia. I also like Hilton Als’s weird write-up of us in the New Yorker. He’s like a carnival barker speaking about some sideshow—he calls us “whippersnappers.” Unfortunately the term kitsch gets used a lot, but everything else on that list I’m okay with.

JG Theater for social change, with an emphasis on Augusto Boal. It’s not community theater, but theater in the community, where participants are nonactors using theater for political and social change.

AS We also were heavily invested in narrative, so we were always telling stories.

JADE GORDON Camp is okay; kitsch is not. Kitsch is sort of like garbage. (laughter)

MG But we don’t use those techniques in a way that is conventional or always legible in theater itself. The art space allows us to change topics, strategies, and genres with each specific project.

We can respond to the architecture of a place, or its location, or a specific audience. Those are features of performance art more than theater.

MG And there were costumes.

JG We required specific attention. We would stop and wait, or we’d try to battle with the clinking of glasses— AS —and we had crazy music influences.

Our models included musicals from the golden age of Broadway, mixed in with psychedelic rock and new wave dance music.

AF So you weren’t really a rock band.

AS We were an art band.

MALIK GAINES Camp relates to theatrical conventions that are critical and also pleasurable. Kitsch is a misinterpretation of our work.

AF A lot of what’s been written about you in the context of art journalism also seems to emphasize the theatrical aspects of your work—maybe because these strike art writers as the most novel in the context of what they are seeing in the art world. The three of you each have different backgrounds in theater, yet My Barbarian now exists primarily in the visual art field, both physically and discursively. How do you think the theater practices and discourses that inform your work function in an art context?

MG Those terms get picked up on because our strategies are somewhat transgressive in the gallery space since they refer to fun and entertainment. In theater you have a play and in art you have a work, right?

JG We had a set of theatrical techniques and tools that we could work with as a medium. At least for me, this was my set of skills.

AS We’re all coming from different backgrounds. I went to art school, as you know, Andrea, since you were my professor.

AF Yes, you got an MFA in visual art, after having gotten a BA as an English major, and Malik, you got a PhD in theater— MG Theater & Performance Studies 40

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AS Before My Barbarian got started we worked on theater projects together. We didn’t exactly have a context; we came from a space that resembled the underground and worked in provisional, DIY venues. We still present work in places that aren’t always contiguous with the visual arts, but the art world offered us an opportunity to experiment with the audience in a way that’s totally different from theatrical and performance venues, where the audience has a very specific role. Getting people out of their seats is difficult. People are— JG —passive.

AS But our first audiences were rock-venue audiences, which are not seated or passive but are actively talking back to you.

JG We were masquerading as an art band. We even created alter-ego groups occasionally. German Toothbrush, with an umlaut over both the o’s was our avant-garde— AF Tööthbrush!

AS —hippie, progressive band. Maybe because there are three of us and we are kind of prolific, we were too hyper to even be one band.

JG We would get frustrated if we had to play the same songs three shows in a row.

AS At a certain point we became really interested in extending past the fiveminute comfort zone for a song into these longer pieces—

AF So your first incarnation was as a band?

AS We did theater together before we had a name, and then we started My Barbarian as a band. We could construct performances fairly quickly and actually get paid a little to go on stage, which was the opposite of what theater was offering us.

JG We wouldn’t have to pay to produce anything. We could have a guaranteed 45 minutes to an hour on stage to figure out what we were doing. It was an incongruous space, not always unwelcoming. The question was: What doesn’t belong here?

That helped form what we do, because we were always allowed to transgress in the rock club.

JG —and added dialogue and scenes and set pieces.

AS Then we wanted to create situations with the audience. We did our very first gay marriage piece for the Baghdad School of the Performing Arts in 2003.

AF What is that?

JG That’s another alter-ego group.

AS That was at the beginning of the second Iraq War. We tried to get the audience to look at it as a ritual they could participate in. Then it became clear that we needed more flexibility. In an art

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Bomb Specific Simon Lee

We called Walter again today but with no success.

As you know, we have been calling him every day since Sunday but get no response. He must be away on vacation but weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll continue to try.

Father Lombardy is on vacation. We called Our Lady of Victory and was told he will be away until Aug 8th.

We think those at your parole hearing will understand that the one you want to represent you is on vacation because this is the most prevalent time for vacations.

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BOMB SPECIFIC â&#x20AC;&#x201D; SIMON LEE

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Still from Two Years At Sea , 2011, 16 mm film, 88 minutes. Images courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry Gallery, London.

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Ben Rivers

by Coleen Fitzgibbon

British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers has made a series of dark, utopian films in which the protagonists, often male, have come to terms with their severance from society. Rivers’s feature-length film Two Years At Sea (2011), which was just released on DVD by Cinema Guild, was the culmination of his focus on the individual alone in the wilderness. For Rivers, utopia can exist as a personal state of mind or as collective thought. He takes from J. G. Ballard the belief that optimism can be born out of crisis and that the past can aid the future. Rivers often lives with the people he’s filming and scripts their actions, creating the illusion of documentation.

Ben Rivers’s work evolved from focusing on the lone individual to filming small insular communities cut off from larger societies, as in Slow Action (2010) and, most recently, the feature film A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness (2013), which was made in collaboration with US filmmaker Ben Russell. At a lecture 55

FILM — BEN RIVERS

hosted by New York MoMA PS1 this past summer, Rivers commented that “utopia in the present is cinema” where filmmakers “engineer circumstances” to construct their own model environments. For A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness, Rivers and Russell created a temporary commune where they lived with and filmed individuals gathered from various actual communes in Scandinavia.

Rivers has filmed on islands off the coasts of Africa, Japan, the South Pacific, and Scandinavia but finds the landscape of his own British Isles “comforting.” His interest in utopia, a concept first coined by Sir Thomas More, evokes a long history in England—from the time of the Enlightenment to British communes in the ’60s and ’70s. Ben Rivers may intuitively understand that small communities should retain their identities in the larger society so that the individual voice is still considered in collective thought.

— COLEEN FITZGIBBON

COLEEN FITZGIBBON The first film I saw of yours was Two Years at Sea at Anthology Film Archives last October, which my daughter brought me to see.

It had just shown at the New York Film Festival and the New York Times quoted you saying that you made films not as end products but as a way to learn about the people you were filming—and how this affected your life.

BEN RIVERS My filmmaking is in part a selfish practice of trying to have some good adventures while meeting good people. I always make films about people I like.

CF An earlier film, This Is My Land (2006), with Jake Williams, was expanded upon in Two Years At Sea as a fictional narrative.

BR This Is My Land was a more fragmented, observational document. I was watching Jake in his daily activities and filming what I thought was necessary and then piecing it together like a collage.

But with the second film, Two Years At Sea, I wanted to be much more controlled because the film was meant to be feature length, so I had to think about the structure. Jake and I collaborated to make an exaggerated portrait of somebody very much like him, but not him. He is really noisy and chatty—he likes to talk, he likes visitors, and obviously there is none of that in the film, so it’s a fiction.

CF In Two Years At Sea, Jake never talks or sees anyone; he’s always alone and working in the woods.

BR I thought about scenarios which could involve other people coming to visit and then decided that it was a greater challenge to just have him not talking—so that it’s more a relationship between him, the space, and the landscape—and whether I could pull that off for an hour and half.

CF It was incredibly luminescent and compelling. I read that you hand-developed the film, which gave it a shimmering black-and-white quality impossible to get any other way. In the film, Jake is a wild character who has left civilization and gone into retreat.

BR Right, people do have these sorts of fantasies; that is how I ended up going to meet Jake in the first place. I was wondering about this idea of living in nature, something that I’ve thought about since I 56

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was a child. I was reading loads of literature based on this idea—especially Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer whose characters take themselves into nature, but it’s not bucolic or easy; they’re struggling with it. Hamsun wrote from the late 19th century into the 20th (and influenced writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka), but the stories in the 1890s are the ones that had a big effect on me, especially Pan, which is about a man who goes to live in a hut in the woods. I was obsessed with this book and wanted to find somebody living like that in the 21st century. Jake Williams was the first person I tracked down. I then made a series of films about people living in the wilderness.

CF —Or men living in isolated rural settings who appear to be hoarders of cast-off objects. You spend weeks, often months, with the people you are filming.

How do you concentrate in the midst of disorder and debris?

BR I look for this; it’s one of the things that usually causes a spark for me when I’m trying to find people—that someone should choose to live amongst the rubble and ruin of past technology is endlessly fascinating to me. The fact that this forms part of the landscape, and can be transformed into something new for the person hoarding it, also points to my continued interest in thinking sculpturally about space. Objects tell another story about the past that shapes part of the person’s psyche. In terms of my concentration, I think I would find it much harder to work somewhere that was clean and free of any kind of debris, somewhere bucolic, it wouldn’t fit my sensibility. I like roughness and dirt.

CF Are some of the people reluctant to be filmed?

BR If there were any sign of reluctance I wouldn’t make films with them. I’m only interested if it’s a collaboration. So there is usually a pre-filming period where I get to know people and make sure they are comfortable with me and my camera, and I make it clear that the films I make are not meant to be factual representations.

CF There is a clear trajectory in your work. Besides This Is My Land, there’s Astika (2006), which is about a man on an island in Denmark being forced out of his home. Then there is A World Rattled of Habit (2008), where Oleg and Ben Meschko, father and son, live close

together—Ben in a rural trailer and Oleg in a house overrun with hoarded objects.

Origin of the Species (2008) begins with a bubbling galaxy while an elderly inventor named S, who lives in a Scottish wilderness, muses over Darwinian theory.

Ah, Liberty! (2008) shows an isolated farmhouse with kids at play in tribal masks, which could be a precursor to Slow Action (2010), a film about four remote islands. I Know Where I’m Going (2009) has a red-bearded man who says he is “just clinging on,” and finally, Two Years At Sea follows a protagonist (Jake Williams) living alone in his forest cabin with music from far-off places.

BR Each person or family takes the film off into another direction because they are distinct people. But I wanted to go back to Jake when I was thinking about making a feature film.

CF I heard he said, “Yes, go ahead and make me a star.” (laughter) BR When I called to ask him to make another film, I thought he was going to say no, but it was quite the opposite.

CF The music was incredible in Two Years at Sea, with Jake playing a one-stringed instrument and his records. What was the title of the bawdy record that he plays in the film?

BR “The Sexton and the Carpenter” plays all the way through, even though it has quite a few jumps in it. Dave Goulder, who sang the song, gave us his blessing to use it. The Indian music, Jake had bought when he was traveling to India working for a shipping company. That’s where the title comes from: working two years at sea in order to save money to fulfill his dream of buying a house in the woods. Like the photographs that punctuate the film, the music and the title are clues to Jake’s past, but they are deliberately ambiguous.

CF The filmmaker Peter Hutton was a merchant seaman who shipped out to sea for seven years.

BR I like his work.

CF Was Slow Action made before you shot Two Years at Sea, or during that same period?

BR They kind of overlapped. I was finishing Slow Action when I started Two Years at Sea in 2009. The way I often work is

Stills from Slow Action , 2010, 16 mm film, 45 minutes.

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FILM â&#x20AC;&#x201D; BEN RIVERS

Untitled Shroud , 2010/2013, inkjet prints on paper, 18 1/4 Ă&#x2014; 10 1/4 inches.

Courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York City.

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TOM HOLMES

Rodrigo Rey Rosa

by Francisco Goldman TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY ELLIE ROBINS I’ve admired Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s fiction since reading, many years ago, his amazing novella Cárcel de árboles (published as The Pelcari Project in Paul Bowles’s English translation). Although he is from Guatemala City and part of my family is from there too, and we are pretty much the same age, we’ve never hung out together there. When I was living in Guatemala for most of the 1980s, and during my frequent visits up until a few years ago, Rey Rosa was always somewhere else, living in New York or Morocco. Even if we overlapped there, we weren’t yet friends. I knew his sister Magali, an environmental activist, because once, on a magazine assignment, I traveled with her up into a cloud forest, a trip during which, unforgettably, I got to sit in a forest glade smoking pot and watching four quetzal birds cavorting through the green glowing air over my head.

Though we have good friends in common—the writers Horacio Castellanos Moya and Martín Solares—it was only over the last couple of years that we coincided at literary festivals and conferences in Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and Paris. Sometimes we headed out for a delirious, hilarious night or two on the town together, often staying out until seven in the morning or so. I love the guy. He’s an elegant dude, always well-dressed— I’m usually in jeans and a t-shirt—with a fastidious yet relaxed air, but with mischievous and teasing laughter brimming behind nearly every one of his spoken sentences. He’s one of those writers who seems as you’d imagined him to be while reading his books.

Bolaño wrote that Rey Rosa “is the most rigorous writer of my generation, the most transparent, the one who knows best how to weave his stories, and the most luminous of all.” Rigorous and luminous, spare and sensual, terse and hilarious, horrifying yet with a poetic, supernatural and metaphysical imagination, his writing—like that found in the novella The African Shore, just out from Yale University Press in Jeffrey Gray’s translation—throws open windows in your mind as you read. In one of those disconcerting coincidences that Rodrigo is famous for, it turns out that he is a close friend of my New York therapist’s. She sometimes asks me if that bothers me. It doesn’t, as long as he doesn’t put her into one of his novels, where undoubtedly she would reveal mortifying dreams that I wouldn’t even remember that I’d had. We conducted this conversation over terrible phone connections from Mexico City and Guatemala, patched through New York. Imagine us shouting like two nearly deaf old men in a noisy cantina.

— FRANCISCO GOLDMAN

Photo by Cherie Nutting.

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FRANCISCO GOLDMAN I remember when we were in Buenos Aires, you and Horacio Castellanos Moya went to Rosario, didn’t you?

RODRIGO REY ROSA Yes. FG And something happened there that almost suggested that when two Central American writers like you travel, you take violence with you.

RRR Ah, yes, there was a shooting a few meters from where we were drinking a beer.

FG What happened?

RRR Horacio and I were there with the director of the Spanish Cultural Institute, who was hosting us. We were talking about Central America when some gunshots went off and people started throwing themselves on the floor. Then we saw a motorcycle go past with two guys shooting into the air, and the director threw himself to the floor too. I got up from the table, and Horacio sat very calmly watching the scene. Later we discovered that they had robbed a bank around the corner and killed someone. Some people had been injured by the stray bullets. Everyone kept telling us: “This never happens in Rosario, it’s a quiet place.” It became a talking point that we’d seemingly brought violence with us.

FG Like a black cloud following you around. I remember you saying that suddenly it was as if Horacio was in his element, going out into the street studiously analyzing and recreating a crime. Then a similar thing happened a few months ago when you came to Mexico City to give a lecture. The topic was violence, wasn’t it?

RRR Yeah. In Mexico I decided I would never talk about violence again. It’s unpleasant to become associated with a topic. Also, violence can overwhelm you. You don’t choose it as your specialty; it’s a daily occurrence here in Guatemala and you just have to work with it.

FG Before your lecture on violence in Mexico City, you went out for a walk on Avenida Insurgentes, and what happened? You were mugged. You have a reputation for very strange things happening to you that almost seem taken from your novels. They told me that you had a black eye and had blood leaking down your cheek while you spoke.

RRR People were jealous, I’m afraid. (laughter) FG Yeah, they were super impressed! Martín Solares is the one who was telling me about all these strange things that happen to you, and that your life and dreams sometimes seem to be mixed up, no?

RRR I don’t know, Frank. I’ve been very lucky. Maybe I just notice coincidences more than other people do.

FG When these things happen to you, do you think they influence the relationship between your writing and your life?

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RRR I’m constantly waiting for things to write about, so maybe in some way I invoke these favors of destiny. I don’t think about it much. It’s a way of seeing the world that makes you more sensitive to coincidences, which aren’t supernatural—life is just very complex and strange. Inexplicable things are always happening.

FG What is the strangest thing that’s happened to you recently?

RRR Not long ago a woman approached me asking if I was Rodrigo Rey Rosa. She had read The Pelcari Project and had wondered if I’d known of a secret prison in the jungle of Izabal, near Petén, in Guatemala. I’d never heard of it. She said that in exactly the same years in which I had set the novella, in the 1980s, there’d been a type of rehab clinic/internment camp for young drug addicts, misfits, drifters, and people with so-called obsessive political ideas. She knew someone who’d worked there who had a very interesting text that I might like to read. So this incredible document fell into my hands—a testimony by a psychologist who’d worked at this internment camp for six months. Like in the detention center in The Pelcari Project, they’d kept these young people there like slaves, like animals, even when their families had been charged a lot of money to send them there. They’d also tie inmates to trees and conduct neuropsychiatric experiments on them. So at the moment, I’m working on a documentary about this incredible story.

FG A documentary?

RRR Yes, we’re halfway through. I have to say, though, that everything that this guy wrote is much stranger than what appears in my novella. We’ve found people who managed to get out, either because their families rescued them or they escaped. We also heard of people who committed suicide after getting out. I knew that there were secret political prisons in Guatemala, but I thought I was writing science fiction about them—I never could have imagined this real story.

FG Why did you decide to make a documentary and not write more fiction about it? I know that you studied film at the School of Visual Arts in New York in your youth.

RRR This story has so many ramifications in real life, that it’s not necessary to fictionalize much. In any case, for me, documentaries are another form of fiction. Situations are recreated. In paying attention to reality, just by passing it through our filter, we change it, construct it—not necessarily with good or bad intentions. It’s inevitable.

FG And memory, the way in which people change things they’ve lived through—as the years pass and they have to recount them—all of that is fictionalizing too. But I imagine that one reason that you are making a documentary is that the fiction came to you almost readymade.

RRR Precisely.

Juan Villoro Mayan Dusk TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY KIMBERLY TRAUBE

It was the iguana’s fault. We stopped in the desert next to one of those men who spend their whole lives squatting, holding three iguanas by the tail. The man we called El Tomate, “the Tomato,” inspected the merchandise as if he knew something about green animals.

The peddler, with a face carved by sun and drought, told us that iguana blood restored sexual energy. He didn’t tell us how to feed the animal, because he thought we would eat it right away.

El Tomate works for a travel magazine. He lives in a ghastly building that looks out on the Viaduct. From his apartment, he describes the beaches of Polynesia.

This time, as an exception, he really was visiting the places he was going to write about: Oaxaca and Yucatán.

Four years earlier, we had made the trip in the opposite direction, YucatánOaxaca. Back then we were so inseparable that if people saw me without him , th ey would ask : “ W h ere’s El Tomate?”

We finished that last trip at the ruins of Monte Albán during a solar eclipse.

The golden stones lost their glow and the valley was covered with a weak light that didn’t belong to any time of day. The birds sang out in bewilderment and tourists took each other by the hand. I felt a strange urge to repent, and confessed to El Tomate that I had been the one who pushed him into the cenote at Chichén Itzá.

That had happened a few days earlier. On seeing the sacred water, my friend couldn’t stop talk ing about human sacrifices: the Mayans, superstitious about small things, threw their midgets, their toys, their jewels, their favorite children, into the sacred water.

I walked up to a group of deaf-mute visitors. A woman was translating the information the guide gave into sign 77

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language: “He who drinks the water of the cenote will return to Chichén It zá.” We were at its edge, and El Tomate was leaning over. Something made me push him in. The rest of the trip was an ordeal because the water gave him salmonella. At Monte Albán, under the uncertain light of the eclipse, I felt bad and asked for his forgiveness.

Then he took the opportunity to ask me: “Do you really not remember that I got you into the Silvio Rodríguez concert?” Very early in our friendship, in the early ’70s, El Tomate had been the sound tech for the Mexican folk group Aztlán. In his moment of glory, he was involved in a festival of New Cuban Trova. Honestly, I did not remember him getting me that ticket, but he told me with a droopy smile, “I do remember.” His smile irritated me because it was the same one he had when he confessed he had slept with Sonia, the Chilean refugee I’d chased after without the slightest possibility of getting into her poncho.

That reconciliation at Monte Albán was enough for us to stop seeing each other. We had crossed an invisible line.

For two years after that, we barely spoke. I didn’t even call him when I found the Aztlán LP he had loaned me thirty years before. Once in a while, at the barbershop or at the dentist’s office, I would find a copy of the magazine where he wrote about islands he would never see.

El Tomate got back in touch when I won the Texcoco Floral Games with a poem that I thought was pre-Raphaelite, very influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The prize was being awarded as par t of the Pulque Festival. My friend called at seven in the morning on the day that the winner was announced: “I want to cut a branch from the epic,” he exclaimed joyfully.

That meant that he wanted to go with me to the award ceremony, possibly to call in the favor of having gotten me

into the uncer tain Silvio Rodríguez concer t. I didn’t respond. What he said next ended up aggravating me: “López Velarde. Didn’t you recognize the quote, poet?”

I said I would call him to set things up, but I never did. I imagined him in Texcoco too perfectly: gray hairs starting to show on the underside of his mustache, drinking a sour-smelling pulque and declaring that my poems were terrible.

His most recent call had to do with the Chevy. I had filled out a form at a Superama grocery store and won a car. I was in the paper, an expression of primitive happiness on my face, accepting a set of keys that seemed to have been fashioned for the occasion (the keychain gave off a luxurious sparkle). El Tomate asked me to take him from Oaxaca to Yucatán. He had to write an article. He was sick of simulating life in five-star hotels and writing about dishes he would never taste. He wanted to plunge into reality. “Like before,” he added, inventing for us some shared past as anthropologists or war correspondents.

Then he said: “Karla will come with us.” I asked him who she was and he was rather mysterious about it. I still hadn’t gotten over appearing in the paper holding the car keys and was willing to do things that would annoy me. Also, something had happened that I needed to get away from. A lot of time has passed and I still can’t talk about it without getting embarrassed. I’d slept with Gloria López, who was married, and there was an accident like nothing either of us had ever experienced before. An improbable occurrence, like some spontaneous combustion that can make a body or a film negative burn to ashes: my condom disappeared in her vagina. “An abduction,” she said, more intrigued than worried. Gloria believes in extraterrestrials. She was pretty interested in me for the occasional roll in the hay, but she was enormously interested in a contact of the “third kind,” for which I had been a mere intermediary.

How can an indestructible rubber just disappear? She was sure that it had to do with aliens. Could she get pregnant, or would the condom be encapsulated? That verb reminded me of her favorite movie: Fantastic Voyage, with Rachel Welch. Gloria was too young to

Charles North Pain Quotient for David Watson

1.

How to explain tragedy to a deer. This is the assignment.

—Well, it isn’t the assignment it’s in the general category of things assigned, like growing to a mature height of four inches if you happen to be a certain strain of ornamental cactus, or being shamed back to life by any means possible. I like the idea that hope springs eternal, especially as the adjective, not adverb suggests that spring is a verb of being rather than action, it doesn’t have to be imagined or looked forward to, or yearned for, or original in any sense of the word. The present which is always with us, regardless. Take the piano music of objects, the black-and-white, the mystical harmonics, bipolarities, etc.

2.

The afternoon smells like rosemary, whereas the morning was on the visual side, jutting among the albums.

Someone David knew, an actress, referred to the café Pain Quotidien as Pain Quotient, apparently with a straight face. The Daily Pain (which I seem to remember my father bringing home from work). Or if you happen to be in show business, the pan. Take the extremist willows.

3.

5:30 p.m. The soul goes out for its walk—just be sure you’re back in time for supper. The colors look pasted on, washy blue like a robin’s egg seen through a landlord shade, then just washed away. Where is conceptual art when you need it. Everyone knows that Janus Weathercock and Cornelius Van Vinckboons are too good not to be true, but very few know of their connection to the poet John Clare. Or that 82

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Susan Friedland The Music Lovers She bored me terribly, but she seemed to fascinate my father. Could she have b e en “his t y p e”? Nothing like my mother: in their wedding pic tures, petite, fashionable, and cur vaceous; and with the years grown into a compliant good-naturedness that found sufficient arena within the bounds of her house, extended more problematically to the block, only edgily and tentatively beyond. No, Mrs. Batki couldn’t have been less like my mother. She was an East European Olive Oyle: tall and thin, plain dressing (long strides in practical pumps, real silk stockings sagging at the ankles, old-fashioned lace blouses, a bit frumpy, some times a bit soiled), somber to funereal demeanor interrupted by eruptions of buck-toothed enthusiasm, guffaws, close-eyed transports. Minus the trembling-eyelid transports, one might have guessed she was too gawky for marriage. But I knew better; the whole tangled family was domiciled just an uncomfortable two doors away.

M y f a t h e r a l w ay s m a n a g e d t o be home for my lessons. I would be dressed for company and, stuck in some scratchy skir t, would have to bide my time on the piano bench while he’d brew coffee, slice cheese. Moments before Mrs. Batki was due, he would emerge from the kitchen with a crystal bowl filled with nuts and a plate of spiraling wheat crackers and mustardcolored cheeses. He’d ready the coffee pot and fine china cups, and, with his back to me, he would study his shelves of records, his cherished collection.

I would swing my legs impatiently as, af ter Mrs. Batki’s arrival, Daddy would turn back to his records, slide one out as though impulsively, wipe it with a special red cloth, then place it on a record player that was his greatest pride, his construction: the parts researched and ordered and somehow, during late nights in the basement, organized into a machine. He would 84

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press a tiny button on the phonograph arm and it would raise its head like a captive insect. He would release the button, and the needle would drop nicely onto the record. He would play it for her. She would stand in front of his speakers as though in a brisk wind, t h o s e f l a r i n g h o r n - s h a p e d s p e a kers that Daddy would travel to other states to purchase whenever he would hear that a great movie theater with a great sound system was to be razed.

Daddy and Mrs. Batki would discuss the musician’s technique as if talking about a close personal friend, his success or failure as crucial as though they had lent him their life savings. I would swing my legs in increasingly disruptive arcs, put fingers on keys as if to experiment, but from experience knew I must not make noise. “Mrs. Batki will be with you in a minute,” Daddy would chide, assuming that was what I was eager for.

Chubby, troubled by their high decibel enthusiasms, would scratch to go out, and I would be allowed off the bench to open the door for him. And then back to my spot under the print of Brahms, who, with his promise of weighty, unruffled genius, was really beginning to get on my nerves.

I put up with it for Daddy. He was having a good time. I was genuinely glad he had found someone who could appreciate his records and grasshopper-agile phonograph arms, the system of horns that he had gathered, protected, and added to, despite much domestic dispute: for no other family of her acquaintance, my mother would point out, in any home of any period or style, had filled its living room with towers of dust-trapping speakers. He could explain his latest hi-fi modifications to Mrs. Batki, flip switches that coaxed lost rolling notes to a nearhopeful moan and landed the saddest trills at a more peaceful melancholy.

Together they turned knobs that moved

cellists from corner to corner, and violists from shy to bold. He was excited to have her there. It was embarrassing but tolerable.

It was the next part that was really too much for me. At some point, Mrs. Batki would look at her watch and then, revived by the coffee and concert, remember that I was the reason for her visit. Daddy would retire to the kitchen, from which, through the open swinging doors, I could hear the distinct sound of teeth cracking open sunflower seed shells. From my “prac tices” I knew that ever y note I hit came through loud and clear to him, for he would yell “Wrong note!” each time I missed one.

Mrs. Batki would put me through my paces, requesting that I play what had been assigned the previous week. And after I offered my more than ordinary renditions, sprinkled with near or full misses, she would show me the correct version, and would play with feeling, with technique, with long and competent fingers. As she played, as if on cue, Izzy would appear on the other side of the metal front-door screen. He would appear at each lesson with the same message: the piano was out of tune, hopelessly, offensively, out of tune.

Daddy would rush to welcome Izzy, delighted to escape from his exile in the kitchen. Mrs. Batki would stop playing and, half turning to her boy, her face flushed and correcting itself in and out of an incongruously dreamy smile, she would begin to goonily beam her special frequency of maternal approval.

Guided by Daddy to the coffee table, Izzy would refuse the nuts and coils of crackers and cheese and request a cup of coffee, black, no sugar. Daddy would pour into the readied cup, his hand trembling. Through the remainder of each session, Izzy sipped coffee like a pro, while both adults delighted in the boy’s version of their sober, steeped pleasures.

(I seem to have stumbled upon the origin of Izzy’s liking for coffee. I came upon this in a recently translated biography, in a chapter on his early years in Hungary: By the year, his third, when the toddler began to show signs of unusual talent, Mr. Batki, once the most highly esteemed teacher of violin in Budapest, had fallen into an engulfing sadness which left his fingers deadened and

Amina Cain Furniture, Table, Chair, Shelves There is a tone I want, but I don’t know how to get it. A T O N E I N M U S I C . I go to concerts (there are always concerts in the summer), trying to find something I can copy down or emulate.

When I was a child I avoided music, but I have a very close connection to it now.

I own a farm, but it’s been a long time since I have D O N E A N Y W O R K O N I T . I’m rich from my farm; I can do other things.

In the fields the crops grow almost too tall, their leaves reaching into the gentle air. This makes you question everything. What is air? What is gentle? Also, what is a child?

It is horrible to lose someone and yet that has happened to me. Now I’m alone, but I’m not unhappy. It is hot and beautiful enough on my farm that I feel okay about being rejected. I have tried to make other people reject me so I can relive my trauma in the way a person is supposed to live it. So far it hasn’t happened, but J U S T T O DAY I S A W S O M E O N E , and I think I can make this person do it. When I see this person I feel sick and I think this means I am on the right track.

This is something I concern myself with only in a “side pocket ” sort of way. My priorities are with my compositions. I have thought about writing a farming manual, but I will have to think even more before I attempt it. I do write about my farm, but in a different way. I allow myself to inhabit my FARM poetically.

In the evenings I’m calm; I am hardly ever calm at any other moment.

I wear what you think I would—long, flowing pants and a button down shirt made out of jean material. My hair is either pulled back in a bun or pulled back with barrettes so that my hair hangs onto my shoulders. I used to be a dancer—you can see this in my posture and in the way I carry myself. I’m graceful. I know this and I’m not afraid to admit it for it is the great triumph of 92

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my life. Also, this helps me with music.

Now that I no longer dance I W R I T E M U S I C I think other dancers would enjoy. My compositions are complex and moody. They’re not pretty, but they allow the listener a deeper relationship to my farm. At the end of the summer I will hold my own concert in this place.

My talents extend in every directi o n: f ar m e r, p ossib l e w r i te r of a farming manual, composer, dancer, possible musician. Now you understand why there is no time for me to actually farm.

Dressed in the way I’ve told you, I stroll about the fields and often right off of them. The palm trees have their own relationship to air and it is exquisite to see. One can only imagine how their fronds take it in and change because of its presence. The movement is very slow. This slowness is good for me to witness. One part of a frond is pointing up, even while the rest of the points move to the left, or stay entirely still.

Then there is the river, moving in its own slow way. To watch the movement of the river sometimes means lying down next to it to G E T C LO S E to the miniature swells and waves.

In the evenings when I am not strolling about I am in my house, cradled by the land. I sit down at my desk and work.

I can’t tell you what I look like when I’m working because I don’t know. M Y DESK IS HUGE AND BEAUTIFUL, very expensive, how could I not want to work there. The wood is unfinished, but in a particular kind of way. When it’s touched it’s smooth.

The compositions come easily, simply because I am cradled and I am able to express this through music. I am able to picture the dancers on the farm and compose songs that are right and true for them to dance to. I am waiting for the right time, for when I C A N H AV E A R E C I TA L H E R E . I will have to work for months before this can happen, because I haven’t yet matured into

my craft. I haven’t matured into any of them. But my relationship to everything I do is serious. You can’t imagine how close I get to my work.

This person, the one with whom I would like to relive my rejection, is always in town. This person must live here now or at least be on a very long vacation. Sitting for hours in the café, not working at all. Or sometimes sitting in the rocking chair on the porch of the post office. But also, riding a bike or running along a path. This person is more relaxed than I am, but not healthier. No one in this area is healthier than me.

Imagine trying to compose something at the beginning of summer.

Tonight I am an insect, a book, a V ERY L A R G E P L A N T . Do you know what that’s like? It means I am light, pensive, and then finally bigger than life.

The one time I engaged in a sitting meditation my hands grew. They were huge. This was only a sensation. Here in this room I have enough love for everyone. Even the men (and the one woman) who work on my farm. There is something I want to get through to you, but I don’t know how to do it.

There is something I want to communicate about MY LIFE .

I have not always lived on this farm.

I grew up in a city where I was taken everywhere I wanted to go. As a young woman I went to see aberrant things and this upset my family. I went to dance classes, where I was introduced to music. On cold autumn mornings the rain beat upon the windows and I exulted in my position in the class. I loved to dance. I even loved to wait on the floor until it was my turn to move across it.

Sometimes it is sensual just to be here, taking in the land, letting it wash over me. In certain moments I am a wild boar. I barely NEED ANOTHER .

At the first concert of the summer season I lie in the grass. Those closer to the stage sit in seats, and though I can afford to sit with them I prefer it here. I have always loved grass. The musicians are far away on the stage, but there are things about them that stand out all the same. They wear dark S K I R T S O R PA N T S A N D L I G H T shirts. They hold their instruments close to their bodies, or, if the instrument is on the ground they draw near it, hovering just above. I haven’t yet put myself in

Barry Schwabsky

A TOUR OF THE HORIZON What fault did the sky contain at ease in its stench of broken colors if not the sour gaze of some face reconstructed by eye, not memory an invitation to pay your rent, excessive next thing you knew I wandered lonely as a child the printable day showed silver maples with shadows of turpentine poems that have fuzzy skin and appendages yes, I feel sorry for your geometric breathing your externalities, variances they sulk feasibly in a fabled silence where one leads to another and another leads to none.

Barr y Schwabsk y is an ar t critic for The Nation and co - editor of international reviews for Artforum. He recently released a CD of poetry in collaboration with musician Marianne Nowot tny, A Voice Hears You from Mysterious Places (Abaton Book Company). His new book is Wo rds f o r Ar t : Cr iticism , H is to r y, T h e o r y, P r a c t i c e (S t e r n b e r g P r e s s).

Forthcoming are a collection of poetry, Trembling Hand Equilibrium, and a collection of critical writings on poetry, The Most Beautiful Perhaps (both from Black Square Editions).

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Robert Antoni From As Flies to Whatless Boys DISEMBARK ATION

As Kings Wharf remained congested with p acke t s of f- lo ading th e f ir s t class—and the morning slipping away fast—Papee made arrangements with a fisherman, hailed over to the side of the Rosalind, to row us ashore in his small pirogue. Now we climbed down a rope ladder, one after the next, stepping cautious into the rocking rowboat.

A sailor tossing down we hastily prepared bundles of belongings. Wrapped up in blankets and tied tight with twine.

They contained the things we’d brought along for the voyage. All our other possessions packed into the trunk in the hold, to be forwarded to our place of residence after a day or two. Exactly what this place might turn out to be, none of us knew. Not even Papee. Because prior to the previous night, when Mr. Carr and the deceased Captain Taylor had informed us of the state of our ‘cottage’ at Chaguabarriga—a dozen bamboo poles stuck in the mud—all of us, including Mr. Etzler and Mr. Stollmeyer, had expected to arrive in Trinidad to find some kind of accommodations. For this reason the agents had preceded us to Trinidad with the Societ y’s funds in they pockets. So despite all of those interminable days and nights aboard ship—only dreaming about this very moment when we would, finally, set foot in Trinidad— none of us, not even Papee, had thought scarcely a moment beyond it.

I c an assure yo u it w asn’ t th e enchanting moment we’d envisioned n eith e r. T h e f ish er man row ing us ashore perched atop a mound of mullet he’d spent the morning seining.

Some still alive, occasionally flapping up they tails in little explosive fits—like a cornered batimamselle beating her wings against a screen. Finally, with a crunch, he beached his pirogue on the gravelly shore. Now, one-by-one, we jumped down from the pointed bow, 96

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bundles clutching under our arms.

Bracing weself against each other as we traipsed awkward up the steep embankment. All our knees and ankles wobbly for the first few steps. Like we’d forgotten how to walk. Son, I could only recall the comte’s sheep —we were them now—stumbling up the seafront.

Yet hardly could we reach the boardwalk at the top when a handful of bareback young b oys approache d.

Surrounding us, smiling, grabbing our bundles from out our arms— Me to tote dis load for you, suh! one says.

Please feh carry dis parcel, mis’ress! says another.

And before we could utter a word in response—even if we had understood the boys’ singsong—each of them had hoisted a bundle up atop he head.

Holding it balanced with a single spindly arm, or no arm a-tall.

They led us onto the wide - open expanse of the Plaza de la Marina.

Lined on both sides with dusty almond trees. Son, they’re not there again, those trees. But in the old days we used to call it Almond Walk, so prevalent were they round the periphery. At one end, facing the bay, we saw the hard stone struc ture of Customs House, with the harbourmaster’s office inside.

The boys leading us over to the nearest patch of shade. They took down they loads to rest a minute, passing round a corked bottle of water. Papee searching his pockets for something. We didn’t know what it could be. Eventually he produced a folded slip of paper, opening it out careful, showing it to the eldest of the boys.

This same boy squinching up his brow, staring down at the piece of paper— Vin-cent! he calls out. And the smallest and skinniest of the boys jumped up and hurried over.

Vincent squinched his brow in a similar manner, head cocked to the side,

staring at the note holding in Papee’s hand. Then he took the piece of paper heself—raising it up to the sun like he’s verifying a bank-bill—slowly mouthing out the words.

Yessuh! he says at last. Only a lil te m p o r a r y c u m b r u x i o n . Eve r y t i n g undah control, suh!

He paused, smiling up at Papee— Me knows de house good-good, suh.

N u m b a h n i n e t e e n D u k e S t r e e t— Mastah Johnston res’dence. Scarce 15 minutes footin from here!

Son, only then did I recall the prime minister back in England—suddenly it seemed so far away—sitting behind his big disheveled desk. Writing out that address with his delicate fingers.

Now the boys hoisted they bundles up atop they heads again. And Vincent led us off like the Pied Piper, Papee’s note holding out before him like if it’s a map.

He directed us round the perimeter of the plaza, in and out the patches of shade cast by the almond trees.

Turning up onto Abercrombie Street, off to the side of the Customs House.

Now we entered the metropolis of the town itself: a careful checkerboard of treelined boulevards, each laid out parallel or, like Abercrombie, perpendicular to the sea. With a fresh breeze off the bay filtering along it. The street itself paved over in a thin layer of pitch, softened by the sun at this hour. So with each step we felt its surface sinking a little beneath our boots, waves of heat rising up. Yet our porters walked over the hot pitch barefoot, without even a flinch.

They turned right after a block onto Queens Street, tall tower of Trinit y Cathedral rising up before us. But not before we crossed Chacon could we view the building from in front like it was meant to be seen. Only then could we take it in, in a single breath—the gothic-styled tower and intricate front façade, modeled af ter Westminster Hall itself. Son, I don’t have to tell you how there isn’t another church in the West Indies—nor few others elsewhere in the world neither— could give you that kinda impression. That feeling inside you stomach of soaring splendour.

Eventually we turned and continued down Fredrick Street, entering Brunswick Square, sidewalks radiating out the middle like a giant ship’s wheel.

Jennifer Kronovet

TEN WAYS TO MOURN A DEAD LANGUAGE 1. Intersperse words from the dead language into your speech. When asked the meaning of the dead words say, I never said that.

2. Think of an idea or expression that can only happen in the dead tongue. Repeat it until it becomes a hole. Yell in.

3. Write dead words in sugar or salt inside food. Distribute.

4. Rename the stars with words for body parts in the dead language.

Teach neighborhood children to use these names.

5. Nothing stays inside the body forever.

6.

7. Use dead syntax with alive English words when asking for directions to places you’ll never visit.

8. What is the most popular song right now? Translate it into the dead language. Then, if the song plays in your presence, hold your breath.

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9. Borrow some clothes from friends. On each label write one grapheme to spell across bodies touch me here in the dead language.

10. Send me your address. I’ll send you a letter.

LOAN WORDS The kangaroo was in a funk. Then an inspiring caravan of hip, divorced tycoons—each with his or her own robot to boss around— went by. The kangaroo thought, “If I ever leave the boondocks, I can be a kung fu icon with all the ketchup I need to bring me a sense of zen.”

Words travel by boat and by horse and by foot. By mail and by phone and by wire. Kangaroo came by boat—the first aboriginal Australian word into English—with an actual kangaroo.

Arabic: caravan. Bantu: funk.

Chinese: ketchup, kung fu, zen.

Czech: robot. Dutch: boss.

French: divorce. Japanese: tycoon.

Russian: icon. Tagalog: boondocks.

Wolof: hip.

Gonçalo M. Tavares

by Pedro Sena Nunes TRANSLATED FROM THE PORTUGUESE BY RACHEL MORGENSTERN-CLARREN Many years ago, when I taught a studio class at Lisbon’s Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, I challenged my students to bring in literary works that we could interpret as film exercises. I was deeply taken by one piece in particular—I wanted to hide it and bring it home so I could make a film of my own with it. I was surprised to find that its author was, as of then, still unpublished. His name was Gonçalo M. Tavares. At least 14 years went by without me working with that very cinematic text, but I did not give up.

Tavares began to be published widely and I continued wanting to adapt his writing for film. We worked together on a few projects, yet less often than I would have wished. Today, in Portugal, Tavares is an essential reference— he is read and respected widely and his presence literally interferes with our lives. He contemplates, filters, and analyzes our surroundings and returns to us tragicomic philosophical exercises, or unravels implausible scenarios that reveal his tireless exploration of the history of literature. Emotional landscapes are at the core of Tavares’s short stories and novels. With surgical precision, he contrasts and draws parallels between his characters’ feelings, which mirror our own. Upon reading Tavares’s work, we may discover that what we fear the most is learning about ourselves.

According to Tavares, “We face the book when reading. We do not read out of the corner of our eyes; to read is to turn the body toward the letter.” From this intense activity of turning the body toward the page emerges Tavares’s constellation of characters, motifs, objects, streets, buildings, and climates, presenting us with powerful words and somber and radiant visions.

Tavares’s books convey an intricate set of ideas that are dispensed only gradually. Jerusalem, with its shards of memories and visions of the future, had a mind-altering effect on me. I read the book two, three, and four times, seeking to discover it anew each time. It was as if I wasn’t reading about things, but with them.

Tavares is an acrobat of words, a multifaceted writer, a prodigious and compulsive artist. I consider him a revolutionary of thought.

— PEDRO SENA NUNES

Photo by Teresa Sá.

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Editor’s note: In this interview, Gonçalo M. Tavares and Pedro Sena Nunes reference two series of works currently available in English translation. The first series, The Kingdom novels—including Joseph Walser’s Machine (2004), Jerusalem (2005), and Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique (2007)—are set in an undefined central-European country in the midst of constant war, political upheaval, occupation, and other forms of strife.

Tavares’s antipodal antidote to the bleakness of The Kingdom books is his unfolding Neighborhood series of short stories inspired by and about famous authors or “Misters” (Mister Calvino and Mister Brecht, among others) all of whom inhabit the same fictitious Lisbon bairro.

PEDRO SENA NUNES Why do you write books?

GONÇALO M. TAVARES I have a physical need to write.

I insist that it’s a physical, not just an intellectual, need.

PSN Is it difficult to write?

GMT Well, the anguish that takes hold of each writer is the anguish over apparent inaction. That is to say, however much it can be romanticized: writing is an act that someone does, at first, when seated. On the other hand, one of the great difficulties of writing a novel, for example, which demands a continuous attention, is precisely the difficulty that we feel in simply sitting down. It seems like it isn’t, but it’s a violent act, because we look out the window, we listen to the noises of reality, we feel that there is a series of events that are out there in the world waiting for us and we, in contrast, in the moment in which we write—I’m not speaking of time spent researching, which can be done in the field, of course, and passes for life experience—but the moment of writing itself, that is solitary, and, as I said before, results in a body which sits, that is removed at least, in the moments of writing, from the world. However, it’s obvious that a writer should be aware of reality and should, if possible, try to influence it through his books. To unsettle is a good verb: to disturb, to make one think.

PSN Who are your main influences?

GMT I could talk about authors I really admire: Italo Calvino, Thomas Mann, and so forth, but it would be an almost endless list. I wrote a book called Biblioteca (Library) where I wrote short texts from the perspective of countless authors. But to respond to your question, I feel that I have hundreds and hundreds of influences. Each week I try to add one or two more influences. In this particular instance, I like to refer to a philosopher, Gilles Deleuze.

Deleuze says that there are two great powers: first, the power to affect, to influence others, and that is obviously something that a writer tries to do—and happily, because there are many artists in different countries, people in theater and in music, for instance, that are drawing inspiration from my books. But returning to Deleuze, he spoke about a second great power: the capacity to be influenced. I believe that this is crucial: to be aware, to be receptive.

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PSN Your writing is very rich and varied. How do you characterize the connection and separation between your novels and your short stories?

GMT There are books with very different tones and contents, but there is a clear link between all of them. There is a form of writing that I believe is common to all of those registers. The tone can be more profound, or more playful, the narrative’s subject or the book’s form can be very different, but there is a style that I believe carries over into all the books. But I think that each form or literary genre expresses a thought, and the narrative arrives at different points. When I write a short story—such as in The Neighborhood, in “Mister Brecht,” or in “Mister Calvino,” for example—I arrive at places that I don’t arrive in with a novel or with an essay. And vice-versa.

It’s evident, for example, that a novel, because it asks the reader to extend across time, also creates a rhythm and density that a short text can’t have. Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique or Jerusalem have stories that wouldn’t work in short forms. I’m forced to go down different paths to try and arrive, of course, at different places.

PSN Why do you write in series?

GMT I divide my many books up into series because they are very different forms of writing. There are novels that are more classic books, but still novels, I hope, of ideas.

There are earlier novels with a backdrop of war, where I try to understand the behavior of men in extreme situations. Ultimately, I try to understand evil and the form in which each of us (we cannot exclude ourselves), from one moment to the next, can enter into the routine and what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” There are strong, aggressive books that some classify as “war machines,” and I like that. There are books that claim to shake things up, to reveal man in his deepest misery.

PSN Can you talk more about the neighborhood in The Neighborhood series?

GMT It is a neighborhood of strange, paradoxical, logical, or ultra-logical characters—very anguished or very playful. There is something about the spirit of the names themselves that gave life to the characters that inhabit my stories. I gave the name of a writer to a character, just as you might give the name of a writer to a street.

There are various “Misters” who I visualize as possible characters, playful characters. Among those, Mister Kafka, Mister Pessoa, Mister Proust, etcetera.

I’m accustomed to saying that we don’t want the street to resemble the writer, but there is a link. In the first place, nothing is biographical. The characters are fictional and autonomous, they go down their own paths. But obviously, there is a link, even if it’s small, in the themes or the tones or the logic of the writing.

I may view The Neighborhood—which is a huge project, if I can finish it (I probably can’t)—as a kind of essay about literature, but fictional and with complete freedom, yet it is also a type of utopia, a neighborhood of

The Misters’ residences in The Neighborhood series as drawn by Gonçalo M. Tavares.

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LITERATURE — GONÇALO M. TAVARES

Amy Sillman by R. H. Quaytman I don’t remember when Amy and I first met—it must have been in the mid ’90s. However, I do remember that she saved my life by being one of the few artists who genuinely seemed to admire and enjoy what I was doing at a time when my work was barely known.

The following dialogue typifies the discursive tug and pull—support and doubt, laughter and pricking annoyance—of our friendship, a friendship grounded in a mutual need and hunger to test what we are doing against a good strong argument. We seem to need each other’s thinking. Or at least I need hers—I feel Amy’s paintings the way I feel music. “How do you do

that?!”, I want to scream. It recently struck both of us that, when we talk, I am like her painting and she is like mine. Between our heads and our work we make a figure eight, or something like that.

For the past 15 years our mutual working lives have been inseparably intertwined. Sprouts from our opposing positions have taken root, and our connection has unquestionably fertilized the soil and stretched the horizon upon which we struggle to sustain our thinking and painting. Also, we love, and I mean LOVE, to dance.

— R. H. QUAYTMAN

R. H. QUAYTMAN Let’s talk about your show coming up at ICA in Boston—so this is your first survey show?

AMY SILLMAN Yeah, it’s the first big survey show. It’s called one lump or two.

RQ I find that doing a museum show stops you in time. And, ugh, how could you ever think about painting another painting again? But you have to, and you do.

AS I’ve noticed that sometimes the next show after someone’s survey show is fantastic—because all of that work has been thoroughly seen and digested—and they can move on to what they really meant.

Anyway, yeah, the ICA show includes work from the ‘80s!

RQ See, to me that would just be so hard to show.

AS It is terribly embarrassing. I called Helen Molesworth, the curator, at one point and said that I hated the first two rooms worth of work.

RQ Are you doing it chronologically?

AS Mostly chronologically, but we are including a whole spectrum of funny side stuff as well—so, we’re hanging the paintings chronologically with non-chronological videos and zines and cartoons. You know, I’ve been doing cartoons and stuff like that forever, it’s just that I didn’t think of putting them into my painting shows until 2009.

A Shape that Stands Up and Listens , 2012, gouache, charcoal, and chalk on paper, 30 × 22 inches. Images courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

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RQ And how did that happen?

AS Well, I went to Berlin where I had a show in 2009 and I thought I needed a kind of translator. So I wrote an essay, I put some cartoons and some jokes in,

Untitled , 2012, oil on canvas, 51 × 49 inches. and it turned into a zine. People came up to me afterward and said the exact thing that I’d always wanted to hear, which was, “I don’t usually really like painting, but the zine made me see where you are coming from.” And I was like, Wow, did I just blow a couple of decades not making these part of my painting shows?!

RQ You really do. I mean, that’s our joke, that my paintings need your brain . . .

RQ Do you think that’s actually true?

RQ My paintings have the look of high intellectual rigor, but they are based in the emotional and the instinctual—

AS Yeah, I think I was so earnestly trying to learn how to paint all those years. Now I realize I should have acted differently all along, because I have this fairly critical, analytical way of thinking— 115

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languages, but you also understand color theory, history, and philosophy much more rigorously than I do.

AS And my paintings need your brain . . .

RQ We need to switch.

AS Totally. Or we just say, “I can understand your work.”

AS —and even the capricious.

RQ You not only understand other

AS Well, I don’t know about that. I didn’t exactly take the royal road to critique.

I didn’t study academically, and I only started reading a lot of theory when I was older. But I did have the same attitude all those critical thinkers had, which was basically: fuck you. Only my fuck-you attitude was more whimsical—more of a heh-heh than a critique kind of thing.

RQ I definitely have the sense that no matter what your education was, these paintings would be what they are today.

Performance view of What is art? What is it for? (O que ĂŠ arte? Para que serve?) , 1978, Recife, Brazil. Photo by Angelo JosĂŠ.

Images courtesy of the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler.

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Paulo Bruscky

by Antonio Sergio Bessa TRANSLATED FROM THE PORTUGUESE

BY ADAM J. MORRIS Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky started his career, and developed a significant part of it, as the military was solidifying its hold over the country after the coup of 1964. Like many artists of the post-concrete generation, it was only inevitable that Bruscky’s work would reflect the jarring new environment imposed by the military on civil society. The shutting down of humanities courses in universities around the country, as well as the persecution of student and union leaders, for instance, gives a measure of how deep the need for control had become. In 1975, the killing of journalist and playwright Vladimir Herzog during a police interrogation sent out a chilling message that the news media was no longer an independent institution—nor was any kind of communication, for that matter. Despite this paranoid backdrop, Bruscky went on to develop a body of work based largely on the dissemination of messages (postcards, newspapers ads, billboards) and audience participation.

More to the point, he managed to do it, for the most part, in his native Recife, a city steeped in tradition and wary of the avant-garde.

Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco, the center for sugarcane production during the colonial era, has a convoluted history. In the early 16th century, the city was taken over by the Dutch, who appointed the Count Maurits van Nassau as its governor (1630– 1654) in a bid to reign over the entire northeast region.

Nassau set up a formidable system during his tenure, implementing most of the city’s early infrastructure.

Upon his defeat, the thriving Jewish community that had arrived with him left the city in fear of the Portuguese Inquisition, and eventually settled in New York. Back under control of the Portuguese, the area became synonymous with monoculture—a system that privileged a few landowning families that for over two centuries held the monopoly on sugar trade.

Following the 1964 coup, Pernambuco became a hub for students and labor activists who sought to inform peasants about their rights, and the entire area soon became a major focus of military intervention. For Bruscky, born in 1949 into a well-educated family (his father was a photographer whose family emigrated from Belarus in the 1930s, and his mother once ran for city council), art became “the last hope,” as he stoically claimed in a billboard work—an arena for provocation and for exposing the absurdities of the situation.

The following conversation is one of many I had with Bruscky while I was curating Art Is Our Last Hope, an exhibition of his work on view at the Bronx Museum through February 9, 2014.

— ANTONIO SERGIO BESSA

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ANTONIO SERGIO BESSA Tell me a little about what Recife has represented for you, especially during the period when you began performing interventions in the city.

PAULO BRUSCKY My relationship to Recife has been quite visceral. I’m fascinated by the city’s geography. It’s all cut up by rivers and bathed by the sea, so I always worked on bridges, over the rivers. Also, Recife is flat, which is very good for urban interventions. I drift through the city, never taking the same route when I go someplace, so that I’m always paying attention. Due to this walking, Recife is always on my mind when I work.

ASB You could have moved to Rio or São Paulo like many artists from this region did, but you decided to stay here and create works about Recife and its local reality. This notion of locality is very strong in your work.

PB For a year I lived in New York and Amsterdam on a Guggenheim Fellowship but aside from that, I never had any desire to move to Rio or São Paulo. After I got involved in arte correio (mail art) at the beginning of the ’70s, I became aware of what was going on in the world thanks to my correspondence with other artists.

I felt that I didn’t need to leave even more strongly than before.

ASB This strolling through the city and seeing different things every time—it’s really a poetic activity. You’re in a dialogue with the city.

PB I’ve been here in this studio now for a little over a year. In this area of Recife, for example, they have these street corners where there’s not even room for someone to pass by. The sidewalks are the width of three toes and no good for anything.

ASB Surreal . . .

PB Yes, surreal. So now I’m taking photographs of these sidewalks that I find on my walks. When I’m abroad, in cities I don’t know, I wander about so I can get really lost. First I map out the area around the hotel where I’ll be staying, and then I go out and catch a bus, which is the best way to get to know a place since it’s stopping every now and then. For example, in 1998 I was with a friend at a bar in Belo Horizonte, and I saw a bus with a sign that said “Saudade” [longing or nostalgia]. After my friend told me it

this page: Image processed by Florian Hecker using a Sift Flow Algorithm.

Photo by Tim Brotherton, Tate Modern. opposite page: The Snake, the Goat, and the Ladder (A board game for playing chimera) , text by Reza Negarestani processed by Florian Hecker using a Sift Flow Algorithm. Images courtesy of the artist and Primary Information.

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Florian Hecker by Ben Vida

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ARTISTS ON ARTISTS — FLORIAN HECKER

Ben Durham by Christopher Stackhouse Submerged in the aging face lives the infant gaze, curiosity accompanying the always soft skin, which is even softer, more luxurious in our glistening elder years, laughter, sadness, unspeakable mysteries of love and loss and destruction and rejuvenating tendency are those constant silences that travel buoying surfaces before, beyond wondering, what might have been some kind of light fixture capturing breaking lead into freezing pulp, crystals falling into a cup around her mouth, just beneath his punctum water pushed forward, it is like more than it is dull hurts excoriating each other for being similar, drinking from the same cup having escaped from and returned to comfortable prisons for familiar sleep in warm arms, limbs themselves not enough to be musicians, or poets, or parents of best sorts, or parents at all, all permitting a stroll through the park after midnight lit by centuries of returning moons, late night birds pausing, migrating, pausing, the whole thing in essence singing for survival, wishing before failure followed by birth details in frequent sense alphabetical distribution even earlier than given meaning, after so many small field moves that retell first agony, first pleasure, nothing particularly special to define individuals with breeze between them, otherwise known as affection, perhaps deprivation thereof, when spun out of laden text any various form that exists may be indistinguishable power, selfsame that determines how flower and replicas persist astonishing precedence into solidity of trying after, to duplicate is the first step in best efforts to reply in concert with isolation itself developing or flowering depending it might be said muteness is expressive, inarticulacy an assertive shape, in wood, stone, steel, ore, flesh as it were, matter, however it takes shape, speaks deciding by indecision, in turn, guiding hand to drum each circumambulatory round toward evening, sketching hover of the Luna moth at the end of her day to grace at rest, having crossed the bridge of facture in word into mouth as night in other tensions checking muscle, or river swim defying tide beneath constellation after myth choosing, things still die beautifully unlike anything that has died previously, perfection covers staggering heavens, disintegrating quartz, coral and particle, each some interim toward a smile caught in the silk netting that casts iridescence in triangular glow, those leaves teasing excretions of some undetermined material world manifests a thistle in a purple duvet as white as it wants to be blood stained made of, from, before and after persons, comes next disappearance into pressure filled joy returned smaller, more precious than a bubble and whatever air left inside, might it be enough to sustain further togetherness as seasonal winds blow buildings apart, push the kite higher, open sails to turbulent indices.

— CHRISTOPHER STACKHOUSE is a founding member of the artists’ collective This Red Door.

He is the author of the collection of poems Plural (Counterpath Press), and co-author of Seismosis (1913 Press), which features his drawings with text by writer John Keene.

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ARTISTS ON ARTISTS — BEN DURHAM

John , 2013, graphite text on handmade paper, 58 × 44 inches.

Ashley , 2012, graphite text on handmade paper, 58 × 44 inches. Images courtesy of the artist and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York. Photos by Christopher Burke Studios.

Ben Durham, John (detail), 2013, graphite text on handmade paper, 58 Ă&#x2014; 44 inches.

Miyoshi Barosh by Annetta Kapon

FEEL BETTER , 2012, acrylic and oil paint, high-density and upholstery foam on canvas, 93 × 132 × 8 inches. Images courtesy of Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles.

FEEL BETTER: The exhortation, wish, or command, chiseled in “stone” calls to me in huge upholstered capital letters from what looks like a black vertical gravestone in relief hung as a tapestry on the wall. On it and on the floor are shiny gold-colored nuggets or “rocks.”

Miyoshi Barosh’s 2012 installation concentrates in one piece her deft use of linguistic slippage, and the dark humor of double entendre. Through the intense materiality of language-as-sculpture, the work activates a kind of monumental craftsmanship that oscillates between the fleeting virtuality of a Facebook “wall” and the timeless finality of a tombstone. That the work is made of illusionistic movie prop materials (fabric, paint, foam, fake gold) adds to this collision.

The clash produces in the viewer a Brechtian estrangement effect, as when we are obliged to stand at a certain distance from the work, a distance that prevents us from being sucked in by the face value of language or the seduction of workmanship in the materials alone. According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “words are deeds.” Language is material; speech is not the opposite of action. Feel Better orders us to feel better (or else?); personal feeling becomes enforced as a marketable social product.

Labor also plays a big role in Barosh’s work—namely as the language of labor, and the labor of language.

What appears as Pop craft such as knitting, sewing, or patchwork, is a gendered way for Barosh to engage in 136

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the labor that capitalist industry and high technology have supposedly liberated us from.

The meaning of the artwork results neither from the straightforward declarative function of a linguistic message, nor from the materials or technique: In Love (2007), the speech action is situated within an orgy of garish afghans, embroideries, and knitting. At once triumphant, pathetic, and humble, Love carries within it primarily the collision and collusion between form and content but also the contradictory messages of a number of discourses, from the cheerful psychedelic designs of the ‘60s, to the invisible, devalued, and discarded labor of other women (euphemistically renamed “labor of love.”)

If we think of J. L. Austin’s and John Searle’s concepts of Speech Act Theory, what we have in front of us is the productive friction of declarative, directive, and expressive meaning: language is always in danger of being swallowed up by the context, and the medium is always resisting the tyranny of the message.

— ANNETTA KAPON lives and works in Los Angeles producing video, sculpture, and installations. She teaches in the Graduate Fine Arts department at Otis College of Art and Design.

Photo by Rick Bahto.

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Julia Holter

by Ben Vida Early this summer Julia Holter and I got the chance to meet for the first time. She was in New York from Los Angeles to play a show and do interviews; I drove down from Woodstock where I was spending the summer. We met at the Tribeca Grand in SoHo—both of us arriving from two different iconic towns to New York City, the iconic town of the 20th century. Trying to locate the influence of place, and even more specifically, the influence of a city that functions as an icon, is very much at the heart of Julia’s new record, Loud City Song.

As she puts it: “I think the thing about LA is it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is—what it’s like, how it sounds, how it smells, so when people make music about LA, which a lot of people do, it’s hard to identify particular things about it, and it just becomes this great abstract or collage.”

The feeling of place, the genius loci that resonates and informs a work—it’s a cliché and, of course, it’s totally true. Maybe it’s all about magnetic fields, or maybe it’s about people converging at a specific point on a map, and at a specific moment, and what that convergence and the personal connections of that moment can manifest.

The places we grow up in or, later, the places we adopt as home, become an intrinsic element in our creative process. On her new record Julia braids her interests in the poetry of Frank O’Hara, the music of Joni Mitchell, and the novella Gigi by Colette. She sets it all against the backdrop of contemporary Los Angeles, making the city the foundational component of the work, and in so doing, creates a piece that delivers on a number of frequencies—cultural, historical, and site specific.

— BEN VIDA

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MUSIC — JULIA HOLTER

BEN VIDA We both played Unsound in Poland last year.

JULIA HOLTER Oh yeah!

BV I loved the brevity of your performance. Did you do all the string arrangements?

JH Yes, and it was really scary, it took so much time. That’s why it was short, because I had to arrange everything and I only had time between touring. We played “World,” which is on the new album, as well as two songs I’ve never released.

BV There was a moment during the performance where, for an instant, the strings arrived at this more dissonant chord, and then you resolved back to a consonant space. I remember thinking at the time: What if that dissonant space was the starting point and represented more of the resolved harmonic foundation? Listening to your new record reminded me of this and it made me wonder about your history as a composer, what sort of practice you’ve had away from the pop song structures.

JH My first music was for other musicians to play; I was a behind-the-scenes writer. I had gone to school for composition, and I didn’t think of myself as a performer or a singer, and I didn’t write lyrics until I was 21. I mean, at this point I’m 28 so I’ve been singing for seven years now. But at first it wasn’t normal for me to be singing. I didn’t really like my voice and I wasn’t going to use it much.

But now, I don’t know what else to do, I love singing so much that I can’t stop.

BV It’s one of the great pleasures of life, isn’t it?

JH Yeah.

BV I was out playing in Will Oldham’s band this past spring on the modular synthesizer, which is a super weird instrument to be playing— JH —unpredictable.

BV It can be unpredictable, but very interesting.

JH I like his music.

BV I like him so much too. The group was just a four piece: two acoustic guitars, Will and Emmett Kelly, the modular synth 140

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and Dawn McCarthy singing and playing a floor tom, so it was a really cool group.

On stage we were all seated around a single microphone and singing four-part harmony. So we were mixing ourselves live, you know, we didn’t have monitors so we had this living-room feeling on stage, even though we were in front of a thousand people.

JH That’s really cool.

BV Singing with those folks was just such a pleasure.

JH I used to have an informal singing group with some composers that I know.

It happened to be all women so it worked well because of our ranges. And then Cat left for Bard and my friend Laura went to Stanford.

BV Cat Lamb? I love Cat Lamb’s work with the overtone series.

JH She’s written these pieces for voice that Laura Steenberge and I have sung together.

BV I’ve met Laura. She came out to Bard and she and Cat performed one of those pieces for two voices. It was absolutely beautiful.

JH Yeah. We would get together and sing Cat’s pieces; she’d have the numbers representing pitches in hertz for us to sing. People who didn’t know much about microtones would still sing with us and would figure it out. It wasn’t exclusive to good singers because none of us are trained singers; all of us are composers who have started singing for fun. And secondly, it wasn’t necessarily for people who know how to read music. Although one time we got together and sang medieval motets just for fun; we didn’t sound so perfect, but it’s just great to sing with people who are focused listeners and composers, even if they aren’t specifically trained in singing.

BV Right, that’s less important; it’s more about the situation and just the pleasure of being together and blending voices.

It’s so interesting when you start to work with the overtone series or alternate tuning systems, how the ear begins to adjust to it, so even if you’re not trained in microtonality you can still recalibrate and hear it. Did you study with James Tenney at CalArts?

JH Sadly, he had passed away by the

time I got there. I did work briefly with Wolfgang von Schweinitz who writes very classical music exploring microtonality. I learned a lot from him about how to hear and listen for different kinds of ratios of intervals. He is a really enthusiastic teacher and interesting composer. I was mainly working with Michael Pisaro, and there was a lot of just hanging out and talking about books or movies I might want to see, things that relate to what I’m interested in, because at that point I kind of knew what I was doing. Michael is great at figuring out what you’re into.

He’s a really good mentor in that way, he doesn’t impose things on you; he just helps inspire you, and his music is also so great.

BV When you were in school, composing before you chose to sing, who were you inspired by?

JH I was really confused because I grew up on pop music but was playing classical piano. I mainly listened to pop until I was 15, and then I started being interested in avant-garde modernist-y, kind of European stuff. That’s when I started writing music. But then, when I started music school at University of Michigan, it was very conservative and classically minded and it was too much for me, almost. But I went for it anyway and tried really hard.

Who was I inspired by? I don’t know if I did a very good job at writing music inspired by him, but one person I was inspired by was György Ligeti. Most of the students and the teachers there were interested in his music at the time, so I wanted to learn about what everyone else was interested in. So Ligeti, and also John Adams—if you can imagine what confused music inspired by Adams and Ligeti might sound like— BV (laughter) I think some of the string sections on your album Loud City Song have a Ligeti-like quality to them.

What was your method for scoring those parts?

JH Well it depends which song.

“Maxim’s 1” in its home-recorded demo form was just all synth of course, but I imagined it being very cinematic, with just strings and synth and voice, so after I recorded the demo, I came up with a notated arrangement for strings that would also blend with a synth part.

“World” was a poem I wrote, somewhat tied to and somewhat separate from a specific melody, written at a piano. Then