BOMB Issue 109, Fall 2009

Number 109 / fall 2009

Allen Ruppersberg by Cheryl Donegan Rebecca Solnit by Astra Taylor Lydia Peelle by Gillian Welch Joel Shapiro by Michèle Gerber Klein Allora & Calzadilla by Carlos Motta Thomas Bradshaw by Margo Jefferson Cherien Dabis by June Stein Karole Armitage by Lukas Ligeti First Proof: BOMB’s Literary Supplement

$7.95 US / $7.95 Canada File under Art and Culture Display until december 15, 2009

Conversations between Artists, Writers, Actors, Directors, Musicians—Since 1981 Cover_109_FINAL.indd 2

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Contents Bomb / NUMBER 109 / Fall 2009 editor’s choicE

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artists on artists Micachu and the Shapes by Anni Rossi Tala Madani by Diana Al-Hadid Dan Schmidt by James Siena

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BOMB SPECIFIC

by R.H. Quaytman & Geoff Kaplan

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THE WICK

by Matt Madden

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interviews

on the cover: Allen Ruppersberg, Untitled, printed poster, 14 × 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

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Rebecca Solnit

by Astra Taylor Filmmaker Taylor delves into Solnit’s latest book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, where the preconceptions of human nature are exposed and the triumphs of civil society are extolled.

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Joel Shapiro

by Michèle Gerber Klein Known for his tilting, anthropomorphic sculptures and psychologically dense archetypical floor pieces, Shapiro speaks of Indian art as a lived experience and his overriding search for its forms.

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Karole Armitage

by Lukas Ligeti The iconic dancer and choreographer is collaborating with musician Lukas Ligeti on Itutu, blending African pop with Western symbolism. They dissect African polyrhythms and Armitage’s movement language of sinuous curves.

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Lydia Peelle

by Gillian Welch A dazzling debut, Peelle’s first collection of short stories circles the terrain of O’Connor and Welty. Welch knows this landscape well, its forlorn glory and its hope-riddled despair.

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contents Allora & Calzadilla

by Carlos Motta An unseen tap dancer whose reverberating steps haunt an empty gallery, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a whistleblower atop a hippo made of mud: Allora & Calzadilla on the politics of site and sound.

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Thomas Bradshaw

by Margo Jefferson Jefferson describes Bradshaw’s plays as treacherous territories peopled with highachieving suburbanites and professors gripped by sexual and racial manias. Their most dangerous quality: they act on pure id.

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Christopher Sorrentino Ventriloquy

Allen Ruppersberg

by Cheryl Donegan The peripatetic conceptualist (Where’s Al?) talks with artist Cheryl Donegan about collections, the reanimated past, and the overlooked poetry of authorless signage.

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Cherien Dabis

by June Stein Dabis wrote her film Amreeka in response to her family’s Arab-American experience.

An immigrant’s tale, the search for a better future in the Promised Land is full of seismic changes.

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BOMB (ISSN 0743–3204) (USPS #773–130) is published March, June, September, and December for $22.00 per year by: New Art Publications 80 Hanson Place, #703 Brooklyn, NY 11217 718–636–9100 generalinquiries@bombsite.com Periodicals postage paid at Brooklyn, NY, and additional mailing offices.

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First Proof: bomb’s Literary Supplement 4

Stephen Ratcliffe Poems from Human / Nature

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Nicole Steinberg Poems from the Getting Lucky series

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Valérie Belin Portfolio

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Solon Timothy Woodward Mrs. Dellum Speaks

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Paul Guest Two Poems

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Victoria Redel You Look Like You Do

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First Proof is sponsored in part by the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation.

This issue is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

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

BOMB is indexed in Humanities International Complete.

BOMB Supporters include Foundation 20 21, the Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative, the Thanksgiving Fund, and BOMB’s Trustees.

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BOMB BOMB STAFF PUBLISHER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Betsy Sussler ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Mary-Ann Monforton SENIOR EDITOR Mónica de la Torre MANAGING EDITOR Nick Stillman GENERAL MANAGER, DIGITAL MEDIA & MARKETING Paul W. Morris MANAGING DIRECTOR, CIRCULATION & DEVELOPMENT Alexis Boehmler WEB MANAGER Ben Handzo CREATIVE DIRECTOR, ONLINE SPONSORSHIPS David Goodman CIRCULATION CONSULTANT Laura Howard ASSOCIATE WEB EDITOR Lena Valencia ARCHIVE EDITOR Richard Goldstein ART DIRECTION & DESIGN Everything Studio Special Projects: Abby Goldstein WEB CONSULTANTS Fred Krughoff Rick Frankel BOARD OF TRUSTEES Tim Nye, Chairman Cary Brown-Epstein Paul Cantor Rosemary Carroll Frances Dittmer Eric Fischl Klaus Kertess Heather Kirby Michèle Gerber Klein Edward Tyler Nahem George Negroponte Ellen Phelan Betsy Sussler BOARD OF ADVISERS Gabriella De Ferrari Andrew Fierberg Nicole Klagsbrun Alexander S.C. Rower David Salle Melissa Sandor Ira Silverberg Madeline Weinrib INTERNS Galina Arnaut, Cecilia Corrigan, Jordan DeBor, Hannah Kahng, Kyle McAuley, Julia Minkin, Katherine Sanders, Shoshana Shmuluvitz, Oona Brangam Snell. Video Editing & Production: Mitch Moore.

PROOFREADERS Georgia Cool Nicole Steinberg CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ART EDITOR Saul Ostrow ART Tina Barney, Ross Bleckner, Cecily Brown, Adam Fuss, Joe Fyfe, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Abby Goldstein, Stuart Horodner, Anthony Huberman, Judy Hudson, David Humphrey, Roberto Juarez, Shirley Kaneda, Nell McClister, Amanda Means, Olu Oguibe, Bruce Pearson, Lucy Raven, Clifford Ross, and Mimi Thompson ARCHITECTURE EDITOR Carlos Brillembourg ARCHITECTURE Diana Agrest, Deborah Gans, and Donald Shillingburg FILM AND THEATER Jon Robin Baitz, Liza Bear, Lawrence Chua, Leon Falk, Bette Gordon, Carlos Gutiérrez, Linda Hoaglund, Romulus Linney, Craig Lucas, Mark Magill, Richard Maxwell, Evangeline Morphos, Susan Shacter, Paula Vogel, and Mac Wellman MUSIC David Byrne, Anthony Coleman, David Krasnow, George Lewis, Alan Licht, Mike McGonigal, Tim Nye, Vernon Reid, Marc Ribot, Ned Sublette, Julia Wolfe, and John Zorn WRITING Esther Allen, Robert Antoni, Deborah Baker, Tom Bolt, Carmen Boullosa, Edwidge Danticat, Deborah Eisenberg, Daniel Flores y Ascencio, Alan Gilbert, Francisco Goldman, Kimiko Hahn, Matthea Harvey, John Haskell, Amy Hempel, A.M. Homes, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Kushner, Jonathan Lethem, Jaime Manrique, Patrick McGrath, Brian McMullen, Mary Morris, Silvana Paternostro, Caryl Phillips, Robert Polito, Minna Proctor, Francine Prose, Daniel Shapiro, Nicole Steinberg, Lynne Tillman, Colm Tóibín, Frederic Tuten, and Benjamin Weissman EDITORS AT LARGE Gary Indiana and Glenn O’Brien CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Adam Bartos, Sarah Charlesworth, Sally Gall, Nan Goldin, Ben Handzo, Aric Mayer, Elliot Schwartz, and William Wegman PRINTER WestCan Printing Group, Printed in Canada

READER Justine Wegner

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contributors Literary Review. She teaches at Columbia University’s film department. Photo by Annie Joly.

Cheryl Donegan Cheryl Donegan makes videos and paintings and lives in New York City.

Her paintings will appear in the group exhibition Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and The Ready-Made Gesture at the Kitchen, on view from November 13, 2009 to January 15, 2010. Photo by Kenneth Goldsmith.

Lukas Ligeti Composer-percussionist Lukas Ligeti has crafted a unique style all his own, drawing upon downtown New York experimentalism, contemporary classical, jazz, electronica, and world music, particularly from Africa. Known for his non-conformity and diverse interests, Ligeti creates music ranging from the through-composed to the free-improvised, often exploring polyrhythmic/polytempo structures, non-tempered tunings, and non-Western elements.

Margo Jefferson Margo Jefferson is a New York–based cultural critic. Her book, On Michael Jackson, was published by Vintage in 2006. She was a staff writer for The New York Times for 13 years and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have also appeared in Bookforum, The Nation, Grand Street, Vogue, O, and Newsweek. She wrote and performed a theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland, at the Cherry Lane Theater and the Culture Project in 2001 and 2002. She teaches at Columbia and at Eugene Lang College.

Photo copyright Brent Murray.

Carlos Motta Carlos Motta is an artist and sporadic writer working on sociopolitical themes.

His work has been individually presented at PS1/MoMA and ICA Philadelphia and has been included in 2009 exhibitions such as X Biennale de Lyon and the first 798 Beijing Biennale. Motta is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and received grants from the Art Matters and Cisneros Fontanals foundations.

Michèle Gerber Klein Michèle Gerber Klein, vice president of the Liberman Foundation, is a trustee of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum, and the Alliance Française. She writes frequently about art and fashion and is currently researching a book project on the last tapes of legendary designer Charles James.

June Stein June Stein has appeared in films directed

by John Turturro, Tim Robbins, and Sidney Lumet, and has directed plays at the Vineyard, Circle Rep, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and the Magic Theatre.

She originated the role of Roberta in John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. She writes for BOMB and has been published by Bellevue

ASTRA TAYLOR Writer and documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor was named one of 25 New Faces to Watch in 2006 by Filmmaker Magazine. Her feature documentaries, Zizek! and Examined Life both premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and are distributed by Zeitgeist Films.

The companion book Examined Life: Excursions With Contemporary Thinkers is available from The New Press. She has taught at the University of Georgia and SUNY, New Paltz. Photo by Jeff Mangum.

Gillian Welch Gillian Welch is a singer/songwriter with four critically acclaimed albums.

She appeared on the Grammy-winning soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother Where Art Thou? as well as on records by Mark Knopfler, Emmylou Harris, and Ani DiFranco, among others.

Her songs have been covered by an eclectic group of artists including Willie Nelson, Joan Baez, Nick Cave, David Byrne, David Johansen, Jimmy Buffett, Alison Krauss, and New York alt-rock trio Secret Machines. Photo copyright paxtonx.com.

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sponsors

Thanks to our Patrons and Sponsors BOMB’s Park-Lit Reading in Tompkins Square Park, July 2009.

We are most grateful to all of our patrons and sponsors for their contributions this past year.

A special thanks to the following event sponsors for their kind support: The Brooklyn Book Festival, The Cleveland Institute of Art, The Brooklyn Public Library, Performance Space 122, The Other Means Reading Series, King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at NYU, Columbia College Chicago, The National Arts Club, Peerless Importers, Empire Merchants, Chatham Importers, NYEHOUSE Gallery, The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, Housing Works Bookstore, Brooklyn Brewery, T. Edwards Wines, Elizabeth Restaurant, Galapagos Art Space, Sixpoints Craft Ales, The New York Parks & Recreation Department.

Colson Whitehead and Stephen Elliot chatting it up at BOMB’s BookExpo America Bash at Housing Works Bookstore, May 2009.

BOMB is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.

If you would like to make a donation or sponsor an event, please call 718-636-9100 x104 or visit BOMBsite.com. this fall, don’t miss our launch party, First Proof reading, and exclusive BOMBLive! programs. Visit BOMBsite.com for full details and for pictures from past events. Sign up for our e-blast online.

BOMB’s Summer Issue Launch Party at Galapagos Arts Space, June 2009.

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patrons LEADERS $40,000 and over

PATRONS $1,000 to $2,499

Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative Foundation 20 21, Sustaining

Lawton Fitt & James McLaren Barbara Gladstone Michèle Gerber Klein Pannonia Foundation David Teiger Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation

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

PUBLISHER’S COUNCIL $2,500 to $4,999

BENEFACTORS $500 to $999

Estrellita & Daniel Brodsky Giuliana Bruno & Andrew Fierberg Melva Bucksbaum & Raymond Learsy Chatham Importers, Inc. Mr. & Mrs. Gustavo Cisneros The Daniel & Estrellita Brodsky Family Foundation, Americas Jennifer Clifford Danner & William Danner Frances Dittmer Empire Merchants Cary Brown-Epstein & Steven Epstein Agnes Gund Stephen M. Holl Mahnaz Ispahani & Adam Bartos Jill & Peter Kraus The Lurie Family Foundation Minagawa Art Lines Fern & Lenard Tessler Madeline Weinrib Angela Westwater, Sperone Westwater

The HeyDay Foundation Judith Linhares Marian Goodman Gallery Lief D. Rosenblatt Arlene Shechet & Mark Epstein Philip Lyford Sussler Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia William Wurm

SPONSORS $20,000 to $39,999 Bertha & Isaac Liberman Foundation Heather M. Kirby New York City Department of Cultural Affairs New York State Council on the Arts The Thanksgiving Fund The W. L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation DONORS $10,000 to $19,999 Bank of America Bloomberg Helaine & Paul Cantor Fundación Cisneros, Colección Patricia Phelps Cisneros, Americas Frances Dittmer Family Foundation Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Dorothy Lichtenstein National Endowment for the Arts Tim Nye The Reed Foundation, Americas Alexander S.C. Rower PUBLISHER’S CIRCLE $5,000 to $9,999

bomb’s ARCHIVE PROJECT BOMB expresses its deep gratitude to the following donors for supporting the digitization of BOMB’s archival interviews—over 900 and counting—free on BOMBsite.com.

This is a work in progress, to be completed by the end of 2009.

New York State Council on the Arts Eric Fischl Heather Kirby Cary Brown-Epstein Paul Cantor For information on how to become a donor, contact Betsy Sussler at 718-636-9100 x103. bomb PRINT CLUB The following artists generously donated their talent to the BOMB Print Club.

Steve DiBenedetto Joanne Greenbaum Sharon Harper Oliver Herring Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle Paul Pfeiffer Brian Tolle To purchase a print or become a member of the BOMB Print Club, please contact Mary-Ann Monforton at 718-636-9100 x105. bomb Portrait project The following artists generously donated their talent to the BOMB Portrait Project.

Adam Fuss Robert Polidori Clifford Ross Laurie Simmons Fred Wilson BOMB Artists Draw, 2009 Gregory Botts Joe Bradley Echo Eggebrecht Eric Fischl Karl Haendel Adam Helms David Kramer Keith Mayerson James Nares Danica Phelps David Salle Billy Sullivan Jason Tomme Kara Walker

FRIENDS $250 to $499 Laurie Chemla Carmela Ciuraru Jane & James Cohan Catherine J. Douglass Galerie Lelong David Goodman Alice Judelson The Kitchen Club Suydam Lansing Barbara London Anthony McCall William R. Peelle, Jr. Susan Penzner William Rees Jane Rose Martine Rubenstein Jill Stuart Lauren Watkins Raúl Zorrilla

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

Special thanks to Klaus Kertess for curating the Artists Draw with Betsy Sussler.

For information on how to purchase a 3 × 5 inch drawing to benefit BOMB, please call 718-636-9100 x103.

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EDITOR’S CHOICE museums. But The Tomb, a harrowingly realistic self-portrait sculpture as a beatnik corpse, is the undisputed apotheosis. Its significance—encapsulating the death of the ’60s, foreshadowing his own death of AIDS—is huge. Artist’s Artist reveals a man constantly motivated to birth a more positive self. Sometimes it worked, but his prescience was always uncanny, and the limitless Thek of the ’60s glimmered and slowly faded just like his hippie, just like the ephemeral promise of that oncelimitless decade.

—Nick Stillman is Managing Editor of BOMB.

Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist Edited by Harold Falckenberg and Peter Weibel MIT Press, 2009 Officially Paul Thek died in 1988, but really he died twice. In 1967 he conceived The Tomb (frequently called Death of a Hippie)—the summation of a decade, a cultural ethos, and a career. It was the piece he never lived down and never lived up to. Thek became the unwilling prophet of the failure of counterculture idealism and could not regain the tragicomic intensity of The Tomb or his Technological Reliquaries, wax sculptures of raw meat and body parts encased within vitrines.

These startling, coolly weird meat pieces were his first taste of major success.

To the New York art scene, he became the “meatman,” which he later upended ironically with his sculpture Fishman. In the mid and late ’60s Thek was, as Axel Heil writes, “limitless and prodigal.”

The enormous Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist is rich with images of Thek’s wildly varied work from the ’50s to the ’80s, and

reveals how Thek the person sometimes interfered with Thek the artist. A section of the book publishes his letters to Peter Hujar and Susan Sontag (who proposed to Thek and was refused, only to have him propose and her refuse later) that show him as brilliantly associative and sharply intelligent, though self-loathing, critical of almost everything, and occasionally desperate. After lengthily and witheringly condemning Sontag’s “bad habits” in a 1976 letter, he begs her for money.

Finding money was like chasing a ghost for Thek; it didn’t pay to be what Harold Falckenberg calls “the first exhibition artist.” Thek’s influence on installation art and the grotesque (Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Damien Hirst, and the Chapman brothers, most obviously) is major, and yet he remains underrecognized, partly because The Tomb was likely trashed in 1981 due to shipping and storage complications. Artist’s Artist rounds out Thek’s career, reproducing caustic, early Television Analyzations paintings, atypically tranquil late paintings, and a host of entropic installations for

Fishman, 1969, installation view, Stable Gallery, New York. Photo by John D. Schiff.

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Emory Douglas: Black Panther The New Museum July 22–October 18, 2009 Emory Douglas joined the Black Panther Party soon after it was formed in 1966, and quickly began to work on the party’s newspaper, the Black Panther. By 1967, he was the Minister of Culture for the party and became responsible for what developed into an incredible trove of what the New Museum’s exhibition wall text calls “Dangerous pictures … meant to change the world.”

Throughout the late ’60s and ’70s, Douglas created posters and prints for reproduction in the Black Panther, all of which depicted the message of the movement. He positioned white establishment politicians as rats or devils or dismembered or killed, and black men and women and children toting

Untitled, offset lithograph, 1970. Copyright 2009 Emory Douglas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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EDITOR’S CHOICE machine guns with defiant fists raised, calling for the overthrow of a repressive sociopolitical paradigm. The message was a call to arms, maybe the last true propaganda art in this country.

The dynamic, outraged, and ultimately positive show at the New Museum includes a video history of the Black Panther Party that outlines its activities like youth breakfast programs, medical care for the poor, and support for the elderly and underserved. But this wasn’t the Black Panthers the media publicized. When Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton realized it was legal to carry non-loaded weapons, they proceeded to shoulder machine guns to get the attention of the white mayors and police.

Whether through public service or public spectacle, they meant business. This is exactly the message of Douglas’s art.

A June 1973 cover of the Black Panther depicts Richard Nixon and Adolf Hitler together with the text CLASS BROTHERS written across in large letters. A cover from the following month warns that only a few blacks will have the opportunity to die of old age. This is accompanied by collaged pictures of a murdered black man in overalls and an old man seemingly working to death, juxtaposed with a happy white family obliviously playing board games. Curated by artist Sam Durant, an Emory Douglas show comes at an opportune and loaded moment for race relations in the US. But almost nothing could be as loaded as the hysterical ’60s, and Douglas’s assault of the status quo is part of what makes these images uplifting to contemporary eyes. Now, with the distance of history, his achievement can be absorbed with perspective, even if the fervor of propagandizing is essential to its message.

—David Kramer was born in New York City where he currently lives and works. His 2009 exhibitions include Snake Oil at Pierogi, Brooklyn; NY Volta with Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels; Guilty Pleasure at Tom Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles; and Rock Bottom at Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris.

moving car whose radio is broadcasting a harrowing description of a roadside bomb blast. Forty vignettes shot in nearly as many locations internationally, Michael Almereyda’s new film, Paradise, has no clear narrative or documentary premise. It plays in part like a video diary, though Almereyda’s assured handheld camerawork, his attention to sound, and the film’s thoughtful, consistent editing give Paradise a structurally considered, subtly cohesive form.

Each brief chapter in Paradise begins with sound over a black screen, its corresponding image cutting in after

several seconds. As a device, this not only primes the viewer for the upcoming scenario, but foregrounds listening as a central component of the film. Close listening requires attunement—felt another way in Paradise by the slightest rise and fall of the camera with the breath of its operator—and links Almereyda’s casual yet exceptional scenes, setting an evenness of tone that resonates throughout.

For all of Almereyda’s evident traveling, movement is nearly always portrayed outside the body. When bodies change position at all, they’re often transported—by car, moving walkway, airplane. From the ever-black first frames, in no particular order, emerge fireworks, fireflies, streetlights, headlights, searchlights, bombs, the whites of eyes filmed in night vision, a cigarette being lit from far away, a cigarette up close, several suns setting, neon lights passed by. Transcendence, then, cannot be confused with rate of change. Instead, the paradisiacal moments Almereyda is drawn toward might be described as momentary points of light in an otherwise dark(ening) world.

—Lucy Raven is an artist and filmmaker living and working in New York. She is editorial director of Bidoun magazine.

Antichrist Lars von Trier IFC Films When Antichrist premiered at Cannes, the Internet went buzzing. Critics lambasted it as gratuitously violent, scatterbrained, and misogynistic. Director Lars von Trier,

Paradise Michael Almereyda Screening at MoMA, September 24–30

A brand new mother unsentimentally nudges her crying newborn toward her breast just after giving birth. “Is life all that bad, already?” she asks. The scene cuts abruptly to the interior of a

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above: Stills from Paradise, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. below: Charlotte Gainsbourg as She in Antichrist, 2009.

Photo by Christian Geisnaes. Courtesy of IFC Films.

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EDITOR’S CHOICE meanwhile, kept up his auteur-of-doom persona and, at a press conference, crowned himself the best film director in the world. I had to stop myself from reading the extensive, spoiler-laden coverage before seeing the film, but I’d read enough to assume that Antichrist— like the rest of von Trier’s work—would not be passive viewing. It wasn’t. Threequarters of the way through the film I was squirming in my seat, covering my face with the press kit and, at times, admittedly, feeling a little faint.

Antichrist is the story of a couple (He and She, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who take a trip to Eden, their cabin in the woods, in an attempt to get over the loss of their young son, who fell out of a window to his death while they were having sex. von Trier made the film after his own nervous breakdown, and his resentment towards cognitive therapy is made clear through He, who convinces She to flush her meds and become his patient.

Her resentment toward his therapeutic

exercises materializes in their natural surroundings. Things get very strange very fast in the woods—the couple fall asleep to an ominous rain of acorns on the roof and constantly find themselves confronted with animals eating their own young. “Nature is Satan’s church,” She points out matter-of-factly, which He frantically attempts to analyze through more sadistic psychological exercises.

Eventually the film becomes a husband versus psychotic, witchy-wife showdown, not without some supernatural elements (a fairy tale-esque trio of a talking dead fox, a bird that burrows underground, and a deer with a half-miscarried fawn hanging out of it). The plot structure isn’t as pristine as in some of his previous films like the staunchly minimalist Dogville or Manderlay. Any last traces of his Dogme 95 roots are noticeably absent, and occasionally ideas become muddled with the intense gore, but Antichrist does what a good horror movie should do: it haunts.

Eating lunch in a West Village park on a perfect summer day after the screening,

R. Crumb, frames from The Book of Genesis Illustrated, 2009.

Courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company.

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I looked up at some branches rustling in the light breeze. Remembering the wind hissing through von Trier’s sinister woods, I felt an incongruous chill. Maybe the trees aren’t as innocent as we’d like to believe.

—Lena Valencia is Associate Web Editor of BOMB. The Book of Genesis Illustrated

By R. Crumb W.W. Norton & Company, 2009 For the last five years, Robert Crumb, the father of underground comix, has been laboring over a graphic retelling of the first book of the Bible. This might seem odd given his predilections for countercultural subversion. From his LSD-influenced stories for Zap to his collaboration with Charles Bukowski to his biography of Franz Kafka, Crumb’s evolution as a storyteller has led him here. With Genesis he tackles some of the great tropes of Western culture.

Informed by multiple translations, secondary sources, Sumerian mythology, and even movie stills from Hollywood Bible epics, the resulting work is a sensitive and comprehensive exegesis, depicted without a trace of irony. Crumb’s Genesis, when divorced from theology and treated as an historical text, comes alive foremost as a political story, rife with deception, scheming, incest, and brutal violence. It pivots around polarized motifs—monotheism vs. polytheism, matriarchy vs. patriarchy, tribalism vs. civilization—themes that emerge graphically as subtext in a way they rarely do with plain text.

Crumb hews to the text so closely that it can accurately be considered “unabridged.” This Genesis possesses all the contradictions never wholly reconciled by the redactors of the Bible—it contains the two very different creation stories, for instance. In an accompanying set of annotations, Crumb shines as an amateur scholar of early Mesopotamian history. This awareness is reflected in his illustrations throughout, which tend more toward realism than ever. Gone are the caricatures, the bulging eyes, the hallucinatory style that defined his early work. Instead, readers get sympathetic portraits of the early forefathers and foremothers, as well as painstakingly detailed terrain, vegetation, and attire— an attentiveness that would border on overresearched if it weren’t so immersive.

Readers will no doubt catch occasional references to Crumb’s past

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EDITOR’S CHOICE

The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis will be on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, October 24–February 7.

—Paul W. Morris is BOMB’s General Manager of Digital Media & Marketing, and the co-editor of KillingTheBuddha.com.

Glory Hole

by Dan Hoy The Hot Tub

by Jon Leon Mal-O-Mar, 2009

work, like a palimpsest revealing habits that are over 50 years old. At times, God himself looks like an epic, full-sized “Mr Natural,” Crumb’s infamous mystic guru.

A scene in which Isaac and Rebekah lay naked and intertwined, while not explicitly sexual, is a throwback to Crumb’s prehistoric romp “Cave Wimp.” And more than a few characters sweat explosively in that classic Crumb expression of distress.

In the ’90s, the Devil Girl ChocoBars, candy bars inspired by Crumb’s Devil Girl character, used to come with a warning: “It’s bad for you!” The hardcover of Genesis Illustrated has its own cautionary advice: “May not be suitable for some children.” This has less to do with the issues that once made his comix taboo—nudity, profanity—and more to do with the violence that peppers the first book of the Bible. Often gruesome, even in black and white, it’s the same bloodiness that can be seen daily in headlines and on televisions. Apparently for Crumb, whose work has always resonated with the times, this isn’t only the oldest story ever told, it’s the same story still being told today.

Remember the old pulp novels—twoin-one, back-to-back and upside-down?

When you finished one, you could flip the book over and read the other. This binding style, called tête-bêche (head-to-toe) was never taken up by “finer” literature (but imagine a Jean Rhys tête-bêche with The Crack-Up)—until now, with Mal-O-Mar’s release of Dan Hoy and Jon Leon’s poetry collections, The Hot Tub and Glory Hole.

The two collections are one book with two jackets, face-out, like orphanage twins or, ahem, the number six and the number nine. Mal-O-Mar (whose name invokes Mallarmé, marshmallows, and ills of la mer and les meres), is the vision of poet Ariana Reines—a series that aims to sweeten “literary engagements with the abyss,” as Reines puts it, and will feature vending machines around New York City, in which M-O-M editions and other select works will be sold in place of cookies.

Let’s flip a coin and start with The Hot Tub. Leon’s poems are petite, rectangular mini-narratives like Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s, but their antihero—a smartass who drinks “vodka

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from a vodka bottle,” then soaks with babes in white bikinis “like snowflakes in tangerine boots”—is closer to a Bret Easton Ellis character. Whoever he is, I wish he’d been with me at the awful Karl Lagerfeld party when I understood that one can’t escape age by covering the neck and hands in chiffon and leather, respectively. To read The Hot Tub is to bathe in the shallow glittery world you dream of and hate, with just the right remove.

Glory Hole, whose promotional video features a man falling and burning, reads like a life flashing before someone’s eyes. The voice, unlike Leon’s, is post-sex, post-American Apparel, but preordained (“I like faces that take my thoughts and make them better”) and vampiric (“after nine thousand years, pretty much everything is a waste of time”). It’s unclear if this is God or, like, Dracula. Either way, these are the frank admissions of someone, possibly eternal, bending over his own reflection and watching himself see—an image of Narcissus that brings us, naturally, to Baudelaire: M-O-M’s next edition will be a much needed new translation of My Heart Laid Bare.

—Rachel Kushner’s novel Telex from Cuba was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. She is a contributing editor to BOMB. The Vaselines Enter the Vaselines Sub Pop Records, 2009 Formed in Scotland during 1986, the Vaselines were a band that was almost a fanzine. The product of the restless romantic union between Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee, the Glasgow act began

The Vaselines. Photo by Stephen McRobbie.

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EDITOR’S CHOICE as a total lark. However, encouraged

by Stephen McRobbie of the revered local band the Pastels, the scene-savvy pair went on to record two EPs and a full-length album filled with faux-naïve, usually smutty songs. Drawing on the Velvet Underground and the Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra partnership as key influences, Kelly and McKee raised eyebrows with cheeky, none-too-subtle sexual references (“Monsterpussy,” “Sex Sux (Amen),” and “Rory Rides Me Raw,” the latter actually about an uncomfortable bicycle), and won a loyal local following before disbanding in 1990.

The Vaselines may not have made the biggest ripple in the pool, but their most crucial admirer sure did: a pre-Nevermind Kurt Cobain was a rare diehard. While Cobain got Kelly and McKee to reunite temporarily, he truly carried the Vaselines torch on Nirvana’s recordings of three of their finest tunes— “Son of a Gun,” “Molly’s Lips,” and “Jesus Don’t Want Me For a Sunbeam.” In 1992, Nirvana’s former label Sub Pop issued The Way of the Vaselines, compiling all of the ensemble’s studio songs and serving as a period at the end of their short, spirited sentence. Kelly went on to assemble Captain America (who morphed into Eugenius after Marvel Comics threatened to sue Kelly) and McKee unveiled the much-overlooked Suckle before both embarked on solo careers, seemingly content to have the Vaselines’ legacy remain “that Scottish group that Cobain was always going on about.”

But the Vaselines weren’t through.

Almost 20 years after they disbanded, Sub Pop recently issued Enter the Vaselines, a compilation featuring The Way of... in pristinely remastered entirety, along with a bonus disc of demos and live recordings. It’s a back-catalog-scraping collection, but it’s also undeniably entertaining and complete. There are a few previously unreleased gems, notably the dreamy “Rosary Job” and the stripped-down concert version of Divine’s “You Think You’re a Man,” successfully complementing Kelly and McKee’s more melodic studio numbers. Enter restores the Vaselines’ true indie-rock lineage; they are the thread between like-minded pop primitives Beat Happening and Scottish sophisticates Belle & Sebastian, who fittingly enough, have several members in the current touring lineup of the impressively reinvigorated ensemble.

Even if the shadow Nirvana cast over the Vaselines was well-intentioned, it’s gratifying to see them finally outpace it.

—Eric Schneider is a freelance writer and editor based in Saratoga Springs, New York. He is currently working on a collection of short stories.

The Fly Girlz Da’ Brats From Da’ Ville True Panther Sounds, 2008 In 1985, Sandy Denton and Cheryl James were working dead-end jobs at Sears when Hurby Azor, a coworker and audio production student, asked for help on a college project. The Queens duo agreed and recorded “The Show Stopper,” a single that would launch their careers and change hip-hop history. With the commercial success of their debut, the scrappy pair known as Salt-N-Pepa proved that female emcees could get just as rowdy, just as braggadocious as the boys.

Flash forward two decades and one borough south to another classroom, this one in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Sam Hillmer, an unlikely rap ambassador from the noise band Zs, is holding court, banging out a lunch-table beat while an 8th grader raps. Hillmer is the creator of Representing NYC, a program that aims to keep at-risk youth off the streets by teaming them up with independent music professionals to make records. The students invent the rhymes and the pros make the beats. The collaboration started at the Brownsville Middle School PS 284 with a group of more than 20 kids; as the project progressed, only six tenacious girls remained. The Fly Girlz were born.

Their first and perhaps last record— the group has since dwindled to just two members—was released on LP and later

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on CD by True Panther Sounds. Titled Da’ Brats From Da’ Ville, the album jumps with the type of rambunctious energy that made early crowds fall in love with Sandy and Cheryl. Like when I first heard Salt-N-Pepa’s 1987 megabanger “Push It,” The Fly Girlz’s “Welcome 2 Brownsville” had me bouncing off the walls with its infectious handclaps and biting refrain “why my hood is so crazy?” No Fly Girlz record, however, will meet the fate of my Salt-N-Pepa tape, which my mother made me return to the store when she caught wind of its transparent double-entendres.

These junior emcees (they were between 12 and 14 at the time of the recording) keep their lyrics totally PG, even as they wax plain on issues from teen pregnancy and domestic violence to drive-bys.

Against all odds, Da’ Brats From Da’ Ville might just emerge as an unimaginable classic. Their producer Zebrablood, aka Nathan Corbin from the electronic ensemble Excepter, alternates between old-school and space-age beats, letting the girls’ voices echo, float, and overlap.

His influences clearly date from the ’80s, when hip-hop was nowhere near the behemoth it has become. Much of the Fly Girlz’s appeal is that they have nothing to do with the current industry machine that churns out homogenous hits. They rap about the world they know: sometimes it’s joyful, sometimes it’s grim. They’re kids, and they don’t let you forget it, chasing boys and erupting into laughter at their own silly jokes, harkening back to the days when two girls from Sears could cut a record, have fun, and grab fans. It was a simpler time—one without manufactured beef and Gatorade endorsements—not just for hip-hop, but for pop music in

The Fly Girlz. Photo by Hanly Banks.

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EDITOR’S CHOICE general, before every young performer was either a prepubescent sex symbol or fabricated by Disney. To the corporate clones, I quote the Girlz: “I’m tired and sick, you make me say ick.” Now, may the adolescent queens of hip-hop lead the way.

—Cameron Shaw is a critic and fiction writer based in Brooklyn.

PUSH COMES TO SHOVE

by Wesley Brown Concord Free Press, 2009 Since the mid-’70s, Wesley Brown has produced intensely provocative, wellcrafted novels and plays in which the lives and characters of African Americans at different points in history are explored.

Tragic Magic tells the story of a black antiwar activist recently released from federal prison—Brown was jailed for refusing induction into the armed services and spent 18 months in a Mississippi prison between 1972 and 1973. Darktown Strutters examines the complications of race, poverty, and the evolution of show business—particularly the minstrel show—in late 19th-century America, and one of his best plays, Boogie Woogie and Booker T, explores race, culture, and politics amongst African Americans on the cusp of the 20th century.

His third novel, Push Comes to Shove, explores American radical politics from the ’60s to the ’80s. Brown tells this complicated story through a group of narrators, although the novel revolves around Muriel, a black New Yorker who was jailed in the South before returning and joining a radical group named Push Comes to Shove. For the most part, Brown’s narrative is more controlled than sprawling. His multiple narrators allow him to observe and critique different

aspects of cultural and political norms.

The elaboration of African American cultural change is one of the narrative’s many strands, as is its connection to the counterculture. His description of The Far Out, a nightclub/performance place/ movement meeting point where drugs, rock ’n roll, spontaneous performance, and physical danger reign goes a long way to explaining the East Village’s original appeal for progressives of all types. In many ways, his fictional East Village hangout echoes elements of Samuel Delany’s memoir, Heavenly Breakfast; race and gender are never far from the speakers’ observations.

While cultural concerns emerge both in the novel and in the timelines that disrupt the narrative, Brown trains his focus on politics, justice, truth seeking, and truth telling. Muriel’s position as a journalist feeds on her movement ties and sympathies but also creates conflict with her family, and most importantly, Theodore Sutherland, the leader of Push Comes to Shove. While Brown tries to give each character his or her due, not all work as well as this reader would have liked, but Sutherland is one of the most impressive. Brown makes his transformation from petty criminal/police informant to actual revolutionary intent on martyrdom completely believable.

Darktown Strutters may well be Brown’s best work, but I’m pleased that Concord Free Press has made Push Comes to Shove freely available to readers, with the understanding that each reader in exchange will contribute funds to assist an individual or group in need through the press. Brown’s new novel locates him among a number of New York fiction writers who are exploring ’60s radicalism and how its ideas and philosophical questions echo into the current century.

How is revolutionary action different from terrorism? How does war scar a nation? What does sexuality—especially homosexuality—have to do with it? Where is the impact of art and popular culture on these ideas? How do you resist a police state? What is sacrifice and who will be sacrificed? When do the people take up armed struggle? Ultimately, the most vexing philosophical question is still the hardest to answer: what is justice?

—Patricia Spears Jones is the author of the poetry collections Femme du Monde and The Weather That Kills and edited Think: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat and Ordinary Women: Poems by New York City Women Poets. Her plays

Mother and Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting were produced by Mabou Mines.

Death in Spring

by Mercè Rodoreda Open Letter, 2009 Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983), often acclaimed as the greatest modern Catalan author, worked as a seamstress and wrote novels while in exile in France and Switzerland for over 20 years during Franco’s regime. Death in Spring, her last novel and posthumous masterpiece, is painfully beautiful, revealing a deep individuality continually curtailed by forces of conformity. Translated into English by Martha Tennent, Rodoreda’s short novel is a deft political allegory bursting with paradox and intrigue.

Written in haunting first person by an unnamed protagonist, Death in Spring takes place in a remote mountain village precariously sitting atop rocks in a river.

The village rituals are shocking, symbolic, and suggestive of an impenetrable power structure. When adults meet together, children are locked in closets; when a man misbehaves, he is beaten in the middle of the night or ritualistically thrown into the river to be killed or maimed by the rocks that support the village; the dying are publicly tortured until dead by having red cement poured down their throats; the dead are buried in trees; and a nonconformist member of the village is kept in a cage until he no longer behaves like a human.

Rodoreda inverts traditional associations and symbols: “Spring is sad, in spring all the world is ill, plants and flowers are earth’s plague, rotten … the affliction of the green, so much

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EDITOR’S CHOICE greenness and poisonous color.” The novel is suspenseful, pushing the reader through the images, memories, and voices that flow within the protagonist’s often confused mind as he develops into manhood. Just as the unnamed protagonist must navigate a world of contradictions, the novel reflects Rodoreda’s own political, social, and literary exile while speaking of a tyranny that feels almost uncanny in its incantation.

—Katherine Elaine Sanders is a writer based in New York City and an intern at BOMB.

picture? “In the weeks since he’d first come to the neighborhood, he’d met a fag real-estate agent, two senile old people, a pair of stoned hippies, and a nut.

(He’d also met, albeit briefly, a substantial number of Negros and Puerto Ricans and one goofy grocer from the Canary Islands, but they were not the people he was looking for, and they didn’t count.)

Clearly such a collection couldn’t be a reasonable cross-section of this or any neighborhood.” The novel is as un-PC and cringe-inducing as they get, but what’s even more wrong with the picture is that, although the novel was published in 1971, it parallels the talk around current gentrification, if not in Fort Greene—it’s tapped out—perhaps Clinton Hill, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy? The list goes on …

L.J. Davis masterfully captures the cognitive dissonance of those incapable of acknowledging the consequences of their actions. Lowell is not precisely evil, he’s just self-absorbed, lost in life. Though he completes the renovation project, the joys of homeownership are forever barred to him. Somewhere down the line things go terribly wrong, but he’s such a nonentity no one even notices. Loser status intact, he’s still merely, if inaccurately, “the guy who moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant.”

—Mónica de la Torre is Senior Editor of BOMB.

A Meaningful Life

by L.J. Davis Introduction by Jonathan Lethem New York Review of Books, 2009 So much to say about this book touching on the deadening effects of mindless employment, on marital dysfunction, middle-class preoccupations, dipsomania, and realty. Real estate, the unfailing conversation starter for those deeming themselves worthy of being called New Yorkers, trumps all of the subplots in L.J. Davis's very dark comedy. Subtly Kafkaesque, this novel tells the story of Lowell Lake, an irritating dimwit with the introspection of a bedbug who wakes up one day to the realization that his life has no meaning. The solution: a fixer-upper in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene. Once owned by Darius Collingwood, a shady colonel who took up residence there in 1884 before fleeing to South America and writing The Autobiography of a Scoundrel, the decrepit 22-room mansion has become a SRO whose occupants Lowell gives less consideration to than the plumbing.

What’s wrong with the following

idea of the artist as a politically and socially engaged individual who makes commentary on the world. THIS is a welcome collection of short writings that resist the policing of disciplines by encouraging a kind of liquidity mixture ... you let it get all tropicalized. The more that artists, of all stripes, are willing to consider the disruption of clearly demarcated rules of disciplines, the more open the arena of possibility ... the ability to change with knowledge. To be sure, language is everywhere, from Nylon microfiber cargo pants to CLASS WAR GAME ANIMAL ATTACK DOG DAYS, and Jennings’s collection encourages visual artists to participate in the direct relationship of language responding to language, information responding to information.

These are our tools. Our maps. And part of what makes THIS such a great read is that the artists’ texts are so widely varied—it is like my Uma experience—it breaks across genre with plastic hand puppets that came with the happy meals, with shiny, plaid memory-pegs in your deathbed and be at peace because I, Sean Landers, exist in your world, in your time, and have great love for you, all of you.

THIS gives witness to a blurring boundary where artists are writers and writers are artists—played by David Lee Roth—and we might be more happily defined as culture-makers—played by Six Flags Great Adventure—than by any single medium that is defined for us. As a poet I say the language arts are in crisis (yeah!), all aboard—relativize our own positions.

Word.

A must read.

—Robert Fitterman is the author of ten books of poetry and the recent Rob the Plagiarist. He teaches writing at NYU and at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts.

THIS: A Collection of Artists’ Writings Edited by Susan Jennings Right Brain Words, 2009 The collection of artists’ writings in THIS, conceived and edited by Susan Jennings, is a convincing testimony to the fact that artists, indeed, can and do work across mediums. It is a liberating assertion, too, that artists are foremost thinkers—the

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by Astra Taylor I’ve often thought of each of Solnit’s books as a tapestry, and of her as a master weaver, incorporating threads that less capable hands could never lace into a single work, let alone something so fiercely elegant. Her essays and books trace the contours of a culture in flux, uncovering hidden histories and bringing subterranean social currents to the surface. Savage Dreams, a genre-defying exploration of the relationship between Yosemite National Park and the Nevada Test Site, unites topics as seemingly diverse as the saga of the Shoshone Indians and the movement for nuclear disarmament. Wanderlust, an unfettered history of walking, investigates the increasing disembodiment of everyday life. River of Shadows, an expansive biography of the visionary photographer Eadweard Muybridge, reveals the often unappreciated causes and consequences of the industrialization of space and time. Hope in the Dark recasts the standard narrative of political despair, illuminating unsung progressive victories of the last two decades.

Though Solnit is one of San Francisco’s most devoted residents, we met in Manhattan to discuss her latest offering, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, a tour through a century of North American catastrophes that deftly guides us through the rubble that results from the volatile combination of social darwinism and disaster. After opening with an astounding portrait of San Francisco’s devastating 1906 earthquake, Solnit takes readers to Halifax in 1917, where a cargo-ship crash caused the largest man-made explosion before the invention of the atom bomb. In Mexico City she revisits the 1985 earthquake, spending time with seamstresses who organized themselves after witnessing bosses who rushed to salvage machinery while workers perished. Solnit then presents 9/11 through the eyes of survivors and volunteers before taking an unsparing look at New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. There, the apathy of government authorities and unremorseful confessions of racist vigilantes who killed innocent people in order to protect their property against imaginary looters stands in dramatic contrast to the stories of selfless citizens who navigated their boats down flooded streets to rescue stranded citizens, opened their homes to flood survivors, or traveled to Louisiana to contribute to the rebuilding of the broken city.

Rebecca Solnit

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Photo by Jim Herrington, 2009. Courtesy of Viking Penguin.

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literature / Rebecca Solnit

Extensive archival research allows Solnit to paint a colorful portrait of mutual aid at the turn of the 20th century, while contemporary first-person investigative reporting lends a sense of urgency and, also, possibility. As Solnit points out, untold disasters lurk just over the horizon. What remains unknown is whether self-interest or a sense of community will guide our next response. ­—Astra Taylor

those disasters. Though it was not what I envisioned at the outset, A Paradise Built in Hell, like Hope in the Dark, argues for a radically different view of human nature and possibility.

I realized how much the usual pessimistic view of human nature—which is not a conspiracy, because it’s not that organized—serves the status quo of authoritarianism, state violence, and fear incredibly well.

While I’ve been working on this project, my running summary for my friends has been that what happens in disasters demonstrates everything an anarchist ever wanted to believe about the triumph of civil society and the failure of institutional authority. It does—this alternative information is truly radical.

AT: But all that wasn’t entirely clear to you at the outset, right? I want to linger on that because that first week the news was coming in about Katrina, I can imagine you feeling pretty conflicted about your thesis.

RS: There was this moment of being overwhelmed by this hysterical belief in all these Hobbesian rumors—about rape, child rape, murder, general mayhem, and even at one point cannibalism, like something out of Bosch or Goya—but I was pretty sure it was a pile of lies. I’d already delved into the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, which hasn’t been written about with enough boldness. Back then the city was essentially taken over by a hostile army that may have killed as many as 500 people as looters. The mayor issued a shootto-kill proclamation about looting. In what society do you kill for minor property crimes? Like in New Orleans, the public was demonized. That’s the social disaster, which is not at all the same thing as a natural disaster. I hope my new book will dissuade some of this thinking, so we’ll handle disasters better in the future. San Francisco already has made some big changes, not to praise my own city.

AT: You’d never do that! (laughter) RS: After the ’89 earthquake, the city government looked at the fire department’s resources and it turned out they’d need twice as many engines and something like ten times as many firefighters than they had. They were not equipped to respond to a major earthquake, so they created a system to delegate and train the citizens, a system that said, “You are powerful; we trust you.” This is exactly what governments should do in terms of our highest ideals and our most urgent needs.

Astra Taylor: I want to begin by talking about your Harper’s essay, “The Uses of Disaster: Notes on Bad Weather and Good Government,” which led to your new book, A Paradise Built in Hell. The essay went to press the day Katrina hit, which is astounding. How did it feel, that uncanny timing?

Rebecca Solnit: I was very distressed about what was happening in New Orleans and was following it intently, like a lot of other people were. I was also freaked out by the coverage of it: you know, the reports of viciousness, mayhem, and murder. I felt a little bit anxious about my very positive view of human nature in the piece. Luke Mitchell, my editor at Harper’s, was wonderful; he said, “The dust will settle and you’re right and they’re wrong, and just watch, and let’s put this out on the Web immediately.”

AT: What led you to the topic of disaster in the first place?

RS: My inspiration came partly from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, whose 20th anniversary is almost upon us. The 1989 earthquake was a remarkable occasion for a lot of us, a moment when everyday life ground to a halt and people looked around and hunkered down … a lot of people still glow when they talk about it, which is not how we think of disaster, really.

I was invited to give the Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture at Cambridge in late 2004 and I thought that in honor of that great cultural critic I should do something good and fresh rather than recycling something else. So this talk began it; then the Harper’s piece went deeper, and in the book I was able to go further into and engage with the impact of Looking Back, September 11, 2001. Photo by Felicia Megginson.

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Long Walk Home, September 11, 2001. Photo by Felicia Megginson.

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what happens in disasters demonstrates everything an anarchist ever wanted to believe about the triumph of civil society and the failure of institutional authority.

AT: One of the most interesting ideas in the book is the concept of “elite panic”—the way that elites, during disasters and their aftermath, imagine that the public is not only in danger but also a source of danger. You show in case after case how elites respond in destructive ways, from withholding essential information, to blocking citizen relief efforts, to protecting property instead of people. As you write in the book, “there are grounds for fear of a coherent insurgent public, not just an overwrought, savage one.”

RS: The term “elite panic” was coined by Caron Chess and Lee Clarke of Rutgers. From the beginning of the field in the 1950s to the present, the major sociologists of disaster— Charles Fritz, Enrico Quarantelli, Kathleen Tierney, and Lee Clarke—proceeding in the most cautious, methodical, and clearly attempting-to-be-politically-neutral way of social scientists, arrived via their research at this enormous confidence in human nature and deep critique of institutional authority. It’s quite remarkable.

Elites tend to believe in a venal, selfish, and essentially monstrous version of human nature, which I sometimes think is their own human nature. I mean, people don’t become incredibly wealthy and powerful by being angelic, necessarily.

They believe that only their power keeps the rest of us in line and that when it somehow shrinks away, our seething violence will rise to the surface—that was very clear in Katrina.

Timothy Garton Ash and Maureen Dowd and all these other people immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started writing commentaries based on the assumption that the rumors of mass violence during Katrina were true. A lot of people have never understood that the rumors were dispelled and that those things didn’t actually happen; it’s tragic.

But there’s also an elite fear—going back to the 19th century—that there will be urban insurrection. It’s a valid fear.

I see these moments of crisis as moments of popular power and positive social change. The major example in my book is Mexico City, where the ’85 earthquake prompted public disaffection with the one-party system and, therefore, the rebirth of civil society.

AT: So on the one hand there are people responding in these moments of crisis and organizing themselves, helping each other, and, on the other, there are power elites, who sometimes, though not always, sabotage grassroots efforts because, as you say at one point, the very existence of such efforts is taken to represent the failure of authorities to rise to the occasion—it’s better to quash such efforts than to appear incompetent. The way you explore the various motivations of the official power structure for sabotaging people’s attempts to self-organize was a very interesting element of the book.

RS: You are an anarchist, aren’t you?

AT: Maybe deep down. (laughter) RS: Not all authorities respond the same way. But you can see what you’re talking about happening right after the 1906 earthquake. San Franciscans formed these community

street kitchens. You weren’t allowed to have a fire indoors because the risk of setting your house, and thereby your neighborhood, on fire was too great—if you had a house, that is. People responded with enormous humor and resourcefulness by creating these kitchens to feed the neighborhood. Butchers, dairymen, bakers, etcetera were giving away food for free. It was like a Paris Commune dream of a mutual-aid society. At a certain point, authorities decided that these kitchens would encourage freeloading and became obsessed with the fear that people would double dip. So they set up this kind of ration system and turned a horizontal model of mutual aid—where I’m helping you but you’re helping me—into a vertical model of charity where I have and you lack and I am giving to you. Common Ground, the radical organization for community rebuilding, 100 years later in New Orleans chooses as its motto: “Solidarity not charity.”

AT: The charity model fits hand in hand with the “we need a paternal, powerful authority figure in a time of crisis” mindset that your book refutes. Do you think people need to be led?

RS: Part of the stereotypical image is that we’re either wolves or we’re sheep. We’re either devouring babies raw and tearing up grandmothers with our bare hands, or we’re helpless and we panic and mill around like idiots in need of Charlton Heston men in uniforms with badges to lead us. I think we’re neither, and the evidence bears that out.

AT: The most poignant part of the book for me, maybe from having been downtown during 9/11, had the stories of people on the stairwells of the World Trade Center telling others to pass them, or waiting for their slower coworkers.

RS: Those stories amazed me as well. The young man who told his story to the fantastic Columbia oral history archives, which I used extensively … he said, “I was evacuating with my coworkers; this sort of cloud of death was approaching.

I’m an ex-college athlete, I could run faster than all of them, but I slowed down.” To slow down as death is approaching is completely contrary to who we think we are in an emergency. Most of us believe in the “you’ll trample me to save yourself, you’ll push me out of the lifeboat” premise.

To find how often in the most extreme circumstances almost universally the opposite is true was just amazing. This guy slowed down just out of a sense of solidarity. This wasn’t his family; these were his coworkers in some kind of big Wall Street corporate entity. There’re so many stories like that: of the quadriplegic guy who gets carried down 69 floors by his coworkers, for example.

What I found is that a lot of that terrible behavior comes because I assume that you’re trying to kill me. So I need to threaten you first, I need to sit on my porch in New Orleans with a shotgun, or I need to deny you aid, or I need to control you in some way, because if I don’t, you’ll get me first. In protecting myself from my fantasies of your monstrousness, I become the monster.

AT: How do you define a natural disaster?

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literature / Rebecca Solnit finally fulfilled to be purposeful, to be a part of history and society, to have a voice.

One of my arguments in A Paradise Built in Hell is that we have almost too much language for private needs and desires and not nearly enough for these other things. This need and desire is so profound that when it’s fulfilled, you find these weird moments of joy despite everything in disaster.

The whole world is falling apart, but I am who I was meant to be: a citizen, a rescuer, a resourceful person who belongs to and is serving a community.

AT: This may be part of why people respond so strongly to your work. You provide your readers with a reinvigorated sense of the social, with affirmation that a vital civil society actually lurks below the surface of all this social darwinism.

RS: My running joke about Hope in the Dark is that it’s a book in which I snatch the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left. There are ways in which people are very attached to these despairing narratives—a lot of people got very upset with me.

AT: You were trying to disabuse them of their comfortable cynicism, which they didn’t like.

RS: Yeah. I’d get attacked by old, middle-class liberals and leftists who felt that you can’t be hopeful while people are suffering. I’d be like, “Well, people who are suffering are hopeful.” Look at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, or the Zapatistas, who speak so beautifully about hope, and keep going.

AT: Maybe despair is a privileged position.

RS: That’s exactly what I realized. For some people, the alternative to hope is to surrender to the horrible things that menace them. The alternative to hope for the upper-middle class is to stay home and watch television or whatever.

These alternatives don’t involve death, torture, annihilation, starvation, exploitation, or slavery. So despair is easy, or at least low cost.

For me, it goes back to my second book, Savage Dreams, about two paradigmatic landscapes—the nuclear test site in the Nevada desert where more than 1,000 nuclear bombs have been set off, and Yosemite National Park, where the Indian Wars never really came to an end. Between 1951 and 1991 you have a nuclear bomb a month for wars that weren’t supposed to have begun, along with Indian Wars that were supposed to have ended in the 19th century and yet never did. The Native people didn’t vanish, and their right to be on the land was still contested, though the violence was more subtle. While Yosemite has this conventional image of paradise, it ended up being a kind of hell for social alienation. At a test site, of course, atomic bombs are hell, but the communities organized to resist them have made it a kind of paradise. So the ideas about paradise and hell got turned inside out for me because of this stalwart, broad community of Mormon downwinders, Hiroshima survivors, nuclear physicists, anarchists, environmentalists, Buddhist monks, and Catholic priests who were convening at that test site.

AT: It’s neat to trace ideas as they wind through your various books. I was rereading A Field Guide to Getting

RS: There is no such thing as a natural disaster. In earthquakes the architecture fails. If you’re out in a grassy meadow, it doesn’t matter how big the earthquake is: it might knock you down, but if nothing falls on top of you and nothing catches fire from broken gas mains or power lines, then you’re probably okay. Architecture is the first casualty of earthquakes, and human beings under the architecture are the casualties of the architecture. Even with a wholly natural disaster, whatever that might be—a tsunami, maybe—who gets help, who has resources to rebuild, who is treated as a threat or a malingerer—those are not natural but social phenomena. With Katrina you need to talk about the role of climate change in making the hurricane; of the crappy levees built by the US Army Corps of Engineers and not adequately maintained; of the lack of evacuation resources for the poor; of the demonization of those left behind; of the transformation of New Orleans into a prison-city preventing evacuation … nothing could be less natural. The natural disaster was the least of what happened to the people of New Orleans, if not the rest of the Gulf, that week.

AT: One phrase you come back to again and again is "civil society." Why did that concept capture your imagination? What does it mean to you?

RS: I’m a writer, so I spend a lot of time alone at home, but I also spend a lot of time as an activist in the streets, in gatherings and things like that, and following revolutions around the world: the Velvet Revolution, Tiananmen Square, the Zapatistas ... In those moments, I’ve discovered in myself and in others a deep happiness, an unknown desire that’s Lower 9th Ward, from the New Orleans Suite, 2006. Photo by Lewis Watts.

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BOMB Lost and there was one line that seemed to convey the essence of A Paradise Built in Hell.

RS: Maybe I didn’t need to write the new book. (laughter) AT: You have the anecdote about the figure of Justice guarding the gates to Hades—basically, to go through hell is sort of a privilege as it provides an opportunity

for growth, it’s not just a punishment opposed to

heavenly stasis.

RS: There’s also bitter American optimism—nothing bad is supposed to happen to you and, therefore, when something bad does happen, there’s a sense of betrayal and shock. On the other hand, there’s a Buddhist paradigm I find much more useful, which is that suffering is inherent. A certain amount of suffering is a given in this world: old age, sickness, and death are built into it. So the question is not how you avoid it, which is what Americans are always trying to do, but how you are going to respond to it. Paradise lies in forming a meaningful and even a beautiful response.

AT: A sort of alchemy can be performed.

RS: There’s a phrase that I keep coming back to that says if everyday life is a disaster, then even disaster can relieve us from it. (laughter) You know, it’s easy to misread this book as endorsing disasters. Part of why I called it A Paradise Built in Hell is so that people will recognize that I know it’s hell, yet sometimes you can build a paradise in it. To go back to a kind of religious thinking, if disaster is a kind of awakening, the point is the awakening to possibilities, not the celebration of calamities.

AT: It’s a delicate balance and one that you manage really well: how to present disaster as possibility.

You’ve walked that line in various books. I’m thinking of your discussions of the American West or various political movements and what it means to be part of an unfinished history.

RS: I love being an American because it’s this great, messy experiment. It’s tedious and failing in a lot of ways, but it’s also full of enormous possibility that calls for participation in shaping the future.

AT: I wanted to ask you about the function of criticism and your influences. Are there critics that you admired when you were beginning your path as a writer?

RS: Gustavo Esteva, Subcomandante Marcos … I joke that I want to be a Latin-American intellectual when I grow up.

There are a lot of engaged but lyrical writers there, including Eduardo Galeano, Pablo Neruda, Ariel Dorfman, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriel García Márquez. Whereas here people think you either write beautifully or you write politically.

AT: That’s the same thing with philosophy, either you write seriously and philosophically, or you must be writing poetry or literature.

RS: I think you can do both. There is pleasure and joy and sensuality and lyricism in these political realms. You know, there’s sort of a privatization of beauty in the lack of recognition both that there is beauty and love in public and political life, and that it is not separate from, but conditions and impacts our most private moments. Politics affects us deeply with joy as well as despair, and we could start dealing with that. Some writers have: Virginia Woolf was able to

describe the most subtle, internal, emotional weather, and to demand a political liberty that allows those moments of awakening, of possibility to arise for everyone.

AT: I like the blurb on Savage Dreams that says your writing has both heart and teeth. It’s a great description; you need both. How do you see yourself in the role of the critic here given that there isn’t the same tradition as in Latin America?

RS: There are good voices often coming out of these radical movements, like those of the Immokalee workers. There are always these annoying white college boys when we talk about the ’60s, but that also was the era of the civil rights movement where you have the poetry of Martin Luther King, and Ella Baker, and a lot of visionaries who were connected to the black church and all this beautiful, biblically inspired language of “I’ve been to the mountaintop.” That’s been a model for me. The essayist and naturalist Barry Lopez was also really important for me. When I started to look at how directly he spoke to people’s hopes and needs, I asked myself why I wasn’t more direct. I also met Susan Sontag toward the end of her life and I had two thoughts when I first met her.

One was, Thank God I’m not a New Yorker! And the other one was, Why isn’t my work that direct? Direct politically, in her case, and emotionally in Barry’s.

AT: Go on.

RS: When the Iraq war broke out, I felt like I had something different to say about it. In some sense we failed, yes, but we mitigated the nature of the war through the global antiwar movement; the Turks prevented Turkey from providing bases to support the war; the war started later; shock and awe was scaled back, etcetera. People have forgotten how different the world would be had we not done all these things. Same with the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the queer-rights movement, and the various movements for racial justice, not that they all succeeded and we all lived happily ever after—yet much has been achieved. A lot of the time, our achievement is nothing to look at: the species that didn’t go extinct, the dissident who wasn’t executed, the civil liberties that didn’t wither, the wetland that didn’t become a mall …

AT: There’s been real progress. I have an activist friend who has a quote of Hope in the Dark as the tagline of his email: “History is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away a stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.”

RS: That’s Tom Engelhardt’s favorite line. It’s funny because I wrote Hope in the Dark as an extension of an essay first published on my beloved TomDispatch.com. I had initially sent Tom the essay. He wrote me a gruff note saying, “I don’t take unsolicited work,” but then left me a phone message saying, “Ignore my email, call immediately, and here’s my home number.” He put it out in this fantastically viral way on the Internet and it went all over the world; it was the first thing I ever did online, and it had a life like nothing I had ever done before.

AT: I think of you as a book person. You write these perfect, polished essays that appear in magazines and, occasionally, in art books, such as the 2008 Whitney

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literature / Rebecca Solnit

Remains of House Father Built, from the New Orleans Suite, 2006.

Photo by Lewis Watts.

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Raising Casket, Treme, from the New Orleans Suite, 2008. Photo by Lewis Watts.

8/19/09 5:45:32 PM

BOMB Biennial catalogue. Have you been at all interested or involved in this print-versus-online-publishing debate?

RS: One of the joys of TomDispatch.com is that Tom is a book editor and he wants things that are beautifully written and thoughtful. We’re not blogging, we’re publishing the kinds of things that I would write for a magazine.

AT: Looking at your body of work as a sort of mapping of your interior landscape, does it surprise you how much you’ve produced and how substantial it is?

RS: Everything surprises me. I was raised with very low expectations for what I was going to do with my life, and when I started out, I thought I was going to write essays on the side and work full-time as an editor or something. I quit my last job 21 years ago. It’s all turned out far better than I ever expected.

AT: It’s interesting how even in Savage Dreams, your second book, so many of your themes are there.

RS: Savage Dreams is the book in which I was born.

AT: Your voice is so fully formed and confident in it.

RS: I started that book when I was almost 30. The Nevada Test Site was the place that taught me how to write. Until then I had been writing in three different ways: I had been writing as an art critic, in a very objective, authoritative voice; I had been writing as an environmental journalist, also with objectivity; and then I had also been writing these very lapidary essays on the side. It felt like three different selves, three different voices, and explaining the test site and all the forces converging there demanded that I use all those voices at once. So as to include everything relevant, it also demanded I write in a way both meandering and inclusive. A linear narrative is often like a highway bulldozed through the landscape, and I wanted to create something more like a path that didn’t bulldoze and allowed for scenic detours.

My training as an art critic was a wonderful background because it taught me to think critically about representations and meanings, and that applied really well to national parks and atomic bombs and Indian Wars. It was great to realize that I didn’t have to keep these tools in museums and galleries—it was a tool kit that could go anywhere. Also, I was trained as a journalist. A journalist can become an adequate expert pretty quickly and handle the material, whereas a lot of scholars dedicate their life to one subject.

AT: More power to them.

RS: Yeah, they’re great; I depend on them. For me it’s a kind of symbiosis—my telescope depends on the results of their microscopes. I love doing research. The book with the most joy in research for me was the one about Eadweard Muybridge, River of Shadows. As I was going through these archives and boxes of old photographs, I was able to put together a picture of what was happening in the life of this amazing, eccentric photographer, and of the birth of cinema, the Indian wars, and the advent of the railroad—the lightning storms were going off in my head.

AT: That book does cause an electrical storm of ideas, even just in the sense of inviting us to imagine what it was like to experience time when we weren’t all on these standardized clocks, or what it was like to have our kin, who were only 100 miles away, be days or

weeks of travel from us. Did you know all that going into this project?

RS: I had a hunch; hunches drive a lot of my work.

AT: It must be a strong hunch, to bet that something worth devoting years of research and writing to will manifest out of it.

RS: There’s a funny dialectic between knowing what you’re doing and having it surprise you. You’re like a jazz musician; you have to learn really hard how to control the instrument before you start breaking the rules. I think of writing a bit like building, in that you need something of a blueprint and building materials. That’s where the pre-writing, the notes, the books full of Post-its, the photocopies, the downloads, the interviews, and everything else come in. And then there’s the process of building with all these materials.

Though perhaps building is an imperfect metaphor: you should go into a big piece of writing like a book with some sense of what you want to do, but you also have to be prepared to be surprised, to improvise when things change.

In the end, to provide something for people and provide those electrical storms in other people’s heads has been astonishing. And to have real influence on people’s lives.

AT: Wanderlust inspired my film Examined Life!

RS: It’s even more astounding to have that happen occasionally when you’re really solitary. It’s like, This is great, I’m connected to hundreds of thousands of people. Where the hell are they?

AT: They don’t know what you look like. (laughter) RS: That communion is extraordinary. Writers whine a lot about the solitude, but I remember that at one bookstore on my first real book tour, there was a very good crowd, and I realized that my solitude was like the apex of a pyramid supported by the editor, the publisher, the distributor, the printer, and by the bookstores supporting the work, and, ultimately, the readers. When I go out in public I get to see these people who are supporting me, giving me a living—like a sponsored explorer sending back dispatches.

Subscribe online at BOMBsite.com

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by Michèle Gerber Klein

Joel Shapiro

I was reminded of an old Yoga saying, “The magic is in the repetition,” because it was like being lost inside a prestidigitator’s sleight of hand. At the end of our visit, I was sent home with a bag full of books containing essays on his work. It came to me when leafing through one of these—where I found an image of the juxtaposition he made in the Musée d’Orsay that reminded me of another fairy tale: Oscar Wilde’s “The Birthday of the Infanta,” a story of how the dwarf in the Velázquez painting falls impossibly in love with the princess—that Joel is a quintessential romantic. His work is about longing and impossibility. While this may be only partially true, it is accurate to say that throughout our conversations he was by turns funny, adventurous, ornery, down-to-earth, contradictory both with himself and with me, and also surprisingly revelatory. And I had the impression of being given a glimpse of something I had not seen before.

So, through his work Joel also reminded me of another more ancient myth—one with many faces, sometimes kind like Dante’s Virgil, or frightening like Chiron, or beguiling like Barrie’s Peter Pan— of the artist as guide to another where.

—Michèle Gerber Klein

The first time I went to see Joel Shapiro to talk about his work I found him in his enormous studio in Long Island City, Queens, which is close to where he lived as a little boy. He was riding around on a scissor lift in front of a vast sculpture that looked like flying forms either leaping or soaring, fighting or playing with each other, until I realized they were anchored tightly, suspended by intentionally visible cords. In one corner of the same space was a small chair with a seat that could be interpreted either as a slightly pouty mouth or a grumpy flower from a Lewis Carroll Alice book. Its blossom was so precariously positioned on its stalk that all could tumble in the smallest breeze. It made me laugh out loud. And Joel helped me sit on it, very delicately, so I wouldn't fall. Then we looked at little handmade maquettes he was making for larger sculptures; I admired his vibrant, hand-mixed colors and his carefully hung, seemingly carelessly assembled collages.

He took me next door to another big building filled with his famous figures, endless (almost musical) variations of abstract assemblages prancing, tripping, balancing, and appearing to express feelings they clearly could not possibly have.

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art / joel shapiro

20 Elements, 2004–­2005, wood and casein, 122 × 132 × 85 inches.

Installation view at Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo by Sophie Boegly.

Copyright Musée d’Orsay. All images copyright Joel Shapiro / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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BOMB

Michèle Gerber Klein: How intimidating.

Joel Shapiro: I’m not intimidated.

MGK: It looks like a scary crab, this recording machine.

So here we go. Tell me about your first show.

JS: My first one-person exhibition?

MGK: Yes, your first one-person exhibition at Paula Cooper, when you were— JS: In 1969? I think, or ’70? When I was young?

MGK: Yes. Were you a child prodigy?

JS: No! I was the opposite. I was a thwarted child. My first show was a long time ago. That I can tell you.

MGK: And … you had shelves?

JS: I’m trying to think back … I showed a series of shelves.

In the small room in Paula’s gallery, 1970, I think. It was good work. It was about material and finding a structure that can contain the work. It was one of the many things I was doing— the real issue is that you’re always doing so much work. It’s an ongoing issue; somehow I’ve never really settled into one thing. People may know me for one thing, but I don’t think that’s the nature of the work. It’s a broader investigation. But to some extent, exhibitions unfortunately seem to be thematic or structured around the most apparent idea.

MGK: Did you personally install your first show?

JS: Yes, it was all about the installation. The first individual work I exhibited at Paula’s was one of these drawings for a group exhibition—fingerprints, mine, thousands of fingerprints in ink running across a big sheet of paper. The shelves were one thing, but I was doing a massive amount of different work at the time that was always trying to find a physical manifestation of thought in material and form.

MGK: You’re not doing a performance. You’re making a material object that’s about your thought.

JS: Yeah, I was investing the material with attitude.

MGK: But you invest it with life, I think. How did you meet Paula?

JS: I showed Brooke Alexander some fingerprint drawings and he suggested that I show them to Paula. That was the beginning. She came to my studio. There were lots of overlaps. Everybody knew each other. It was when Paula’s gallery was on Prince Street. I met her in 1969. She picked some work for a group exhibition and then she offered me a show. I showed there for 20 years, a long, fertile time; particularly long when you’re young.

MGK: Sometimes you haven’t even lived that long when you’re young. When did you start doing the little sculptures?

JS: Well, I was never terribly interested in big sizes. The work was not preconceived, or at least I wasn’t conscious of that.

The work was all about size and there was no need to make anything larger. Size was determined by the content. The drawings were big and preconceived to the extent that you make certain choices that contain the activity. When I finished a drawing, I’d cut the piece of paper off the roll, but it was never as if I was setting up to be large. That work needed to be large.

MGK: Yes, but your first sculptures needed to be little.

JS: The shelves were not particularly small—they were very matter-of-fact and determined by the hardware. They were

what they were and the big choices were what material I was interested in and how to handle each material. But I was doing other things. I was carving these stone balls. Carving wood. Making things. I did a lot of work with clay that was about an accumulation and a passage of time; I was trying to find some form that I could possibly believe in … which was hard.

MGK: How was clay about accumulation and passing of time?

JS: It was about making endless piles of stuff. I did these pieces where I would toss dowels to accumulate a large form that built up into the air as the dowels interlocked. A lot of the work was very spontaneous, very much determined by the materiality and edited by whatever I may have been feeling.

It was an interesting moment. But I worked with paint and I worked with sticks and stone … no bones.

MGK: (laughter) JS: Plaster and clay—and plaster plus clay. At some point, that investigation of physicality, how material responds to it, became boring and limiting. My interest in structuring the work around some reference outside of myself became less and less engaging. So I began to make stuff that had to do with my immediate experience and with materiality, I mean, all of those other things that I had investigated came into play and were utilized. But I had to figure out a way to make sculpture and to have some faith in the form.

It meant something. I always felt that my ideas—I doubted their significance and meaning. I didn’t have this massive, driving sense of I had a sense of … purpose but it wasn’t conventional in that I wanted to do a large body of significant work. I just tried to make work that was relevant to my experience.

MGK: You were more playful.

JS: Well, I guess, playful. Tentative. Sensitive. (laughter) Anyway, so I began to work.

MGK: You made the birds; you said to me one was for each hand.

JS: Yes, I made one in my right hand and one in my left hand.

MGK: That’s playful.

JS: It was playful in a sad sort of way. The body of work evolves. You see what’s going on. You’re working within some context. Or you’re cautious of what’s been done or what’s going on and that informs the work.

MGK: So what informed you in the beginning? What was going on then?

JS: In the ’60s? Well, I wasn’t interested in Pop Art. I was interested in artists’ strategies: Bob Morris questioning the possibility of making sculpture, Richard Serra’s enthusiasm, Carl Andre’s and Donald Judd’s reduced palates. Sculpture was very vital and full of possibility. Conceptual art seemed awfully illustrative and pedantic. I thought my problem was to describe an emotional state, my own longing or desire.

The work was small but ambitious, and it was much more abstract. To what extent that was successful.… Gee, if I still smoked I’d have a cigarette now. Maybe I’ll have a Nicorette.

MGK: (laughter) JS: That was the impetus behind the small work. And it wasn’t so much about smallness; it was about appropriate

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art / joel shapiro size. And by alteration of size and context you could establish scale and interaction. So the first big show I had after those shelves was this progressive accumulation of material that was almost like a parade of sorts. It was essentially groups of single and multiple accumulations of shapes: spherical and conical. I installed it in a kind of line. I was anxious or nervous; it was slightly more rigidly installed than I would do it now. I mean, one’s style evolves too as one matures; it becomes less anxious. Then I had a show at the Clocktower of that single bridge milled from a block of steel. It was in a vast space—maybe its impact was more meaningful because of that great spiral staircase. You had this utilitarian structure that moves you from one point to another point and then that

above: Untitled, 1972–1973, bronze, 1.75 × 3.75 × 2.75 inches.

Installation view at the Clocktower, New York. Photos by Robert E. Mates and Paul Katz. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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was really about a mental process, a key of invoking memory that’s about change and possibility. But I don’t think that it was necessarily about smallness.

MGK: But when you make a bridge or a house and you make it really little you make people look at it in a different way.

JS: Dwelling on smallness really misses the point. The work is about my experience, and if you care to participate, to look, then you bring your own history to the situation. These were familiar references—bridge, boats, coffins—very much about the everyday.

MGK: How is scale different from size?

JS: Well, scale is a relationship of size and an experience.

You can have something small that has big scale. Objects tend to have no scale when they’re meaningless. But scale is about a relationship and I think size is about measurement.

MGK: So the small sculptures are about scale, not size.

JS: They’re all about scale and the small size was an aspect of their scale. And of course scale is about relationships, to the viewer’s size, essentially. Scale is also in relationship to what you’ve just encountered and what you may have encountered 15 years ago. It’s this very active thing that’s changing and altering as time unfolds, consciously or unconsciously. Size is a factor of scale, but scale is much more interesting.

MGK: Although you’ve made huge things. The flying pieces are big.

JS: Yes, I’ve made big things. They’re not colossal. They could be monumental. I’d like to think that they’re not too bloated.

MGK: (laughter) Too bloated?

JS: Bloat is a disease of sculpture.

MGK: Nothing you make is a statue.

JS: I’d like to think that’s true. It’s not too hard to differentiate.

Of course, what I find inert, others might find meaningful.

Very subjective stuff. It’s about the component of work that differentiates art from objects.

MGK: That’s a good question.

JS: It’s a serious issue that has to do with the capacity of the work to evoke aspects of collective experience or reframe experience in some new way. Without that, the work becomes just some dumb statue or yet another stupid, or at best amusing, object. It’s how much can be vested in the form.

MGK: That’s a lot of what your work does, not just the early work. It takes very simple things and makes them either seem to be moving, or dancing, or alive. I look at them and think I’m seeing something and then realize that’s not what I’m looking at.

JS: If I’m in the right frame of mind I can see that aspect of the work. Making art that enriches one’s experience is a lofty ambition.

MGK: You’ve also said to me that there are no new forms, no new shapes.

JS: Let’s say nobody’s going to invent a shape that we haven’t seen. Maybe they will with a computer. It’s conceivable.

Individual artists create things that are new all the time, but it’s not necessarily a new form, it’s a recombination. I guess every once in a while there’s a massive breakthrough, where the necessity or their vision is so strong that it makes

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below: Untitled, 1971–1973, milled gray cast iron, 3.5 × 22.5 × 3 inches. Installation view at the Clocktower, New York.

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BOMB one aware of a new way of interpreting the situation. That’s happened in sculpture.

MGK: Who? JS: Degas. One of many—Giacometti, Brancusi….

MGK: You love Degas.

JS: Let’s say I can see beyond who he was and recognize his contribution. Did I say I wanted to meet him? Why? Give him a boot in the ass for his nasty take on Dreyfus. He was visually impaired when he was working on sculpture, maybe that had an— MGK: Beethoven was deaf. What difference does it make?

JS: It did make a difference because I’m sure Degas would not have—

MGK: Done what he did if he could see?

JS: I think the work seems to spring from the mind and tries to describe movement, possibly, from memory. I’m not sure of his physical condition at the time but—the work is natural, and seems to be about his experience, and observations.

MGK: Well, it’s more humanistic.

JS: Yes! It’s more natural. It’s that intricate question of addressing a situation where there’s a big continuum of thought—close to but radically different from, say, the sinuousness of the Baroque. There are many aspects in common, limbs projecting into space… There is a continuum of development in how artists alter more or less the same form. Degas and Rodin are naturalistic—no ideal form—the form is based on observation. Regardless, the communality of sculptural discourse binds the whole lot together: Rodin, Giacometti, Carpeaux, and Canova … and some anonymous sculptor carving into a hillside at Ajanta.

MGK: Let’s talk about your work in the concrete. I want to talk about the way you play with things being on the ground and not on the ground, against gravity—and with it—and movement and balance.

JS: At one point, I stopped making the smaller pieces.

MGK: You told me you got happy.

JS: Let’s say “expansive,” which is joyful in itself. It was also the recognition on my part that the work was destined to use the ground or the room as a base or a point of origin: a reference—like the picture plane in painting. The equivalent would be Greenberg and flatness. But I wanted to make work that stood on its own, and wasn’t limited by architecture and by the ground and the wall and right angles. I wanted the work to differentiate. It was about an experience that was not architectural or using the plane as a means of organization.

Does that mean anything?

MGK: Yes. That’s why half of them look as though they won’t fall over but are so precariously positioned that they would tumble instantly if you had not grounded them.

JS: Some of them are falling over; there’s a point where even anchoring a piece becomes a drag. Well, not a drag, but it’s limiting. There’s a limited amount of possibility of expression within a relatively reduced vocabulary that I’ve worked with.

I’m not going to invent some new shape. I’ve not been terribly interested in the repositioning of found objects. I was more interested in the reconfiguration of and repositioning of

relatively known, simple geometric forms. As long as the work was bound up by architecture or predicated on architecture, you know, it would only have limited possibility. I wanted to overcome that. I found that if I made a sculpture and inverted the sculpture, or moved it, flipped it upside down, its meaning was entirely different. How do you encounter the form? Its inversion can be a meaningful event.

MGK: You make great juxtapositions. The sculpture by the tramway in France—in Orléans—that one can look at next to both the cathedral and a really modern building.

JS: Outdoor sculpture in particular has to function in the real world: in traffic, against fabulous architecture, hideous architecture, cars, and strollers … it’s very not ideal. It’s not framed or on a pedestal. It has to endure and function out there.

MGK: You also made one in juxtaposition in the d’Orsay.

You were invited to the museum and asked to create a work in relationship to one in the collection.

JS: I chose La Danse, the great Carpeaux that was commissioned for the Opera Garnier. The work is all about complexity with an internal hierarchy, plus super sexy. It is a masterpiece; aside from that, Carpeaux was entirely dismissed by arch modernists and I thought worth a close look. Also the work is bristling with life and I think has a strange dark component in the facial expressions of the various players—from orgasmic to demonic. Anyway, it is part of the big picture.

MGK: You made a very complicated piece that seems to be dancing in all directions.

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Untitled, 2009, painted wood and spectra, dimensions variable. Photo

by Brina Thurston.

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art / joel shapiro JS: I was working on really complicated forms that derived from a capricious organization of multiple elements.

MGK: It has all this rhythm in it.

JS: Right, but the rhythm corresponded to the Carpeaux.

I didn’t actually look at the Carpeaux and then make the piece—I chose the work for its uncanny similarity to what I was doing. I was interested in the complexity of its expression, in Carpeaux’s spirit, not a mimetic process. I’m interested in where vision or intent overwhelms the special context. I think that’s what sculptors are interested in doing.

At least that’s what I’m interested in doing.

MGK: What are you drawing?

JS: Nothing. I’m doodling. But you never know when a doodle will end up being a drawing. Doodle is a vulgar term. Anyway, what else?

MGK: Okay, let’s talk about your drawings then.

JS: My drawings?

MGK: Since you’re drawing.

JS: Essentially, I’m more of an abstract artist than a representational artist, I mean, it looks like stuff—

MGK: I think you walk the line.

JS: Yes, I walk that line. So you have a page to draw on, or a wall. It’s not easy, but it’s more immediate—at least you’re not building the goddamn thing. I make stuff; I’m actually trying to create this new form. And it’s not coded in the way a page is. But I can put together form in a fairly fast way with models and wood, too. Lately, I’ve been drawing rather than making sculpture. I’ve been concentrating on two-dimensionality.

I haven’t been putting too much wood together. I haven’t grabbed a stick in a while.

MGK: You told me you make sculptures out of your drawings though, sometimes.

JS: I’ve never made a sculpture from a drawing.

MGK: What about that drawing that looked like a cat’s cradle and then you showed me the sculpture that looked like a spiderweb that was inspired by it.

JS: That was somebody else you interviewed.

MGK: On the contrary.

JS: I said that?

MGK: Yes. JS: If anything, the drawings might anticipate the complexity of the sculpture.

MGK: Oh, so they’re the thought of the sculpture.

JS: Drawing can be very complex. They feed back and forth. I would use drawing as a means of defining what the sculpture was about, as clarification of thought. So, all those early drawings of boundaries have nothing to do with architectural rooms. They have to do with the projection of kinds of masses of space, more condensed against less condensed.

MGK: It’s very alchemical.

JS: Not so alchemical; it’s attitudinal. You can differentiate space via line—that depends on its nature—how much you put into it. The sculpture’s been very fluid over the last five or six years. Drawing seemed frozen, not much other than a reflection of what I knew. Recently I’ve been drawing and I think it has caught up with the sculpture. It is really about where you choose to focus. It’s fun. I’ve been cutting paper and stapling and gluing it to the page.

GK: Would you call that drawing—making shapes M that aren’t really flat with paper?

JS: Essentially I look for some configuration that means something to me. Don’t ask what. It’s much quicker to push shapes around and find something with collage than drawing and developing single forms that in the end might have no meaning. I’d rather find the image and then draw.

My mother, when her cognitive ability was fairly gone, did a series of collages that I thought were inspired. The forms looked whimsical but actually were visually resonant. I think I took the cue. She was 97; the abstraction of Alzheimer’s— lots of scrambled experience. Drawing as a means of discovery, old-fashioned hands-on, is just too slow. I fucked around a bit on a computer but it’s so format-driven—it all looks like a printed page. So you have an idea, or at least an idea of what you don’t want, and you start to stick stuff together until you find something. Once that’s established, then I can draw it out. The drawing is a mirror of some other moment. Although it never works that way since you end up changing the whole thing and shifting around drawn elements—kind of messy and labor-intensive but I’m fairly masterful with the eraser. That’s what I showed in Paris.

MGK: The drawings that you made from collages?

JS: Yes. And then they change.

MGK: What do you mean, they change?

JS: I mean that once I’m in them, I might change them.

They’re not literal—there are no rules.

MGK: (laughter) JS: It’s so I can find the form.

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Untitled, 2009, pastel and charcoal on paper, 30 x 20 inches.

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The struggle in my work to find a structure that reflects real psychological states may well use Indian sculpture as a model.

MGK: When you’re making a sculpture, how important is your personal movement; what you’re doing physically to create it?

JS: I better be conscious of it. I’m very aware that I’m ripping something from here and sticking it there and taking this from there and recombining it and shooting it and inverting it and pulling it apart again and putting it back together again.

I’m aware of all the activity that’s going on. Dominant-hand pattern, how right-handedness might affect work—I try to remember to watch that but always lose sight in the frenzy. I’ll make a sign.

MGK: It’s sort of like doing meditation or yoga. (We’re getting to India by this route.)

JS: Yoga? Maybe. It starts out as an ordeal and it’s difficult and it’s extremely gratifying, and sometimes there is this moment of real ecstasy when you actually have accomplished something, and that’s wildly satisfying. I should say that that’s the measure: when something’s really good, it’s a new experience. It’s emotionally new. It’s fresh. It’s sort of transcendent, but … I always think of meditation as lulling.

MGK: No, you’re really concentrating on what you’re doing. It just feels as though it’s empty.

JS: I lived in India for two years growing vegetables and looking at art. Yoga was not part of the program and the little I’ve done seemed like self-inflicted torture. A lot of stuff you just toss together and it happens. Just like that. It’s fast; it’s spontaneous. It’s great. In fact, I would say that’s the really interesting work, when that happens. It can be very labor intensive. But labored work looks labored.

MGK: Okay, tell me about India.

JS: It’s a large country in Southeast Asia.

MGK: (laughter) JS: With a population of 1.3 billion people. I can show you a picture of me in India. I was a kid. I was 22. And I wasn’t seeking nirvana. I was in the Peace Corps. I was doing my time in what I thought was a meaningful and fun way. And I looked at a lot of artwork. I had a chance to really see stuff that was not in museums. I grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, which is architecturally significant but it’s different from India.

(Searches through some photos.) I thought I had this picture from India.

MGK: How is Sunnyside architecturally significant?

That’s you in India! Oh, you were young, and you smoked cigarettes. You were so young!

JS: Sunnyside had great scale. There’s a cuter picture.

MGK: You look as though you’re having a good time.

Tell me about India.

JS: It was great and overwhelming. I was very free, unencumbered in the middle of deep culture.

MGK: What did you find most attractive?

JS: It was different from Queens.

MGK: About the art.

JS: It was very present, part of everyday life. And it was not compartmentalized, which happens in our culture. It was pervasive. The iconography seemed to correspond more with

real experience, ecstasy, misery, jealousy, death, etcetera.

It was about the abundance of life.

MGK: It’s about living.

JS: Yes, and very explicable in terms of one’s own experience: the necessity to create some aspect, some divination of a god that represents a human state. Now, that may well be true in Western religion, too.

MGK: I don’t know, Joel.

JS: It’s so refined; it’s only the experience of saints. It’s very exclusive.

MGK: The saints chiefly suffer and have epiphanies.

They’re defined by how they’re killed.

JS: No, Western religion is about a miserable world and the ecstasy of the afterlife. And Hinduism seemed to me to be very alive and in the present; full of pageant and ritual.

I remember one of my first experiences of observing deep religious fervor and faith and how extraordinary that seemed.

It was that first night I was in Hyderabad. I went to some remote part of the city where people were walking through hot coals. This is not a fantasy; this is real.

MGK: And they didn’t appear to be hurt.

JS: People walked through the coals—it was amazing.

Anyway it started to get really violent. Huge crowds, and the threat of a stampede; the cops were trying to keep this crowd from surging. I’m in the front of the crowd and I’m thinking, Fuck man, I’m dead. I’d get burned alive. I wasn’t ready to walk on fire. But other people were doing it. I mean, it was like a goddamn barbecue.

MGK: (laughter) JS: And then you walk back through the town and somebody is on the side of the road dying, in the last throes of life.

Heavy stuff. Or a corpse is being walked down the street on the way to a burning ghat, shrouded in white and covered with flowers—very matter of fact, entirely open—life continues.

MGK: So how do you think that affected your work?

JS: I’m not sure. India gave me the sense of … the possibility of being an artist. Art was totally important to the entire culture. Art was pervasive and integral to the society and that became very clear to me. How it affected my work is a more complicated issue. I think the struggle in my work to find a structure that reflects real psychological states may well use Indian sculpture as a model. I don’t know if it was spiritual, but I spent a lot of time in temples.

MGK: That was spiritual, or maybe it was a physical experience?

JS: Do you mean the impetus? Definitely spiritual: what physical effort it was, this creation of form and space. And it just appears in the middle of nowhere. A flat spit of land, or a beach. It was this real experience of art, not conditioned art. I’m going back this year.

MGK: I wanted to talk about your flying pieces.

JS: The one in London? You mean the large suspended one?

Oh, and the one that’s downstairs. Fuck everything else, the only thing I want to do is stick stuff in space, because that’s

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art / joel shapiro

what I’ve always tried to do. Why accept any limitation of architecture? Except as a foundation. I think they have great expressive potential.

MGK: I think they’re wonderful.

JS: They are not constricted by much other than my drive at the moment and the physical limits of space.

MGK: You could do them outside. You could suspend them between houses.

JS: Not so sure about them outside. They need some sort of frame, some structure as a limit.

MGK: Do you have dreams of flying?

JS: No. It’s where you want to do a piece that’s so tensely attached to the ground that you sense the torque and twist of it, so it’s really asymmetrical but pulled hard. So it feels like it’s going to rip away.

MGK: And your upcoming show at Paula Cooper?

JS: I think it’s in February. We have not talked too much about it—it will be early work that has not been seen.

MGK: What about the new work?

JS: I need to find space. But I haven’t really brought anyone over to look at it.

I might show one in Los Angeles in January. I could do one outdoors. LA Louver has a defined outdoor space that’s perfect. It is actually where I first showed one of those pieces four or five years ago. I like to work but I’m tired of doing all the ancillary, bullshit aspects of work—sending images, doing Untitled, 2002–2007, bronze, 160 × 333.5 × 155 inches. Photo by Ellen Labenski and Collin White. Courtesy of PaceWildenstein, New York.

Shapirio_r2.indd 8

this, doing that.

MGK: Isn’t that what one has assistants for?

JS: It’s complicated. It’s a complicated body of work.

MGK: One thinks it’s simple and immediate, and it’s totally deceptive.

JS: No, my body of work is not simple. It’s seen as that, because it has a kind of visceral appeal. Some people know the figures, but they don’t know the rest of the work.

MGK: Well, it all has humor. Your chair makes me laugh every time I see it.

JS: Life’s humorous.

MGK: Give me an example of a piece that you really love that is unfamiliar.

JS: (Flips through papers.) Oh, here’s a work that nobody knows.

MGK: Oh, that’s the one I was talking about that you said came from a drawing, the one that looks like the spider’s web!

JS: I think the drawings that were similar came after the fact—but they all come from the same place.

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8/12/09 3:00:22 PM

BY Lukas Ligeti

Karole Armitage

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Made in Naples, 2009, performance photo of Megumi Eda. Costumes by Alba Clemente. Photo by Luciano Romono.

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theater / karole armitage

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BOMB As a composer, improviser, and cross-cultural collaborator, I hope to be innovative; to deliver work of the highest integrity. In this era of informationoverload-induced confusion, that’s not always easy; whether I manage, I don’t know. But once in a while I come across an artist who, in my opinion, definitely does. Karole Armitage is one of these rare artists. From her earliest work combining ballet, modern dance, and punk to her ever-unpredictable choreographies for various European ensembles and her current work with her own troupe back home in New York, Karole has done something I greatly admire: she has asked herself questions, answered them, and in so doing, came up with new questions.

This entropy of questions is unavoidable and actually a necessity for a truly creative artist.

When Karole invited me to work with her on a piece, The Elegant Universe, a ballet about new discoveries in particle physics, I was delighted. If dancing about architecture seems difficult, dancing about physics is truly a challenge. And yet, dance is physiology, gravity, shapes, and geometric formations. The intersection of dance thought, musical thought, and the thinking of a physicist are perhaps not as far removed from each other as one would think.

Soon this project was joined by another, unrelated one, which will open at BAM Opera House in Brooklyn on November 4. Karole had seen Burkina Electric, the West African electronicdance-art-pop band I co-lead with my friends Maï Lingani, Wende K. Blass, and Vicky Kafando from Burkina Faso; Zoko Zoko from Côte d’Ivoire; and Pyrolator from Germany. Karole became interested in choreographing to this music and adding another dimension to our already unusual mix, leading to the contrasting of—and unification of—ballet and African dance. It was the merging of West African pop seen through an occidental lens and Western symbolism examined through an African one. The piece, originally entitled Summer of Love but since rechristened Itutu, has helped all of us develop completely new ways of understanding what the other does, and what we do ourselves. What more can one ask?

— Lukas Ligeti

different light?

Karole Armitage: Really it’s using a different light to get at a feeling. I’m thinking of dance as a poetic form, making metaphors that draw upon science as an underlying structure with some kind of poetic content to make meaning. Whether it’s a piece about physics or a piece like Itutu, with African influences, the basic way of making the dance doesn’t change.

LL: All dance is about physics because there are the laws of physics and the physiology of the body—but that’s not really what you’re addressing here when you say it’s about physics.

KA: I’m just saying you have two arms, two legs, one head, certain joints; the body can only move in a few ways because that is how the human physiology is made. Unlike music, we can’t actually plug in—though I’ve longed to be able to put an electric current into my body many a time.

LL: It’s going to happen sooner or later. (laughter) KA: There are a couple of ways I think about physics quite consciously. I try to make a majority of my movement come from a principle analogous to “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” For example, a dancer pushes another’s shoulder, making that dancer turn and follow the force of the push. This trading of forces can go on for a long time, producing a different look to the movement than that of a dancer taking positions. Given that the movement is made by dancers trained in ballet, they add that conceptual and physical knowledge to the pulls and pushes and come out with exquisite form combined with rawness.

Traditional dance is based on Euclidean geometry and is very vertical and horizontal. I am more interested in the geometry of fractals, which describes the shapes of clouds, coastlines, or mountains. It is full of curves. So is Japanese calligraphy, and these ideas have helped me to turn my dance vocabulary into a curvilinear, sinuous language. I’ve been thinking about a 360-degree sphere around the body that allows the dancer to make shapes in all sorts of angles that were never really thought about in the 20th century.

These curves and tracings are lyrical and could become monotonous, so I interject a lot of violent accents and spastic interruptions. The path of getting to a shape is more important than the actual shape, so it’s a kind of anti-materialistic dance.

The same dance movement can be permutated into many different forms and scales. For example, an arabesque is the most famous dance shape—the leg is up in back.

Traditionally there is one correct way to do it, but in fact you can do it lying on the floor, upside down, low, high, twisted, contorted. I have used this idea as a way to make a lot of dancers pulse together in fractal-like group formations.

I have a phrase, “cubism in motion,” which describes this form of visual organization. The dancers interpret the shape while facing different directions. My interest in creating order within great disorder is tied to my love of nature. This form of group organization is somewhat like that of a flock of birds in flight; each dancer is moving in their own way with a common purpose. The dance and dancers are in constant metamorphoses. I want dance to be as fast as my ideas, as fast as consciousness, so that it looks like people are thinking,

ukas Ligeti: How do you manage to juggle so many L different, independent ideas? Are you addressing similar issues in different pieces and just looking at them in a

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I want dance to be as fast as my ideas, as fast as consciousness, so that it looks like people are thinking, that their bodies become the tool of thinking, and you’re seeing them feel, notice, act, all simultaneously. that their bodies become the tool of thinking, and you’re seeing them feel, notice, act, all simultaneously.

LL: In what you’re saying here, I see many analogies to my own work as a composer and improvisor.

Imitating various aspects of nature, juxtaposing the natural and artificial, seeing people think, and observing a piece (of music) in a metaphorically spatial way— hearing it differently based on which part or line you’re concentrating on. I came late to music, and when I started, I began listening to and trying to make many different types of music simultaneously. I studied composition the Western-classical way, but I can’t say I’m grounded in one tradition as opposed to another.

You, by contrast, started very early as a ballet dancer, and your basic vocabulary comes from that tradition.

Certain gestures in ballet have meanings that are historically encoded. Does that weigh on you or do you not think about it?

KA: It doesn’t weigh on me at all. I like to use tradition because it’s so finely honed; it gives you the ability to riff on well-known auras, like how a woman in pointe shoes is supposed to behave. But dance is so ephemeral. I don’t dwell on using the history too much because the references are fairly obscure. I use references all the time, but I don’t use the quotes. I don’t think people know where they come from and I don’t really worry about that much.

LL: What about when you’re working in a relatively

commercial context, like you did for Hair?

KA: Well, Hair is first of all a story, a very schematic one; its narrative predetermines the way people look upon art.

Hair was the right project for me because I wanted to make something that looked as if it wasn’t choreographed. I wanted to be as invisible as possible. Because, of course, the ’60s ethos is spontaneity, individuality, free expression, and sharing within the tribe. So I took very conceptual—kind of radical, actually—ideas, and gave them a little bit of rhythmic and musical structure. But I gave everyone images related to the words in the songs or on the grand theme of sexual freedom and had them improvise on them. Everybody made up their own stuff, so it didn’t look like one person told anyone what to do; there was no unison whatsoever.

LL: That doesn’t sound like commercial choreography.

KA: It’s not. That’s the point. The fact that it went over well is a miracle. But it just suited the subject matter. I mean, it would never work for any other musical.

LL: How about Passing Strange?

KA: Passing Strange has the brilliant work of Stew, who takes all kinds of cultural references, turns them upside down, topsy-turvy, and makes ironic and brilliant commentary on their limitations. Again, Passing Strange was so playful, and the piece was so conceptual—you had four black actors playing Dutchmen and Germans and Americans, each playing ten roles—that it worked. It wasn’t trying to illustrate; it wasn’t

trying to do dance numbers. It was helping actors become these different situations.

LL: Does a context like that in itself satisfy the urge to

do something new?

KA: In the case of Passing Strange, the director, Annie Dorsen, was very brilliant and very radical. She was absolutely determined to do everything as outside the mainstream as possible. I was just a cog in the wheel of trying to be outrageously unconventional. So those are two oddball productions … and Passing Strange wasn’t a great commercial success.

LL: No, but it still was vaguely commercial. (laughter) During the 20th century, the prevailing language of Western concert music—tonality, writing music relating to a central pitch—was gradually deconstructed to the point of not really being a language anymore. And when there is no common language to subvert, it’s difficult to determine whether something is in a certain style or not. I had a conversation with a critic-type who told me he thinks it’s impossible to do something new in jazz. I played him something of mine that had attributes typical of jazz—improvisation, some of the communication.

I said, “I think that’s something new in jazz.” He said, “No, I don’t think so. It’s not jazz.” I think we now lack a mutually intelligible language to contextualize or define things. In dance, is there also this deconstruction

and emergence of new languages, but the lack of a

shared one?

KA: It’s very similar. When minimalism was part of the art and music mood, dance also arrived at a point where walking was almost too complicated a statement. And then people were doing pseudo-Cunningham, or there was a moment when people didn’t have new ideas about how to rebuild the language again. Forsythe came along then and found a new range in real virtuoso capabilities. He has taken his own language and deconstructed it to the point that it almost has no movement left. Now he’s starting to do art installations, so it’s like the body has even disappeared. There seems to be this kind of constant push and pull between him and people like me who are trying to do an elaborate sort of language with a big range of possibilities that includes metaphor, and accepts that dance has poetic content. Then there’s this other thing: almost non-movement, more purely conceptual dance.

LL: Do you feel that this language you’re creating relates to the language of other choreographers? Or is everybody working more or less on their own planet?

KA: I feel like I’m kind of on my own trajectory. I was trained as a ballet dancer, then I danced with Cunningham, then I was influenced by punk, and I put those three things together and that was considered to be a terrible thing. (laughter)

LL: But it was a new thing.

KA: It was very new. It excited a lot of people and it horrified a huge number of people. In a way that still kind of sums up

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BOMB

above: Itutu, 2009, performance photo of Armitage Gone! Dance with Burkina Electric's Maimounata Lingani. Photo by Giacomo Orlando.

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below: Itutu, 2009, performance photo of Megumi Eda with Burkina Electric's Abdoulaye Kouanda. Photo by Giacomo Orlando.

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theater / karole armitage what I’m trying to do: combining ballet with modern, scientific with poetic. And using raw, pop influences—whether punk or other kinds of street-culture influences—more as atmosphere, not recreating street moves or vocabularies or their ethos.

It’s a kind of energy in the work rather than a vocabulary.

Anyway, I’m in neither the ballet nor modern world; it makes people uncomfortable to this day.

LL: So you feel like an outsider.

KA: Yeah, and yet there clearly are people who are interested in that. Possibly more in Europe than in the US.

LL: Do you find younger choreographers imitating you?

KA: Not a lot. I think I’m hard to imitate because you need a lot of skill as a dancer to do what I do. Unless you’ve really pushed your body—like classically trained ballet dancers who are trying to supersede the human…. It’s just not that available to a huge amount of people. There are probably ten choreographers in the world who are on a similar trajectory.

We’ve done ballet and modern and we want to make both of them go into unexplored territory, where there is no division between them. Believe it or not, there’s still a really big division between what is ballet and what is modern. There are only a few of us who think the division is meaningless.

LL: Well, it seems to be a situation that is pretty analogous with music.

KA: They’re so intrinsically connected, music and dance; two sides of the same coin, really.

LL: In Africa you can’t separate them at all. There aren’t even different words in most languages for those two things. In a way, playing music is dancing because you need to move on the instrument to produce sound.

Maybe you’re just moving your fingers and it’s a difficult dance for the audience to see, but it’s still a dance. I think what’s reversed is the cause and effect. Because in the case of music, movement causes sound and in the case of dance, sound causes movement.

KA: The dance that I like most is dance that has a musical soul, as if the music were visual. Inevitably, dance has human content. We have mirror neurons in our brains which are designed to allow us to read other people’s intentions; that’s how we’re social animals—we look at each other to read feelings and objectives and therefore when you’re observing dance you are seeing people behave and you read into it all kinds of meanings.

LL: Your choreography is closely tied to music. That’s where you’re very different from somebody like Cunningham.

KA: Cunningham was very, very private. He did not want to collaborate by talking to people, ever. Not that this wasn’t based on really interesting ideas, but I think the personal and the conceptual go hand in hand. I love not dancing to music, too—I actually think it’s much easier. It’s much more difficult to make the two work together so that they’re entwined but completely independent. Really good choreography is both at once: it’s like you’re collaborating with the music. You’re in a relationship with it; it’s basically a dialogue, giving and taking like in a love relationship.

LL: These kinds of relationships happen not only between music and dance, but within the music itself,

and within the dance. When I write music I sometimes build in little things that actually go against my structure to make it less transparent, or just to give myself a

hard time.

KA: I love accidents more than anything. I’m just blessed by accidents. Half the best stuff I do is an accident. Like I’ll show a phrase to dancers and they misremember it, and it looks better, or they fall over, or they try something with too much force and it leads to another thing.

LL: What kind of a tradition in choreography is there for the use of accidents?

KA: I have no idea; I trained as a ballet dancer and then decided to try choreography, so I don’t really know how it’s taught. Dance is a strange, strange thing. We don’t communicate very much with each other. You can’t look in books. Of course there’s video, but major history is gone and people don’t talk about it. Maybe they do at universities; I’m sure there is a kind of consensus about how you’re supposed to choreograph and what you’re supposed to look for, but I have no idea what those things are.

LL: If you were, say, 30 years younger, how would you start now? Could you see yourself dancing in your company?

KA: That’s an interesting question. We just revived some pieces that I did dance—some of these early punk pieces.

I’m really interested in the sensuality and the erotics of movement. And it is very sensual; it’s nice to be enveloped in that world. So I guess the answer is yes.

LL: Something I was going to ask about is this sensual and erotic side of dance. The way in which society views sensuality and eroticism and the gestures associated with them have gone through enormous changes over the past couple of decades. Does your current choreography reflect a different approach to sensuality than the old one?

KA: What comes to mind is the difference between how people moved to be sexy in the early ’80s when MTV started and how they’re moving now. Like the club dances: they’re just all about the booty now, and that wasn’t the case. What to me is erotic and sensual is how you feel air molecules around you, how you feel gravity, how you use your hips, how you go out of a straight line into something that has other kinds of curving stuff. So it’s not based on pop culture—it’s really about an interest in the other.

LL: To get back to being a young dancer or choreographer today: are you looking for similar technical personalities, for lack of a better term, in dancers today as you were in your early choreography?

KA: I’m looking for people who are virtuosos in the sense that they have a wide range of ability to control their bodies but who don’t look academic, who have a very personal way of moving. Their own voices within. They have to have some kind of interesting internal lives, an eccentric personal relationship to the world that comes through. I need people with a point of view.

LL: You were working with dancers in New York in the ’80s, then you went to Europe for a while, and then you came back here. I was trained as a musician in Vienna—

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BOMB the home of classical music—and a lot of stuff that was going on there was very sloppy, although with an inherent knowledge: we are this tradition, we don’t have to prove anything. In America I see a lot more effort put into being very structured and academic and technical.

Like being more Catholic than the Pope. On the other hand, I see the exact opposite in jazz: there’s a lot of very inspired, sloppy jazz in America, and European jazz musicians tend to be a whole lot more clean, yet are often quite derivative. There’s a certain spiritual thing that’s very important in jazz. Jazz and hip-hop have a strong American sociopolitical aspect and a European jazz musician exists in a complete vacuum as far as that is concerned. Is there any of this attitude in European dance: not having to prove anything?

KA: No. I think you have to prove it every single day, physically.

LL: You have to stay in shape, like an athlete does.

KA: Yeah, and if you did something last week, but can’t do it this week, you’re a disgrace. Paris opera training is fantastic; no one is coasting on the fact that they invented classical ballet as we know it. They’re killing themselves to keep it going.

LL: Do you think the general absence of government funding for the arts in America creates an atmosphere more conducive for innovation?

KA: I think the exact opposite. We are punished here by being so economically and culturally marginalized. In Europe art is a part of daily life. It is simply normal. I don’t think it makes you more innovative to waste so much time just trying to survive.

A lot of innovation comes from downtime; we know that so many enormous discoveries happen when people have time to daydream or drop out—

LL: And produce accidents.

KA: Exactly, and here you always have to make the next occasion work for you in some way, whether it’s social, or getting the next audition, or whatever.

LL: But you still wanted to come back here and exist in this stressful environment.

KA: I’m American and it’s strange to live an entire career in foreign countries—two months in Holland, three months in France, two months in Italy, two months in Spain—creating new ballets for all these different sites. I wasn’t developing an aesthetic. I would teach something conceptually and physically in one place and then I would have to start over again in the next place. I wanted continuity rather than these one-time things.

LL: I wanted to create a bridge and now I forgot it.

KA: We were talking about the sociopolitical context of jazz.

LL: Right. In Africa, where I’ve spent a lot of time, hip-hop is really big now. Like in Burkina Faso, where Burkina Electric, the group that plays for Itutu, is from. Which elements of African-American culture catch on there and which don’t is very interesting to me. American hip-hop is so bound to certain social situations and political environments; African hip-hop is in a sense decontextualized from that. How did you approach working with African music and dancers? In seeing Itutu develop, I was very touched to be part of this African band, yet I’m not African. It’s this weird

zebra existence. But I have become thoroughly Africanized in that sometimes I see from a EuropeanAmerican viewpoint and at other times from an African viewpoint. That’s one of the reasons why it is interesting to be part of Burkina Electric. I cofounded it, so we’re like a family, but there are a lot of differences in background and we’re constantly learning from each other. One thing that really touched me was seeing the Burkina Electric dancers and the Armitage Gone! dancers completely flowing together. For example, seeing the Burkina Electric dancers participate in the ballet warm-ups is something I really enjoy. How do you bring those things together?

KA: Well, Itutu is incredibly challenging and I don’t think I’ve figured it out yet, because it’s a piece without context.

I mean, the context is a wonderful idea about things colliding and flowing and crossing boundaries. We’re crossing boundaries between Africa, Europe, and the US, and we’re crossing dancers and musicians, and we’re crossing abstract intellectual culture with pop culture, so it’s a very complicated world that we’re trying to create. I want to push the piece even more.

LL: It’s not really important where somebody comes from; it’s important what culture they ground themselves in. In cross-cultural projects it’s important, I think, to respect the choice of the identity performers give themselves, not necessarily the identity they’re born with.

KA: Another challenge to the piece is how to go from instrumental music—your compositions, which are dense, polyrhythmic, abstract pieces with a lot of electronics and ambiguity—into the world of the pop songs by Burkina Electric. These are very different musical worlds. The songs are literal, unambiguous, and direct. The Burkina Electric members think of themselves as a band performing for a public rather than as performers caught in the midst of an experience. The songs are extroverted and grounded in the present; your abstract music is roiling with layers of tensions and are connected to the beyond. I want to go from the world of day and song to the more abstract world of night, a world of mystery. I hope it is possible to make these disparate, contradictory musical worlds mean something theatrical so that the piece holds together in a coherent way.

I think you understand better than I do some of these issues.

LL: I’m not sure about that. (laughter) And I co-wrote those Burkina Electric songs, so …

I had a very interesting experience with African musicians I have been working with. This was with Beta Foly, an experimental ensemble of musicians from different parts of West Africa. We would listen to music together, say, Korean traditional music, and then try to imitate some of the atmosphere. How they approach meter … it would sound nothing like Korean music, but like a very strange African music. We played each other lots of different types of music, and the reactions were generally ones of great interest. But strangely, one composer made everybody draw a total blank: Steve Reich.

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theater / karole armitage music. Listening to different layers is like looking at an object from different sides. Something I know has challenged you is that we always play this music differently.

KA: That’s really difficult.

LL: And we play a lot less differently than we normally do! (laughter) I think we’ve converged on a certain compromise in our collaboration there.

KA: Aside from collaborating on music, I’m often intricately involved with a painter who is working on a design of some sort. It’s the same idea of almost creating a cosmos or dream place—a mental space where these productions take place. Philip Taaffe is designing Itutu and, in this case, is even creating the designs for the fabric that the dancers and musicians wear. It is not African-based design, though it uses the kind of graphic energy that one associates with the syncopated rhythm of the African visual world. Another painter, Will Cotton, is designing tiaras. It’s a collaboration.

I’m trying to align the artists creating set designs, the lighting designer … all of them, so that they’re riffing off of each other to make one complete experience.

LL: The lighting design of Itutu is kind of a nocturnal atmosphere.

KA: That’s definitely going to change. The piece really isn’t finished yet. We had limited equipment for the one version we’ve done. Some of it is meant to be night, in that the piece is trying to explore the night side of our imagination— mysterious or irrational forces, these primal impulses that pulse through us.

LL: Sunsets in Burkina Faso have a lot of dust in them, so the light is very different from what you find in America or Europe. In the city, people light small fires by the roadside, and it becomes smoky and dusty; it creates a very mysterious atmosphere. Many Westerners have difficulty grappling with something about African art, music, textile design, whatever: for them, it conjures happy feelings. There are major chords, a lot of colors that seem to exude happiness, yet the lyrics can be about disaster. Of course, in an African cultural context, things that seem happy to someone from the West aren’t necessarily happy at all. Have you found that to be a challenge in this collaboration?

KA: I see vitality and energy; patterns that have a great vibrancy to them. So I don’t see that as happy as much as energetic. Some of the Burkina Electric music has this kind of deep visceral urgency. It’s not the opposite of happy, but it has a charm of letting itself be what it is. It’s tricky for me to understand how to make songs have an interesting evolution so that I don’t get stuck in the structure.

LL: They don’t have an evolution, really, so maybe the evolution can come through other things.

KA: Yeah, the thing that I want to emphasize the most is that we’re just in this together. In the beginning I thought maybe I needed to slowly introduce these worlds coming together, but I actually think it’s more interesting to be already there, already doing this crazy thing!

LL: I think that’s the perfect way to end. We’re born, and we’re all thrown in together.

KA: Wow, that’s amazing.

LL: Yes, so strange. Morton Feldman, for example, makes music that’s incredibly static and yet you used it as a springboard for some very intricate movement in Connoisseurs of Chaos. What about the extremes of approaching movement to music by Feldman and then movement to music by Burkina Electric?

KA: It’s very often important to have music that isn’t too full, so that there’s room for the dance.

LL: African music tends to be very full.

KA: Yeah, but something like Mozart is so full that adding anything feels extraneous. Adding to it can be so rich that it becomes nauseating. You have to find music where the visual can somehow join with it. African music, even though it’s dense, there’s space in it—it doesn’t feel tight. There is room there for the body.

LL: To me, one of the fascinating things about African music is that it’s very three-dimensional, sculptural above: Time is the Echo of the Axe Within a Wood, 2004, performance photo. Left to right: William Isaac, Valerie Madonia, Cheryl Altshuler, Leone Barilli. Set by David Salle. Costumes by Peter Speliopoulos. Photo by Tom Brazil.

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below: The Mollino Room, 1986. Left to right: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Leslie Browne, Ricardo Bustamente. Set and costumes by David Salle. Photo by Richard N. Greenhouse.

8/18/09 2:43:53 PM

BY ANNI ROSSI

left to right: Marc Pell, Mica Levi, and Raisa Khan of Micachu and the Shapes. Photo by Liz Eve.

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ARTISTS ON ARTISTS / MiCACHU AND THE SHAPES

Micachu and the Shapes

This winter, I wrote a blog post about music I had been listening to during a tour of the southwestern US. Some readers chimed in with what they had been enjoying, too.

I recognized most of the artists’ names, but one funny band stood out: Micachu. Micachu? What a weird name for a band, I thought—must be electronic music or something. I was overcome by curiosity; I tracked down this Micachu’s Myspace page and listened to all the tracks. It was antielectronic music. Theirs were definitely pop songs, but all the choruses and identifiable sounds you expect of pop had been swapped out for a woody, buzzing, acoustic clatter.

I was more curious than ever.

Micachu, it turns out, is the 22-year-old British musician Mica Levi. In 2008 Levi joined with keyboardist Raisa Khan and drummer Marc Pell to form Micachu and the Shapes.

After the release of two beautifully cacophonous singles— “Lone Ranger” and “Golden Phone”—they signed with Rough Trade (home in the ’70s of like-minded bands like the Raincoats and the Swell Maps) and released their addictive debut album, Jewellery. The singularity of this album lies both in its confidence and its utter weirdness. Despite being a classically trained musician, Levi's music is never precious, never anything but immediate. Through the squalor of their collaged, otherworldly chaos is the persistent hum of Levi’s diminutive children’s acoustic guitar. Part of the strangeness of this music can be traced to the instruments. Pell uses baby-food tin cans (he’s a father) in lieu of toms. Levi alters her guitars (one is adapted so it can be hit with a stick) and has also made an instrument out of a CD rack and an electric guitar that is played with a bow. Aside from the keyboards, Micachu and the Shapes are primarily an acoustic affair, though they’re anything but serene.

A couple weeks after becoming aware of the existence of Micachu, I glanced through my tour schedule to discover that we would be playing two shows together, the first of

which was at the South by Southwest festival in Austin. On the back patio of a bar called Ms. B’s, Micachu and the Shapes performed in the scalding Texas sun. In the week between this show and the next, Devin Maxwell, my drummer, and I were constantly singing bits of their songs that repetitively careened through our heads. Slowly, it became clear to us that Micachu’s are some of the most perfectly British melodies we had heard in a long time. During the second show I heard things I had missed the first time I saw them. The drummer dropped into perfectly natural grooves with cowbells, rim clicks, janky cymbals, and two drums.

Live, Micachu and the Shapes don’t sound anything like classical music, but they play with the finesse, articulation, and phrasing of classical players using brokendown-sounding, barely intact instruments. This awkward juxtaposition somehow makes perfect sense: Levi once wrote a piece as part of a young composers program that was performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Luckily for me, I had scheduled a tour with Micachu and the Shapes during July. Unluckily for me, my apartment was broken into the night before leaving Chicago and I missed our show in Toronto. But honestly, being on tour with Micachu and the Shapes is distracting in the best way possible. Their presence is irresistible, their melodies unforgettable, and Levi’s coolly magnetic persona makes everything but their insistent clamor seem like nothing at all.

—Anni Rossi is a violist whose solo EP Afton was released in 2008. 4AD released her debut full-length album, Rockwell, in March of 2009. Rossi will play at the Crossing Border Festival in the Hague on November 20 and 21.

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

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now on BOMBsite.com

Walead Beshty and Eileen Quinlan

Walead Beshty: The term “abstraction” seems important to how you were discussing the function of images, specifically to how images can slide from material substrate to material substrate and stay, by definition, unchanged. Perhaps, by extending this line of thought, the term offers a way to trouble this condition.

Eileen Quinlan: In some ways there’s an intentional passivity on my part, so the discussion can be more about how the photographs function as objects, how they’re configured in the space, how they may relate to one other as fragments.

There’s a lot about the term that’s very problematic, but I’ve allowed it to be sort of grafted on to my work and I do think that the term has consolidated a number of artists considered to be abstract photographers. Remember that story in ArtNews about new abstract photography and your work was on the cover? I got ten phone calls from people thinking it was mine and I said, “No, that’s Walead Beshty’s, actually.”

We’ve been lumped together to represent some kind of new direction for photography that might present a future for what was becoming an exhausted medium.

WB: The irony is that calling it “new” and putting it on the cover of a magazine means that it’s already past. (laughter) Which is true in the sense that work that considered the material conditions of photographs had been largely dismissed, and when discussed, was usually treated as a historical cul-de-sac, a dead-end experiment.

Read Walead Beshty and Eileen Quinlan's entire interview now on BOMBsite.com.

Walead Beshty, Six Color Curl (CMMYYC: Irvine, California, July 17th 2008, Fuji Crystal Archive Type C), 2009, color photographic paper, 50 × 96.125 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Wallspace, New York.

Photo by Lee Stalsworth.

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Eileen Quinlan, Fracas #10 (for J.F.), 2009, UV-laminated chromogenic print mounted on Sintra, 24 × 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.

8/19/09 6:27:20 PM

new & upcoming on bombsite.com web Exclusives

RICK WOODWARD / MITCH EPSTEIN RW: Why did you decide to do a book called American Power?

ME: In 2003 I was commissioned by the New York Times to do a piece about Cheshire, Ohio. The town had a 75-year history erased: sitting in the shadow of one of the largest coal-fire power plants in the US, there were major environmental issues with the emissions and they tried to buy everybody in the town out. (Above: Gavin Coal Power Plant, Cheshire, Ohio, 2003, 70 × 92 inches. From American Power. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.)

David Korins by Oskar Eustis There’s plenty to argue about when it comes to New York theater, but no one’s arguing this: David Korins’s set designs are like nothing else. He sits down with Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater. (Above: Korins’s set design for Passing Strange, 2008.)

on a single microchip—set to release this October, the composer sat down with performance artist Nick Hallett.

Ned Smyth by Keith Sonnier Smyth is best known for public art projects; his The Next Generation will be installed at Lehman College in 2010. His recent show at Salomon Contemporary featured primal, found objects (stones, twigs, cast concrete) made for private spaces. Fellow sculptor Keith Sonnier catches Smyth in his studio. (Above: Image from the Seeds and Stems series. Courtesy of the artist and Salomon Contemporary.)

New Video We’ve got a new video camera and we’re wearing it out. We’ve been to: Jana Leo’s Rape New York, Armen Ra at The New Museum, and Roman Ondák’s Measuring the Universe at MoMA.

word choice Our poetry series keeps going, with poems from Rosemarie Castoro and Idra Novey. Don’t miss BOMB’s chapbook, Think: Poems for Aretha’s Inauguration Day Hat, edited by Patricia Spears Jones. (Above: Mary Murphy, Self Portrait B AP, digital print, 11 × 14 inches. Courtesy of Pierogi Flat Files.) rona pondick by shirley kaneda Pondick's The Metamorphosis of an Object is on view at the Worcester Art Museum through October 11. Her interpretation of seven historical objects is declassified on BOMBsite.

(Above: Installation view courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum.)

Bomblog online Archive BOMB’s digitization project is almost complete! Check the blog for highlights from 28 years of conversation handpicked by editors and interns. (Above: Eric Mitchell and Patti Astor. Photo by David Armstrong. From Eric Mitchell by David Ehrestein, BOMB 1, Spring 1981.)

Tristan Perich by Nick Hallett With 1-Bit Symphony—Perich’s fivemovement composition programmed

Weekly Series Watch weekly previews of Art:21’s Season Five artists.

Get our Podcasts! Including Jacques Roubaud, Gary Indiana, Jem Cohen, Frederic Tuten, and many more.

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by Diana al-Hadid

Tala Madani

When I look at Tala Madani’s paintings, I notice a peculiar relationship between what is direct (the manner) and what is ambiguous (the matter). Her spare compositions and fluid brushstrokes are easily, almost subliminally, absorbed but my attention also stutters in its effort to comprehend the image as a whole. Her manner is straightforward, but the imagery so uncertain: Is the man of Braided Beard actually braiding another’s beard, or strangling him? The titles, however (Fish In Pants, Paper Boat), aren’t at all mysterious. They often point out the single clearest fact in the painting: either Madani knows only as much as we do, or she’s protecting her secret.

Either way, this deadpan withholding beckons us to delve into the absurdity beneath what is obvious.

Initially alienating paintings, even Madani’s most legible scenarios are unruly and mysterious. Men are her exclusive subjects, and she mercilessly depicts their vulnerability, holding them hostage with her compositions. From a Red Stripes with Stain, 2008, oil on canvas, 76.77 × 82.68 inches. All images courtesy of the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects.

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woman’s perspective, there is some relief in turning the oftensubliminal perception of the male point of view as a genderneutral one against itself. In this way, her antagonism is quite funny. Humor is as palpable as violence, and it rescues her work from being read as a dogmatic (Western) feminist manifesto.

Madani paints with a candid quickness, but this manner of the mark is skillfully deceptive; it obscures elemental facts and highlights the obscure. The quickness of the paint does not engage the quickness of our image-reading sensibility.

Her slippery oils are so drunk with power that narration is suspiciously and deliciously gossipy. Madani paints paintings within paintings, men eaten by their own drawings, and drawings attacking men. In Original Sin, the wispy apples painted on the blackboard accentuate the unusually applelike shape of the man’s buttocks. In Red Stripes with Stain, a vertical mark is an object falling on the heads of a quartet

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Table Trouble, 2008, oil on wood, 9.65 × 11.81 inches.

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artistS on artistS / tala madani always appear fumbling and clumsy, the doomed performers of incomprehensible dream scenarios.

There is a complicated, if cruel, tension between the creator and her characters—as if she’s eager to submit evidence of their idiocy. My first instinct is to trust the brush marks and laugh along with Madani, and maybe even to feel vindicated. But after deliberation, I begin to feel empathy for these generic men. Their peculiar humiliations become particular, and thereby personal. Eventually, I am embarrassed to notice myself implicated as an eager voyeur, hungry for more inconclusive gossip. Their shame turns onto me. Madani’s paintings seduce without beauty, but rather, shamefully, with humor and humiliation.

—Diana Al-Hadid moved from Syria to Ohio in the first grade to pursue a career in sculpture. She was recently included in Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East at the Saatchi Gallery in London and in the Sharjah Biennial. This fall, her work will be exhibited at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa and at BAM’s Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn.

She has upcoming shows at Rice University and at La Conservera Contemporary Art Center in Murcia, Spain.

She is a 2009 NYFA Sculpture Fellow and her work is represented by Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York.

seen crouching from behind; in Man In Cape, someone vomits the colored stripes of his cape onto the backs of two others.

The men are at the mercy of painterly abstraction and each scene is suggestively fetishistic. A flick of pink paint in Tower Reflection represents a tongue licking a staple-shaped man’s rear end. In Withered, two men watch mystified as a wilting plant grows from their pants.

The muddy, out-of-focus paint humiliates this fellowship of balding, indistinct men. With birthday cakes, candles, and chalkboards as their props, Madani’s grown men are in an awkward stage of childhood discovery, nervously bidding and speculating on their future. It’s hard not to cringe and feel sorry for them. We peer in on their absurd rites, which they seem inexplicably and idiotically compelled to perform (stamping one’s painted clown face onto another’s back; demonstrating, with an actual rope, how to play hangman).

Madani’s strangely cartoonish marks cause the figures to

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Spreading Clown, 2008, oil on wood, 15.75 × 11.81 inches.

8/12/09 1:58:58 PM

By James Siena

Dan Schmidt

Picture a man in New York City, wandering its busy streets.

He spies a battered piece of small cast plastic on the sidewalk. Its shape is familiar to the eye and hand; it is intact but not instantly identifiable. He puts it in his pocket, goes to a photocopy shop, and has it enlarged 300 percent. After taking the enlargement home, he makes carbon transfers of the shape onto paper and wood. It’s a glyphlike form; there’s a section that redoubles halfway, culminating in a small hook facing the same direction as its counterpart. The material is rounded, not stamped out, and the man’s transfer carries over that rounded quality. He remembers to put the original object (a sock hanger) in an accordion file filled with strange found pieces of cardboard and plastic: shapes that evoke shields from a children’s army, vases with impossible necks, bent and distorted swords, collars from cubist oxen.

The man works in a small, neat room. Typewriters with long carriages rest atop one bookshelf, and the walls are lined with hundreds of books in glassed-in cases. The books! There are too many to describe: a cacophony of text and image. It’s not a library, though. It’s Dan Schmidt’s studio, and he prepares to work with his arsenal of modest shapes surrounded by the work of others, both literary and art-historical (the books), and industrial (the packaging he scavenges from the street, and sometimes even pays for at local drugstores or dollar stores). Ironically, out of this condition—this immersion in “others”—he creates his own work. It is among the most personal and human work I know.

As he makes paintings and works on paper using these shapes—six-pack cartons, collar stays, toothbrush bubble wrap, and the like—he considers the anonymous designers who dreamt them up, but never expected these shapes to take on the resonance and meaning he is giving them.

Schmidt says about these shapes, “They have an utterly desirable symmetry and perfection and rightness … it would be impossible for me to have originated any of them …

[but] as with all commercial design, use value almost destroys it and makes it nearly invisible.”

Schmidt makes his own decisions, to be sure—about color, scale, surface, material—in fact, many of his gouaches make trips to the sink to be rinsed off when they’re not quite right, but not wrong enough for the circular file, and the cumulative effect of latent images rewards the eye with pleasure and mystery while the final ur-form steals its way into the viewer’s wheelhouse before she knows it. On the other hand, his panels are, like all devotional painting, preordained. Two constant elements are his use of various security-envelope patterns (one wonders at the meaning of his use of forms whose original purpose is to prevent things from being seen!) and the forms from the accordion archive (Schmidt calls them “figures”). The figures leap forward from their humble beginnings when, as three-dimensional objects, they housed sippy cups, ink cartridges, and air fresheners: the stuff of human life. Schmidt’s paintings materialize what is intended to be invisible. The capitalist world is a world where shapes toil unnoticed and unappreciated; Schmidt brings the work of unacknowledged artisans into the light, and seamlessly blends it with his own rich experiences.

While he’s extraordinarily well read and well versed in literature and art history, his work reveals a different world: one where the boundary between conscious and accidental, unexpected meaning is breached. It’s on the sidewalk or at the dollar store, where there’s not a customs agent in sight.

—James Siena is an artist who lives and works in New York and the Berkshires.

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artistS on artistS / Dan Schmidt

above: Wicked, 2009, gouache on paper, 16 × 12 inches. All images courtesy of the artist. All photos by Becket Logan. below: Twos and Fives, 2008, gouache on paper, 16 × 12 inches.

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above: Goodstein, 2008, acrylic on wood panel, 14 × 11 inches. below: Untitled, 2007, acrylic on wood panel, 14 × 11 inches.

8/17/09 6:24:01 PM

By Gillian Welch Singer/songwriter Gillian Welch writes of Lydia Peelle, “We met in Nashville as part of a circle of Southern transplants. All of us were artists, writers, musicians, and folklorists, living in the South because it spoke to us and to our work. I feel a great kinship with Lydia’s writing, and have from the first story I read. It was a joy to talk with her about her process, inspiration, and trials in writing her first collection of short stories.”

Peelle’s stories in Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing carry a memory of the Southern past that we might find in a short story by Flannery O’Connor or Eudora Welty. A memory that, mixed with the present, becomes something that couldn’t have existed back then but that in all its forlorn glory and hope-riddled despair brings us to the understanding that the past, as Faulkner knew so well, never dies.

—Betsy Sussler

Lydia Peelle

Photo by Brooke Guthrie. Courtesy of HarperCollins.

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“And a few summers later, spinning out of control on a loose gravel road in a car full of boys and beer, we weren’t scared of it [death] then, either, and we laughed and said to the boy at the wheel, do it again. We only learned to fear it later, much later, when we realized it knew our names, and worse, the name of everyone we loved.” —from “Sweethearts of the Rodeo” Gillian Welch: I’ve known you for all these years, but I know so little about your life as a writer. Did you always want to be a writer?

Lydia Peelle: Yes … always. But, for a long time, I just kept it a secret, and if someone asked me what I wanted to be, I would say something else. I don’t know why, I guess because writing was such a private act. But going back to when I was five—my parents gave me an old electric typewriter. I used to sit and play with it. I remember sitting in the dining room banging the keys and hearing my mother in the next room say to someone, “Oh, she’s going to be a writer,” sort of as a joke, you know, and me thinking, Well, yes, I am!

GW: So you were aware even at that age that people were writers. That one could be a writer.

LP: Oh, yeah … I loved to read and would read everything I could get my hands on, so I knew. In terms of becoming aware of “the author,” I had a copy of Stuart Little—I loved that book and, at a very young age, probably before I could read it, I remember looking at the title page and thinking about E. B. White, and how he’d written it, and how … Wow, a person was responsible for that story. That had a big effect on me.

GW: I was the same way in that I knew right from the start I wanted to play music. If not, I mean, then what?

But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to perform.

LP: Were you shy?

GW: Yeah, if I could have found a way to just play music in my room, I would have, but then, slowly, I came around to the idea that I would have to perform in front of an audience. When did you come to the idea that you wanted an audience for your writing?

LP: Well, if you write it down, it must be because you want to share it with other people. Though, of course, sometimes you have to write something down to figure it out for yourself, so yes, I suppose you can write without ever having the intention of showing it to anybody.

GW: So how did you come to know you wanted an audience for your writing?

LP: Well, along the way, teachers and people would say, “We should try to publish this.”

GW: So it came from the outside?

LP: Yes. There was a certain amount of encouragement.

GW: You’re not from here—you’re from the Northeast and moved to Nashville several years ago. Tell me about your experience coming here.

LP: I moved to Nashville when I got married, having never been in the South before. I came with this idea in my head that it was going to be just like a Faulkner story … that there’d be, you know, donkeys downtown and horses pulling carts

and old general stores, and that there certainly wouldn’t be Sonic and Arby’s and Burger King—

GW: Which there are. (laughter) LP: Which there are, exactly—that’s what there is. But the thing is, that other world, that older world, the mystery of that, is still here. You just have to look for it. Here in Tennessee, people’s connection to the land is much more immediate than it is in Massachusetts, where I grew up. The accelerating loss of that connection is also much more immediate. In my hometown, the farms were divided and subdivided hundreds of years ago. Here, it is happening as we speak. Growth seems to happen in a much more rampant, unstructured way here in the South—I suppose because there’s just so much more open land. That recklessness both repels me and greatly interests me. What it says about our country, and mankind as a whole.

History is so present in this landscape. Stories.

Walking, exploring old barns and abandoned houses, you can feel them, see them, almost hear them. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead—it isn’t even past.” But different landscapes tell different stories. Growing up in Massachusetts, the history I was aware of were the stories of 350 years before. That’s what they drill you with in grade school: the pilgrims and the natives and the early European settlers. Growing up, I thought about those stories a lot, but never the ensuing ones of the centuries after; it was like time had fast-forwarded to the present day. Here in Tennessee, I am tuned in to a much more recent history: the Civil War, the opulence and horror of plantation culture, the farm families— lives lived in the past 150 years.

GW: I know you travel quite a bit. Did you write the stories here or somewhere else? What effect does location have on your work?

LP: Most of the stories about Tennessee I wrote while living in Virginia. Joyce said you couldn’t write about a place until you exiled yourself from it. The stories had taken root when I was in Tennessee, but they came to be reality in Virginia, which is, of course, also the American South, but so different, in so many ways, from Tennessee. When I was there it was like Tennessee had ceased to exist. The first three years in Tennessee, we lived in the country outside Nashville, pretty isolated, and I had a tough time with it. I wanted to get out, and for many reasons the only way that was going to happen would be if I were to go back to school, so finally I went and did my graduate work in Virginia. I definitely felt like I was never coming back here. It took so much to reach that escape velocity, and I was so happy to put it behind me. But the thing was, I kept thinking about Tennessee. Writing about it. It had got a hold on me, on my imagination.

GW: It can be so valuable to be an outsider.

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BOMB LP: Yes. You’re attuned to things, small things, that someone who has been in a place all of their lives takes for granted, or doesn’t even notice anymore. For example: my parents have lived in the same neighborhood since before I was born, and the same house since I was three. I did a lot of exploring as a kid, walked around a lot, and I’d like to tell you that I knew everything about the place, every street and tree. Last year we were back visiting, and my husband went out walking.

He found a 17th-century graveyard right down the street and through the woods from my parents’ house. I had never known it was there. When you’re new to a place, you are so much more attuned to the physical landscape, as well as to the way people talk, the way they communicate, they way everyday life unfolds. Of course, for those first few years living in Tennessee, being an outsider made me miserable. I felt like I didn’t even speak the same language. Writing about the place was part of my process of trying to understand it, to make it home.

GW: I had to go away for a while to get back to that first feeling about Nashville, about being inspired by it, because it had become just the place I lived.

Now, why short stories? As I was thinking about

this, I realized, it’s really exactly like making an album.

LP: It is like making an album. A short-story collection is like an album in ways that a novel is not; your hope is for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. What you want is for each song or each story to stand on its own, but for them to say something greater when collected in one album or between the covers of a book. And sequencing is so important—as I know it is with a record—the way you order the stories; you think about the emotional arc to the whole book. I wouldn’t want a reader to skip around the book, but to read the stories in order. As for the stories, well, I knew it had to be stories … When I moved here I was so inspired by this place; I wanted to come at it from a lot of different perspectives, to look at it through the lives of a lot of different people, in many different time periods. I was especially interested in the evolving human relationship with the land.

To look at the way our relationship with the land, and what we ask of it, has changed, and is changing, and how all these different people in different eras have coped with that.

GW: Were there stories that didn’t make it in?

LP: So many.

GW: That sounds familiar. So many more songs that don’t make it in than do.

LP: Yeah, and you hope they make it into an outtakes album someday, but they probably won’t. (laughter)

GW: Probably not.

LP: So the editing process—I knew it was going to be a book about the South. Once I figured that out, I had a clearer idea of how I wanted the book to be, the shape I wanted it to take. There was one story I worked on for a long time, about a black sharecropper during the Mississippi flood of 1927. I was fascinated with that event, and for a long time I thought the book really needed that story: that perspective, that era, and the repression and exploitation experienced by so many Southern blacks.

I wrote the first draft of it about six months before

Katrina. I read a lot of old documents and New York Times articles about the 1927 flood, which was one of this country’s greatest disasters. So much of the poor population of Mississippi ended up in Red Cross relief camps along the levees. For miles and miles, there were thousands of people with the few belongings they had marooned on that narrow strip of high ground. Then Katrina happened and it was like déjà vu. The New York Times headlines were almost identical: Levee Breaks, Hundreds Feared Dead, Water Rushes Southward.

That story never worked out. I just kept writing draft after draft, trying to get in somehow. It was very difficult.

Ultimately I just couldn’t get in; I could not embody this story.

And I learned something, too: that the book had limitations.

It helped me narrow my sense of what the book should be, and focus my energies. Of course I wasn’t going to be able to write a book that embodied the entirety of the Southern experience! And what a relief it was to say that to myself. So it helped me to see the thread that did hold the stories together.

Once I could narrow it down like that, by the end of it I was writing a story to be a cornerstone for the book, a keystone.

GW: Which story was that?

LP: “This is Not a Love Story.” That’s the little story I wrote to hold the rest together. I knew the collection needed it. A young college girl moves down to Georgia with her camera to become the next Walker Evans—though the dream dies pretty quickly. In a way, the woman in the story is a sort of a selfportrait. She is the outsider coming to the South with a whole set of preconceived notions, and trying to respond to and create something out of it. But it turns out—in the story and in life—that this new world she’s come to is unfathomable, ultimately. And literally, in the story, because so much history is deep underwater, in the town flooded by the dam. Even if she did come to understand the place she was in, there are things lost forever that she’ll never find. That’s something I’m aware of: though it helps to look at a place with an outsider’s eyes, you can never know it as deeply as someone does who has been there his entire life.

Also, thinking about the characters in the book, I knew I wanted a story about a middle-aged woman looking back, contemplating what’s lost in her life, to round out the story of the two girls in “Sweethearts of the Rodeo.” I knew too that I wanted a story in there that took place in the 1980s as a fulcrum between the 1940s, when the earliest story in the book takes place, and current day.

GW: There’s a lot of music in these stories, which of course drew me in: If the river was whiskey and I was a duck

I’d dive to the bottom and drink my way up

But the river ain’t whiskey and I ain’t a duck— LP: The fiddle tune in “This is Not a Love Story” is called “Drunken Hiccups.” The first version I heard is by the wonderful Virginia fiddler, the late Tommy Jarrell. Those old tunes are interesting because, in the folk tradition, people would make up verses along the way. They are collaborative works, and ever-changing—as long as they keep getting sung.

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literature / lydia peelle There’s a line that sometimes gets sung in that tune: “Get to feeling much better, gonna sprout wings and fly.” I’ve always loved that line. It’s at once so hopeful and still so resigned.

GW: I know that books and writing inspire my music, and I was wondering if music inspires your writing?

LP: Oh yeah, the old songs. They work in two ways for me: I use bits and pieces of them in the stories, but also think my ultimate goal is to write a story that could capture the feeling of one of those songs. Of course, a story always has an emotional arc: you’re in a much different place at the end than at the beginning, while most songs don’t change from beginning to end, just sustain one emotion or one feeling start to finish.

GW: Those old songs can really trigger something.

The other day I was writing a song and I wrote the line, “Going to run all night.” And I thought, Where’s that from? I know that’s from something. Oh! Of course, “Camptown Races.”

LP: Yeah, well, we were talking about Joyce before the recorder was on, about how he could write Ulysses making all those allusions to other works and knowing that his reader would have had a certain literary education and would be bringing it all to the reading of Ulysses. The thing is now, in 2009, you can’t be certain your reader has read all these works. You just don’t know what they have read, and you don’t know what they are bringing to your work. Except with—

GW: Except with music.

LP: Exactly; you can still do it with music. You can make those allusions and references. You can put a line from “Camptown Races” in a song and it will do so much to me as a listener. It’s going to remind me of something from when I was two years old, and it’s going to make me think, “Do-dah, do-dah”—

GW: And how cool is that!

LP: Yeah, and so many other things that come with my memory of that song. For me, and I imagine for a lot of other people, it has a strong association with my school playground.

Boys sitting on top of the monkey bars singing it at the top of their lungs. So I am reminded of that. I also see a 19th-century saloon on the Western frontier, rough characters at a piano, a poker game … And you’ve done it with just five words! I envy you songwriters. First you write the song, and when it’s really good, you hit that point when you’re writing, that moment you get the spark, you know, and you forget yourself and all that. And then, later, you get to perform the song, and you might get that spark again. You might get it again hundreds of times over the course of a lifetime on stage. Whereas when you write fiction, it’s just the one time, sitting at your desk, that you might get the spark. And the finished work is just the ashes, really.

GW: But there is something about performing—and I’m just thinking about this now—which is that you have to rely on the interpretations of others. If someone plays it from transcribed music, it’s going to be an interpretation, whereas with a book, the thing is the thing.

I don’t want to ask about particular stories, because I think it takes the focus away from the work as a whole, but I do want to ask about “Kidding Season.”

The end of that story takes such a turn. I had such a

reaction to it, physically—it sickened me. The reader likes Charlie, and you want him to get out of the goat farm, but then the end comes and you just think, Oh, no—the baby goat! Do you want to comment on your process for that story?

LP: Yeah, I worked on that story for a long time. I started an early draft in 2000, and finished it last year, so it was moving through my mind for eight years. The structure was always the same, but I never knew how to end it. This sounds totally ridiculous, but then I had a dream, and in the dream someone came to me and said, “You know that goat story of yours?

Well, Charlie needs to get away, and then much later he will realize that he loves Lucy, his boss on the goat farm.” I woke up and thought, a) I really shouldn’t be listening to my dreams for advice on how to finish stories and, b) I just don’t know about him coming to the realization that he loves her. That seemed too tidy. But, of course, I wrote the dream down.

Years later, that dream did help me write the end of that story.

There’s something very personal for me in that story.

I have been in that situation so many times in my life, where I’ve left like that, just burning all the bridges and leaving a place or a situation, and thinking I’ve gotten out—

GW: Needing to get yourself out.

LP: Yeah, and you think you do, you think you’re safe, but then it’s like, Oh my God, the baby goat. You’ve abandoned something. Thinking you’re okay, that you’ve managed to save yourself, and then realizing your actions have such a greater effect, and what you may have lost or destroyed along the way: ow many days? How many days did the kid fix its eyes on H the crest of the hill, waiting for him? And Lucy, out checking the fence line for winter damage, how many steps did she take towards what was left of it, first thinking it was nothing but a last dirty pile of snow? … Se le perdió algo, they said to one another after a while. He has lost something.

GW: I almost started crying there. It’s funny, it’s only

with a few books I’ve had that reaction where I’ve

actually cried—wearing glasses, the tears start to puddle

on your glasses! It’s always Steinbeck for me. I wouldn’t

say he’s one of my favorite writers, but for some reason,

those endings, those punch lines, trigger that in me.

LP: For me it’s Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’m just weeping at the end. It’s such a long book, and intense— something like three days covered in 400 pages—and all the emotional weight of that is on you in those last pages, and then Hemingway slows it way down. You’re just exhausted, and Robert Jordan, of course, is exhausted, hiding out there in the forest, so you’re right there with him. He’s just waiting; you know he’s surrounded, done for. The officer is coming up the trail, gun cocked. The book ends with the image of Jordan’s heart beating: with life. That simple last sentence: “He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.” When you close the book, he is alive. So the book ends with great hope coupled with tragedy. Every time you open that book, Robert Jordan is still alive, hanging in the balance, though you know he’s going to die. It’s incredibly powerful. It’s what we all are, isn’t it? The bell “tolls for thee.”

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BOMB It doesn’t happen as much any more. I wonder if that’s a part of getting older. Or maybe it’s because now that I’m more conscious of writing, I’m looking too closely at how writers are doing it to really feel it.

GW: I was able to go to a Bob Dylan show once where I was able to escape that. It was so good that I wasn’t trying to figure out how he was doing it.

There are many heartbreaking moments in your stories—where farm animals invoke that sadness.

LP: I am very interested in our relationship with animals, and, for that reason, I am drawn to the culture of agriculture, where animals are ever-present not only as companions but as work partners and food sources. I think a lot about our failure, as a species, to communicate well with each other, and that leads me to think about our communication with other species, how sometimes it can be, ironically, so much purer than the relationships we have with one another. I’ve always had animals in my life, so for me, they are intrinsically tied up with thoughts about responsibility and caregiving. Domestic animals put the ultimate trust in us, so there is great potential there for ultimate betrayal, which terrifies me.

GW: Was there something that you looked at to help you write this book? That’s an odd way of saying it, but was there something along the way that helped inspire you?

LP: It took five years to write it, first in Nashville, then in Virginia, then in Cape Cod. Through all that, the thing that kept it going, the thread, was walks. Walking in the woods.

I do a lot of my writing while walking … not like Wordsworth composing whole sonnets while walking the heath, you know, not whole paragraphs, but I’ll go for a walk and a sentence will come and then I’ll come back and sit down at the desk and build around that. Also music. Always music—listening to those old folk songs.

GW: Yeah, those old songs that are so strange. Like, “and then he killed her,” but they never tell you why he killed her.

LP: I listened to a lot of Dock Boggs: “When my earthly stay is over / throw my dead body in the sea. / Just tell my falsehearted lover / that the whales will fuss over me.” It’s like, Whoa! So amazing. So beautiful and mysterious.

GW: You think, If I could ever write a line like that. But you can do that in fiction, can’t you? Just write a line that is totally mysterious and strange?

up or foul the world up beyond repair. That is somehow more terrifying; we’d rather see the whole planet combust and disappear than see the cockroaches take over the Empire State Building and the coyotes trailing along the empty, cracked interstates. Anyway, across so many cultures, stories of the end of the world are about a new world, a better world on the other side of the destruction. The fresh beginning.

That’s the picture that the Book of Revelation paints. My hope is that this language will echo that for the reader.

GW: Did you learn anything from writing this book?

LP: Quite a bit. Because it’s my first book, I learned so much about my process. I’m working on a novel now, which is completely different than my experience of writing these stories. Sometimes it’s like I’m watching myself sitting there at the desk, and saying, Wait a minute. Stop right there. I know what you’re about to do, and it won’t work, so don’t even try it. What I learned is that I am an extremely inefficient writer.

GW: It sounds like we have a similar process. (laughter) LP: Just reams of wasted paper. I feel like I have to know the whole story, as if someone has told it to me, before I actually write it. Like I’ve got to know all about this guy’s mother before I can begin to write about him. For a while I couldn’t write a story unless I knew whether or not each person in the story believed in God. Then there’s, of course, rewriting the same paragraph over and over, because I’m afraid to go on, or I don’t know where to go next. I write in the mornings—

GW: I was going to ask if you had a routine.

LP: Yeah, I write in the mornings, not for any reason other than that I said, Okay, I’m going to sit down every morning and do this. Sometimes I wonder if I’m so inefficient simply because I’m not awake enough at that hour to think clearly, to be effective.

GW: For me, it’s the same, but on the other end. I don’t get going until midnight, and then by the end of it, I think my brain …

LP: Is not firing on all cylinders.

GW: Right.

LP: Someone told me recently that you shouldn’t sit down to write without knowing what you’re going to write about. I thought, Hang on, that’s like three-fourths of my process right there, sitting there staring at the desk!

GW: Me too, and then I don’t start writing until I’m totally miserable.

LP: Writing is so painful. There are so many things I’d rather do than write. I think I’d rather do anything than write.

GW: Jerry Garcia said, “I’d rather pitch cards into a hat all day than write a song.”

LP: Flannery O’Connor said it was like trying to eat a horse blanket. The thing is—you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to just get something down. If I’ve done that, then I know I can go on with the rest of my day and do all the other things I do. Writing that one page—or even that one paragraph or sentence—is the one sacred part of the day. That’s the sacred act; everything else is simply profane. I don’t feel like anything else I do is all that worthwhile.

One of the girls, dark-eyed and wasted, sees me and reaches out, saying something I can’t hear over the din, and I strain to make out her lips. Come on, she’s saying, come quickly, come, come … (from “The Still Point”) LP: This passage is inspired by the language of the Book of Revelation. The girl sitting on the carousel horse, the whore astride the beast: “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come.

And he that heareth, let him say, Come.”

“The Still Point” is a story about a man who is caught up in thoughts of the world ending—a lot of my characters are, though. The world’s going to be just fine, it’s going to long continue to exist: a rock revolving around the sun. It’s us that might one day end, either because we blow ourselves

Listen to Peelle reading a story from Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing on BOMBsite.com.

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BOMB specific

Since 2001, I have structured my work as if it were a book of paintings with evolving chapters: the story unfolds via the exhibition situations, the past work, the paintings themselves, and the viewer’s place before them. The size of these chapters can range in size from

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one painting to however many I choose. The paintings—all either a golden ratio or a square—must always be one of six sizes priced accordingly.

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R.H. Quaytman & Geoff Kaplan

These four pages are an outline of an underlying structure showing chapter titles, dimensions, and prices. The op patterns function as background noise to scramble legibility. I developed them as drawings with the San Francisco-based graphic designer Geoff

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Kaplan, who designed my book Allegorical Decoys. Presently, we are working on an upcoming publication and used this project to begin a visual discussion about it. —R.H. Quaytman

8/12/09 2:47:46 PM

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BOMB BACK TO SCHOOL baG

BARD Bard’s MFA program offers a nontraditional approach to the creative arts. Intensive eight-week summer sessions, ten-month independent study periods, and online seminars challenge students while providing space for artistic exploration. www.bard.edu/mfa

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CALARTS California Institute of the Arts’ (CalArts) six schools—Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music, and Theater—educate professional artists in an environment founded on excellence, experimentation and cross-pollination among disciplines. www.calarts.edu blog.calarts.edu CARNEGIE MELLON university Carnegie Mellon School of Art’s BFA, MFA, and interdisciplinary degrees offer a breadth and depth of programming that engage contemporary issues, ideas and technologies, and anticipate the future while respecting the traditions of artmaking. In both practical and visionary terms, we seek to examine and expand the role of artists in our time. www.art.cfa.cmu.edu

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GODDARD COLLEGE Goddard’s pioneering BFA Creative Writing low-residency program provides students with an intense on-campus residency, opportunities to form writing communities, and the chance to work with experienced faculty writers who mentor them, helping them place writing at the center of their lives. www.goddard.edu/bachelorfine arts_writing NYU TISCH SCHOOL OF THE ARTS

SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE’S MFA WRITING PROGRAM One of the largest programs of its kind in the country, Sarah Lawrence College’s nationally recognized Graduate Writing Program brings students into close mentoring relationships with active, successful writers. Students concentrate in fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry, developing a personal voice while honing their writing and critical abilities. www.sarahlawrence.edu/writing

Offering graduate degree programs in the performing and media arts: stateof-the-art facilities, a collaborative community of award-winning faculty, internships with established professionals, and the incomparable resources of New York City.

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Columbia University School of the Arts (SoA) is a thriving, diverse community of internationally renowned artists and faculty. SoA offers MFA degrees in Film, Theatre Arts, Visual Arts and Writing and MA degrees in Film Studies, as well as summer programs and public events.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, THE LEWIS CENTER FOR THE ARTS

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The Lewis Center for the Arts is designed to put the arts at the heart of the Princeton experience. Students can engage in a range of arts programs including Creative Writing, Dance, Theater, Visual Arts and more. www.princeton.edu/arts

Inventive and inquisitive students from all backgrounds are invited to enroll at SFAI for unique cross-disciplinary investigations into contemporary global art practice and theory.

Spalding University’s four-semester, brief-residency MFA in Writing combines superb instruction with unparalleled flexibility. Study fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children/young adults, screenwriting, or playwriting. mfa@spalding.edu, (800) 896-8941 x2423 www.spalding.edu/mfa

for more information visit bombsite.com

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BY Carlos Motta

Compass, 2009, plywood, tap dancer. Photo by Jens Ziehe.

Copyright Allora & Calzadilla and Tempor채re Kunsthalle Berlin.

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art / allora & calzadilla

Allora & Calzadilla

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BOMB for the Temporäre Kunsthalle. Their latest sound environment is Compass, for which they’ve altered the vertical dimensions of the space with a dropceiling made of plywood, on top of which an unseen dancer performs, sending the sounds of steps and jumps resonating throughout the empty gallery.

—Carlos Motta

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

—Isak Dinesen Since 1995, artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla have collaboratively produced an expansive interdisciplinary body of work. Their videos, sound pieces, installations, sculptures, performances, and social interventions reflect on and use contemporary and historical sociopolitical conditions and events as a point of departure. I first became interested in their work when I encountered Land Mark and Returning A Sound, two pieces made in response to the civil disobedience campaign in Vieques, Puerto Rico, which lyrically addressed the particular history of US militaristic ideology and intervention on the island. Allora & Calzadilla’s particular approach to the political is closely connected to their determined site-specificity. Their manipulation of objects, sound, and environments would be impossible without their preceding research of and thoughtful response to the particular sites where they produce and show their work.

An Allora & Calzadilla project begins with this hands-on involvement before its transformation into an effective work that makes sophisticated use of metaphor and language both as narrative and aesthetic devices. In Chalk, a monumental social intervention in Lima’s central square, the artists distributed enormous pieces of chalk to the public, who used it to write temporary messages (political or otherwise) on the plaza’s pavement. Hope Hippo, a life-scale hippopotamus made of mud for the 2005 Venice Biennale, supported a volunteer who read the daily newspaper and blew a whistle upon encountering an instance of social injustice in the news. Their recent piece Stop, Repair, Prepare represents their greatest synthesis of conceptual rigor, political awareness, and sensitivity to form.

This sculptural performance consists of a grand piano with a hole in its body through which a pianist stands and plays Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” (the anthem of the European Union as well as the inauguration song for a Nazi propaganda building) while laboriously pushing the instrument around the space.

This interview was conducted by email over a period of two weeks between New York and Berlin, while the duo was preparing their new exhibition

arlos Motta: There is currently a cacophony of sounds C and images being produced in Honduras—the effects of the military coup, which ousted Manuel Zelaya from presidency yesterday. The national anthem is being sung by pro- and anti-golpistas alike, shifting its meaning to fit their respective ideological stands. Crowds are joining to form spontaneous choirs, screaming slogans of support and/or resistance. Militarism and the media are reproducing an aesthetic of antagonism, a spectacle of politics. Several of your recent projects address the political implications and aesthetics of sound and music associated with militarism and war. Could you share your thoughts on conflict as an aesthetic force? And expand on your engagement with it as artists and as activists?

Guillermo Calzadilla: We see a fundamental relationship between violence and form in the sense that the creation of all forms entails a certain violence—the exclusion of everything the said form is not. The idea of “conflict as an aesthetic force” is much more troubling for us, as it asks how social violence in the form of conflict affects sensory values and taste. This is a provocative question that opens up new angles we hadn’t considered before in the relation of our work to militarism and music.

Jennifer Allora: One example of the direct influence of military conflict on musical aesthetics is the alla turca musical style of the late 18th and 19th centuries. This was popular among Western classical composers such as Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn, who attempted to imitate the sounds of the Turkish mehterhane (Janissary bands) with the sounds of bass drums, triangles, and cymbals folded into their scores. It is argued that these “exotic” sounds first entered Viennese classical– music culture after the 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna.

Another example, this time from the World War I is the 369th Regiment. This was the first African-American combat unit consisting of musicians recruited from Harlem to Puerto Rico, led by James Reese Europe, a famous ragtime composer and bandleader. Known as the “Harlem Hell fighters,” they formed a military band and performed for the troops, government officials, and French civilians while on duty in France in 1918 and 1919. They are largely responsible for bringing jazz music to France.

GC: There are endless examples of these kinds of crosscultural influences brought about by military conflicts, but these are just a few of the many ways in which the history of war has affected the history of music.

JA: And vice versa. From Aeolian kite flutes used during the Han dynasty—whose sounds were thought to be

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art / allora & calzadilla

above: Chalk, 1998 and 2002, 12 pieces of chalk, each 12 inches in diameter and 64 inches long. Performance view at the third IberoAmerican Biennial, Lima. Photo by Allora & Calzadilla.

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below: Hope Hippo, 2005, mud, whistle, daily newspaper, reader.

192 Ă— 72 Ă— 60 inches. Installation view at the Venice Biennale. Photo

by Giorgio Boata. Copyright Allora & Calzadilla and Lisson Gallery, London.

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BOMB

Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, 2008, prepared Bechstein piano, pianist (Amir Khosrowpour), 81 inches long. Photo by David Regen. Copyright Allora & Calzadilla and Gladstone Gallery, New York.

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From Aeolian kite flutes used during the Han dynasty— whose sounds were thought to be warnings from the gods, petrifying the enemy and causing them to flee— to the Scottish Great Highland Bagpipe—the only instrument to be declared a weapon of war—music has served as both a psychological weapon and a way to communicate in battle. warnings from the gods, petrifying the enemy and causing them to flee—to the Scottish Great Highland bagpipe—the only instrument to be declared a weapon of war—music has served as both a psychological weapon and a way to communicate in battle.

GC: Right … also, take the current Iraq War loudspeaker assaults during PSYOPS missions that make use of pop, heavy metal, rap, and rock music as a sonic weapon blasted toward buildings to prevent insurgents from sleeping and for its perceived cultural offensiveness. Here, music is used directly as a weapon to detract the opponents’ ability to fight and to increase the possibility of surrender.

CM: How did your interest in this subject begin?

JA: We first became interested in this question during our involvement with the civil disobedience campaign in Vieques, Puerto Rico, which ultimately led to the closure of the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility. This was a 60-year-old military ammunitions-storage facility and multiple-warfarepractice range supporting large-scale virtual war scenarios from land, air, and sea. “Vieques Libre,” as it was popularly known, was a grassroots movement that grew to include an international network of support for peace and environmental justice not only for the inhabitants of Vieques who were exposed to toxic levels of contamination, land expropriation, and environmental degradation, but also for the thousands of innocent civilians whose lives were destroyed as a result of US-led military conflicts that were prepared for in Vieques.

GC: As artists, we became interested in questions related to the sonic violence that marked this space, as it was exposed to ear-splitting detonations up to 250 days out of the year.

The first work we made in that regard was Returning A Sound, which we filmed just after the military lands were semiopened to the public in 2003.

JA: We decided to make a work that acknowledged the achievement of the peace and justice campaign, while at the same time pointing to the new stakes. The video addresses not only the landscape of Vieques, but also its soundscape, which for residents of the island remains marked by the memory of the sonic violence of the bombing. It follows Homar, a civil disobedient and activist, as he traverses the demilitarized island on a moped that has a trumpet welded to the muffler. The noise-reducing device is diverted from its original purpose and instead produces a resounding call to attention. It becomes a counter-instrument whose emissions follow not from a preconceived score, but from the jolts of the road and the discontinuous acceleration of the bike’s engine as Homar acoustically reterritorializes areas of the island formerly exposed to sonic blasts.

GC: The atonality of the trumpet’s call—it variously evokes the

siren of an ambulance, Luigi Russolo’s Futurist intonarumori and even experimental salsa or jazz—puts it at odds with the musical convention we might typically expect to mark a popular victory and an affinity with a “land,” namely an anthem. We were interested in the idea of an anthem as a commemorative structure, but we were not satisfied with the conservative connotations of the word. We preferred the more open set of associations that the Greek etymology of the word offered, antiphonos (sounding in answer), a composite of anti- (in return) and phonos (voice). The title of the work excavates the etymological origins of the word in order to unsettle it from within. The anthem thus entails a kind of answerability to a sonic event that preceeds the one who answers. This primitive definition marks a potential dissonance in a genre associated with the harmonious “voice of the people,” a figure normally tied to the principle of territorial belonging. Yet in Vieques, the future of the reclaimed land remains uncertain and is largely insulated from democratic claims. Returning A Sound at once celebrates a victory and registers its precariousness, calling for an unheard-of vigilance.

CM: I am interested in your statement above: “The idea of ‘conflict as an aesthetic force’ is much more troubling for us, as it asks how social violence in the form of conflict affects sensory values and taste.” I hear the sound in Returning A Sound as metaphor and think of metaphor in the context of your work as a prime aesthetic resource that conceptually assists you to address conflict from the perspective of sensibility and taste, as opposed to, let’s say, discourse and rhetoric.

Can you expand on the role of metaphor in your work and its relation to the way you influence form?

JA: Metaphor, for us, is a primary resource in questioning the limits and boundaries of all so-called truths. By means of creative combination or substitution, metaphors can produce new insights and meanings. Because metaphor has the ability to transform, it can be a powerful tool when applied to the social arena where meaning is consensually fixed. It can become a tangible force in reshaping how the world appears to us, thus opening new possibilities for subjective, individual, and communal identifications. We see this function as both aesthetic—shaping form to create new sensibilities and perceptions—and political—making possible new meanings which can influence someone’s choices in how they relate to a given subject.

GC: We’re also interested in the excessive potential of metaphor—that is, for a thing to represent something other than what it is. This unformed potential of metaphor is very important for us. It’s what makes it monstrous.

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BOMB CM: Metaphor’s ability to transform aids it in reaching us affectively. Your recent piece Stop, Repair, Prepare, for example, is very moving. The poignant simplicity (and originality) of the gesture of having performers play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from inside out on an early Bechstein piano is very successful in articulating the political weight and associations of this piece of music. But its greatest strength, to me, lies beyond its contextual references; it lies literally in the sound of the piano’s open “guts.” Can you speak about affect in your art, and about the relation between affect and the political in your work?

JA: Sound has played a major role in many of our works.

It is a very interesting territory to explore because of, as you mentioned, its affective nature. Sound literally touches.

The vibrations produced by sound move tiny bones inside our ears. This stimulation is registered first as an intensity (affect) to which the body responds with feelings, emotion, and cognition. The sensorial experience of sound—physical, bodily effects—unformed, unstructured, and prior to any attribution of particular meaning, is perhaps what people refer to when they say a musical experience is “moving.” How our senses, our emotions, our beliefs, and our judgments are mediated through affects and resonances constitutes a very rich line of inquiry within the larger terrain of the biopolitics of embodiment, especially since it foregrounds the body as the material site from which people are connected to each other and to the world at large.

and art-historical references (you’ve talked about Gordon Matta-Clark as an important predecessor), and how it may have opened new grounds for your work in the future. It seems to me that it successfully bridges several of your interests.

GC: Stop, Repair, Prepare developed over a long period of time. We had the idea of making a hole through the body of a grand piano for a long time, but it wasn’t until 2008 that the work took its final form. After making a series of works that took more of a constructivist approach to sculpture, such as Clamor and Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech), we wanted to return to the traditions of the readymade and assemblage, so this idea of a grand piano with a hole in the center of it stood out from our notebooks as an appealing object to pursue.

JA: Since around 2005 we had been looking closely at the history of music’s relationship to warfare and had amassed a great deal of research on the subject. One of the subjects, which we mentioned earlier in this interview, was the influence of Janissary music on Western classical music. We had actually traveled to Turkey a few times starting in 2006 to develop a short film for the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, and so had become more familiar not only with its rich history, but also with current geopolitical questions. Turkey has always played such an important role as a link between Eastern and Western cultures, but at that time, three years into the Iraq War, facing such challenging questions about what constitutes a healthy democratic state was especially interesting to us. What are the limits of freedom of expression (especially with regard to religious expression and the secular state)? What are the limits of state sovereignty (the Kurdish question)? What role should Turkey play as a regional actor in the Middle East? Finally, what is its status within the European Union?

GC: Having learned that the musical anthem of the European Union was Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” which includes a Turkish march as part of its score, we felt that we finally found the right piece of music for our piano idea. We considered proposing the piece for the Istanbul Biennial, but after doing some research into the technical aspects of making this happen, we realized it would be much too difficult in the time left before the exhibition, and so kept it aside for a later time.

JA: Around the time of the Istanbul Biennial opening we were

GC: Also, we’re interested in the violence embedded in the transmission of affects and the role that sound has historically played in the way bodies affect one another … what arouses affect? How can affect be mobilized or engineered as a social force? As artists, we are interested in practices that foreground the material nature of sense and that place the body in the center of public forms of subjectivity linked to the organization of power.

CM: Stop, Repair, Prepare seems to be a work that addresses both the affective nature of sound and the “material nature of sense,” as you describe it above. I would be interested in learning more about the process of making this piece, as well as about its conceptual Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, 2008, prepared Bechstein piano, pianist (Andrea Giehl), 81 inches.

Photo by Marino Solokov. Copyright Allora & Calzadilla and Haus der Kunst, Munich.

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Returning A Sound, 2004, color video with sound. Total running time: 5 minutes, 42 seconds.

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art / allora & calzadilla asked to develop a project for the central hall of the Haus der Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich: the Third Reich’s first monumental propaganda building. We got a chance to look at the archives in the building’s basement. There we found an image of a room with a Bechstein piano and tables in it.

It turns out that there was a piano bar installed in the room adjacent to the central hall that would play officially approved music, which Beethoven was no doubt included in. In fact, we later learned that the “Ode to Joy” was played to inaugurate the building. It was one of Hitler’s favorites.

GC: Other factors slowly emerged that made it more and more clear to us that the Haus der Kunst would be the perfect place to realize our piano project. One was the unique relationship that Germany has with Turkey. The largest Turkish population living abroad is located in Germany (this migration began with the “guest worker” program initiated over 40 years ago during the post-war reconstruction period). Finally, there was an interesting connection between Nazi Germany and the nationalistic state architecture built in Turkey in the 1940s (especially in Ankara, under the influence of Paul Bonatz, a contemporary and rival of Paul Troost, architect of the Haus der Kunst). These associations provided a rich constellation of references within which to situate this piano work.

roads lead in the expanded field of art, performance, and musical experimentation from John Cage and his peers to the present? Finally, the terrain of affect and embodiment that we spoke about earlier was also very important to us.

CM: Your work’s relationship to history and the political seems to be mediated by language, storytelling, and narrative. Your projects provide alternative ways to “read” canonical interpretations of history. Also, as the answers in this interview make evident, discourse is essential to your practice. You carefully construct meaning by way of language in addition to your work with form. Can you talk about the role of language, speech, and narration in your work?

JA: Language has played such a central role in our practice mainly because of the fact that we collaborate. We are two people with different backgrounds, subjectivities, and ideas who must find a way to communicate in order to work together. So language has become a very obvious place to begin this dialogue.

GC: Our particular pleasure in looking into the origins of words is an extension of this. It is both useful and fascinating to us to see how words have taken different turns in meaning as they have moved through times and cultures, and inversely, in what distant universe of meaning a word began, and how those etymological beginnings might still haunt its understanding and use in the present.

JA: All the same we are interested in the ruin of language, with words that slip from their intended meanings, that work against themselves, that topple into nonsense, that push language to its silent end or beyond.

CM: You have often referred to your work as “monstrous art.” Can you expand on your use of this adjective/ category/concept?

GC: We have talked in the past about the monstrous dimension of art. By that we mean the potential in an artwork to exceed the plans and purposes of its creators. For example, in the case of the piano, which is formed in such a precise manner, we are interested in the things that are unmeasurable and unformed in the work, which can go beyond our intentions, and can make the work mean something we couldn’t anticipate.

JA: The etymological root of “monster” is fascinating. It derives from the Latin monstrare: to show.

GC: We’re interested in those moments in which the work “shows” at the level of form and content something that interrupts and alters its context and predetermined meaning: the ever-present possibility within a form or matrix of a future that could be something other than an extension of the present.

JA: While these factors became the impetus to realize this work in Munich, we were also interested in a more essential set of questions that we hoped this work might also provoke, which are not reducible to any of these site-specific influences. One of these questions was specifically related to the music: what can “Ode to Joy” stand for today, if anything?

Have the claims for “universal brotherhood” been hollowed out over the course of centuries of appropriation by disparate political and ideological agendas? What role might silence play when introduced into sections of the main melody?

What does it mean to push a piano while playing? What new relations can be made between musical performance and choreography? Other questions had more to do with the work’s potential within the art historical tradition: what constitutes sculpture today? What is the relationship between object and performance? How does one deal with questions of time and duration in an exhibition? What is the relationship between site specificity and displacement? Where might the Clamor, 2006, plaster, foam, pigment, tuba, trumpet, two trombones, flute, drum kit, pre-recorded sound, live musicians. 365 × 207 × 64 inches. Photo by A. Burger. Copyright Allora & Calzadilla and Kunsthalle Zurich.

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Watch Allora & Calzadilla’s Returning A Sound on BOMBsite.com

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By Margo Jefferson

Thomas Bradshaw

Jerry Zellers, Peter Mccabe, and Hilary Ketchum in Prophet. P.S. 122, 2005. Photo by Ben Kato. All images courtesy of Thomas Bradshaw.

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theater / thomas bradshaw “But what exactly is a black? First of all, what’s his color?” Jean Genet prefaced his incendiary 1959 play, The Blacks: A Clown Show, with those words. I’m happy to appropriate and apply them to Thomas Bradshaw, for his plays (published

by Samuel French, Inc.) also invade dangerous, treacherous territories. I interviewed him at the Lark Theater this past July. He was preparing for a workshop of his latest play, Job, at Soho Rep, which gives that sacred biblical text some seriously profane and welcome revisions. Thomas Bradshaw is a “distinct shade of brown,” to use a phrase uttered by the father of Marvin Gaye in a Rolling Stone interview conducted after he had murdered his son. (“Negroes” calling themselves “blacks” were one of Reverend Gaye’s many grievances.)

These are the kinds of lethal facts and ironies that Bradshaw cherishes. His plays are full of highachieving suburbanites—college profs, corporate lawyers—cheerfully gripped by sexual, racial, and religious manias, and often set on ignoring the fact that they are alcoholics and cokeheads. The first one I saw was Prophet, which began when a well-groomed, well-spoken man any woman in the audience might have mistaken for a decent prospect, clasped his hands together and prayed: “Lord, I have failed to be masculine. I am not worthy of my penis.” To become worthy, he is instructed by the Lord to time-travel back to 1865, that deadly year when slavery ended and the women’s movement was reinvigorated. His mission was to marry a “Negress” and re-enslave her.

In a Bradshaw play, no one in the audience gets to sit back in safety and crow over the sins of others. In matters of vanity and perversity, our lust for psychic and social power—in addition to our secret angers: class, race, and gender—are equalopportunity employers.

— Margo Jefferson

character/caricature of the professor in Purity.

TB: Yeah, someone like Vernon in Purity. Fifty years ago, writing was treated as art; it was assumed that what someone was writing was coming out of their imagination. Now we live in this moment of reality TV and everybody’s trying to tell their story. Being an artist of color, there’s an even higher expectation that you’re supposed to be writing about your struggle, your personal experiences.

MJ: And your personal anguish. It’s very much permeated criticism; the life is ceaselessly read into the work. Your work is historically grounded. It occurred to me that with so much slavery showing up in your plays, in a way, you’re writing costume dramas. It’s historical, psychic costume …

TB: Absolutely. I love costume drama.

MJ: Gone with the Wind? (laughter) TB: Definitely not. But I loved the movie Mandingo. I actually didn’t see it until after I wrote Southern Promises, and I’m glad because— MJ: Oh God, yes! You must have thought, I appropriated Mandingo without having seen it!

TB: Exactly. It was amazing! I was so glad that I hadn’t seen it before that, or else it would have influenced me.

MJ: I remember deciding, with a black feminist friend, that we were going to go see Mandingo. We joked about wearing big hats so we wouldn’t be recognized.

The thrill that that supposed trash delivers! You’ve also nabbed on to a certain truth: our psyches speak in what our egos and rational selves call clichés. These pronouncements, these declarations, these extreme statements, like “I hate niggers!” That’s the way our fantasy lives and our internal dialogues work. You know, we all want to think we don’t have bad taste—we

do! That’s the zone that you are always pushing the

audience into.

TB: You’re absolutely right; my characters speak in subtext.

In traditional plays, we’re still in this moment of psychological realism that we’ve been in for a very long time. In that world, characters say one thing, but their intentions are different.

So when actors are taught how to act, it’s “Okay, so you’re saying this, but what are you playing? You’re playing the subtext.” There’s none of that in my plays. There’s a unity of

Margo Jefferson: Thomas, you look so preppy in your blue shirt with a polo pony!

Thomas Bradshaw: Well, when you write plays like mine, you had better look responsible and decent! (laughter) People are often surprised when they meet me. I feel like they sometimes think they’re about to meet a monster with three heads that’s going to rip their throats out and kill their parents.

MJ: Something like that.

TB: People actually say to me, “You’re Thomas Bradshaw … you seem so, nice and, um, good-humored.”

MJ: They’re probably expecting something like your

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Detra Payne, Jason Grant, and Peter Mccabe in Prophet. P.S. 122, 2005. Photo by Ben Kato.

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BOMB what the characters are thinking, feeling, and doing. They’re acting on pure id.

MJ: All of the social habits and manners are still, nevertheless, at the service of the id. Like when the two wives crowd around the black professor Carl in Purity: they’re being good, liberal, sexually aroused, bourgeois women.

TB: They’re doing what we were just talking about with the struggle: “Oh, we feel so bad for you! Oh, your life was so hard!”

MJ: How do you get your actors to work that? You’ve been called a satirist, but often your satire is played with emotional texture, like in those moments of incredible grief and tenderness one feels from Essie May in Strom Thurmond Is Not A Racist. Your actors are amazing at giving us three-dimensionality within this world where it’s not “I’m playing subtext.” How does this happen?

TB: This is the most difficult thing. Casting is really the most important part of any production, but especially with my plays. It’s about being absolutely present and in the moment and being able to turn on a dime. Let’s go back to the psychological-realism analogy. Actors often think about the arc of their character, but in my plays, you can’t think about any of that stuff. It’s like, right now I’m angry at my wife and I’m yelling and screaming, and, the next moment, I’m really happy that I’m going to go off to Ecuador. There’s this purity of feeling. I often talk about my work as hyperrealism; it’s more real than reality: reality on crack, reality without the boring parts, if you will. Psychological realism has too much of the boring parts of life: “Oh, let’s just sit around and talk for an hour.” Like anybody wants to see that on stage! I mean, I’m often in conversations thinking, Man, I really gotta get out of this conversation.

MJ: You’re not just blaming the other person; it’s yourself also.

TB: Right. This person and I need to stop engaging with the subject matter and just break away. Clearly, plays are artifice—mine too—but approaching theater in the way that I do is much more real than the truth that we claim to derive from psychological realism. In psychological realism the characters always tell the audience exactly what they’re thinking and why they’re doing what they’re doing, but people seldom have that much self-awareness. My characters don’t explain their behavior and that’s much closer to the way we experience life. If you came in here today angry and standoffish, I would have no idea why you were doing that. I wouldn’t know whether you stubbed your toe this morning, or whether something was going on with your family, with work, or anything. All I would see was how you were treating me, but with no insight into your psychology.

We respond moment to moment; we don’t know what’s going to happen during the day. This whole search for truth with reality TV and “your struggle”—I don’t think it gets at any real truth. I’m trying to get at an essence of the truth.

MJ: There’s something similar going on, both sensational and earnest, in this search for truth in the conversation about race that we are nationally advised to have. It makes you feel a sense of weariness and

dreariness, even though we all know, on some level, that we want it terribly. But we want it to deliver something other than this dutiful psychological realism that you’ve been talking about.

I remember reading that you had a responsible black father who wanted you to be a lawyer. You had majored in sociology and playwriting, thinking you might go to law school.

TB: My father, who has always been very supportive, is an electrical engineer. He’s this man of science and numbers, so he just couldn’t understand that I was going to go to college and major in theater. Really, it has to do with the price tag: $34,000 a year to just make up things on a piece of paper and say them out loud. A lot of people think that about theater, That looks easy, I could do that!

MJ: Movies feel much more central to the culture.

TB: Yeah, absolutely. My mother always wanted me to be an artist. As a kid I went to this arts school where we did academics for half the day and arts the other half. I knew this was what I wanted to do, but I thought I should have a backup plan in case it didn’t work out, seeing how few people actually are successful in the theater. By my junior year it became apparent that I was not going to go to law school.

I was going to try to go to graduate school for theater. My father accepted this decision.

Whenever I go see my father and his wife they’ll be like, “Why don’t you write something more mainstream, you know, one of these Broadway musicals, something that people want to see?” And my father, God bless him, when I won the Guggenheim, was like, “Oh my God! Wow! That’s so amazing; who arranged that? Did your agent do that for you? I knew you had a following, but I thought that they were some kind of fringe weirdos.” (laughter) MJ: You see, it’s a perfect example of your dialogue.

It’s all right there. He wasn’t going to censor, it just got blurted out.

TB: And he wasn’t trying to be derogatory or mean; he was paying me a huge compliment. But stuff like that you can’t even make up.

MJ: I started this track about sociology and law; I’m thinking particularly about Strom Thurmond and Southern Promises, but it also happens in Prophet. At the end of these plays, a character steps forward and makes a public address that has elements of an elegant court summation: “Here is the case, for and against; here is why I had to find my freedom, why I was willing to be nailed into a box and escape.”

These plays also have the quality of those great 19th-century speeches that were politics and theater: Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, just hundreds of people who made speeches that were a form of entertainment, but also intellectual and political enlightenment. Those speeches are risky theatrically, because of the legal-argument quality. Audiences get their backs up about being lectured to: we’ve had it pounded into us that theater mustn’t be didactic, that we shouldn’t make judgments. You’re asking us to weigh evidence, draw our own conclusions, but you’re

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theater / thomas bradshaw

infusing that process with multiple emotions.

TB: Those speeches are almost a little comical to me— especially my placement of them.

MJ: How so?

TB: Because they end a play in a very traditional way. After you’ve watched this play that’s not traditional at all, whose form is not recognizable, then suddenly it’s, “And now we’re going to act like you just saw a normal play that you could have seen at any other theater.”

MJ: That’s true.

TB: Actually, Chekhov does that a little bit.

MJ: He does. When you see good Chekhov, even if it’s just a particular speech that lights up, it stays with you; you keep repeating it to yourself, like you’re feeding on it.

TB: Shakespeare too, with his speeches at the end. You’ve watched this fantastical stuff and then it’s like, “And now we’re going to wrap it up with this.”

MJ: That wrap-up gives you a little space; it quiets you down. You’re very smart with that because you’re always in some kind of strategic negotiation or battle with your audiences. The speeches are defenses, arousals… They allow you to have some common order restored, so there’s more room for this tumult and turmoil to come up in a way the audience finds manageable.

TB: I don’t do this in all my plays, you know. I’m perfectly happy to leave people in turmoil at the end. (laughter) MJ: You’re right. That’s not what’s going on in Prophet.

Matt Huffman, Derrick Lemont Sanders, Peter Mccabe, Erwin Thomas, and Hugh Sinclair in Southern Promises. P.S. 122, 2008.

Photo by Ryan Jensen.

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It’s not what you do at the end of Purity either. It’s very disturbing—a death followed by the murderer’s lines: “I hope that tainting my white doves was worth it for you, because they’ll never be the same to me. A dark stain now rests upon them.” It’d be as if we ended Macbeth with one of the murderers just saying, “Calm down.” (laughter) TB: It pretty much ends with a Shakespearean couplet. It leaves you with a very unsettling feeling. Every play calls for something different. Purity is a very unsettling play and we need it to stay in that place all the way through. That’s generally considered my most controversial play.

MJ: I read some of the reviews. Which play of yours received the most critically ignorant reviews?

TB: The reviews for Purity are the most critically ignorant.

MJ: What is it that people were missing?

TB: I wish more critics understood that theater is in conversation with other theater. How does Purity interact with August Wilson? How does Purity interact with plays that were coming out during the Reconstruction?

MJ: We do that with literature vehemently: that’s the critical approach. How does it interact with Amiri Baraka? You can’t not think about Dutchman when you see Purity: two college professors, one black and preppy, one white. Then the sexual underside: in Baraka it’s a black man and a white woman; here it’s the two men and a ten-year-old Latin-American girl. But when another black professor is hired, Vernon becomes

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BOMB obsessed with his own hatred of a certain kind of ’60s blackness. He hates “niggers” and this “nigger” must die. It’s as if Vernon in Purity contained both the white woman’s sexual rage and contempt and the black man’s cultural rage and self-loathing in Baraka’s Dutchman.

TB: Criticism doesn’t often recognize theater artists as being part of this long tradition. What is the place of the theater that I’m making if you look at it as part of that tradition? And here’s the other thing: I write plays without subtext—characters’ motivations are left unexplained and no overriding message is being championed. This is apparently confusing for some people. In the case of Purity, there was this assumption that I didn’t know what I was doing. Some of the reviews came close to saying, “Well, he just hasn’t figured out how to write a psychological-realist play yet.”

MJ: And he made Vernon, the black character, so unsympathetic.

TB: Right, you can’t have these unsympathetic characters and hope to advance the racial conversation. How could a critic assume that I don’t know what I’m doing? The assumption should be that this is all done on purpose, and if it’s done on purpose, then what does that mean? Trash the play, by all means, but write about the play on its merit.

MJ: I’d also add, from the critic’s side, maybe you don’t trash it but instead say, “I am in tumult; I don’t really know what to make of it; my feelings are incredibly mixed, but I have to coherently convey uncertainty, vulnerability, while making the work come alive.”

TB: That’s a really good point. In most plays you can hear the playwright’s voice telling you what to think. One of the things that pissed people off about Purity was that the play never said, “Going to Ecuador to have sex with a kid is a bad thing to do.” Really? People need me to tell them that that’s a bad thing to do? I want audiences to think about what’s happening.

It’s for the audience to come to a conclusion about the play. A critic writing, “I’m confused about how I should feel about this,” is making a valid statement. I wish critics didn’t claim to have all the answers all the time. There’s a review for my play Dawn, which is all white characters—

MJ: Ah, a black writer featuring all white characters!

TB: Yeah, I’m not allowed to do that.

MJ: That barrier has existed for several centuries.

TB: I’m desperately trying to break out of it. One of the reviews of Dawn said essentially, “Tom Bradshaw should stick to writing about subjects that he knows something about.” I couldn’t believe that an editor would let that slip by; an editor should say, “Wait a minute, do you know Thomas? How do you know that he has had no experience with the subject matter?” There’s a lot of stuff going on in that play—the basic subject is alcoholism. I can assure this reviewer I know plenty about alcoholism, and having grown up middle class, in a primarily white environment, I’m probably more qualified to write about white society than I am to write about life in the ghetto.

MJ: Or life on the plantation. (laughter) TB: I’m definitely more qualified to write about modern society, white or black, than I am to write about what black

life on a plantation in 1854 was like. I just think that we’ve gotten away from this idea of the imagination as a source for writing.

MJ: Which writers is your work in conversation with?

TB: That question always catches me off guard. Emily Brontë is a huge influence on me.

MJ: Interesting.

TB: Wuthering Heights is told so brilliantly. Also Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—his economy of language.

He talks about very major plot points with such simplicity, that you could almost miss them if you weren’t paying attention.

Camus’s The Stranger makes me think about why humans behave the way they do. It’s like, “I shot this guy because I was hot.” I’m reducing his philosophy there. Bertrand Russell—what is reality? Those people influenced me very early on, and I had forgotten the effects that those writers and philosophers had on me. Heart of Darkness also blew me away when I first read it. That, Wuthering Heights, and Hemingway showed me what literature could be; I could do whatever I wanted!

MJ: Tell me a little more; you said with Wuthering Heights it was the way the story was told.

TB: Heathcliff embodies the idea of acting on pure id. This guy is just doing what he wants; he isn’t adhering to any conventions of the day. And yet he is acting this way with

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above: James Scruggs and Daniel Manley in Purity. below: Albert Christmas and James Scruggs in Purity. P.S. 122, 2007. Photos by Ben Kato.

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I’m definitely more qualified to write about modern society, white or black, than I am to write about what black life on a plantation in 1854 was like. I just think that we’ve gotten away from this idea of the imagination as a source for writing. it’s about understanding, not about dividing, about the fact that we can all relate to each other a whole lot more than maybe we would even want to.

MJ: That’s the thing: can one make sense internally of some of the monstrosity, of this drive to subjugate like the one we see in Prophet? You don’t only deal with slavery—very often it’s suburbia, religion, gender.

It’s also the need for power and some sort of weird self-expression that gets turned into domination, and seduction.

TB: Yes, that’s true. In Dawn, for example, what’s unsettling is that the characters are people that everybody can recognize. This might be you, your next-door neighbor, your kid—it’s all rooted in humanity. That’s more frightening than demonizing people and pointing at things and saying, “Bad.” It’s easy to separate yourself and put these people you don’t like in another category, but if you’re all standing in the same pool, what does that mean?

MJ: There are layers and levels of complicity. Tell me a little about the new play.

TB: It’s called The Bereaved and it’s about a white family in Manhattan. The mother is a very wealthy lawyer and the husband is an adjunct professor. She wins this big case and they decide to do some cocaine to celebrate—she goes into cardiac arrest and dies suddenly. The play is about the consequences of that situation. It’ll play at the Wild Project, this new theater on East 3rd Street between Avenues A and B. It’s very nice.

MJ: Are all the characters white?

TB: There are lots of layers: the family is white, there’s a drug dealer who’s black, and the husband’s new wife is Asian.

Race is not really an issue in the play; it’s more about what’s not said.

MJ: Which is—hello!—often the way life unfolds.

TB: I mean, the play is more of a commentary on modern culture. If there’s any racial commentary, it’s that there isn’t any racial commentary, mostly.

MJ: Is that, you think, what is meant by this term “postracial” that is being thrown around a lot? Do you buy that?

TB: I don’t buy the way the term is being used. I was listening to some Republican pundits on NPR and they were like, “I’m glad Obama got elected because it shows that racism is over.

There’s no need for affirmative action anymore. We can get rid of all these programs because we’ve proved that a person can rise.” We need to put the brakes on for a couple of moments here.

MJ: Also with Sonia Sotomayor … In their minds, people of color are becoming the oppressors.

TB: I can’t believe that someone like Rush Limbaugh, of all people, is calling her a racist.

MJ: Don’t you love the way people like him have been

this suit and tie—he becomes this refined individual on the outside, but inside he’s still totally brutal. The lengths that Heathcliff goes: he digs up Catherine’s body and hugs it, knocks out the side of her coffin so he can be buried next to her in the dirt and have their bones be together! It gets to an essence of truth that is more truthful than reality, and that’s what I’m talking about.

MJ: You know what just flashed in my mind? The slave-master-turned-abolitionist husband in Southern Promises. He’s killed the mulatto baby, he’s killed his wife, and he decides to free his slaves. The way that’s played, the grimness, the horror.

TB: That’s one of my favorite moments in Southern Promises because it’s having a conversation, historically, with other pieces of writing where freeing the slaves is a wonderful moment that comes from this place of pure goodness: “Let’s give the slave master a round of applause!” It’s unclear what my character’s motivations are; he could be doing it out of spite.

MJ: Yes, he could.

TB: He’s just like, “Fuck Elizabeth, cheating on me with this nigger! I’m gonna free this …” The truth is, with human beings it’s often a mixture of so many different things: there isn’t a pure motivation for anything.

MJ: I want to know what blew you away about Heart of Darkness.

TB: The descriptions of these English men engaging in brutal acts, yet they’re wearing crisp white shirts that they have to keep changing throughout the day.

MJ: Because they’re getting bloodied.

TB: Because they’re getting bloodied, they’re getting sweaty, and they need to maintain a sort of decorum under those circumstances… that just blew my mind. It’s like, What on earth are these guys doing? It crystallized the horror and the hypocrisy for me. I also deal with dark subjects, but what I try to do in my plays is bring out the humanity of these people— Mckenna Kerrigan and Andrew Garman rehearsing The Bereaved, 2009. Photo by Ben Handzo.

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BOMB screaming at people of color, especially blacks, for playing victim and playing the race card? I’ve never seen so many powerful white men enjoying playing the victim.

TB: This gets back to this whole idea of the id, and being one thing one moment, and the exact opposite the next.

MJ: They’re having the time of their lives.

TB: Obviously, this Obama thing is truly amazing. It’s changing people’s perceptions in subtle ways. It’s just making it a lot more difficult for people to make the assumptions they made before. That’s a huge small leap forward.

MJ: In a way, that’s what you’re doing with your work, notwithstanding those extreme shock moments.

TB: If you described the plot of one of my plays, it sounds very unfunny. And yet the plays can be laugh riots and it’s like, Why are we laughing at these things?

MJ: Which are usually a series of crises and catastrophes and follies.

TB: The way we usually deal with major subjects in art and the media bears no relation to the truth. There’s comedy in the midst of tragedy and tragedy in the midst of comedy. You actually can never separate the two and that’s how theater should be.

MJ: Who is The Bereaved in conversation with? I love this idea of the playwrights in conversation.

TB: I see five to seven plays a week, and I am often left with the feeling that something important is missing. So many plays are just skimming the surface of important issues, and fail to connect in any real visceral way. I’m making an effort to fill that void. So, I’m in conversation with all theater at this moment, not just one playwright.

MJ: You’re in conversation with our Western traditions.

What are you working on today?

TB: What we’re workshopping today is my honest, un-cynical adaptation of the book of Job; it’s called Job. I did a ton of research. The Talmud has like eight different theories about when Job lived and who he was, so I had to sit down with a Jewish scholar and figure out which would be best for my purposes.

MJ: Why Job? TB: We live within this oddly religious moment in America.

It’s funny, you go to Europe and society is so secular there.

In many ways, the way people talk about the Bible and what’s actually written in the text bear no relation to one another.

Mainly, I just love Job. The beginning of Job is Satan coming to a meeting of the sons of God. God says to him, “Hey Satan, what’s going on? Have you seen my servant Job?” So they start having this conversation about Job and they make a bet.

Satan claims that Job’s only righteous because God gives him everything and he lives this perfect life. He says to God, “If you took away everything that’s dear to him, then he’ll curse you to your face.” And God says, “Okay, take everything away from him, but don’t harm his person.” So Satan kills Job’s family and takes away his home, but Job doesn’t curse God. God goes, “I told you so!” Satan argues that it’s because his physical well-being wasn’t harmed, “If you take away his health, then he’ll curse you.” And God is like, “Go ahead, do whatever you want to him. Just don’t kill him.”

I started thinking, What is their relationship? In my play God and Satan are brothers: that’s what their relationship seemed like to me. They have kind of this love–hate relationship, and they very much seem like equals. Then I started thinking about the sons of God. In my play, they are Jesus and Dionysus—I see a lot of similarities between the God of the Old Testament and the Greek gods. That’s all part of the texture of the play.

I’ve always been fascinated with religion. In Mary, a play I’m writing right now which was commissioned by the Goodman Theater, the title character is an old black lady who can’t read but can quote the Bible. One of the stories she quotes is Lot. Do you know the story of Lot? MJ: Lot and his wife fleeing without looking back. It’s sort of like Orpheus and Eurydice.

TB: There might be some plagiarism going on in the Bible from Orpheus and Eurydice. Lot insists that two men, strangers to the town of Sodom, stay in his home. Then every single man in the town comes to Lot’s house because they want to have sex with the two guys. Lot is like, “No, please!

That’s not how we treat guests!” Then he says, “Look, I have two virgin daughters. You can do whatever you want with them, just don’t touch these two guys.” The guests happen to be angels of God.

MJ: And the daughters?

TB: The angels of God save them. What does this say about the world we live in, if we’re supposed to look at this book as the guide for our morality?

In Dawn, there’s a character, Steven, who has sex with his niece. His justification is that incest is all over the Bible.

Adam and Eve—their kids had sex with each other. I mean, this is how the world got populated. And in the story of Lot, after Sodom is destroyed, his daughters get him drunk and have sex with him because they think they’re the last people living on earth and they want to repopulate the world.

MJ: From “The Devil and Daniel Webster” to “The Bible and Thomas Bradshaw.”

TB: I guess you could say one of my major influences is the Bible.

MJ: There we go, a properly pious ending. (laughter)

Subscribe online at BOMBsite.com

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by Cheryl Donegan

Seven posters from The Singing Posters: Allen Ginsberg's Howl by Allen Ruppersberg (Part I), 2003, 14 Ă— 22 inches. All images courtesy of the artist.

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art / allen ruppersberg

Allen Ruppersberg

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BOMB Al Ruppersberg is my favorite young artist. This might be an absurd way to describe someone whose exhibition record extends from the ’60s to today, yet that’s how I think of both him and his work: fresh, perennial, and maybe a bit underexposed. Maybe it’s the surprise of encountering his work, comprised of drawings, posters, collages, texts, books, and photographs—all alone or in rotating combinations, their colors vivid, their organization crisp. Yet for all their variety and arrangement, a familiar feeling creeps up on you, reminiscent of that used bookstore you used to haunt, that swap meet where you rifled through cartons of old magazines, that restaurant that time forgot.

Ruppersberg reintroduces you to the experience of a less uniform time, a more textured reality, a personal history. It’s a strangely precise feeling teetering on the edge of the ordinary, the meaningful, and the forgettable. It’s real life, but as it’s lived on the printed page: collected, rearranged, retold. Slogans appear in Ruppersberg’s works; not exactly slogans as in ad copy, but more like set phrases rendered strange. They could be quotes from famous artists, or blurbs from Life magazine circa 1957—all familiar, yet somehow not memorable. “The sky above, the mud below.”

“Coming soon! Or maybe later.” Do they come from a Hollywood movie poster or Poor Richard’s Almanac? Did he write them? Where’s Al?

He quotes, “Sometimes a man is lost and shows that he is lost.” Sage or teenager? Al Ruppersberg is my favorite young artist.

—Cheryl Donegan

honest: “I don’t even like to assign students what to read. I don’t even want to give them a syllabus.”

It seems that you do make lists in your work. I’m

thinking about Letter to a Friend, the list of people

whom you were struck by who’d passed away in 1997:

James Lee Byars, Martin Kippenberger, Allen Ginsberg

… You made an elegiac list of these artists.

AR: Well, I wasn’t making a list; I was making a work.

CD: What might be the difference between a list and a work? I was thinking of Homer, who sings the praises and tells the exploits of heroes and gods. That’s the archaic idea of a poet—someone who is communicating stories so they won’t be forgotten.

AR: That’s definitely on my mind, but the work, like Homer’s, is not just a list, it’s also telling a story. Like any other work, it has X number of pieces that go in to make the whole. It happens to be a coincidence that within the year in which I formulated and produced the work, all these artists and writers and poets whom I either knew or respected or was influenced by were gone. If you read the text of the letter that I wrote with tiles on the floor along with these artists’ names, you’ll see I ask myself, What do I do now? These were my heroes and friends, now there’s a huge loss that I have to fill up. The rest of the piece is about this filling up.

CD: Would you say, then, that the piece is a collection?

Or is it an interaction, an experience?

AR: All of the above. Each work has a different origin, and might have a different focus. One might be on some experience; another one about a collection; or yet another one might be about making the past live again through viewer interaction, like my remake of Allan Kaprow's Words, a 1962 environment, for MOCA in 2008. Each work starts with a different frame of reference, and is developed from there.

CD: One of the first pieces I knew by you was Where’s Al?. It’s an early work with snapshots of people hanging out, eating, on the beach, etcetera, alternating with dialogue on index cards in which people wonder if you'll show up soon. So many artists make their own personality very present in their work, but in your work there’s sometimes a kind of disappearing.

AR: Yeah, I’m in there but I’m very distanced, both consciously and unconsciously. That distanced quality shows up in obvious ways in Where’s Al? and also in other works, such as Letter to a Friend, in which I talk about disappearance.

In Where’s Al? I’m there in words but not pictures. In other early works such as Al’s Café and Al’s Grand Hotel, I’m literally there in person. In some of the photo pieces from the early ’70s, I'm wearing a mask. Then there's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Thoreau's Walden, for which I copied Wilde's and Thoreau's works by hand: I’m present but absent there.

To go back to the distancing, it began to occur in the early ’70s with the photo pieces. In those days artists tended to use themselves as objects in a formalized way, or as a way of talking about something more personal. We physically appeared in a lot of our own work. Then there came a point sometime in the mid-’70s when I didn’t want my own image to be present in the art—I began to draw again, and made works like The Picture of Dorian Gray. I wanted myself out

Cheryl Donegan: Looking at your The New Five-Foot

Shelf of Books, I was thinking about “The Three

Marcels” section. The obvious thing that came to mind

was Marcel Proust’s famous questionnaire— Allen Ruppersberg: Oh, right.

CD: There are also the great Pierre Cabanne interviews with Marcel Duchamp; and there must be some great interviews with Marcel Broodthaers. I thought I’d cull questions from interviews with the three Marcels and then feed them all to you. But my husband, Kenny [Goldsmith], was like, “That is so conceptual.” So I’m not doing that. It sucks! (laughter) When I was reading about how you developed this project of curating the library— AR: Yeah, for the Belgian curator Moritz Kung, who asked artists, architects, poets, etcetera, to select a number of books for the library of an arts space in Antwerp. I was supposed to generate a list of books that he could start acquiring.

CD: I noticed your response to him was incredibly

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Installation view of Circles, Allan Kaprow’s Words, 1962, by Allen Ruppersberg, 2008, in Art as Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

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BOMB of them for a number of reasons ... maybe it was the one work where I had myself tied up in various ways—strangled, being gassed in an oven, or drowned in the bathtub. I forgot the title for good reason, I guess.

After that, the works became different, more methodical. There’s always a distanced approach, though it’s not as conscious. That makes it hard for some people. If they can’t figure out how to enter them formally, and they don’t find an emotional core, then they don’t know how to enter the works.

But that’s just the way I work.

CD: Yeah. I’ve witnessed exactly what you’re talking about, when at Gorney Bravin & Lee you showed The Singing Posters. It was right at the beginning of the Iraq war. I remember being stunned, because though the look of the posters was really familiar, the text in them was, at first, absolutely indecipherable. Then, all of a sudden, I literally started to sound it out, and realized it was the phoneticization of “Howl.” I found it intense to be uttering the words almost like a baby, and became aware that this was the way into the work: to actually expose yourself to not knowing what you’re saying, and have this awkward experience of sounding it out, like you’re learning a foreign language. Your posters repoliticized that poem which had become so aestheticized; they spoke of how much we’d forgotten and of the need to relearn how to speak this language of outrage and protest. I got really excited because I’d gotten it, and I remember standing there with somebody who said, “Ugh! It’s old Ginsberg. Who cares?”

AR: Ha! CD: I was like, Oh no! We can’t talk anymore because I’m going to get really mad. I had this fantasy about having a bunch of people doing this public performance, about making them say it aloud, literally almost like a reeducation camp. (laughter) AR: That’s exactly what I set up for people to do: they had to be in there speaking that poem out loud. I didn’t directly connect it to the Iraq war, but I do think of it as a political poem that has to be listened to again. It’s great poetry; surprisingly, young people don’t know it, even though it might be the most famous poem of the post–World War II era—

CD: Probably, yeah.

AR: A couple of years prior to making the work, I asked my students if they knew this poem “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg.

One of them had kind of heard of it in his English class, and another was a little more familiar with it, but the majority of them didn’t know it at all. I actually then used “Howl” as a project in the class; later I decided to take the project out into the world. And you’re right, the posters are very familiar; they’re a public-address system, in LA anyway, or they used to be—they're something else that’s disappearing.

When you drive around LA you see these posters on telephone poles advertising public events. It’s a form that I can empty out and fill up again. I took the form—the colored posters—and then rewrote the poem using phonetic dictionaries and combining three different phonetical pronunciation forms. There is also the giant scale of this thing, so that when you come into the gallery you’re compelled to

start reading out loud.

CD: You hear Ginsberg reading his poem and it’s incantatory, like a chant. We’re back to really old forms, to the aural, to …

AR: Oral history.

CD: Communicating through telling stories. Or, what

you’re saying about these posters. Every time I go into

the supermarket in the country and I see one of those

posters for, say, a church carnival, I go, “Oh look! One of

Al’s posters.” (laughter) AR: See, I never set myself up to have a signature work, but this has become an unconscious signature, which is fine.

Since the early ’80s I’ve used this same company. I let them design the posters, for the most part, because that’s what they know how to do and they do them well. I've kept having ideas for posters, so over the years that work has become more familiar.

I want to go back to “Howl” because one of my inspirations was an original LP that came out in 1959, I think, of Ginsberg reading that and other poems. The recording took place only a couple of years after his first reading of it in San Francisco. His reading is so fantastic. He wrote the poem following his own breath, and so when he’s reading it, he’s reading it the way he wrote it. So when you’re reading it, you’re doing the same thing. It brings it back into an oral tradition, which is where it comes from originally.

CD: This reminds me of one of my really big questions for you in terms of your signature, and work that falls between the cracks. Your New Five-Foot Shelf of Books is very spatial, and sculptural, but I was moved by it as a work of literature. I can spend a long time with it in terms of its structure, its content, the different ways it can be read. I’m convinced that it’s a profound poem— it felt like reading Gertrude Stein. You can flip around in it, which I always like in a book; you don’t have to read it in one direction.

AR: Raymond Roussel said that when you read Locus Solus—or is it Impressions of Africa?—you should start in the middle. He thought it made more sense if you read from the middle on, and then back to the beginning. I always remember that. The book has so much information; so much to read on so many different levels. It’s like an autobiography.

What you have is the softcover version of The New FiveFoot Shelf of Books, which is part of a bigger, physical work consisting of a 50-volume set of hardcover books and a set of 40 life-size color photos, each about 40 by 60 inches. The books reproduce exactly—from the covers, to the paper, to typestyle—the original Five-Foot Shelf from 1909. This was literally a small library compiled by Harvard University's president then, Charles W. Eliot, who claimed that if you read these books you'd have the equivalent of a Harvard education.

The second half of the original work is a to-scale photo documentation of my old studio in the Cable Building on Broadway and Houston in New York. When the photos are hung, they again become the studio. My New Five-Foot Shelf is not the reproduction of the Harvard classics, but a record of the ideas that were generated in the studio pictured in the photos.

We produced the softcover book that you have for the

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art / allen ruppersberg Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia, curated by Christophe Cherix in 2003. One aspect of the piece in the biennial was a performance: I would go, for instance, to a flea market in Ljubljana, where I had a table and would give copies of the book away.

CD: That’s like Duchamp at the trade fair, giving away the Rotoreliefs.

AR: Right. There was a small advertisement in the museum that said that I’d be there at such-and-such time and place and you could have the book.

CD: Were you giving them away as free samples or based on some criteria?

AR: No, they were strictly free. I wanted to give the book away. It’s only an edition of 1,000, and it states in the colophon that it’s not for sale. On a practical level, it’s because the publisher could have been sued a million times over if people wanted to track down the attributed and nonattributed quotes in there—they could get into a legal jungle.

CD: I see the five sections of the book almost like a crawl—they seem to move forward since they’re all in separate lines. You could read them down the page in a traditional way, but you could also read them like musical bars going forward.

AR: You could take the first section and read it—

CD: —All the way through 1,000 pages.

AR: Or when you turn the pages you can mix them up.

But if you wanted to read only the “Honey, I Rearranged the Collection” section, for instance, you could read that straight through by only reading the first line of every page.

CD: But that section, in terms of copyright, is original.

AR: All of the 350 or so entries are original works of mine, yes.

CD: Also the last part, the “Letters from Ohio”: a personal narrative from correspondence. Then there are the notes in “When in Doubt Go to the Movies,” that you’ve made over the years— AR: It’s all my notes about my own works over the years. But the same section of notes also includes quotes I’ve collected out of 15 years worth of notebooks—quotes that probably are copyrighted. And then there is the “Three Marcels” section, which contains lines from or about Proust, Duchamp, and Broodthaers. There’s a lot of stuff there copied straight out of books that connects these three Marcels—they happen to all be my favorite artists, and I may have taken from them the most in the beginning. A copyright lawyer would freak out, so we had a certain number of copies of the book to be given away during the exhibition. Unfortunately, they gave away too many and now they’re showing up on the Internet, which pisses me off.

CD: Now someone who was given a gift is turning a profit. It defies the gift economy.

AR: There are going to be very few of those performances from now on. The idea was that you could only get the book by my giving it to you.

CD: My sister is an historian of early American colonies.

She told me this story about the clash between

Native Americans of the Chesapeake Bay and the

English. It strikes me also as a clash between a gift-

giving economy and a mercantile economy. The natives

and the English wanted to trade, but the natives had

this ritual of gift-giving first. The English wouldn’t

reciprocate because they didn’t understand what the

heck was going on. So they’d take all the gifts and

they’d be like, “When are we going to get to the

trading?” But the natives would think, “You don’t know

how to be polite; you’re not giving us any gifts, so we’ll

save face for you by taking this silver cup as a token.”

Then the English would assume, “They’re thieves!

They’ve stolen our silver cup! We must retaliate!” The

next day the English would burn the native village. The

native people thought they were actually sparing the

English of the embarrassment of their barbarism!

AR: It’s a good story.

CD: I thought you’d like it since there’s this idea of sharing, storytelling, and perpetuating what otherwise would be forgotten because culture doesn’t have the proper values to honor what you’re determined to keep alive. I’m stuck on this idea that there’s this archaic quality to the work; archaic in the poetic sense.

AR: That’s definitely 90 percent of the work.

CD: Kenny was asking how come you were not in The

Pictures Generation show at The Met; I thought that it

was because the work is not about the media, but

actually, in a funny way, about the absolute opposite.

Media is about built-in obsolescence.

AR: The Pictures Generation issue is complicated but, certainly, the work has never been exclusively about media.

An element of my work uses mass culture and popular culture—that’s always been there, particularly in California, where I went to school and got started. I mean, it’s Hollywood!

CD: What’s interesting about the pop-cultural tropes you’ve chosen is that, like the posters, they’re rather authorless.

AR: That’s a good point.

CD: Like plastic bags that say “Thank You.” Who designs those? Who picks the typeface for the bag that says “Thank You for Shopping Here”? I love their authorlessness and their ubiquity. When you take an object from pop culture, it’s almost the most humble, like these mass-produced posters.

AR: I gravitate to those kinds of things. They are straightforward and simple—there’s a lot of that kind of look that I appropriate and use. Graphic design plays a big role in what I choose to work with.

CD: I’m thinking about the project for Utrecht … those

illuminated signs.

AR: The show was called Nightlines, and my piece, Evening Time Is Reading Time, is now a permanent installation. The city of Utrecht bought it after the show, and it’s been well taken care of because the people there really like it. Scalewise and form-wise, the signs were taken from beer signs— what’s the most well-known Dutch-Belgian beer from there?

CD: Heineken?

AR: I think so. Anyway, it’s a ubiquitous form that I could empty out and fill up again with my own subject matter: in this case, reading and looking. In a way it’s the same as

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appropriating the posters from LA. The illuminated signs have a specific scale; they’re two-sided and they stick out perpendicular to the wall. Nightlines is a site-specific work in that the signs are installed on one street in Utrecht where we interviewed the people living there to find out their occupations. Then I designed signs that related to this information. In the old days, a sign of an image of eyeglasses meant that it was an eyeglass store. This is similar. Up and down the street there are X number of double-sided signs which, on one side, have images relating to people’s jobs.

I did these using a salesman’s book of matchbook-cover designs from the ’30s or ’40s. They were categorized; a barber, for instance, would pick the barber matchbook cover.

Same for waitresses, or whatever. I appropriated those images, mixed them up, and remade them into logos for each occupation. The idea came from the old Gotham Book Mart on 47th Street in Manhattan. It had a great handmade sign of a boat with a man fishing, and a logo that said, “Wise Men Fish Here.”

CD: Wow! AR: I went for that kind of poetic image/text. The other side shows a blind being pulled down. As you go down the street, the blind comes a bit further down on each sign, and written on the blind is the text, “Evening time is reading time.” So, as you walk one way down the street, you see the blind coming down. If you turn around and come back the other way, you see the images of people’s occupations. That’s how it works.

CD: Daytime is for work and nighttime is for reading.

AR: The title and theme of the exhibition is a Utrecht tradition: Installation view of The New Five-Foot Shelf of Books, 2001, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Belgium.

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they have an annual all-night poetry reading.

CD: Here’s a funny question based on some of the things that we’ve been talking about, and some we didn’t talk about, like Al’s Café and Al’s Grand Hotel.

So much has been made about relational aesthetics— I wonder how frequently your work is mentioned in

the development of those practices? Your work also

tends to encourage ways of living and models of action

suggesting a more playful, thoughtful way to be in

the world.

AR: I’m definitely related to relational aesthetics because of my relationship to the artists whose work generated the development of this idea. It begins in ’90 or ’91, when Eric Troncy and Nicolas Bourriaud curated a show called No Man’s Time at the Ville Arson in Nice with the curator/director there, Christian Bernard. It has become a well-known historical show because it included the artists who would then go on to be associated with relational aesthetics: Philippe Parreno …

CD: And Rirkrit Tiravanija— AR: He wasn’t in it. Felix González-Torres was in it; Dominique Gonzales-Foerster … and some Americans like me. After all, I come from the original relational aesthetics of Allan Kaprow and ’60s experimentalism, with cross-disciplinary ideas and so on. Basically, the art–life continuum is a large part of my position as an artist and, as I see it, relational aesthetics is just a step away from that. The dispersal of objects as in scatter art, the uses of time and coincidence in both the public and private space of the gallery, and what used to be called poststudio art, are all involved in their work and mine. They might

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art / allen ruppersberg disagree, but I very much identify with this group of artists.

I’ve been in other shows with them over the years and we’ve become friends in the process.

CD: Back to Ginsberg, if you think about it, his readings must have been like happenings. Your work may be heir to happenings and poetry at the same time, or maybe it’s something completely new, yet familiar in that it’s resuscitating something we’ve missed back to life.

AR: I do try to find things that are on the verge of disappearing so I can resuscitate them, use them so that they are present again. One of my favorite works of this kind was for Sonsbeek 93 in Arnhem, Holland. I made a memorial for the Battle of Arnhem of 1944, the event by which the town is best known. I researched the most popular books of the period in the four countries involved in the battle: Germany, Holland, Poland, and the United Kingdom. I then found original copies of as many of these books as possible, and chose five from each country to have reprinted. One hundred copies of each were printed: half were shown in a restored trailer made to look like a closed bookstore, and the other half were sold as new books in the local bookstore in the center of town.

CD: Resuscitation is a good word because it’s not sentimental or nostalgic. It’s almost like someone performing CPR. AR: I always liked the movie Re-Animator. It’s a horror film from the early ’80s. I like the title and the idea of reanimating.

CD: I’m attracted to things that have an undercurrent of violence that’s somewhat seductive: CPR, where there’s this horrible struggle going on, and it’s almost like the violence of birth or the violence of sex. It’s supercharged, which totally separates it from nostalgia or even museology. Which brings me to that book out on the table, with Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” He talks about how the library is not a waxwork, but this living thing. You can really make a picture in your mind when Benjamin talks about the books all spread out, and the mess and the chaos— AR: It’s one of my favorites, for sure. It’s about having the past be present. In The New Five-Foot Shelf there are lots of quotes about bringing the past forward, like this one by William Faulkner: “There is no such thing as was. To me no man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was, because the past is. It is part of every man, every woman, and every moment.”

CD: Well, not to trivialize that, but having worn vintage clothes all my life, I certainly know what he means! So, when you talk about your projects with their multiple origins and variants, do they exist on the Internet?

You’ve expressed an interest in giving things away …

AR: Dia invited me to do a Web project, and it turned out that The New Five-Foot Shelf worked really well as one. For the online version, all of the volumes of my books appear at the bottom of the page: you can click on each of the books and they will open up so you can read them. You can look at an image in the photos and you can also go to the books and find

texts that relate to those things you might see on the shelves or walls of the studio. It’s all there; you just go to the "Artists' Web Projects" on the Dia website.

CD: Someone scanned all the books and photos?

AR: Yes, it took them a year to do it. I also did a soundtrack for it, which most people don’t know is there.

CD: And what about your film collection?

AR: My collection of films is for me to make artworks out of. For a work like Remainders, 1991, for example, I used my collections of books, movie posters, vintage greeting cards, etcetera, to make a work without any found objects in it; it's completely original.

CD: It’s known that you’re a collector, but the works you make from the collection are the works, and the collection is the collection.

AR: I collect not as a collector, but as an artist who finds things to use. It’s not that I want to collect something that’s going to be this or that in the future; it’s because I think I can use it. Though it might take 20 years for me to—

CD: To figure out where it goes.

AR: In some cases it has taken 20 years to figure out where something goes. The only real question is where to store what I collect so I can use it later on. As of now I’m doing a new work that is based on an old Uncle Scrooge comic-book story. I used it once in 1969, but now it seems new again and will become a sculpture.

CD: I think of a collector as somebody who’s very

stationary, who needs to be around all of their things,

but you’re really peripatetic. How does that work?

AR: That’s what everybody wants to know.

CD: Good! It’s part of the interview, so everyone now

will know.

AR: I can’t tell you exactly how it works, except for the fact that each of my locations feeds me in a different way. There’s the practical aspect of it: I can only afford to keep my stuff in certain places because I only have so much money. There are a number of reasons for having the majority of it in Ohio.

CD: Space is cheaper.

AR: It also happens to be where I’m from, and I like to go there. I do certain things there, and out in LA I have other stuff that I use, or in my apartment in New York … the stuff moves around as I move around, if I need it.

CD: Maybe people need to get a different idea of what being a collector is: it’s not being around objects, but having the memory of objects—that’s part of the way in which collections turn into works.

AR: Exactly. I might start a project based on something that I have and want to use, but then as the work develops, something new comes out of it that later, in turn, starts a new collection. Eventually that new collection might work itself back into new pieces. It’s not that there’s a set kind of thing to be collected or kept: that is always evolving out of the work.

Now I’m interested in finding things that I hadn’t thought of before. I wish I had, because they would have been a hell of a lot cheaper! But you don’t know until you get there.

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By June Stein

Cherien Dabis directing Melkar Muallem (Fadi) on the set of Amreeka.

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film / cherien dabis

Cherien Dabis

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BOMB January, 2002: Columbia University’s graduate film school. The winter sun flashed through the miniblinds in my classroom, spilling slatted bars of light onto the beautiful face of a stranger in the corner.

Who was she? It was a new semester, but “Directing Actors,” the class I teach, is a full-year course and I don’t allow new students to join midstream. Rules are rules, but I didn’t bargain on the likes of the force about to be born. Cherien Dabis stayed, busted her ass, and ate every pertinent molecule in that room. As my colleague, professor and filmmaker Katherine Dieckmann said: she was incredibly diligent, dogged, and determined to learn the screenwriting form. She’d rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

She was tireless. She just didn’t give up on her ideas until she got them right. Her great determination and focus were a huge factor in how she got her first feature made. Because she’s tenacious. Power to her.

Amreeka, a comedy/drama, premiered at Sundance in 2009 and played as opening night of New Directors/New Films at MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. At Cannes in 2009, it was awarded the prestigious FIPRESCI Critics’ Prize. The film is a universal journey into the lives of immigrants searching for a better future in America’s promised land. Muna, a single mother, leaves the West Bank with her son Fadi only to find undreamed-of challenges in a new world full of seismic changes.

I thought of my own young artistic ambition as I trudged up 85th Street, past a FedEx depot that used to be Merkin’s, a jazz-and-drugs bar. Bizarrely, Cherien’s apartment was in the exact same building that I had moved into exactly 40 years ago when I first came to New York, before Cherien was even born. Here’s the old wrought-iron fence! And the crooked little entrance facing the elevator that I got attacked in! God, the lobby hasn’t changed at all.

I feel old, but proud. Cherien answers the door and we horse around, do some girl talk, and apply lip gloss for a photo shoot. Then she cracks a joke that she is clearly fond of, so please, LOL.

—June Stein

growing up in rural Ohio surrounded by cornfields, but going back and forth to Palestine and Jordan. How eccentric is that? But when you shake it all down, it’s so American to have had a dual experience of growing up here but feeling displaced, like your roots were across the ocean. So there’s that identity conflict, a tug of war, and suddenly the poem “Generations” came to mind by Kim Addonizio from her book Tell Me. I need total quiet when I read but I don’t have it, so lean in close: (JS reads Addonizio’s astonishing poem.)

CD: I love the part about her father chopping off three lovely syllables and raising Americans—I so understand that. My parents are actually quite proud; they raised us very Arab. But even still, my father was very aware of how we were going to be perceived. My last name in Arabic is Dai’bus, pronounced with that deep back-of-the-throat guttural sound. But in the US we simplified the spelling and pronounced it to sound like Davis. That was the Americanization of our name.

JS: Tell me a bit—or tell me a lot—about growing up the way you did.

CD: I was the first in my family to be born in the US. My parents immigrated the year before I was born. I was born in 1976 in Omaha, Nebraska, where my father was doing his residency. He’s a pediatrician. So, my parents were in the ghettos of Omaha.

JS: Arab ghettos?

CD: There were no Arabs in Omaha. They came over and had nothing and knew no one. My father was spending every other night at the hospital and my mother would barricade us in the apartment because she was so terrified of being in a new place. My older sister was so lonely that her best friend was a nail in the wall.

JS: Excuse me?

CD: She used to speak to a nail in the wall. She was that lonely. (laughter)

JS: That is so sad, but what an incredible image.

CD: We eventually ended up in rural Ohio because a small town there needed a pediatrician. My mother was bored to tears. Every year she saved every penny to take us all back to Jordan for the summer. I went to Palestine for the first time when I was eight. We were harassed and given so much trouble at the Israeli border—we were held for twelve hours, strip-searched at the age of eight.

JS: Oh, no!

CD: My baby sisters were strip-searched. (laughter) Our electronics were confiscated along with my mother’s makeup.

My dad got into a huge fight with the soldiers and vowed never to take us back. So every summer we’d go back to Jordan, and he would go to the West Bank on his own.

Jordan and Ohio are such amazingly different places. In Celina, Ohio, there were many people who had never left the state. So we got all kinds of questions, like, Are there cars in Jordan? Are there phones? Do you ride camels?

JS: Were you ostracized at all at school?

CD: We stood out for sure. But we weren’t really ostracized until the first Gulf War, when I was 14. There was definitely ignorance, but the first Gulf War was when ignorance turned into discrimination.

Cherien Dabis: Are you sure you want an Arab American in BOMB? (laughter) When people Google me, my name will come up next to— Both: BOMB! (laughter) June Stein: (laughing) I’m choking. Too funny. Whew!

Okay, I’ve been thinking about your background,

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we weren't really ostracized until the first gulf war, when i was 14. there was definitely ignorance, but the first gulf war was when ignorance turned into discrimination.

JS: A young teenager. That’s a very tough time anyway.

Even if there’s no war. Even if you’re not Arab in Ohio.

CD: It was my freshman year of high school, and up to that point my dad had been relatively successful. He had saved kids’ lives, so he was kind of like a town hero. And then the first Gulf War hit and almost overnight he became the enemy.

There were crazy rumors flying around. A lot of my father’s patients walked into his office and asked for their medical records back because they didn’t want to see an Arab doctor.

That’s one of the things that I portrayed in the movie.

JS: It’s very palpable in the film. It felt like, Our livelihood is being snatched away from us because of this outrageous and illegitimate discrimination. What gives Amreeka such scope is the political context of the first Gulf War and the echo of that war in the present.

CD: And again, like in the film, we really got death threats.

Quite a lot of them. They were anonymous, handwritten notes left in our mailbox, saying things like, “We’ll get Saddam and we’ll get you too.” Or, “Love it or leave it.” My dad actually kept them all.

JS: Love it or leave it? What does that mean?

CD: Love the US and everything that it does. Love the US government. And if you don’t agree with what the US is doing, then get the hell out.

JS: Were you terrified on a daily basis? Did you actually go to school worried about your safety?

CD: No, I don’t know that I knew the extent of the death threats. One of the most egregious things that happened, though, was that the secret service came to my high school to investigate a rumor that my 17-year-old sister had threatened to kill the president. That was kind of the breaking point for me: Who are these people and where are they getting this information? A friend in high school came up to me and said, “My brother could go to war and die because of you.” The local newspaper was publishing letters to the editor about “the Arabs in town.” It just blew up to the point where there was no escaping it. Prior to that point in my life, I was like, I’m American. I’m no different. I just wanted to fit in. I would go to bed and pray to wake up with blonde hair and blue eyes.

JS: So did I! I’m Jewish, so of course, I wanted to be blonde and blue-eyed. You know, it’s the classic thing: you want to pass. Like the Jews in Germany. They wanted to pass. They needed to pass.

CD: So this was the point in my life where I was like, Okay, clearly I’m not just American; there’s this whole other side to me that I need to examine. I became really interested in who I was and where my parents came from. And because I grew up traveling so much, I was given the privilege of perspective.

Whenever I got used to one place, I was taken out of it.

And then I had to get used to another. And then I was taken out of that. It was always the Arabs not understanding the Americans, the Americans not understanding the Arabs, and constantly having to defend one side to the other and explain who I was. I never quite fit in here and I never quite fit in there.

JS: You didn’t feel American enough for the Americans and you didn’t feel Arab enough for the Arabs?

CD: Totally. I always felt like I was on the outside looking in. I had the philosophical outlook of an observer: What’s happening here? What can I do to facilitate these two things?

I felt like a bridge between two places. And I think it’s why I went toward the arts as a means of expression. After the first Gulf War, I wanted the hell out of that place. But I also wanted people to know what had happened to us. And not just us, but what has happened and what still happens to so many others, too.

JS: Did you imagine that other places in America would be different?

CD: I was in love with New York. From the age of 12, I was begging my parents to move to New York. I had even looked up dance studios and knew that I wanted to take classes at Steps on Broadway.

JS: No kidding! That’s right, we were both dancers! Girl after my own heart. Did you do jazz, ballet, modern, what?

CD: All of it. Tap too!

JS: Tap! You did tap?

CD: I did. But jazz and modern ballet were my favorite. I taught classes and choreographed dances for the yearly recitals and dance competitions. It’s what got me through high school.

JS: You know, when I look at your body I can see that you could have been a dancer. You’ve still got it in you.

You’re kinesthetically hooked up. The neural pathways are carved where you have that mind-body connection.

The openings of both Amreeka and your short film Make a Wish have such a kinesthetic velocity to them.

They move in the same way that an incredibly agile body can cover space and time, fly through the air and hit all its marks. It’s as though the rhythms are in your gut, moving your actors and camera around. For instance, during a scene in Amreeka we see Muna in the background as a woman in the foreground turns on her desk fan, blowing all the papers off Muna’s desk. They go flying in an arc like a corps de ballet doing jetés. Then you capitalize on the repetition of the fan moment later, so we really experience the frustration, the last-straw moment of Muna’s life as she knows it. You brought your dance background into filmmaking. That’s how I interpret it.

CD: I had never really thought about it that way—the rhythm and precision and economy. I work off of my gut feeling about the rhythm of a scene when I’m writing it, as well as when I’m watching it on set and in the editing room.

JS: Your whole nervous system is so musically trained when you’re a dancer. You’re never studying music but of course you’re studying music all the time; not only are you studying it, you’re expressing it. You’re the conduit.

CD: I love that! I think I knew it intuitively, but I never vocalized it. It makes perfect sense, though, because music is so

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BOMB important to me. I have to have music on while I’m writing.

JS: Really? You write with music on?

CD: I like to play music that puts me in the mood of the film that I’m working on. With Amreeka, for example, I had almost the entire temp score and a lot of the music chosen by the time we were in production. The only problem with that was that there were a few heartbreaks—songs that I couldn’t get.

It all ended up working out, though. Like the music in the checkpoint scene where everything’s in slow motion, I found that song at the last minute after giving up the fight to secure a Fairuz song. I think her people turned us down 20 times!

But now the Natacha Atlas song that’s in there is one of my favorites, and it’s my favorite moment in the film, actually.

JS: Oh yes! It’s that moment when that boy is coming toward them, holding a box of something. Yes—he’s so young and happy, but he looks so run-down. We see his whole life ahead of him and how he’ll end up a broken man in this place. That was one of the best-articulated moments I’ve ever seen in a film. We were in such conflict as we identified with Muna, Should I go? Should I stay? I can’t leave my family. I can’t leave my mother.

But my son will have a future if I go to America. Will he really have a future? And then, suddenly, that moment of Muna seeing in that boy what her son’s future will be if they stay.

Wow. You came to study filmmaking at Columbia University in 2001, the week before 9/11—it’s uncanny, the reenactment— CD: The reenactment of what happened to us in Ohio in so many ways.

JS: You finally got to New York, where you always wanted to come—to escape.

CD: Well, people talk about New York and how it was back in the ’80s and ’90s and I get nostalgic, as if I had lived here. But I had never been here before.

JS: That’s a very interesting concept. I have this incredible nostalgia for the ’60s out in Brooklyn where the Jews settled. Old-school Jews. I have a nostalgia for a time I never lived through. Anyway, here you are, 2001, September, and…

CD: And really mourning the loss. Like, what is going to happen to this city? It was as if I’d known New York had already become a different place—the paranoia, the suspicion. Fear was so palpable. It was interesting having grown up in Ohio, where there was no anonymity—everyone knew that my parents had accents and we went to Jordan every summer. In New York I was relatively anonymous.

JS: I remember you so well when you came into my class during the second semester at Columbia. I looked at the roster and thought, Who the fuck is Cherien Dabis? And I’m like, You’re not allowed to be here.

CD: I know! Because I was transferring from another class.

I think you did say that, too. “You’re not allowed to be here.”

JS: I still remember you working on a scene from— CD: High Fidelity! You laughed so hard during my reworked presentation of that scene, and then you said something afterward that I’ll never forget. I have moments in my life where people have given me little nuggets of confidence that

I take and put in my pocket and pull out whenever I need reassurance. You said, “I think for the first time ever, I don’t know what to say.”

JS: Ha! That’s highly unusual! I don’t remember ever having been rendered speechless.

CD: You literally said, “It was perfect,” I totally blushed. It was one of the highlights of my career at Columbia.

JS: I’m curious to hear what your script process was with Amreeka, because the script is masterful. It wasn’t written in this fit of passion where it all poured out. It’s too well crafted for that. You must have worked really hard on it. The passion behind it, what you needed to say, was the fire.

CD: Yeah, I was definitely burning to tell that story. I started writing it in 2003 in Katherine’s Dieckmann’s screenwriting class at Columbia, and it was just lots and lots of rewriting until I got it right. Katherine read so many drafts—she’s an amazing notes-giver—she taught me story structure and character development. I had great teachers at Columbia, Lenore DeKoven, Tom Kalin, Brendan Ward, Dan Kleinman.

I gave it to everyone, I applied to every lab. And then all my peers at Columbia—I took everything that I could; I was like a sponge, soaking up everything.

JS: You were ravenous. Just the fact that you got into my class was … it was like, This girl doesn’t know the meaning of no.

CD: I wonder what I said to you when you told me I couldn’t be there.

JS: It wasn’t what you said. It was who you were.

CD: You taught me how to break down a scene. You taught me subtext. That Fritos bag in High Fidelity—how you can express the emotional undercurrent through something like how a character handles a crackling little bag of chips, rather than some big, emotional actor fireworks.

JS: I want to ask you about the acting in the film, and the casting. I know you went through a Scarlett O’Hara search for the right cast.

CD: I did, actually. I should rewind a bit to say that I did all of the development labs from Sundance to Film Independent to you name it; those programs became my postgraduate education. It was my transitioning to the real world. And then I also worked on The L Word. Intensive years of writing and rewriting and being in the trenches of television production.

It moves so quickly. It was the perfect experience to have before making my first film.

JS: That is great training because nothing is as fast as television. Everything else seems luxurious after television.

CD: Exactly. Well, we shot Amreeka in 24 days.

JS: You are kidding.

CD: It was four and a half to five and a half pages a day; so, the TV experience came in quite handy.

JS: I’m dying to know the budget. Is that, like, secret information?

CD: I’m told to say “under five.”

JS: That’s what you’re told to say? But what was it really?

We won’t put it on tape. Mouth it. No! See, I think that’s something that you should be proud of because—

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film / cherien dabis

above: Cherien Dabis on set in the West Bank during the filming of Amreeka. Courtesy of National Geographic Entertainment.

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below: Nisreen Faour and Hiam Abbass as Muna and Raghda in Amreeka.

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BOMB CD: It looks like it was made for more, right?

JS: A lot more! I mean, my God, just the two different countries and the sets.

CD: The international cast flown in from all over the world … And to get back to that, I always knew this movie would live or die by its acting. It’s a character-driven film. It’s not stylized. It’s not fancy in its camera work. I felt a huge amount of responsibility because, in many ways, my drive to become a filmmaker originated with the desire to tell my family’s story and represent authentic Arab Americans.

It had never been done before, sadly. So we started with my New York–based casting directors at Orpheus Casting putting out an international casting call. First I traveled all over the US and Canada, then Paris, and then Amman, Beirut, Haifa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah. I had to find casting director–type people in the Middle East because there really aren’t casting directors there. It’s a relatively small community of actors who all know one another. You tell them what you’re looking for, and they’re like, “Ah, you should call this person and that person.” Actually, the process of casting there was so much fun. The woman who plays the mother in my short film Make a Wish ended up being the casting director for Amreeka in the West Bank. The way we cast the movie is that we would go to dinner and have a three-course meal, and then we’d smoke a shisha pipe at the end.

JS: Yum. CD: (laughter) And of course, the whole time she would ask me 1,001 questions about the characters. What do they look like? What kind of music did they listen to? What kind of relationship do they have with their mother? Their brother?

Their sister? Their this? Their that? It would challenge me to come up with backstory and psychology and sociology. By the end, she would look at me and write down several names, and I would call those people and bring them in to read.

That was how we found Muna. I told her exactly what I was looking for, exactly what she looked like physically.

JS: You’re a casting director’s dream; half the time people don’t even really know what they’re looking for.

They just hope that someone walks in and they can go, “Yeah, that’s it.” Did you work with the actors at the audition?

CD: Nisreen Faour, the actress who played Muna, walked in with her two sons; the first thing I noticed about her was her relationship with her sons. They treated her like they were her equals. They even jokingly spoke down to her in a way, and she would laugh about it. They had this really sweet relationship. She read the first scene and she started giggling afterward, because that’s just her personality, and I fell in love with her. I looked out at her boys who were sitting and watching the audition and I said, “What do you think?”

And they were like, “It sucked!” Nisreen burst out laughing and started jokingly cursing at them. Right then I knew she was the woman. Her relationship with her sons had a similar quality to the relationship I wanted with the son in the film, where they feel like they’re in it together, and he kind of feels like he’s her husband.

JS: That was one of the things that really succeeded about the film; they were a team. Was there anything

that you added because you had a perfect Muna?

CD: No. Physically and emotionally she absolutely fit the role.

But I looked everywhere for her. Six to eight months traveling, looking at tapes. Watching every Middle Eastern and French film I could get my hands on. It was really quite intensive.

JS: Actually, every single, solitary person in that film was brilliantly cast. How did you work with actors on the set?

Did you rehearse at all before you shot?

CD: I rehearsed as much as I could with the two main characters, the mother and son. And spent a lot of time with them so they had a history; they were in a dynamic.

JS: Did you actually invent a history for them?

CD: As much as possible, yes. But everyone was flying in from different countries. I kept putting their photos up in different collages just to make sure they all looked alike. I didn’t see them all together until two days before we went to camera.

JS: You’re brave. Did you use improvisation at all?

CD: It’s funny because the actors Hiam Abbass and Yussuf Abu-Warda who play Raghda and Nabeel loved improvising.

In fact, their Disneyland argument in the car was improvised.

JS: You’re kidding! And I thought that was brilliant writing— CD: It’s brilliant acting. And being in the moment. I worked closely with them to come up with improvs. But we only used them if they really worked or elevated the material in some way. We would rehearse right before the blocking, and I encouraged them to be in the moment and go off page. To me the script is a map; it’s a point of reference. When you get on set you’re working with people, and if you’re smart then you’ll use the creativity of those people you’ve entrusted. So we improvised, but it was always with intention and a purpose and somewhat structured.

JS: When you say “structured” do you mean that there were circumstances and objectives? They knew what they wanted?

CD: Absolutely. They knew not to go off in a direction that was unrelated. They could improv within certain parameters.

The scene in the car where the kids are smoking pot: that scene is a huge combination of scripted and improv. Part of it was because I was working with the actor Fadi who had never smoked pot in his life. (laughter) And I wanted him to feel loose and free. We did a lot of takes of that scene. (laughter) JS: The film’s locus is the emotional life of the characters, but it also looks great. Who were some of your influences in terms of visual storytelling?

CD: I was looking to the neorealists and social realists. Mike Leigh, for sure. The biggest directors in terms of natural realism were Leigh, John Cassavetes, and Robert Altman.

JS: I love Altman. I was in Tim Robbins’s film Bob Roberts—if you ever watch it you’ll see me do a very wild little cameo. So I go to a screening or the opening or whatever and I get into an elevator after it was over, and Robert Altman steps in. The elevator door closes and it was just the two of us and he turns to me and he goes, “Well, you were amazing.” But he said it like a violent accusation. It was like, “Well, you fucking bitch.”

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film / cherien dabis Great example of playing opposites: the line is “I love you,” but you say it like “fuck you.” Yeah, I love Altman.

I use Altman’s Short Cuts a lot in class.

CD: That was one of the films my director of photography, Tobias Datum, and I looked at for the blocking and camera movement. The way it’s all super organic—the movement of the camera with the movement of the actors. That sort of philosophy—we will block the actors and find the most natural movement for the scene. And then we’ll place the camera, keeping in mind the larger visual goal of the scene.

JS: Was preproduction challenging?

CD: It was actually one of the worst times of my life. It was just an intensely stressful, miserable experience. For some reason we didn’t have a production manager until ten days before going to camera, when we discovered that we were $300,000 over budget. My shooting days dwindled, and I was expected to make “meaningful cuts” from the script five days before going to camera. So it became a question of what I could cut without sacrificing the creative integrity of the film, and how we could scramble to try to find some more money.

For me, it was a real lesson in figuring out what I needed to tell the story. We ended up doing a combination of me cutting as much as I could and the producers getting some more money. Even still, we had a bond company that got involved and came to our production office and said, “We don’t think you can do this.” I think they were literally on the verge of shutting us down. They were breathing down our necks and I went into my first week of shooting so aware of the fact that if I didn’t make my days, I could be shut down or thrown off my own film.

JS: Oh my God! When you started shooting did you feel, with all that stress, that you could keep the focus of your film within you?

CD: Absolutely. I had to. When we started shooting, the misery faded, and I was so in my element. It went from the worst time of my life to the best time of my life. I never felt so deeply aware and focused. I knew exactly why I was there.

And I was really well prepared. You’d be proud. I had my through line, life needs, scene needs, and choice-action verbs all prepared in advance.

JS: We taught you well.

CD: Yes, you did. Production was amazing. When I got to set I was like, Now I know why I’m doing this. I’m loving this. I finished my first day a half an hour early.

JS: Get out. I’m going to put you in the Guinness Book of World Records.

CD: It was a little victory, for sure. The production manager called to congratulate me, which I hadn’t really expected after the stressful prep period. But everyone calmed down a bit.

And I ended at least five minutes early every day that first week. I felt like I had to prove that I could do it.

JS: You’re a warrior.

CD: I had a great crew. And my assistant director, David Antoniuk, and I planned an easy first week as far as emotional content of the material was concerned. Of course, after that first week I said, I’m not going to push myself to end early anymore. I’m going to take every moment I have because I had really tough, emotional scenes coming up, and I knew

I was going to need every last moment of the shooting day.

So it was very strategic. We just needed to prove to the bond company that we knew what we were doing. Starting the second week, I was able to really dive into the work. And I just went to this incredible place of focus; I’d never gone that deep. It was the coolest, most amazing experience ever.

JS: It’s better than sex.

CD: (laughter) Each night, I broke down the next day’s scenes and thought about beats and what I needed emotionally from each moment. Tobias and I had already talked about every scene during prep and what we wanted visually, and I had ridiculously, neurotically storyboarded the entire film. I had a shot list per week and by day. But I was also willing to throw it all out if we got there and it didn’t work. It helped that I trusted Tobias tremendously, because it enabled me to focus on the acting on set.

JS: What was the absolute most challenging scene to shoot in terms of the acting?

CD: The scene with Muna and Fadi at the end of the movie.

It’s the resolution of the main story line. That scene was actually very challenging to write and then it was really challenging on set and it’s in part because I knew it was like, the “Big Scene.” Part way through shooting it, I started to panic that the blocking wasn’t quite working and I didn’t like the way that Fadi was cornered on the couch. I thought I needed more movement, but it was too late because we were two and a half hours into the shooting of the scene. I called my editor afterward, and he said, “It’s great, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” It was just one of those moments where I got so into my own head, and I let this little seed of doubt sprout.

JS: You must have had a real mastery of your emotions to get through that shoot. You have to keep the subject of the story alive in your nervous system and keep the objectivity of the visual. The demands of being a director—to simultaneously have the objective and the subjective as potently opposing forces reconciled within yourself, and keeping that tension intact and not as a source of anxiety … it’s a real high when you manage it.

CD: You’re so aware of everything, everything in yourself and in other people. Your only job is to recreate human behavior, to control space and create reality.

JS: And it’s not ordinary reality, because a large part of ordinary reality operates on an unconscious level.

You’re operating in a hyper-reality. And it’s imbued with a consciousness of reality in order to recreate reality. It’s like we get plugged into the Big Socket. (laughter) CD: It’s the most satisfying place I’ve ever gone. In fact, I can’t wait to go back!

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the wick / matt madden

Matt Madden is a cartoonist and the author of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style.

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