BOMB Issue 115, Spring 2011 Preview

Conversations between Artists, Writers, Actors, Directors, Musicians—Since 1981

the 30th anniversary issue Luis Camnitzer Katharina Grosse Joe Fyfe Thomas Pletzinger & Sufjan Stevens Jim Shepard SebastiĂ n Silva Robert Wyatt Sibyl Kempson

$7.95 US / $7.95 Canada File under Art and Culture Display until june 15, 2011

Number 115 / spring 2011

number 115 / spring 2011 Editor’s Choice

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BOMB SPECIFIC Huma Bhabha with Jason Fox

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Artists on Artists Erik Moskowitz & Amanda Trager

by Craig Kalpakjian Rona Yefman by Michel Auder Jorge Queiroz by Emilie Clark The Wick Dale Williams

60 64 66 96

Interviews Literature / Thomas Pletzinger 24

by Sufjan Stevens A Skype conversation between Berlin-based writer Thomas Pletzinger and New Yorkmusician Sufjan Stevens on life on the road, their favorite Brooklyn haunts, and Pletzinger’s forthcoming novel Funeral for a Dog. ART / Joe Fyfe 30

by Josh Blackwell Joe Fyfe tells painter Josh Blackwell about his involvement in abstraction as a by-product of loss and the wabi-sabi discovered on his travels to Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. film / Sebastián Silva 40

by Christian Viveros-Fauné Sebastián Silva’s highly realistic films are also thrillers. Set in Chile and performed by ensemble casts who replicate their counterparts in life with stunning veracity, his latest film, Old Cats, opens in New York this spring.

Literature / Jim Shepard 50

by Christie Hodgen In the ambitious stories in Shepard’s latest collection, You Think That’s Bad, psychological insight is derived from the characters’ exposure to extreme duress. With fiction writer Christie Hodgen, Shepard discusses his short stories’ guerrilla tactics.

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untitled, 2004, Acrylic on wall, floor and various objects, approx.

110 × 177 × 157 inches. Photo by Nic Tenwiggenhorn. copyright Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2010.

ART / Katharina Grosse 68

by Ati Maier Berlin-based painter Katharina Grosse sees infinite potential in the marriage of imagination and projection. Here, with painter Ati Maier, she expands upon the lack of prescribed causalities or fixed hierarchies in her art.

THEATER / Sibyl Kempson 78

by Kristen Kosmas The two playwrights and performers on the drawbacks of being in constant production mode versus the pleasures of, and requirements for, the incubation of plays: a dose of folly and wonderment. music / Robert Wyatt 84

by Shadia Mansour Musician and composer Robert Wyatt, renowned for his vocals and complex blends of pop, jazz, and world music, bridges the generation gap with the emerging “first lady of Arabic hip-hop” Shadia Mansour.

ART / Luis Camnitzer 88

by Alejandro Cesarco For Cesarco, meeting fellow Uruguayan transplant and early conceptualist Luis Camnitzer in New York in the ’90s had a mind-altering effect. The artists talk about art education as a form of benign manipulation and Camnitzer’s survey at El Museo del Barrio.

First Proof bomb’s literary supplement Jimmy Raskin on Saul Fletcher John Tranter Deb Olin Unferth Roberto Bolaño Madison Smartt Bell Rebecca Wolff Paul Maliszewski Emilie Clark: Portfolio Vestal McIntyre

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letter from the editor The story of BOMB begins about a year before the publication of its first issue in the spring of 1981. The visual artists, filmmakers, and writers who were living in downtown Manhattan at the time discussed its conception for that long—at dinner parties, on street corners, at bars and clubs, and over the phone . . . A look at the first issue gives you an ample cross section of who was talking: Sarah Charlesworth, Kathy Acker, Duncan Hannah, Michael McClard, Tina L’Hotsky, Craig Gholson, Michael Oblowitz, Anthony McCall and Jane Weinstock, Duncan Smith, Terrance Sellers, Eric Mitchell, Glenn O’Brien, Gary Indiana, Liza Bear, David Walter McDermott III, Cookie Mueller, Lynne Tillman, Joan Jonas, Becky Johnston, Jimmy DeSana, Amos Poe, Carl Apfelschnitt, Mark Magill, and myself—visual artists, filmmakers, fiction writers and playwrights.

I was acting and directing with the ensemble theater group Nightshift, and as with all ensembles, each participant’s contributions in rehearsal were organically incorporated into the final production. So, at many of these various dinner parties, I kept saying, Wouldn’t it be great if we had a magazine where we talked about the work the way we talk about it among ourselves? And everyone inevitably responded, Yes! Because within any collaborative arrangement—whether it be dance, theater, performance, or site-specific sculpture—you talk about a work of art’s evolution. What you’re thinking, what you’re open to, what historical works are at play—that’s a natural part of the day’s conversations. As in any rehearsal period, things evolve in a way that perhaps you’d never imagined. That sort of conversation—one like the creative process itself, where the participants eventually come to something that they recognize as revelatory—was the concept we all wanted to catch in BOMB.

BOMB has come a long way in 30 years, and we’re making plans for the next 30. But our mandate remains the same: to deliver the artist’s voice. However, now we do it over multiple platforms: in the magazine itself; on the web at BOMBsite.com, where our Digital Archive will soon expand to include a comprehensive library of all content ever published in BOMB; and in our newest incarnation, BOMBlog, where young practitioners—emerging artists and writers— create their own version of BOMB, this time with new media.

By making artists the interpreters of their own practice, BOMB has changed the nature of cultural discourse, humanizing intellectual ideas, and giving context to their origins.

Beginning this year, we will be applying what we’ve learned to Oral Histories, expanding the parameters of how an artist’s tale can be shaped. In addition, we'll also be launching our iPad application this year, as well as our pilot e-book initiative. It’s an exciting time, because while we’re grounded by our three-decade-long history, we’re taking off into the brave, open-source world of digital publishing, increasing our reach like never before. Stay tuned for the generations to come.

—Betsy Sussler, Co-Founder and Editor in Chief

10 bomb 115

BOMB Magazine’s 30th Anniversary & Silent Auction Honoring Marina Abramovic’ Richard Armstrong Betsy Baker Francine Prose Friday, April 15, 2011 Capitale, 130 Bowery, NYC Cocktails, Silent Auction, Seated Dinner Toasts by: Arthur C. Danto, Mary Heilmann, Ellsworth Kelly, and Michael Cunningham

This year the following artists are generously contributing works of art to the Silent Auction in support of BOMB Magazine Thordis Adalsteinsdottir Michael Ballou Valérie Belin Huma Bhabha Josh Blackwell Sebastiaan Bremer Emilie Clark Verne Dawson Steve DiBenedetto Carroll Dunham Rochelle Feinstein Adam Fuss Joe Fyfe John Giorno David Herbert Arturo Herrera Jene Highstein Roni Horn Judith Hudson

Jessica Jackson Hutchins Richard Kalina Deborah Kass An-My Lê Ati Maier Robert Mangold Howie Michels Curtis Mitchell Shirin Neshat John O’Connor Adam Pendleton JJ Peet Judy Pfaff Jimmy Raskin Clifford Ross Mika Rottenberg Cordy Ryman Elizabeth Streb Fred Tomaselli Carrie Mae Weems Lawrence Weiner Stanley Whitney Jack Whitten Joe Zucker

View the art in the Silent Auction, purchase tickets and tables, and download an absentee bid form by visiting BOMBsite.com/gala

Thank you to all 2010 BOMB Patrons LEADERS $40,000 and over Cary Brown-Epstein & Steven Epstein Dorothy Lichtenstein National Endowment for the Arts SPONSORS $20,000 to $39,999 Lybess Sweezy & Ken Miller The Thanksgiving Fund Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative DONORS $10,000 to $19,999 Bloomberg The W. L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation Frances R. Dittmer Family Foundation Michele Oka Doner Fundación Cisneros, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gagosian Gallery Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fundación/ Colección JUMEX Heather M. Kirby Bertha & Isaac Liberman Foundation New York City Department of Cultural Affairs New York Community Trust, Oral History Project New York State Council on the Arts Jerry I. Speyer PUBLISHER’S CIRCLE $5,000 to $9,999 Helaine & Paul Cantor The Fine Foundation Barbara Gladstone Marian Goodman Gallery May & Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc. Jennifer & David Stockman

PUBLISHER’S COUNCIL $2,500 to $4,999

Amy Cappellazzo Rosemary Carroll Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo Janice Gardner Cecil Jane & James Cohan Andrew Cullinan Jennifer Clifford Danner & Bill Danner Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Lisa Dennison Elizabeh Easton Pat Steir & Joost Elfers Stacy Engman Shelly & Vincent Fremont Shirley Kaneda & Joe Fyfe Agnes Gund Sandy Heller Jennifer Coates & David Humphrey Susan & Steven Jacobson Ernest Kafka, MD Kaplowitz Family Foundation Nicole Klagsbrun Rhiannon Kubicka José Kuri, Kurimanzutto Ursula & Paul Lowerre Susan & Glenn Lowry Sylvia Plimack Mangold & Robert Mangold Kirsten M. Meadow Gregory R. Miller Jan Hashey & Yasuo Minagawa Amy Smith & Jeremy Mindich Lorea Canales & Dave Morgan Toshiko Mori Edward T. Nahem The New York Community Trust, The Randy Slifka Philanthropic Fund Dore Hammond & Jim Normile Nancy Delman Portnoy Clifford Ross Kathy T. Ruttenberg Pamela Sanders Alanna Heiss & Frederick Sherman Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Liz Swig Jamie Tisch Rebecca Van de Sande BENEFACTORS $500 to $999

Chatham Importers, Inc. Tina Kim & Jae Chung Hugh Bush & Douglas S. Cramer Empire Merchants Giuliana Bruno & Andrew Fierberg Steven M. Holl Rachel Hovnanian Jill & Peter Kraus Christina Weiss Lurie Amy & John Phelan Ellen Phelan Marla Prather Mimi Thompson & James Rosenquist Alexander S.C. Rower Select Equity Group Foundation Joel Shapiro Sue Scott & Mike Stanley Madeline Weinrib

Anonymous Ross Bleckner Dianne Blell Patricia Vail Caldwell, Graham Gallery Jean Pagliuso & Tom Cohen Frayda & Ronald Feldman Shelley & Vincent Fremont Greene Naftali Gallery Michèle Gerber Klein Ilana Maoz & Michael Matz Coleen Fitzgibbon & Tom Otterness William R. Peelle, Jr. Jane Rosenblum Mr. & Mrs. Andrew Saul Ann & Mel Schaffer Arlene J. Shechet Diana Leydon & Philip Sussler Kate & Bernard Tschumi Thomas Woltz

PATRONS $1,000 to $2,499

FRIENDS $250 to $499

Carolyn Alexander Anonymous Roland Augustine & Lawrence Luhring Mahnaz Ispahani & Adam Bartos Diana Betteridge Linda & Thomas Boehlke Karin Waisman & Carlos Brillembourg Cecily Brown Priscilla Caldwell Scott Campbell

Elizabeth C. Baker Lina Bertucci Mr. & Mrs. Francesco Bonami Linda Blumberg Elizabeth A. Boehmler Donya Bommer Jenny Hankowitz & Gregory Botts Pablo Castro Ward Cunningham-Rundles Gabriella De Ferrari

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Robert S. Engman David Goerk Joanne Greenbaum Jennifer Lyn Greene Deborah Kass Philae M. Knight Suydam Lansing Lavender May LLC Elizabeth LeCompte Julian Lethbridge Frances Levine Judith Linhares Anthony McCall Francine Hunter McGivern Scott Nussbaum Jane Rose Andrea Rosen Donna Perret Rosen Amy Sandback Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz Cindy Sherman Carolee Thea Yvonne Force Villareal Helen Warwick Susan Wheeler PALS $100 to $249 Michele Abramowitz Richard Armstrong Jill & Jay Bernstein Megan Hodes Cecily Horton Elizabeth LeCompte Lucy & Irving Sandler David Stack 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 GALA BOMB extends heartfelt thanks to the artists who generously donated work to BOMB’s 29th Anniversary Silent Auction and Gala Benefit, 2010: Diana Al-Hadid Amy Cohen Banker Tina Barney Álvaro Barrios Valérie Belin Guy Ben-Ner Sheila Berger Jimbo Blachly Dike Blair Antonio Caro Michelle Charles Steven Charles Michael Combs Jessica Craig-Martin Carlos Cruz-Diez Shoshana Dentz Harry Dodge Cheryl Donegan Rikki Ducornet Mitch Epstein

Franklin Evans Solange Fabião Rob Fischer Claire Fontaine Allen Frame Joe Fyfe Mike Glier Nan Goldin Dulce Gómez Deborah Grant Sharon Harper Scott Healy George Herms Alex Hubbard Joan Jonas David Kapp Alex Katz Fernanda Laguna Lluis Lleó Eva Lundsager Vera Lutter Matt Madden Guy Maddin Joanna Malinowska Esperanza Mayobre Michael McClard Amanda Means Julie Mehretu George Mead Moore Carlos Motta Carrie Moyer George Negroponte Thomas Nozkowski Roxy Paine Luis Molina-Pantin Lamar Peterson R.H. Quaytman Eileen Quinlan Lesley Raeside Jason Reppert Pedro Reyes Allen Ruppersberg Lynn Saville Dread Scott Richard Serra Joel Shapiro Amy Sillman Laurie Simmons Xaviera Simmons Adam Simon Michael Smith Keith Sonnier Charline von Heyl Carrie Mae Weems Madeline Weinrib

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Hervé Le Tellier. Photo by François Coquerel. love and its attendant complications.

I spotted Enough About Love on the front table at Three Lives & Company last night, ready to be snatched up as spring comes upon us.

It’s a French intellectual sex romp, an updated Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice if they had Lacan, Queneau, and Barthes on their analysts’ shelves, and you were to add a few more characters into the mix. Instead of purporting “what the world needs now is love, sweet love . . . ” the book begins with a warning: “Any man—or woman— who wants to hear nothing—or no more—about love should put this book down.” Fluidly translated by Adriana Hunter, Enough About Love graphs love’s disruptive geometries in a playful manner, at points making use of double columns, villanelles, and obsessive catalogues. If you, like me, prefer your erotic lit to be structurally stimulating on several levels at once, you’ll enjoy unfolding this scaffolded novel.

Translated by Le Tellier’s fellow Oulipian Ian Monk, The Sextine Chapel is a more nakedly laid-out series of sex scenarios, each in a half-page of prose. Proceeding through a kind of spirographic, tag-team dance card, one member of the first amorous pair goes on to engage with someone new on the next page, who, in turn, carries the torch on to the next tryst and so on. An authorial chart maps who has made love with whom in a visual logarithm of geometrical constraints, heterotextually Lucky Pierre-style.

An alphabetical crisscrossed roster of named bodies takes turns making love

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with each other, handing off the generated erotics to the next set of lovers until a sextile web of specific scenarios is replete with who, what, when, where, and how the sex act is evolving. Le Tellier teases out the erotic space between intellectual bodies getting it on in a kind of mathematical chapel of love: “After lovemaking, the first person who speaks always says something dumb . . . ” Like a book of poems, the book is easy to pick up and enter into at any page and at any point.

You also might pick up a few pointers on how to do it in a new way.

—Lee Ann Brown’s poetry books are Polyverse and The Sleep That Changed Everything. She teaches at St. John's University and recently co-curated a Conference on Constrained Poetry for the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Sic Alps Napa Asylum Drag City, 2011 Bay Abuzz with Lyrical Fuzz from Hunch-Haunched Hippest Sic-sters!

Left with a box-wine hangover, regrets, a mess, a bad drunk—you think they were talking about The Cramps at Napa State? Yr nutz. They should put you in an asylum! This Napa Asylum is a sweet bladder of White Zin, and

the Alps are soaking in it. Somewhere on a cigarette sunset over Ocean Beach, a barefoot Mike Donovan with toenails in the sand gave a slow wink to Matt Hartman combing the shore with a World War II metal detector while Noel Von Harmonson cradled a trashed box of Franzia below his chin.

Sure, these guys were going to build a Kiss’s The Elder-style concept album around a drawing of the institution, but that idea was tossed and the title remained. The record starts in medias res, a Schroeder-meets-Ray Davies piano driving the stoned tour anthem “Jolly.” The tambourine shakes out a refrain to the road, to time passing.

“Jolly” can mean drunk or happy, and as a plural noun gets pervy; it makes for a surreal chorus, losing its meaning and starting to distort by the third time it’s sung. The Alps could easily be singing dying.

Numbers and cold, hard cash continue to dog these guys, who in the past touched on the IMF (“Battle of Bretton Woods”). “Do You Want to Give $$?” is a basement bump-and-grind, a Plastic Ono Bandjamming-with-Easy Action-era-Alice Cooper ass shaker. Some material mama must have done the Alps wrong, ‘cause $$’s “Hold it in your hand, honey […] are you really happy?” and the “Ball of Fame” lyrics “girl told to play that game and make her name” fall between Jagger's “look at

Mike Donovan, Noel Von Harmonson, and Matt Hartman of sic alps. Photo by Brian Pritchard.

Thomas Pletzinger and Sufjan Stevens Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog, a riveting story of search and loss, combines its protagonists’ physical and mental restlessness with something of an old-European lingering.

A marathon across continents and between past and present, the book nevertheless thrives on its characters’ condition of “just being”—they’re not exactly idle but not productive either.

Disorientation prevails as the author ponders life’s two grandest mysteries: love and death.

Pletzinger’s debut novel propelled him to the front row of new German fiction and will be published in English this spring.

When BOMB approached Pletzinger for an interview, he wished to speak with musician Sufjan Stevens who, indirectly, shaped his book—namely by inducing a certain state of mind with his songs. (Pletzinger continually listened to Stevens’s albums while writing Funeral for a Dog.) There are obvious affinities between the two artists’ works: an interest in the symphonic, in empathy, and a “courage for pathos”— a resolution that Pletzinger’s main character, a writer, arrives at in the end of the book.

Pletzinger and Stevens met for the first time via Skype while they were both on the road. Their conversation drifted from missing limbs to hip-hop and will no doubt continue in some form.

—Sabine Russ 24 bomb 115

THOMAS PLETZINGER Hello, Hong Kong? This is somewhere near Cologne.

charismatic. And Gerald Stern approached her and patted her on the back. They were chitchatting for a bit and she seemed really, really nice. Stern and Patti Smith talked about Warhol, actually. Stern grew up in Pittsburgh and knew Warhol back then. When Warhol moved out from home, Stern was the one who drove him to the train station.

SUFJAN STEVENS Hello?

SS Oh my lord.

TP Good. I’m very excited to talk with you.

SS Ah, it is beautiful, this technology that we have access to now.

TP Did you have a chance to read my book?

SS I haven’t quite finished. I’m reading a whole bunch of things at once.

TP What else are you reading?

SS I just finished Patti Smith’s memoir about her and Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids.

TP Did you like it?

SS I love Patti Smith. She’s so sublime. As a performer, she is a real social-energy force for transcendence.

Whenever I see her I’m inspired.

Reading her book I loved the anecdotes, the history, and all the nuanced information in it. She and Robert had a beautiful and symbiotic relationship —companionship. The book is worth reading, even just as a voyeur if you have interest in that '70s scene in New York. It was the tail end of the Andy Warhol thing.

TP I translated a collection of poetry by the American poet Gerald Stern into German. Have you heard of him?

SS Yeah.

TP He is 85 years old now. Last year I invited him on a trip to Germany and we did a series of readings, one of them in Cologne, at the literary festival lit.Cologne. When Gerald Stern and I checked into the hotel, Patti Smith was there. She had this whole entourage with her and she was the star of the festival. I found her very

TP Warhol was going to be a commercial artist for a shoe company or something in New York. So Stern gave him a lift to the train station. Warhol had all these bags and he had this painting with him. He gave that painting to Stern for driving him.

SS No . . .

TP So Stern went home and gave it to his mother and she said, "Really, that Warhol, that pimply Polack, can paint?"

And then she threw that very early Warhol away. (laughter) Stern always says it’s the story of his first lost million.

SS Wow, that is tragic. Well, you know, money wouldn’t have done him any good anyway. Poets are meant to be poor.

TP Yeah, yeah. But he is not really poor. ( laughter) You live in Brooklyn, right? Have you gotten to the New York chapters of my book yet?

SS I have, actually. I was excited about the number of times you referenced the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the BQE. TP Well, my protagonist Svensson and his dog walk to Williamsburg and through Greenpoint on the BQE. I myself was living on Lorimer and Skillman, right next to the BQE, across the street from a bar called Union Pool. Do you know that one?

SS Yeah, Union Pool is right on the expressway.

TP So, in my imagination, my characters live on this street corner. Right above a corner store. In reality, there is no store. I simply put one there for the book.

going on in the same story.

TP Yeah, for the characters it is a very distracting time, because it is September 11. I didn’t want to tell a story where people are able to make up their minds. Everyone at that time was making resolutions and deciding to do this or that—to change their lives, to move somewhere else, to hate Arabs, and so on. People were making up their minds and going in one direction. My characters don’t do that.

I felt that this was more a sign of the times than anything else—they had to go back and forth, they had to talk a lot, about both nonsensical and very interesting things. And they have to get drunk because they can’t make up their minds, really.

SS It’s interesting that you position this kind of major catastrophe with this collection of people. They are so ambivalent. There is a kind of emotional anarchy in these characters; they never seem to come to grip with the event itself, you know, with this major event. Instead, there is this nearsightedness; they only see what is in front of them and they are just barely getting by from space to space and from moment to moment. It becomes almost surreal, in a way. And at some point you have the dog talking as well.

TP Yeah. thomas pletzinger. photo by juliane henrich.

SS Were you writing the book while you were in the city or was this something you wrote afterward?

TP I was living in New York from 1999 to 2001, but I didn’t write the book then. I wasn’t even writing, really, at that time. I wrote it several years later, mostly in 2007. By the way, I was listening to your BQE album yesterday.

Last night, actually. I put it on at dinner for my sister and her kids. They didn’t quite get it.

SS The BQE is not good for digestion, I suppose.

TP You’re probably right. The two little kids wanted song and we wanted to listen to Wagner in traffic on the ugly highway. They wanted sugar and storytelling and we kept telling

them to listen carefully. It was hard for my sister to hear anything, let alone references to architecture and urban planning and development and weirdness and Robert Moses—all translated into music. (laughter)

I was actually wondering if you thought the New York parts in my book were okay? You know, they were first written with a German audience in mind.

SS I really appreciated a lot of the references. There’s a kind of linguistic cacophony. The characters in the prose are very distracted, which is evocative of the physical New York landscape.

Especially that area in Brooklyn, near the expressway, where you have all these bisecting lines of streets. Your narrative has that same kind of shape to it, narratives upon narratives. There are three different time sequences

25 literature / THomas pletzinger

SS Because the prose is kind of surreal in itself—everyone is drunk, doing drugs, or wandering around— it seems very natural that the dog starts talking.(laughter) TP Yeah, the dog is what you would call, in team sports, the glue. (laughter) He is the one that holds it all together. The dog offers his opinion or his reflections, usually when everyone is drunk. It’s then that he seems to be able to talk. Later in the book he actually really speaks and articulates his wisdom and all the pain he experienced. He is a real character in the book, he is not only a dog.

SS The dog is the prophet in some ways, he’s the spiritual advisor.

TP Absolutely. Have you gotten to the point where his leg is amputated?

Joe Fyfe

by Josh Blackwell

Dargah; 2008–2010; Linen, muslin, cotton, gauze; 48 × 56 inches. Courtesy of James Graham & Sons. photos of artworks by bill orcutt.

Traversing an ever-expanding, increasingly globalized art world is a tricky business for artists. Sometimes it seems like New York has become so large and unwieldy as to feel anonymous. Making work alone in the studio, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of it all—is anybody listening?

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Occasionally, however, there are moments when someone (or something) emerges from the glut of artist talks, studio visits, and gallery openings to instigate a less inhibited exchange, one that speaks directly to shared concerns. That’s why I want to begin by enumerating the series of encounters that

ended with this conversation in Joe Fyfe’s Brooklyn studio. I first saw Joe’s work in his exhibition at James Graham Gallery in 2007. Struck by the works’ combination of humble textures and full-bodied colors, I was left with a vivid impression. Upon further research, I discovered a multifaceted artist whose activities include writing, curating, and teaching as well as his studio practice. While visiting the gallery with a friend the following summer, Joe and I were introduced. Subsequently, we found each other on Facebook.

Last year Joe contacted me about some works of mine he had seen in an exhibition at CANADA Gallery, and we began corresponding. We discovered that we both teach at the same institution, Pratt, nearby his studio. Our proximity to each other, engendered through common interests, the urban geography of New York, and a propensity to wander, has yielded an interesting conversation touching on travel, writing, French painting, and the artisanal versus the industrial.

—Josh Blackwell Joe Fyfe It’s strange the way things happen. For example: I think I became an abstract painter because I quit smoking. A big change allows you to make another change. It’s a practice leap. I really became an abstract painter because of Blinky Palermo’s work, but it could just as easily have been because I quit smoking. I quit smoking and couldn’t bear to do figurative work anymore—I didn’t know what do so I just lay on the couch and read.

Josh Blackwell Because you weren’t smoking?

JF Exactly. Whenever I found this

then it led to an unfolding of a lot more?

Monivong Boulevard; 2009; Cotton, muslin, felt, gauze; 68 1/8 × 80 1/8 inches. Courtesy of ACME, Los Angeles.

JF Prior to my first trip to Vietnam, the artist Mary Carlson said: “I know this Vietnamese artist, Kim Tran. I’ll send you his email.” Then he sent me email addresses of artists in Hanoi. I told Raphael [Rubinstein] at Art in America, “I think there’s a Hanoi art scene.”

He said, “Well, take notes.” I was dropped into this burgeoning—actually, it was the opposite of burgeoning. It had fallen through after the late ‘90s Asian boom. There were 30-year-old artists who were already completely cynical about the art world. But there were still other more interesting, more political artists working enthusiastically.

I wrote something about it for Art in America. I got invited back to do a show and wrote more about it. Then I applied for a Fulbright because I already had a trail of articles and went back for six months, two of them in Cambodia, in Phnom Penh. It all came out of curiosity and wanting to be away. But initially, it had to do with the dog.

sentence I really liked, I would project it onto the painting and trace it out.

One day I crossed out one of the sentences and the painting looked really good. Then I thought, Oh, that’s how you make an abstract painting. After I’d been painting for 20 years the fact that it’s an actual language emerged.

JB (laughter) Right.

JF Or, another example: I began traveling because my dog died. I decided that instead of getting another dog, I’d visit the airport whenever I could, because nothing was keeping me here all the time. After getting into lots of debt, I learned to get by on nothing, just being careful about every cent.

I learned to go to Mexico for $700 for a month—stay in places for five dollars a night, eat for three dollars a day.

I would run over to Paris for ten days as soon as I had the money, or jump over to Southeast Asia. It’s an incredible education, even in your 40s, to be able to do that. You don’t realize how hungry you are for what travel has to offer.

JB Did you have an opportunity and

31 art / joE fyfe

Khan Jahan, 2010, Commercially dyed cotton, 68 × 80 inches.

Courtesy of James Graham & Sons.

Sebastián Silva is a gifted filmmaker, a musician with several terrific recordings to his name, a restless visual artist, and a genuine polymath.

His most accomplished ensemble production, Old Cats, a Hitchcock-like thriller masquerading as a family drama, opens in New York this March.

Best known as the director of 2009’s Sundance Film Festival favorite The Maid—it won both the festival’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize as well as the Special Jury Prize for its lead actress, Catalina Saavedra (the film garnered so many other international awards, they are literally too numerous to mention here)—Silva has squeezed into his rail-thin frame of 32 years more than most folks do in a lifetime. A brandnew New Yorker, his energy mirrors Gotham’s legendary restless streak. Manic, purposeful, and driven, like certain artistic immigrants of lore— think of the young García Lorca or Patti Smith—he looks every bit the picture of a man aching to set the world on fire.

Born in the butt end of the globe’s southern latitudes—in Santiago, Chile, to be exact, where I also happen to hail from—Silva predictably rebelled against the conservative mores of a Catholic society which experienced travelers liken, strangely, to postwar England.

A precocious master of the buttoned-up family drama with absurdist overtones, he uses his films to explore the tiny passive-aggressive hypocrisies that mine everyday human relationships—the claustrophobic 42 bomb 115

cease-fires staked out between parents and children, the secrets guarded by husbands and wives, the collusions entered into by housemaids and their charges. When Silva’s filmic catharses occur, they arrive with Almodóvarian abandon. Stiff upper lips are set quavering with Latin turmoil.

As someone partially brought up in the sort of wellheeled, incestuous social environments Silva describes, films like Life Kills Me (La Vida Me Mata), The Maid (La Nana) and the soon-to-be-released Old Cats (Gatos Viejos) contain, for me, moments of personal recognition that erupt suddenly, like revelations packed into letter bombs. Before meeting Silva, I already felt the sort of connection with him one does with an old acquaintance or a friend’s best friend. As Susan Sontag once said about André Gide, watching Silva’s movies can mean experiencing something like labor pains—for the thoughts his films give birth to.

So it was, then, that talking at length with the young director about his life and work proved less an interview than a bracing chat with a dazzling stranger; a conversation with a man you don’t really know, but find every reason to believe you’d very much like to.

—Christian Viveros-Fauné Christian Viveros-Fauné You had a nana, a maid, when you were growing up. What was that like?

Sebastián Silva It was traumatizing enough to make a movie about. We’re seven siblings, so there was always a maid at my house, if not two. One

would take care of the first floor, the other would take care of the second floor and the children, the garden, and so on. I was a rebel with my parents or any other authority figure. For me, the maid was a third parent rather than someone serving us.

CVF Kids here call it a “frenemy.”

SS That’s how it felt. Growing up with a maid was always uncomfortable. First I grew rebellious against the institution of having maids, then, when I was old enough to feel some compassion, I started feeling guilty, because there can’t really be compassion in that relationship. I felt guilty having someone working for us, not sharing the Christmas Eve with us in the living room but spending it by herself in the kitchen.

CVF You developed a social consciousness.

SS I guess so, it was clear that something was wrong. The awkwardness of the relationship is exposed in the beginning of The Maid. It’s her birthday and she can’t even comfortably eat her cake with the family, you know?

CVF The natural tendency is to want to read your film as a kind of neorealism, which I don’t think is necessarily what you are doing.

SS It’s realistic, and it was made now, so neorealism makes sense. But I didn’t make an intentional social or political judgment about the institution of having maids, which is something that Chilean critics didn’t appreciate.

The reviews stated that the movie lacked a political outlook. But that was absolutely intentional. I made the movie to exorcise my own demons, not to overthrow the institution of domestic help or to judge people who have maids. These folks are my parents. To demonize the patrones or make the job of a maid look humiliating would be patronizing for the more than 100,000 . . .

CVF I think there are 250,000 maids in Santiago alone. These relationships are learned from generation to generation. It’s an extended family you’re talking about here. But there can be a

psychological hellhole resulting from the social imbalances.

SS It has a flavor of slavery. Maids have endless duties. The Maid was a breakthrough in my own family. They could see themselves portrayed very realistically. The movie takes place in my parents’ house, where I grew up. Raquel is inspired by a maid who lived and worked at our house for over 25 years. The movie maids slept in the real maids’ rooms. We used the same photo albums, the same TV set, decoration, everything. So it was quite a reality check for my family. My youngest brother, Lucas, played me in the movie. My sister did art direction.

It was a family enterprise.

CVF A family affair.

SS The shooting was kind of incestuous. The relationships were very intimate. The real-life character who inspired Lucy, the second maid, worked at the house while we were filming. She wore an apron and served everybody. While she worked as a maid she coached Mariana Loyola, the actress. They became really good friends.

CVF I’ve seen the film a number of times now and for me the reason

that the film works so well is because Raquel is such a wild card. She’s essentially an unstable being in an otherwise fairly ordinary environment.

It’s an upper-middle-class Chilean family, of which there are hundreds of thousands in Santiago. She throws everyone’s dynamic off kilter, then everything piles up like a mountain made up of tiny little hypocrisies. Did you find yourself looking for an acceptable level of instability for her? As I was watching, I often wondered: Is this going to turn into a slasher film? Did you ever think, Okay, Raquel is going to get this crazy, and no crazier?

SS Since the character was based on a real person, I knew Raquel’s boundaries. Even in the first 40 minutes—when you think Raquel might kill everyone with an iron or something—it wasn’t intentional. I never thought of Raquel as a psychopath. This was the maid I lived with for most of my life.

CVF So when did you realize that the character had those attributes?

SS I remember shooting the scene with the plastic gloves. Her hair and that make-up—I thought, Fuck, dude, this really looks like Ringu or something. I was scared that we were taking it too far. But I never really had

to dial it down. I knew it was never going to get gory.

CVF You also knew the end of the story.

SS My cowriter, Pedro Peirano, was more aware of the suspense.

CVF How long have you been working with him as a cowriter?

SS I wrote my first movie, Life Kills Me, by myself. But when I got a production deal with Fabula, a small Chilean producer, I was told that the script needed a rewrite. I showed Pedro the screenplay, he liked it, and I invited him to write it with me. After that we wrote The Maid together, and now we’ve just written and directed Old Cats. Pedro’s extremely savvy about film and he’s a great storyteller. Before meeting him I wrote two screenplays that never got produced. But Life Kills Me was just right and genuine. I have always been really obsessed with the phenomenon of death.

CVF You’re too young to be obsessed with death, you’re 32. And you wrote Life Kills Me five years ago.

SS I don’t think death has anything to do with being old. People die young. The way I use the idea of death is more like a replacement for God. Death is such a mystery . . .

CVF Meaning that if you don’t believe in God, then that’s the one mystery you keep going back to?

SS Even the question of believing or not believing makes my mind go blank. I was very Catholic once. I think I have destroyed any trace of Catholicism in myself but, in moments of desperation, I find myself in bed with my eyes closed . . .

CVF Praying?

SS “Hello, God?” (laughter) You know that dialogue they make you establish with God as a child? When they give you the host, you kneel down and you’re supposed to connect with God.

overleaf: bélgica castro and alejandro sieveking in old cats (2010); above: bélgica castro in old cats. images courtesy of elephant eye films.

43 film / Sebastián Silva

CVF Like the prayer scenes in The Maid.

John Tranter Three Poems

Rink The opening scene is shot outdoors in bitter cold: bottle-blue dusk, which she sweeps through more or less like a swift or a swallow, shaving whispers off the surface of the road, that is, the ice vault over her private black glass underworld.

The arena is bordered by rushes and canes and just over there a shred of plastic.

Now this mise-en-scène is not a commercial franchise, so no soft drink cans or teenagers, likewise a lack of maintenance, no surface grading, brushing, or injury insurance, and you also have to imagine, if you wish to track cause and effect, an erratic anti-depressant routine and a shouting husband in a trailer-park a decade ago, half-forgotten. A bird swoops by to draft a reconnaissance whose terms are kept from us, then dodges away.

The ice is not evenly thick, and the sky is tending to a twilight deeper than the ice and so two linguistic fields overlap: gray cloud, an inscribed surface too mottled to be a mirror, too dangerous to offer praise, echoing the other backdrop, her various failed careers including wife, mother, star of the rink.

John Tranter has published more than 20 poetry collections. His Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected won a number of prizes. His latest book is Starlight: 150 Poems. He is the founding editor of the free online magazine Jacket (jacketmagazine. com), and he has a homepage at johntranter. com. He lives in Sydney, Australia.

8

First proof

The Last Clean Shirt We have to make do with Third Avenue, which is a street in an urban environment.

It runs parallel to Second Avenue, naturally, because parody means parallel discourse.

The spectator is trapped, and we are shown a “walk” sign. Do they shirk the issues? No, they just find more elegant ways to engage ethical issues. Okay, shirk the issues.

Then you have some guilt, and where to put it?

Would you like a weekend in Havana?

Maybe for the music, but the politics?

We could bring some fiction: fiction could at least be subversive. You won’t be bored and you won’t be lazy. Elke Sommer and Loretta Young shine. Can the escape hatch be found within Frank O’Hara’s subtitles?

“I used his lines against the image,” the cinematographer said. Does he mean that he, Alfred Leslie, subverted the subtitles?

Or the image? Can we trust him? He’s talking about 1964, more or less.

So there is a struggle, hidden from the audience.

Which force takes over? No, they only stress their differences. They would like to make something new appear

on the surface of the screen, moving, childish.

Then it seems that many of these subtitles are direct quotations of poems. Well, what did you expect? It is a secret anthology, a mask of Frank O’Hara. He often moved from one type of writing to another. No, he never shied away from whetting his language against other media.

Here’s a strange contradiction: how to display an excess of sight, and then tact. And although there are connections with death and dying, no shirt is ever mentioned.

In the end, we have been taught not to take things at face value: we are now free to walk by ourselves, we have completed our training in skepticism.

Huh. Here are some fantasy bribes, offered by the manipulators of desire.

They can’t help it if they are well financed.

Maybe you could attach your guilt to Mother, or perhaps World War Two. Frank fought in that. I just hope the rain won’t wash it all away.

Columbo’s Kangaroo Detective Columbo is questioning a clever murderer who is a magician in his day job, with his own television show. Here we are in the back lot, sun beating down, between the villain’s trailer and the waiting studio, a script in his hand. “Oh, just one more thing, sir,” says Columbo, preparing a subtle query to slip in between the man’s ribs and drain the blood from his heart—1976— and we notice, a hundred yards away, between two hangar-like studio buildings, an actor in a Roman Centurion costume, smoking and talking to a friend, and beside him a kangaroo on a lead looking around then tentatively sniffing the ground.

9

john tranter

26 First proof

27 emilie clark

jim shepard

by Christie Hodgen

photo by michael lionstar.

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An editor friend once told me, in a conspiratorial voice that indicated he was letting me in on a shameful trade secret, that at the end of the day, at those meetings in which he and his colleagues decided which manuscripts to accept and which to decline, it all came down to one question: “Would you pay $23.95 for this?” However crass it might seem, however awkwardly the worlds of art and commerce might be stitched together, the fact remained that a book had to be worth its price. It had to do something for the reader—teach her something she didn’t know, take her somewhere she’d never been.

Make her laugh, make her think. And most importantly— and this was where publishing was a business more so than an art—make her want to buy another book. If a manuscript could do that, my friend said, it was a go.

Readers familiar with Jim Shepard already know that his books are well worth their price. For 20 bucks, Shepard will not only take you somewhere you’ve never been, he’ll take you to multiple places you’ve never even imagined.

His new collection, You Think That’s Bad, travels the globe in 11 stories, landing in some of the most remote, mysterious, and hostile environments on the planet. Inhabiting these stories are characters whose occupations and obsessions have driven them to physical and psychological extremes.

“The Track of the Assassins” introduces us to Freya Stark, a 20th-century British travel 51 LITERATURE / JIM SHEPARD

writer whose fascination with an ancient Shia sect impels her to the mountains of Iran, through territory so dangerous it is considered impassable.

“Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” is the story of a small group of avalanche researchers hoping to survive the winter in a hut on a Swiss mountaintop, a hut which is “naturally refrigerated from the outside and a good starting point for all sorts of adventurers, nearly all of them lethal.” “The Netherlands Lives With Water” sets us down in Rotterdam in the mid21st century, where disaster preparedness is not only a national preoccupation but also a grand-scale existential crisis, and where, despite unprecedented feats of design and civic cooperation, preparedness isn’t enough to stem the tide.

In “Poland Is Watching” we ascend to the 8,126-foot high summit of Nanga Parbat, in the Himalayas, with a group of Polish mountaineers whose obsession with climbing in subzero temperatures compels them to part with their families and, in many cases, their lives. To be sure, traveling with Jim Shepard is never a picnic. He isn’t the kind of polite travel guide pointing out what’s world-renowned for its loveliness. We don’t exit through the gift shop. No, a Jim Shepard story takes up where the average travel guide leaves off, and it will carry you all the way to the terrifying edge of an abyss.

All of the characters in You Think That’s Bad are in some way isolated, desperate, suffering in their often self-imposed

crises. But they are also compellingly self-aware, and often, despite their circumstances, seriously funny. In the most base but also in the loftiest of terms, these stories will give you extraordinary returns on your investment.

—Christie Hodgen Christie Hodgen You Think That’s Bad is quite a diverse collection, yet, by the end, there’s also a strong sense of unity, in that it’s a very physical collection. In almost every story, characters are dealing with extreme challenges to their bodies—cataclysmic weather, combat, mountain climbing, etc. There’s a sense that these characters are up against the unendurable, if not physically impossible, and that this is only the beginning, the outward manifestation of what’s going on emotionally and culturally. While some of your earlier work explores this territory, the physical extreme seems to be the guiding principle of this collection.

What drew you to this subject matter?

Jim Shepard I’m interested in maximizing the pressure that the narratives exert on the emotional situations in which my characters find themselves.

I’m also always looking to embody that kind of conflict in concrete terms, which means I’ve been increasingly drawn to those kinds of extreme situations. I’m drawn to those situations for their own sake, of course—they’re just very cool to read and write about—and then I’m forced to interrogate my own interest, in emotional and thematic terms. What I start to figure out about the sources of my own obsessions then becomes shaped into the story.

I found myself arrested, for example, when reading about the mind-bending physical miseries that GIs endured in the middle of the rainy season in the New Guinea jungle during the early years of World War II. The more I thought about it, the more the nature of those miseries—so quotidian, so intense, so often humiliating— reminded me of the agonies of certain types of not-fully-reciprocated love relationships.

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57 bomb specific / Huma Bhabha with Jason Fox

I enter Katharina Grosse’s latest installation at MASS MoCA and I am awed by the sheer dimension of the piece and by the intensity of the encounter.

It feels like being on another planet and I want to explore immediately. I walk into a realm of painted soil and painted, fabricated boulders to discover painted clothes in between, a painted window, a bench partly hidden under painted dirt.

I sit down and take everything in. I make out a large warped shape covered with paint, and look across this enormous psychedelic landscape on top of which tower huge, glacierlike white forms carved from Styrofoam. In the next room I cross a painted floor with more painted clothes, I gaze at painted walls, and proceed upstairs into yet another room. Here, on the wall, I find the only painting on canvas, and, on the floor, another mighty, warped shape merging into a painted dirt hill.

I reach the edge of this open space, look down from the balcony onto the otherworldly landscape that I just wandered through, and contemplate.

Katharina Grosse titled her exhibition One Floor Up More Highly. Her unique approach to painting has long fascinated me. As Grosse says, painting is not a closed system, it is a window, it is a mode of thought.

And much more.

Katharina Grosse and I met years ago at a friend’s dinner party in New York; I was immediately captivated by her open and ever-searching mind.

Thereafter we would meet whenever she came to New 70 bomb 115

York, visit museum and gallery exhibitions together, and our dialogue about art began. I’ve also had the opportunity to see her impressive studio in Berlin.

I always feel I am learning by just talking to her, and I was thrilled when we were asked to do this interview via email.

—Ati Maier Ati Maier As you know, I am very inspired by your work and your mind.

Have I ever mentioned that I admire your painter’s outfit? You use a spray gun and wear this white protective suit that looks a bit like an astronaut suit— as if you were working on a different planet, researching and exploring unknown space, opening up a new path with each installation you do. How far out can you go? Is the external world working its way inside or is it the other way around? What is your vision?

K atharina Grosse I do not have a vision. I am the vision. There are no limits to painting; that´s why I am involved in it. I don’t experience “limits” as limits. There is no resistance when I am painting. The inside and the outside coexist. What appears in the image field is not subordinate to existing reality, it constitutes that reality.

I don’t interpret reality; I understand reality as a performative activity that generates itself newly and differently, again and again.

AM I like your answer, the artist being the live vision. I feel similarly and I’m always in search for the next dimension.

Your work takes place on another level. How do you get there? Do you work in a subconscious way? Is painting in any way meditative for you?

KG I don´t understand this level or limit stuff. Painting is simply what I want to do when I open my eyes. I indulge in exuberance and aggressive energy without killing anybody.

Looking at my painting you are experiencing the absence of linear structures, the fracturing of causalities, and the equality and simultaneity of structures that normally seem to exclude one another. In my painting

they can be seen at the same time.

Painting is an ideal medium to put across this phenomenon of equality and concurrency. It is able to provide all visual particles on the picture plane simultaneously.

AM I relate to that. I weave multiple layers of space together in such a way that foreground, middle ground, and background, along with past, present, and future, become one dense presence on the same plane. This is all a direct result of the physical and mental space I occupy when I make the work.

I put a lot of different sketches on top of one another and, through that overlapping, new, invisible, and unexpected elements of space materialize.

KG My painting overlays the surfaces with levels of imagination and projection. I understand imagination as the undirected capacity of imagining things, and projection as a directed ability to choose in terms of “what will work versus what won’t,” which are both conditions of infinite potential.

The coexistence of the imaginary and the materialized is experienced by the viewer as irreconcilable, as an encounter with a paradox.

When I’m painting I show what I’m thinking about the world I live in.

I don’t make up a world; everything can become anything at any minute.

AM You are showing what you think about the world you live in. How, specifically?

KG Maybe you could put it this way: I need painting to give a certain degree of clarity to what is evaporating when thinking.

AM Is that what you mean by painting as a mode of thought? Thinking by way of painting?

KG The very moment when fulfillment has yet to come through the door is what interests me. On the image surface there is no prescribed causality or a fixed hierarchy that organizes the things I see. I manifest a painting that is nothing but the residue of the thought.

That would be different if I chose to depict such a constellation intentionally. Or, and here comes another important aspect into play,

KG There is no singular I, or singular world or being. There is no singular existence within the piece. We put it together as we move, every second anew. We continually remake this surrounding just as we do when we perceive the world. To see the installation as a coherent unit is illusion.

AM Is everything an illusion for you? How can you see what is true for yourself? You must process the information of the world somehow.

We live in a world of total information overflow and virtual reality. How do you filter this immense input?

KG You see, to me everything is illusion, not an illusion (as opposed to a reality). Everthing is unstable, clicking into place again and again and making sense each second. Therefore, the concept of the overflow of information is not interesting to me.

AM When I start my paintings I often use visual elements and dynamic structures derived from scientific theories. I study NASA websites and I exploit mapping and geological models. I feel like a sampler of unlimited information in an endless universe where everything I find can be equally important. Are there specific areas or aspects of certain fields (like science, for me) that enter your work?

above and overleaf: Installation view from One Floor Up More Highly, 2011, Mass MoCA. Photo by Art Evans. copyright Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Rosemarie SchwarzwälDer, Vienna, and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica. if I were to depict anything at all. To depict structures they have to be put in a certain order and be distinguished from one another. In that case I would have to deal with separations. Since my core interest is how phenomena that appear at the same time seem to exclude one another, all techniques of separating or distinguishing are useless for me.

AM Is your way of painting anarchic?

How much in your work is chance and how much do you control? Does chaos play a role?

KG Anarchy, chance, control, chaos—

71 art / katharina grosse

they are all illusion. Anarchy—I do not work against anything but with everything. Chance, control, chaos all suggest that there is a singular continuum organized by ideas of hierarchy and dialectic thinking. Our existence is not continuous.

AM Walking through the landscape of your MASS MoCA installation I felt so many shifts in scale and also time. One moves through real and painted space at the same moment, absorbing your painting both mentally and physically.

I perceived time in different ways at different locations in your installation.

What is your concept of space-time?

KG The digital world or unlimited information are concepts to be considered, but I don’t think they are more important than other sources of input. To me the world is more like an everchanging fluid, which I am part of.

Therefore, I cannot react or refer to it, describe or depict it.

Now, if I would integrate into my work anything nameable—figures, things, quotes, or other references— I would introduce segments into painting that establish suborders on the picture field. My preferred working field in painting requires the unfinished, the unnameable. The concrete prematerializes the kind of weightless, mental picture zone through qualities of the everyday world. The painted picture is drawn into the material life and pushed away from the task crucial to me, which is to remain open to mental movements that are not derived from the seen or the named.

above: Rafael Sรกnchez, Kourtney Rutherford, kate benson, and Sarah Cameron Hughes. Photo by ariana smart truman; below: Mike Iveson, jr., and Sibyl Kempson. Photo by justin bernhaut. From Crime or Emergency, PS122, December 2009. images courtesy of Sibyl Kempson.

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Sibyl Kempson

by Kristen Kosmas Sibyl Kempson recently found herself in a gruesome, frenzied fairy tale: pricked in the thumb by the tooth of a dead mouse, she dashes to the emergency room for a series of rabies shots just days before she has to rush off to Singapore. She can still, seven months later, feel the foreign substance of the injections in her body, and though it itches and weirds her out sometimes, she’s comforted knowing she’ll “never get rabies and be condemned to die in horrible insane convulsions chained to a hospital bed to prevent me from biting my gathered loved ones.”

It’s exactly the kind of ludicrous but real predicament that might set one of her mind-bending plays in motion.

In Crime or Emergency, Kempson’s recent New York production at PS122, the crisis of the title refers to one of the 11 characters (most played

by Kempson, two or three played by performer/pianist Mike Iveson, Jr.) boxing another on the ears. Is this a crime or an emergency? What authorities should be called? What is just punishment for such an action? Her earlier play Potatoes of August, which premiered at Dixon Place in 2008, revolves around a swarm of sentient potatoes antagonizing a pair of middle-aged retired couples (all played by Kempson or other women) until they come apart at the material, spiritual, and 79 theater / sibyl kempson

psychological seams.

I first experienced Kempson’s work in 2001 at Little Theater at Tonic. Everything of hers I’ve seen since then (and I’ve tried to see it all) has convinced me she’s one of the most radical, transgressive, and hilarious playwright/performers out there. She has a singular theatrical imagination, a searing stage presence, a ferocious intellect, and arguably the busiest schedule of any theater artist in New York City.

In addition to writing, directing, and performing in her own plays, she works regularly with Richard Maxwell and Elevator Repair Service. (It was for GATZ that she traveled to Singapore after the rabies calamity.) In 2009, she went to Vienna with Nature Theater of Oklahoma and worked on Life & Times—Episode 1. After being in production for three years straight, she is taking a break from performing in favor of “incubating” several new projects. She was recently awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony and a membership at New Dramatists, two places that have provided her with much-needed and welldeserved refuge and sanctuary.

We corresponded while she was at MacDowell and met at New Dramatists when she returned. Following are excerpts from our dialogues.

—Kristen Kosmas

PART ONE: MACDOWELL ¯ 'i ng-| incubate |'inky bat; ' verb [trans.] (of a bird) sit on (eggs) in order to keep them warm and bring them to hatching —(be incubating something) have an infectious disease developing inside one before symptoms appear: the possibility that she was incubating early syphilis —[intrans.] develop slowly without outward or perceptible signs —Origin: mid-17th cent.: from Latin incubat- “lain on,” from the verb incubare, from in-“upon” + cubare “to lie” Kristen Kosmas You are incubating at the moment. Of the definitions here, does one feel closer to what you’re doing? Is it like sitting on eggs in order to bring them to hatching?

Or is it more like having an infectious disease developing inside you?

Sibyl kempson It’s like when they make flu and rabies vaccines inside a chicken egg. They inject the infectious disease into the living chicken egg and allow it to develop as they carefully incubate it. They put it through all kinds of mysterious and difficult processes, and the resulting mixture is injected into human and domesticated animal beings to protect them from diseases. That’s the sense of incubation I am referring to. Although in this vaccine scenario, sadly, no hatching ever occurs that I know of. I do mean for the plays to eventually hatch, so, in that respect, I hope this analogy is inadequate. During the incubation stage, plays require confinement and quiet, unquestioned care and attention. It’s a tender time around which all other events, expectations, and demands must be placed on hold. One must stay with the play every possible moment and keep it warm and always in mind, and be always listening and looking for new things to feed it so it can grow. This includes materials from the subconscious, so a lot of naps are usually necessary. It also includes a lot of reading material. But I have to be very conscious of what I pull into the incubation space because it affects the outcome and growth of the whole

Luis Camnitzer

by Alejandro Cesarco

Memorial (Detail), 2009, pigment prints, 11 3/4 Ă&#x2014; 9 1/2 inches, 194 parts, edition of 5 with 1 ap. courtesy of alexander gray associates, new york, ny.

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una que cubre la palabra que la nombra, 1973–76, mixed media, 13 1/2 × 9 7/8 × 2 inches. courtesy of alexander gray associates, new york, ny.

Real edge of the line that divides reality from fiction, 1974–75, mixed media, 13 1/2 × 9 7/8 × 2 inches. Photo

by Peter Schälchli, Zurich.

Signature by the Slice, 1971/2007, Laser-cut paper, 2 9/10 × 23 3/5 × 5 9/10 inches; Slices: 4 1/3 × 5 1/3 × 1/40 inches each. all images courtesy of Daros Latinamerica collection, Zurich, and el museo del barrio, ny, except when otherwise noted. Photo by Dominique Uldry, Bern.

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Tricky Weather; 2010; Gouache, chalk, and ink on paper; 12 Ă&#x2014; 9 inches.

Check out BOMBsite.com for additional images as well as an interview with the artist.

96 the wick / dale williams