Cultured Magazine February/March 2019 by CulturedMag

BROAD CITY BRINGS THE ART WORLD DOWN TO EARTH BY TINA BARNEY ABBI JACOBSON AND ILANA GLAZER

FEB/MARCH 2019

THE FILM ISSUE

PHOTOGRAPHED BY NICK KNIGHT

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Contents FEB/MARCH 2019

Broad City creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer photographed by Tina Barney.

FAIRY TALES Aya Takano’s genre-bending images of mystical creatures envelop their audience in fantasy. 50 HUNTING A MYTH Matthew Barney returns to his alma mater for “Redone” at Yale University Art Gallery. 52 ACID RAIN The New Museum delves into the textural treasure trove that is Nari Ward‘s long and illustrious output with a career survey, 54 “We The People.” MODEL SON Roberto Rossellini Jr. is more than just the scion of one of Hollywood’s most legendary families. He’s a creative triple threat. 56 BEST IN CLASS Charles White is finally getting the recognition he deserves with a retrospective coming to LACMA in February. 58 SOUND IT OUT Fiona Alison Duncan’s Hard to Read lit series turns public readings into social practice. 60 CULTURED 25 We’ve gathered 25 exhibitions, happenings and moments that have caught our attention. 71 CULTURE SEEKER Laura de Gunzburg journeys to Beirut, Lebanon to immerse herself in the country’s rich history of architecture, textiles and more. 88 SPACE FOR INTIMACY With Company and Baby Company, Sophie Mörner has carved a space in the Lower East Side—for friends and for family. 90 THROUGH THE LENS OF FASHION Cathy Leff checks in with Fashion in Film Festival co-founder Marketa Uhlirova 92 ASK ME ANYTHING Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Kristi Jacobson’s gut-wrenching ouevre of investigative documentaries takes on 94 everything from food insecurity to the prison system. HER MOMENT IS NOW Jenn Nkiru is the visionary filmmaker defining her milieu who is launching a collaboration with Gucci at Frieze LA. 102 ELEVATION PLAN Giancarlo Valle digs deep into his projects, bringing his peripatetic upbringing into everything he takes on—from 104 infrastructures to interiors.

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COURTESY GREGOR STAIGER GALLERY

Contents

Installation view of Nicolas Party’s 2018 “Pastels” exhibition at Gregor Staiger gallery in Zürich.

SEX, ALIENS & SURREALISM Is surrealism the answer for a sexless era? Slutever’s Karley Sciortino thinks so. ON THE NATURE OF BEING Deferring to silence over sound and feelings over action, filmmaker Naima Ramos-Chapman is charting a new course for storytelling. THE MUSE Candyland, subway maps, Jackson Pollock’s wild abstraction: for fashion historian Colby Jordan Mugrabi, inspiration is everywhere. THE CEREBRAL SUBTLETY OF ROSETTA GETTY With artist collaborations essential to her practice, the designer is expanding traditional definitions of fashion. THE MARKET COMES TO MARFA Long beloved as a remote outpost of artistic inspiration, Marfa hosts its first-ever art fair. DON’T BLINK This year, Ja’Tovia Gary ups the ante with her first feature-length movie and a solo presentation at Galerie Frank Elbaz. GOD SAVE THE CURATOR In her first interview since last year’s MOCA debacle, Helen Molesworth reflects on her past and where she is going next. THE HEALER Adelita Husni-Bey’s New Museum exhibition puts American immigration policy—and the people it affects the most—front and center. PATTERN MAKER Jessica Vaughn finds and then undermines the narratives lurking in the objects and materials that surround us. IT’S FOR YOU Artist Madeline Hollander talks about her hand in Jordan Peele’s forthcoming thriller, Us. THE DISSENTER As Emile de Antonio’s influential Vietnam documentary, In the Year of the Pig, turns 50, Danny King looks back on the late director’s career-long mission of confronting American authority. THE LONG TAKE Kevin Jerome Everson focuses his lens on the people behind the scenes, illuminating the quiet humanity of the everyday. COLLAPSE OF TIME MacArthur “Genius” Okwui Okpokwasili dips into the past, subtly elucidating its bearing on the present.

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Contents

Emily Allan, Leah Hennessey, E.J. O’Hara, Ruby McCollister from the hit YouTube series Zhe Zhe photographed by Dana Hoey.

IT’S ABOUT TIME The German collector Julia Stoschek has one of the world’s largest time-based media troves. Now, the new MOCA Los Angeles trustee is bringing her vision of contemporary art to the biggest global audience yet. I’M LAUGHING WITH YOU Broad City pioneered a new model for the young and hopeful of New York with its take on the sitcom. Now in its final season, creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer turn their attention to the blank canvas ahead. A PERENNIAL EDEN Shirin Neshat has fundamentally shifted the way we see Iran. Fariha Róisín digs into the artist’s life and work. FOOL’S MATE Artist Derek Fordjour is toppling expectations and enjoying the game along the way. MARATHON MAN Alex Da Corte’s colorful contribution to the Carnegie International requires more than binge-watching. HOUNDS OF LOVE Savannah Knoop shares their “body” of work with Jarrett Earnest and reflects on fiction, intimacy and celebrity. WHY AND WHEREFORE The art world’s favorite architect, Kulapat Yantrasast, on how buildings are like people. FAKE OUT, FAKE IN Bandulu Street Couture toes the line between branded and bootleg. REALITY CHECK Orit Gat spends a day in a virtual reality museum. Larry Fink captures the experience. THE STRANGER Using gloriously colored pastels and inspired by the arcane, the Swiss artist Nicolas Party is a beloved outlier on the contemporary scene. BEASTS OF BURDEN The artists behind the hit YouTube series Zhe Zhe are smuggling comedy back into art one episode at a time. A SEAT AT THE TABLE Young chefs and mixologists are shaking up the art world, taking our palates and minds along for the ride. OFF THE DEEP END Created in partnership with Prospect NY the latest Cultured Commission is a Misha Kahn-designed pool float that will have you longing for summer.

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BROAD CITY BRINGS THE ART WORLD DOWN TO EARTH BY TINA BARNEY ABBI JACOBSON AND ILANA GLAZER

186 194 200 208 214 220 228

FEB/MARCH 2019

THE FILM ISSUE

Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer photographed exclusively for Cultured by Tina Barney and styled by Katie Christopher in front of a painting by Sturtevant. Glazer wears Proenza Schouler top and Rachel Comey skirt with Lizzie Fortunato bracelet. Jacobson wears Proenza Schouler top and bottom with Lizzie Fortunato earrings. Hair by Marcel Dagenais; makeup by Delina Medhin; flowers by Lauren Ancona.

eyewear L A K E B EL L FOR R AG & B ONE B A L H A R B OUR S HOP S 970 0 COL L IN S AV E 3 0 5 728 4 4 0 0

FARIHA RÓISÍN

IKECHUKWU ONYEWUENYI

LARRY FINK

Writer

Curator

Photographer

Fariha Róisín, whose work addresses her Muslim identity, race, queerness, pop culture and film, profiles Iranian artist Shirin Neshat for this issue. “Meeting Shirin was like meeting a soul mate,” she says. “So many times through our few hours together I felt her to say things I’d already been considering on my own, or she mirrored an understanding of myself I had only just faced recently. She reminded me of the realities of the artist, and how important it is to accept your path.”

Ikechukwu Casmir Onyewuenyi joined the Hammer as a curatorial assistant in May 2017, where he has collaborated on exhibitions, programs and catalogs, including “Stories of Almost Everyone.” Onyewuenyi maintains an ongoing writing practice, having profiled the likes of Maurizio Cattelan, Awol Erizku and more for publications such as Aperture and ARTS.BLACK. In this issue, Onyewuenyi takes a look at Fiona Alison Duncan’s lit series, Hard to Read.

Larry Fink has worked as a professional photographer for over 45 years in addition to having solo shows at MoMA and the Whitney. For this issue, he photographed the story “Reality Check,” writer Orit Gat’s trip to a virtual reality museum. “I live on a farm,” he says. “Virtual reality is reflected from the earth…What I found upon this visit was multicultural in profound degrees… The virtual illusionary reality is not on my map for exploration.”

TINA BARNEY Photographer Our Broad City cover story was shot by Tina Barney, whose photography is part of the permanent collections at MoMA, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Barney says of the pair, “These two women were so much fun to photograph. They had no ego, no vanity—they were just themselves, and so appreciative. Hard to find these days!” 40 culturedmag.com

CLÉMENCE POLÈS (ROISIN), ©GEOFFREY BERLINER (FINK)

Contributors

EXCLUSIVE TIMEPIECE COLLECTION MIAMI . ISTANBUL . ANKARA SEVANBICAKCI.COM

MITCHELL KUGA

ORIT GAT

YAEL MALKA

Journalist

Writer

Photographer

Born in Hawaii and based in Brooklyn, Mitchell Kuga is a journalist and the editor of SALT. For thiss issue, Kuga profiles five culinary artists on the rise: “In writing about these chefs, I was struck by what connected their approaches: the desire to bring people together. Writing about food and drink in relation to art can sound esoteric, even alienating. But I hope what comes across is very simple, which is the ability to activate communities through the senses.”

Orit Gat is a New York-based writer whose work has appeared in Frieze, ArtReview, and The White Review, where she is a contributing editor. She is a winner of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. During her visit to VR World, she loved “hanging out with the attendants. One told me his dream was to become famous on Twitch, where he streams himself gaming. I follow him now on Instagram, waiting to hear about his big break.”

Yael Malka, who captures Jessica Vaughn for this issue, works and lives in New York where she had her first solo show “Almost Touching” at LES gallery the Rubber Factory this past fall. Her work has also been shown at the Brooklyn Museum Library and Bruce High Quality Foundation, among others. After publishing two books with artist Cait Oppermann, Malka is currently working on her own book of photos made in Kibbutz Kinneret, Israel.

BARBARA HAMMER Artist New York-based visual artist Barbara Hammer has received numerous awards for her films and in 2010 was the subject of a month-long retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Known for her primarily uses film and video in experimental, nonlinear time based work, Hammer is considered a pioneer of queer cinema. For this issue, she photographed Company gallery founder Sophie Mörner.

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JUSTIN WEE (KUGA), CAIT OPPERMANN (MALKA), SOPHIE MÖRNER (HAMMER)

Contributors

EMMA CRAFT

CATHERINE OPIE

Dana Hoey

Photographer

Artist

New York-based fashion photographer Emma Craft finds inspiration through past artwork and her own life experiences.For this issue, she photographed Naima Ramos-Chapman at her Brooklyn apartment: “Although we felt intrusive with all of our equipment, Naima gave off an inspiring, warm energy that helped us transfer the same feeling into our images.”

Catherine Opie, who captured Helen Molesworth for this issue, is an artist and photographer in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the US, Europe and Japan, including a mid-career survey at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008. She has received numerous awards and honors, among them the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Medal in 2016.

Dana Hoey examines female identity through work that orbits familiar visual conventions. She hosted the team behind Zhe Zhe at her farm in upstate New York for a shoot with the resident animals. “I feared bringing such mistresses of artifice and camp to my farm,” she shares. “What would their genius find amongst the dusty dirty animals? I grossly underestimated their gigantic hearts. What a pleasure and privilege to photograph Zhe Zhe.”

OLIVIA LOCHER Photographer “It was such a pleasure to be invited into Shirin Neshat’s home to make her portrait. She was lovelier than I could have ever imagined,” says photographer Olivia Locher of her work for our artist edition cover. “Having the opportunity to photograph her was an absolute joy and a session I know I will never forget!” Locher’s work is often grounded in dreamlands and consciousness; her first book, I Fought the Law, was published in 2017.

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PEGGY OLDER (CRAFT), SELF-PORTRAIT (LOCHER)

Contributors

Publisher Gail Feldman gail@whitehausmediagroup.com

Founder /Editor-in-Chief Sarah G. Harrelson sarah@culturedmag.com Creative Director Carlos A. Suarez Executive Editor Sara Rofﬁno VURIÀQR#FXOWXUHGPDJ FRP Features Editor Kat Herriman Contributing Editor Michael Reynolds Associate Art Director Katie Brown Digital Media Editor Jessica Idarraga Assistant Editor Simone Sutnick Landscape Editor Lily Kwong Design Editor Mieke ten Have Architecture Editor Andrew Heid

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Contributing Photographers Emma Craft Warren Elgort Naima Green Jeremy Liebman Aubrey Mayer Landon Nordeman Jason Schmidt

François Dischinger Douglas Friedman Dana Hoey Olivia Locher Matthew Morrocco Matthew Placek Catherine Opie

Senior Accountant Judith Cabrera Senior Photo Retouchers Bert Moo-Young, Matt Stevens

Partner Mike Batt

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Interns Carolyn Batchelor, Paola Coriat, Callan Malone Prepress/Print Production Pete Jacaty

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The Film Issue burst onto the small screen five years ago with their trademark “Yas Kween,” Broad City has been a cultural touchstone. This season, their hilarious sitcom about millennial feminists navigating relationships, work and a diverse New York City is in its final season on Comedy Central. When we started thinking about cover stars for Cultured’s inaugural issue dedicated to film, Jacobson and Glazer were natural choices for their honest, unguarded approach to the medium. Photographed by Tina Barney, whose saturated, lush portraits have graced gallery walls and too many magazines to count, “the two women,” Barney says, “had no ego, no vanity—they were just themselves.” Our Features Editor Kat Herriman sits down with the duo to talk about accessibility, identifying as artists, and life after Broad City. Film has been a thread uniting many of the multidisciplinary artists that Cultured has covered in its pages. And its impact is ever growing in a media landscape pivoting to video. Now is the perfect moment to release our first film issue, as we’ve grown more interested in thinking about how film shapes and responds to the larger art context. We’ve done that by bringing together artists across genres and generations who are working with film. Kevin Jerome Everson, whose films about the black working class screen this March at the Centre Pompidou, was photographed by Bridget Donahue Gallery’s Erin Leland—who also wrote the profile of Everson. Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat made her first foray into film nearly 20 years ago with the striking black-andwhite Rapture. Fariha Róisín, our new contributing writer, visited Neshat in her Brooklyn home and studio to write a feature in advance of the artist’s survey exhibition at the Broad Museum this fall. Our photoshoot with Neshat resulted in our Artist Edition cover, to which Neshat added a poem by Hafiz, the 14th-century Persian poet—poetry has long been an inspiration for the artist. We also touch base with conceptual artist Savannah Knoop, who was the face of the authorial persona JT LeRoy in the early 2000s. Knoop was portrayed by Kristen Stewart in last year’s Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy, a film adaptation of Knoop’s memoir about the JT days. Rounding out the issue, we feature choreographer and MacArthur “Genius” grantee Okwui Okpokwasili; writer and sexpert Karley Sciortino, aka Slutever; and so much more. We are more excited than ever about 2019. We extend the most sincere thank you to all of our readers and supporters. Celebrating the creative spirit in our subjects is our driving passion, which pushes us daily to present thought-provoking insights into the people defining our collective cultural moment.

With Yvonne Force Villareal at The Bass Museum and L’Objet’s Art Basel dinner honoring their collaboration with the Haas Brothers.

For our Artist Edition cover, Olivia Locher photographed HY[PZ[ HUK ÄSTTHRLY Shirin Neshat in her )YVVRS`U OVTL 5LZOH[ [OLU ZL[ [OL PTHNL HNHPUZ[ H WVLT I` [O JLU[\Y` THZ[LY /HÄa ^YP[[LU PU 5HZ[HSPX ZJYPW[ 5LZOH[ OHZ SVUN ILLU PUZWPYLK I` WVL[Y` ÄYZ[ THRPUN P[ H WHY[ VM OLY WYHJ[PJL PU [OL Z ^P[O her Women of Allah ZLYPLZ

With gratitude,

Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson Follow us | @cultured_mag

Subscribe today at culturedmag.com 48 culturedmag.com

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FAIRY TALES

Aya Takano’s genre-bending images of mystical creatures envelop their audience in the fantasy. From March 2 through April 13, Perrotin plays host to the latest installment from the menagerie.

Untitled (2019)

“Since I was very young I have been attracted to the culture of mysticism present in both Eastern and Western civilizations from ancient times. I’ve always had a desire to glimpse and then be immersed in the abyss—the source of the universe—to discover all that is, through either ordinary or extraordinary experience.” —Aya Takano

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John Procario

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HUNTING A MYTH Matthew Barney returns to his alma mater for his exhibition, “Redone,” opening March 1 at Yale University Art Gallery. In an exploration of myths, landscapes and materials, Barney’s newest works—sculptures made with experimental proccesses and a two-hour video following a wolf hunt—are a view of the world that is both deeply introspective and cosmic.

A production still from Matthew Barney’s film, Redoubt (2018)

“In a place like Idaho, I could never imagine a political conversation about reintroducing wolves into the wild without a parallel conversation about hunting wolves. Hunting is entwined in the way land management is approached there, and it runs deep in the culture. As I understand the Diana myth, the fact that she hunts is a given, though one of the paradoxes of her character is that she kills the thing she holds sacred. The myth became a useful tool in translating the Redoubt narrative from a local scale to a more universal one.” —Matthew Barney

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ACID RAIN

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK, HONG KONG, SEOUL

This February, the New Museum delves into the textural treasure trove that is Nari Ward‘s long and illustrious output with a career survey, “We The People.” Eroding our sense of certainty, the show celebrates Ward’s mastery at culling poetry from the quotidian.

Ward’s Sky Juice (1993).

“As technology gets such a strong hold on us, I think the hand and the moment that people are engaged with, the ritual of being present, is really what I’m trying to have my work evolve for the viewer.” —Nari Ward 54 culturedmag.com

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In the canon of modeling

MODEL SON BY CAIT MUNRO

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Roberto Rossellini Jr. is more than just the scion of one of Hollywood’s most legendary families. He’s a creative triple threat.

P O R T R A I T BY B RYA N H U Y N H

industry clichés, if getting randomly discovered on the street is the first, being the offspring of a famous person is surely the second. But if you’re part of a legendary Hollywood family and were also randomly discovered on the street, then two clichés make for one very good story. Such is the case with Roberto Rossellini Jr., a New York-based model and photographer and the son of actress Isabella Rossellini. “I was walking with my girlfriend in Soho,” Rossellini recalls, “and I had some lady come up to me, like, ‘Are you a model?’ and I said no, and she was like, ‘Do you want to be?’ My girlfriend and I didn’t know if it was real.” The offer, courtesy of fashion journal L’Officiel Italia, was indeed very real. Not long after, 25-year-old Rossellini signed with Ford Models, and has since walked the runway for Michael Kors and Dolce & Gabbana and starred alongside his mother in a 2017 campaign for the upstart brand Sies Marjan. Upcoming projects include a Gap campaign and curating a selection of fine jewelry for Bulgari’s 50th anniversary celebration. “People are just now discovering that I’m my mom’s son, which is funny,” Rossellini says. When he’s not in front of the camera—or tending to the family’s working farm on Long Island—Rossellini can be found behind one. A lifelong photographer, he mostly eschews the fashion world in favor of shooting up-andcoming rappers and hip-hop musicians (along with more established groups like Sad Boys and A$AP Mob) when they’re in New York to perform. “I like showing a different side of people. Rappers seem like these hard guys, but I want to show them in a different element,” he explains. Eventually, he hopes to put together a book of the portraits. “I’m going to do it for free, though. I don’t want it to be something that I need to make money from.” Rossellini is also launching a unisex clothing line, Control Plus, which features denim and streetwear plus small toys that look a bit like high-end robot action figures for adults. He realizes that his current status as a creative up-and-comer begs the question as to whether he’ll ever follow in his mother’s Hollywood footsteps. The answer is: maybe. “It’s been on my mind a bit recently,” he admits. “A small part or a smaller role is something I’d definitely do. But a main role is still a little intimidating.”

BEST IN CLASS

Charles White PZ ÄUHSS` NL[[PUN [OL YLJVNUP[PVU OL KLZLY]LZ ^P[O H YL[YVZWLJ[P]L JVTPUN [V 3(*4( PU -LIY\HY` ( ZH[LSSP[L ZOV^ VYNHUPaLK I` 6[PZ *VSSLNL ^OLYL >OP[L [H\NO[ MVY TVYL [OHU H KLJHKL [HRLZ P[ [V [OL UL_[ SL]LS ^P[O HU L_OPIP[PVU OVUVYPUN OPZ L_WHUZP]L PUÅ\LUJL VU HY[PZ[Z PUJS\KPUN 2LYY` 1HTLZ 4HYZOHSS HUK +H]PK /HTTVUZ BY JANELLE ZARA

Kerry James Marshall resolved to be one of Charles White’s students at Otis Art Institute years before he was even old enough to apply to college. In the fifth grade, he picked up a book called Great Negroes, Past and Present, and made a discovery in its back pages: a prolific artist who made images of black people with realism and joy, eschewing the racist caricatures that had dominated their portrayal. In the eighth grade, when Marshall found the book Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White, he made up his mind. He diligently copied its pages and attempted to recreate White’s paintings until he was old enough to enroll in 1977. In his essay, “A Black Artist Named White,” he writes, “I tried to be Charles White in every way I could.” Works by Marshall and dozens of artists like him appear in “Life Model: Charles White and his Students,” a companion exhibition to the blockbuster “Charles White: A Retrospective” that is on view at LACMA from February 16 through September 15. While the long overdue retrospective traces White’s career over more than 100 drawings, paintings and various other media, “Life Model”—on view at LACMA’s satellite gallery at Charles White Elementary School, the original Otis Art Institute campus—digs deeper into the reverberations of his legacy. It showcases an array of artists, from Marshall to David Hammons to Chicano activist Judithe Hernández, who were directly influenced by his mentorship. The majority of them were students at Otis, where White was the first black faculty member and taught from 1965 until his death in 1979. For White, mentorship was paramount to his own practice from the beginning, and he had long ago resolved to pay it forward. “His foundation was based on the sharing of information,” says White’s son, artist C. Ian White, who co-curated “Life Model” with Sarah Jesse. He recounts that while his father was growing up in Chicago during the Great Depression, art education was out of reach for so many of his peers. In high school, as a member of Chicago’s Art Crafts Guild, White belonged to a community where the few artists who could attend school would come back and share their lessons. “It instilled in him the understanding that information is not privileged,” says Ian White. “It took the individual out of the artistic practice, making it a matter of community involvement.” In the classroom, White imparted foundational skills of drawing:

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structural anatomy, line quality, tonality. But “whatever I was drawing wasn’t really that important,” Hammons recalls in a recent interview with Ian White. In the late artist’s classroom, “The energy was more important than anything else to me. Like being in the room with Ali or James Baldwin.” As an homage, in 2017 he curated a show at the Museum of Modern Art that mounted White’s 1973 drawing Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man) next to a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, essentially putting the two on the same pedestal. To an entire generation of aspiring artists, White was a singular touchstone for the visual representation of black culture. His career persisted through the setbacks of bigotry, including scholarships that were rescinded once art schools realized that he was black. The broader public knew his work from reproductions in Jet and Ebony magazines, or stapled to telephone polls; his images starred in the annual calendars of Golden State Mutual Life, the sole black-owned life insurance company of its day, and made cameos on the walls of movies like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, thanks to his friend, Sidney Poitier. As the first black member of the Otis faculty, White was sought after by students of color, and his classes were always full. As much as his skills, White’s students sought his guidance, although he never had a prescriptive approach to becoming an artist. “He taught that you need to develop a practice that allows you that point of personal discovery, and he really gave them the room to maturate through that,” says Ian White. It was the baseline that launched a wide array of careers, from the murals of John Biggers, whom White taught during his time at Hampton University, to Marshall’s redress of art history through the figurative painting of black subjects. Hernández, one of the few female Mexican American students at Otis at the time, went on to become the sole female member of the Chicano activist collective Los Four. And Hammons, of course, sought his own depictions of the black experience through radical experimentation in sculpture. Although White’s retrospective arrives 40 years after his death, his legacy lives on as his students carry it along the path that he carved. “No other artist has inspired my own devotion to a career in image-making more than he did,” Marshall writes. “And because he looked like my uncles and my neighbors, his achievements seemed within my reach.”

COURTESY THE CHARLES WHITE ARCHIVES

White was an important teacher for many students at Otis College of Art, including Judithe Hernández, pictured here, who became an inﬂuential ﬁgure in the Chicano Art movement and the only woman in the Los Four collective.

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A writer by trade, Fiona Alison Duncan takes a curatorial approach to books and has expanded that practice into community-driven experiences.

SOUND IT OUT

Fiona Alison Duncan’s Hard to Read lit series turns public readings into social practice. BY IKECHUKWU ONYEWUENYI PORTRAIT BY D’ANGELO LOVELL WILLIAMS

To be hard to read is to be impenetrable, not fully forthcoming. Fiona Alison Duncan is antithetical to this. In fact, she almost needs to be. How come? Well, Duncan is the progenitor of Hard to Read, a lit series that decidedly makes space for a host of personalities atypical of such bookish events—dancers, nutritionists, porn stars, actors, musicians, journalists, models. For the many gracing Hard to Read, it’s safe to say writer is not their chief calling card, in that each participant dons varying hats. Ultimately, this panoply of professions—some more public than others—demands a selfless vulnerability, a giving over of self that isn’t contrived to mislead. Instead, for Duncan, negotiating who shows up at Hard to Read is less about parading the best foot forward than it is about willingly performing—offering— multiple selves, faults and all, to say nothing of that trailing leg. I would say Duncan sets the tone for all this candor. She launched Hard to Read in October 2016, on a psychedelic-informed whim to escape the silo that can be Los Angeles. But, for Duncan, to want (escape) is to give, and wanting out of this isolation required her to give a little. Hence, Hard to Read began, in a way, as an act of benevolence (and atonement if we consider Duncan’s loneliness as a grievance of sorts) for an LA operating at a maddening pace—a supermodernity overrun with events upon events that still feels empty.

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Duncan turned to The Standard Hotels in LA as a container for said acts, with the majority of events alternating between the hotel’s Downtown and Hollywood locations. That hotels are often deemed nonplaces—transient spaces of solitude, identity-loss and role-playing— makes Duncan’s choice, on the surface, all the more vanguardist. Which, perhaps, begs the question: Can fleeting pleasures remedy lonesome subjectivities? But that’s hardly the rub here. Clocking at more than 40 events at the Standard and 12 at allied institutions (e.g., Eckhaus Latta’s retail shop), Hard to Read is far from short-lived, with the event making itself at home in varied places. Earlier this year, the program went rogue, with Duncan adding programming in galleries, community centers, malls, and gardens throughout 2019. Now a staple fixture, Duncan’s endeavor has, without doubt, brought an (un)expected edge unto itself and the very non-place of The Standard Hotel. There’s the time, not even a year in, when the plangent sounds of all-femme punk four-piece Fuck U Pay Us tore into the rafters of the lobby to the chagrin of the management. The show went on, as did Duncan’s lit series. And while the hubris of manifestos is becoming increasingly passé and impotent, the “Xenomaskuline Manifesto” delivered by transmasculine performance artist Cade felt less manifesto than memoir. There was no assured, chauvinistic tenor to it, something all-toocommon in avant-garde manifestos of the last century. Instead, Cade details how he’s not a man, but performing a “historical attitude known as masculinity,” one chock full of the familiar failings of patriarchy. This incantation from Cade circles back to Duncan, a multihyphenate who, in all sincerity, prefers to fall (back), which is to say lean on others as she experiments with ways to convene. “This series has taught me a lot about appreciating people who have some investment in actual relationship and collaboration,” Duncan reflects. But even in these moments of camaraderie, tensions arise. While Duncan admits she “can be very conflict averse” in our tête-à-tête over tea, the above happenings—i.e., Fuck U Pay Us, Cade—suggest an agonism at play. Later on, Duncan retreats just so, stating “you can’t have a narrative without conflict.” Precisely. Going off of Hard to Read, I would say, then, that Duncan is acutely aware that working out conflicts is a relation rich with occasional misgivings. That is, we can gather and still feel apart, sequestered in thoughts all our own. Moments like this find Duncan acknowledging that she “can’t know everything,” an insight that welcomes other forms of exchange, experimentation. Take Ready-to-read: a “diffusion line” of books that Duncan thematically pairs with the high fashion-seasonal calendar and presents out of Eckhaus Latta’s retail store. Or Pillow Talk: the sister series to Hard to Read that delves more deeply into sex, love and communication. Originally held at the Penthouse Suite of The Standard, Downtown LA, Pillow Talk is more interactive, employing far greater crosstalk relative to Hard to Read’s somewhat strict reader-audience divide. Duncan considers Hard to Read as “simply demonstrative… scratching the surface,” while Pillow Talk allows for “unpacking” ideas. As evidence, we can think of Hard to Read as asyndetonic, with Pillow Talk emerging as this conjunctive glue, that in-between where sense is fleshed out. This year, Pillow Talk is also going rogue; yet still taking place in intimate spaces, like hotel rooms, and even domestic venues. Duncan has “aspirations of Hard to Read being a publication.” Can it sustain that verve though? My guess is Duncan isn’t too worried about such things; periodicals she’s drawn are ones that flourish long after they’re over, like a cult following. That Duncan has hit those heights now bodes well for Hard to Read, Ready-to-read, Pillow Talk, and the many other iterations that spawn from this selfless talent.

NAJLA EL ZEIN TRANSITION February 28 - April 13, 2019

FRIEDMAN BENDA FRIEDMANBENDA.COM

515 W 26TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10001 TELEPHONE 212 239 8700 FAX 212 239 8760

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Photograph taken at M+, Hong Kong

Participating Galleries # 10 Chancery Lane 303 Gallery 47 Canal A Miguel Abreu Acquavella Aike Alisan Anomaly Antenna Space Applicat-Prazan Arario Alfonso Artiaco Artinformal Aye B Balice Hertling Beijing Art Now Beijing Commune Bergamin & Gomide Bernier/Eliades Blindspot Blum & Poe Boers-Li Tanya Bonakdar Isabella Bortolozzi Ben Brown Gavin Brown Buchholz C Gisela Capitain Cardi Carlos/Ishikawa Chambers Chemould Prescott Road Yumiko Chiba Chi-Wen Sadie Coles HQ Contemporary Fine Arts Continua Paula Cooper Pilar Corrias Alan Cristea Chantal Crousel D Thomas Dane Massimo De Carlo

de Sarthe Dirimart du Monde E Eigen + Art Eslite Gallery Exit Experimenter Selma Feriani Fortes D‘Aloia & Gabriel Fox/Jensen G Gagosian Gajah gb agency Gladstone Gmurzynska Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Gow Langsford Bärbel Grässlin Richard Gray Greene Naftali Karsten Greve Grotto H Hakgojae Hanart TZ Hauser & Wirth Herald St Max Hetzler Hive Xavier Hufkens I Ingleby Ink Studio Taka Ishii J Annely Juda K Kaikai Kiki Kalfayan Karma International Kasmin Sean Kelly Tina Keng

Kerlin König Galerie David Kordansky Tomio Koyama Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Andrew Kreps Krinzinger Kukje kurimanzutto L Pearl Lam Simon Lee Leeahn Lehmann Maupin Lelong Lévy Gorvy Liang Lin & Lin Lisson Long March Luhring Augustine Luxembourg & Dayan M Maggiore Magician Space Mai 36 Edouard Malingue Matthew Marks Mazzoleni Fergus McCaffrey Greta Meert Urs Meile Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Francesca Minini Victoria Miro Mitchell-Innes & Nash Mizuma Modern Art The Modern Institute mother‘s tankstation N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Nadi Nagel Draxler Richard Nagy

Nanzuka Taro Nasu neugerriemschneider nichido Anna Ning Franco Noero O Nathalie Obadia OMR One and J. Lorcan O‘Neill Ora-Ora Ota Roslyn Oxley9 P P.P.O.W Pace Pace Prints Paragon Peres Projects Perrotin Petzel Pi Artworks PKM Plan B R Almine Rech Regen Projects Nara Roesler ROH Projects Tyler Rollins Thaddaeus Ropac Rossi & Rossi Lia Rumma S SCAI The Bathhouse Esther Schipper Rüdiger Schöttle ShanghART ShugoArts Side 2 Sies + Höke Silverlens Skarstedt Soka Sprüth Magers Starkwhite STPI

March 29 – 31, 2019

Sullivan+Strumpf T Take Ninagawa Tang Templon The Third Line This Is No Fantasy dianne tanzer + nicola stein TKG+ Tokyo Gallery + BTAP Tornabuoni Two Palms V Vadehra Van de Weghe Vitamin W Waddington Custot Wentrup Michael Werner White Cube White Space Beijing Barbara Wien Jocelyn Wolff Y Yavuz Z Zeno X Zilberman David Zwirner Insights A Thousand Plateaus Asia Art Center Bank Baton Beyond Dastan‘s Basement Don Empty Gallery Espace Fost Hunsand Space Yoshiaki Inoue Johyun Richard Koh Mind Set

Pifo Star Yuka Tsuruno Watanuki / Toki-noWasuremono Wooson Yamaki Discoveries 1335Mabini A+ Contemporary Sabrina Amrani Christian Andersen Capsule Château Shatto Commonwealth and Council Crèvecoeur Ghebaly High Art Hopkinson Mossman hunt kastner Jhaveri JTT Maho Kubota Emanuel Layr Michael Lett MadeIn mor charpentier Nova Contemporary Project Native Informant Société Tabula Rasa Tarq Vanguard

The Denver Art Museum is proud to present this highly acclaimed emerging artist, and Denver native, in her ﬁrst major museum exhibition.

FEBRUARY 2–AUG UST 18, 2019

IMAGE:

Jordan Casteel, Sylvia’s (Taniedra, Kendra, Bedelia, Crizette, De’Sean), 2018. Oil on canvas; 90 x 78 in. Denver Art Museum: Funds from Burgess Services, Maude B. Lofton M.D., Robert F. Smith Family, Tina Walls, and other donors. Image courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York © Jordan Casteel. Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze is organized by the Denver Art Museum. It is presented with generous support from Merle C. Chambers, Vicki and Kent Logan, Barbara Bridges, Judi and Joe Wagner, the Robert Lehman Foundation, the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, and the citizens who support the Scientiﬁc and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Educational programs associated with the exhibition are funded by FirstBank, Riverfront Park Community Foundation, and an anonymous donor. Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine, CBS4, Comcast Spotlight, and The Denver Post.

Now open 7 days

New York City guggenheim.org

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future is supported by LLWW Foundation, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, and The American-Scandinavian Foundation. This exhibition is organized with the cooperation of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm. The Leadership Committee for this exhibition, chaired by Maire Ehrnrooth and Carl Gustaf Ehrnrooth, Trustee, is gratefully acknowledged for its support, with special thanks to Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté; Rafaela and Kaj Forsblom; Helena and Per Skarstedt; Johannes Falk; Miguel Abreu Gallery; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York; Katherine Farley and Jerry I. Speyer; Barbara Gladstone; Gilberto and Rosa Sandretto; and Candace King Weir.

Hugo Rivera-Scott, Pop América, 1968. Collage on cardboard, 30 x 21.5 inches (76.5 x 54.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist. © Hugo Rivera-Scott. Photo by Jorge Brantmayer. Pop América, 1965 – 1975 is co-organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. The exhibition is guest curated by Esther Gabara, E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Romance Studies and associate professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. Pop América, 1965 – 1975 is a recipient of the inaugural Sotheby’s Prize and is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional thanks to the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) and to its President and Founder, Ariel Aisiks. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. At the Nasher Museum, this exhibition is made possible by the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions; Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; Fox Family Foundation; Ann Chanler and Andrew Scheman; Katie Thorpe Kerr and Terrance I. R. Kerr; Lisa Lowenthal Pruzan and Jonathan Pruzan; Kelly Braddy Van Winkle and Lance Van Winkle; Parker & Otis; and Karen M. Rabenau and David H. Harpole, MD. Support from Duke University is provided by the Vice Provost for the Arts; the Global Brazil Lab and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute; the Dean of the Humanities; the Departments of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies; the Duke Brazil Initiative; the Ofﬁce of the Provost; and the Ofﬁce of Global Affairs.

THE TWE NTY FIVE We’ve gathered 25 exhibitions, happenings and moments that have caught our attention—and we think they’ll capture yours, too.

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Yasumasa Morimura’s Daughter of Art History, Theater B (1989)

Janine Antoni’s Paper Dance (2013) a collaborative work with Anna Halprin.

Contemporary artist and MacArthur “Genius” Janine Antoni shares the spotlight this winter with her collaborative retrospective, “Paper Dance” at The Contemporary Austin. A transgression of the cookie cutter survey format, “Paper Dance” is a living creature animated by Antoni’s solo dance performances conceived with choreographer and dancer Anna Halprin. The show offers a once in a lifetime opportunity to intimately engage 30 years of Antoni’s radical sculptures, performances and photographs. THECONTEMPORARYAUSTIN.ORG 72 culturedmag.com

“My Kid Could Do That” is not just a phrase heard all too often in art galleries, but also the name of ProjectArt’s annual fundraiser, which enables the nonproﬁt to provide art classes to students that would otherwise receive no creative education in school. Artist Michele Oka Doner is one of the donors to the auction happening March 15 at the Moore Building in Miami. She recalls her own early education with pleasure: “Art was always my favorite period of the day, and looking back many years ago, when I discovered this childhood painting saved by my mother and folded up in an envelope, I was struck by the child who included the beautiful blue sky of Miami in her portrait from 1951—a worthy appropriation. The sky under which I grew up was always visible.” Join the artist in her vision by buying tickets at PROJECTART.ORG/BENEFIT

Contemporary art’s fascination with reenactment is a well-documented tradition helmed by canonical darlings like Jasper Johns’ painted ale cans and perhaps Sturtevant’s entire oeuvre. The Getty Museum taps into this history with “Encore: Reenactment in Contemporary Photography,” an exhibition pulling together artists who wield restaging as a conceptual and aesthetic tool. The artist list is stacked with participants including Yinka Shonibare MBE, Gillian Wearing and Qiu Zhijie. Get ready for the double take. “Encore” opens March 12. GETTY.EDU

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. pays homage to the curving, organic shapes of Ursula von Rydingsvard, epitomized in For Natasha, pictured here, with a survey scaled to her own towering, undulating columns and waves of bronze and wood. With her immediately recognizable aesthetic, von Rydingsvard’s hand has changed the landscape of contemporary sculpture with its naturalistic abstraction. We can’t wait to see what niche it carves in the capital. NMWA.ORG

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UP TO SPEED Blum & Poe’s dedication to introducing and unpacking early conceptual work from Japan resonates throughout the gallery’s programming and is front and center in their February show, “Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s.” A celebration of co-founder Tim Blum’s history and fascination with the era as well as the gallery’s 25th anniversary, this two-part show curated by Mika Yoshitake is a comprehensive crash course for those in LA. Fingers crossed some part of the exhibition makes it to New York. BLUMANDPOE.COM

Rodney McMillian’s In This Land (in process) (2019)

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Jonas Wood’s Calais Drive (2012)

THE EARTH IS FLAT Those headed to Dallas for the upcoming art fair have a chance to see Jonas Wood’s first major museum show at the Dallas Museum of Art. Bringing together varied objects executed in the LA painter’s unmistakeable hand, the exhibition will inevitably envelop its audience in the colorful, flat plane that defines Wood’s work. DMA.ORG

© YUKINORI YANGI. PHOTO BY Y. SAKAI. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES, PHOTO BY BRIAN FORREST. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SUSANNE VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES PROJECTS; © RODNEY MCMILLIAN. PHOTO BY ROBERT WEDEMEYER.

Yukinori Yanagi’s Ground Transposition (1986)

COURTESY OF NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH / GETTY IMAGES. © NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH / GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA.

Scanning electron micrograph of just-divided HeLa cells captured by Dr. Torsten Wittmann.

ICA Philadelphia Assistant Curator Meg Onli wrestles a behemoth this year with “Colored People Time,” a three-headed exhibition that unfolds in the museum’s intimate project space over the course of the year. In part tipped off by Onli’s previous work with Martine Syms, the year-long show is presented as a trilogy beginning with “Mundane Futures,” a ﬁlm-driven chapter on view through March 31 and dedicated to four artists: Syms, Kevin Jerome Everson, Aria Dean and Dave McKenzie. We dig deeper at CULTUREDMAG.COM/COLORED-PEOPLE-TIME.

Rodney McMillian descends upon SFMoMA this February with a room-enveloping painting—a monumental new work entitled In this Land (2019) accompanied by a musical and spoken word track. A continuation of the LA-based artist’s negotiation of the American landscape, the exhibition offers fellow West Coast dwellers the opportunity to immerse themselves in McMillian’s colorful perspective. SFMOMA.ORG

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SPOILER ALERT

PHOTO BY LEONARDO FINOTTI; © PETER KNAPP

Before the Venice Biennale, we plan on making a stop in London for former Cultured cover star, knight and all around visionary architect David Adjaye’s exhibition, “Making Memory,” at the Design Museum through May 2. Focused on seven of his projects, the presentation provides the ﬁrst chance to look at Adjaye’s forthcoming Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial for the Boston Common. DESIGNMUSEUM.ORG

Sclera pavilion by David Adjaye for the London Design Festival in 2008

Peter Knapp’s Stern (1979) in Thierry Mugler from the Autumn/Winter 1979–1980 Prêt-à-Porter collection

CLOSET ENVY

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On March 2, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has the distinct pleasure of presenting the world’s ﬁrst retrospective of fashion designer Thierry Mugler, whose sharp silhouettes helped deﬁne the wardrobes of artists like Beyoncé, David Bowie and Lady Gaga. Visit culturedmag.com for a close-up of the show. MBAM.QC.CA

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST. PHOTO BY ROY ROCHLIN.

theLorem Echo Chamber, the David Adjaye @ Design Leaving Museum name of adipiscing the 2019 Sharjah Biennial, ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur plays with its ut own title by taking the elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt form of exhibitions labore et dolore magna aliqua. Utthree enimdistinct ad dedicated minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitato the event’s three curators: Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif and Claire Tancons. A collaborative effort stretched over an eclectic group of questions, the biennial brings together a roving group of artists that includes known American entities like Cory Arcangel and Ian Cheng as well as new names to learn, like Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan and Anawana Haloba. Open through June, we recommend the trip. Head to culturedmag.com for our highlights. SHARJAHART.ORG

A still from Alia Farid’s At the Time of the Ebb

Arcmanoro Niles’ Homesick for a home I never had (2018)

The New York City Ballet’s artistic leanings shine this season thanks to several concurrent programs including MoMA’s “Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern,” an exhibition dedicated to unpacking the influence of the city ballet founder on the art world and New York. One can imagine the late Kirstein smiling if introduced to NYCB’s current Art Series, which are currently engaging British artist Shantell Martin and her eye-popping illustrations. Martin’s sitespecific installation for NYCB responds to the balcony floor of the Philip Johnson-designed building, serving as preamble to wonders once inside the theater. NYCBALLET.COM

Last winter, Rachel Uffner hosted her first show by Arcmanoro Niles and this March, the Washington D.C.-born artist returns with a provocative title: “My Heart is Like Paper: Let the Old Ways Die.” A kind of poem, the show delves into the narrative mode through the artist’s fiery figurative compositions. RACHELUFFNERGALLERY.COM

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A still from All is Fair in Dreams and War (2018)

BURN BABY BURN

The empty-eye uncanniness of Andro Wekua’s figurative sculptures and paintings have garnered the young Georgian artist a reputation for otherworldly experiences that point to the absurdity of our own. In All Is Fair in Dreams and War (2018), a new video that debuted at Kunsthalle Zürich in June, Wekua uses a triptych of potent before and after imagery sets to probe precarious nature of the present. On view through April 6 at Sprueth Magers’ Berlin flagship, the five-minute work offers a fiery escape from the winter doldrums. SPRUETHMAGERS.COM

While Pictures Generation icon Sarah Charlesworth passed away in 2013, her presence continues to loom large in New York’s contemporary circles, especially after her posthumous 2015 survey at New Museum. Opening February 23, fans of her striking photographic compositions will have a chance to look back on a her work at Paula Cooper, the gallery’s ﬁrst show with the late artist’s estate. PAULACOOPERGALLERY.COM

Norton Museum of Art is ready to reopen its newly Foster + Partners-renovated doors after ﬁve years of anticipation. The West Palm Beach art institution adds yet another jewel to Florida’s contemporary art crown. We can’t wait to check out Rob Wynne’s site-speciﬁc installation, which we can only imagine makes use of his enigmatic mirrored phrases and, of course, Nina Chanel Abney’s solo exhibition. NORTON.ORG Sarah Charlesworth’s Samurai (1981)

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COURTESY OF FOSTER + PARTNERS; SPRÜTH MAGERS BERLIN.

The new façade of the Norton Museum of Art designed by Foster + Partners

INSIDE THE MIND OF KAHLO

COURTESY OF NICKOLAS MURAY PHOTO ARCHIVES. © NICKOLAS MURAY PHOTO ARCHIVES.

In a 1953 Time magazine piece, the late iconoclast, Frida Kahlo, is quoted saying: “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” The artist’s saturated life comes to the fore in the Brooklyn Museum’s “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” on view through May 12. The ﬁrst show to emphasize Kahlo’s clothing and personal effects, “Appearances Can Be Deceiving” honors the breadth and interconnectedness of Kahlo’s creative outputs across mediums and periods. BROOKLYNMUSEUM.ORG

Nickolas Muray’s Frida on Bench, (1939) culturedmag.com 79

BARE BONES

COURTESY THE ESTATE OF ALICE NEEL AND DAVID ZWIRNER.

Late artist Alice Neel’s nudes reveal a level of intimacy that in her other work is just suggested. Opening February 26, David Zwirner hosts a stereotypically masterful reclamation of the painter’s works on paper with an emphasis on the bare form, a favorite and recurring subject for Neel whose own personal life was notoriously tumultuous. DAVIDZWIRNER.COM

Alice Neel’s Pregnant Julie and Algis (1967)

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Faith Ringgold’s Coming to Jones Road Tanka #1 Harriet Tubman (2010)

Faith Ringgold’s long and varied career has more visibility than ever—a testament to her commitment to the wisdom of her own path. Still represented by ACA Galleries, her ﬁrst gallery, the living legend makes a grand appearance this March with a solo presentation at the Armory Show, one of many treasures the premier fair has in store. Go to culturedmag.com for our fair highlights this March. THEARMORYSHOW.COM

N. Dash’s Untitled (2019)

Come March, Huma Bhabha gets a survey as large-scale as her sculptures. ICA Boston’s exhibition “Huma Bhabha: They Live” offers a look into the artist’s relationship with the human ﬁgure as subject, expressed in sculpture, drawing and photography from the last 20 years of Bhabha’s career. ICABOSTON.ORG

Huma Bhahba’s Unnatural Histories (2012)

President Richard Nixon’s resignation, Washington, D.C., August 8 (1974) by Annie Leibovitz

Photographer Annie Leibovitz is famous for many things, from her heavy hand in crafting Vanity Fair’s visual identity to her ﬁnal-hour images of John Lennon. But these are second wave accomplishments, in a sense, that piggybacked on Leibovitz’s early years working for Rolling Stone and covering the quickstand politik of the 1970s. Los Angeles gets an eyeful of these ﬁrst decades, thanks to a 2017 Luma Foundation exhibition which lands at Hauser and Wirth’s West Coast outpost on February 14 with over 5,000 images culled from the artist’s archive. HAUSERWIRTH.COM 82 culturedmag.com

© 2018 FAITH RINGGOLD / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK, COURTESY ACA GALLERIES, NEW YORK. © ANNIE LEIBOVITZ. FROM ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: ARCHIVE PROJECT #1. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK. © HUMA BHABHA. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND CASEY KAPLAN, NEW YORK. PHOTO BY JASON WYCHE.

The work of artist N. Dash begs the viewer to wonder about its making. Her surfaces, like the complex polymer chains that compose them, hide their underlying structures from the naked eye, leaving us to marvel. This March, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum makes room for such meditations with the artist’s ﬁrst East Coast museum show. ALDRICHART.ORG

Nam June Paik’s TV Cello (1971)

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALERIE EVA PRESENHUBER, ZURICH. FORMERLY THE COLLECTION OF OTTO PIENE AND ELIZABETH GOLDRING, MASSACHUSETTS, COLLECTION WALKER ART CENTER, T. B. WALKER ACQUISITION FUND, 1992.

BLINK TWICE FOR YES The images of rising star and conceptual photographer Lucas Blalock betray the artist’s unmistakable eye and the contrived humor and terror it bestows upon its subjects which range from humans to bananas. Opening February 10, the Institute of Contemporary Art LA digs into Blalock’s punchy archive for “An Enormous Oar,” the photographer’s ﬁrst US museum show. THEICALA.ORG

Lucas Blalock’s Emile, Man of the Future (2016–17)

If the biohackers are right, we are headed into a brave new world, one in which our virtual and physical selves become one. A longtime ﬁxation for artists interested in the interaction between the technological and the organic, the body seems to be an endless site for questioning our relationship to each other and reality. Curator Pavel Pys dives headﬁrst into this deep end with “The Body Electric,” a group exhibition spearheaded by multimedia savants like Sondra Perry, Pierre Huyghe and Lynn Hershman Leeson opening at the Walker on March 30. WALKERART.ORG

Kiki Smith never leaves one medium alone for too long— she circulates. On March 1, the artist releases her latest spiritual curlicues at Pace Gallery, where she will unveil new sculptures and drawings that follow up on her recent trips into the ﬁgurative and its entanglements with the mystical. PACEGALLERY.COM

Kiki Smith’s Sun (2018) culturedmag.com 83

ICA MIAMI Free Admission Every Day! April 18 2019

\ Eric-Paul Riege: Hóló–it xistz

/ Ettore Sottsass And The Social Factory Left: Eric-Paul Riege, study 2 for Hól --it xistz, 2018, digital collage. Courtesy the artist. Right: Ettore Sottsass, “Superbox” Cupboard, designed 1966. Plywood, plastic laminate. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Abet Laminati S.p.A., 1983-40-2

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

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CULTURE SEEKER

Inside the Old City of Byblos.

Contributing Editor Laura de Gunzburg journeys to Beirut, Lebanon to immerse herself in the country’s rich history of architecture, textiles and more. Bokja Design Studio manufactures incredible fabrics in Beirut and produce various furniture pieces. Though they are soon moving, I got to visit while they were still in the palace. The space was surreal, with a massive staircase at the entrance.

The Sursock Museum, Beirut’s modern and contemporary art museum, was formerly the home of Lebanese art collector and patron Nicolas Sursock, who donated the building to the people of Lebabnon in 1952 after his death. Stained glass windows inside the Sursock mansion, built in 1912.

Oscar Niemeyer’s unfinished theater on the International Fairgrounds of Tripoli.

We traveled about two hours north of Beirut to Tripoli, where the International Fairgrounds hosts the Oscar Niemeyer campus. Because of the country’s civil war (1975–90), the campus and the 15 unfinished Niemeyer structures were abandoned.

Installation view of the current show “Trance,” where Albert Oehlen plays artist, curator and collector. The ceiling of Bechara El Khoury, a 19th-century structure in Beirut that now serves as a workshop 88 culturedmag.com

The Aïshti Foundation was founded by Tony Salamé of Lebanon’s Aïshti retail empire, and designed by architect David Adjaye. I was really surprised as I went on a Friday afternoon to what I thought was a great show—I was the only one in the entire building.

2019 NASHER PRIZE LAUREATE

ISA GENZKEN

Learn about the month-long celebration of free programs, lectures, and livestreams at nashersculpturecenter.org/nasher-prize-programs

Presenting Sponsor / JPMorgan Chase & Co. Founding Partners / The Eugene McDermott Foundation and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Nasher Prize Month Sponsor / Gagosian Education and Community Month Sponsor / The Donna Wilhelm Family Fund Presenting Media Partner / Belo Media Group Media Partners / KERA’s Art & Seek and PaperCity Public Transportation Partner / Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2006 Plastic chair, doll, leather, coat, adhesive, tape, lacquer, sunshade 55 x 59 x 71 in. Image courtesy of the Pinnell Collection.

SPACE FOR INTIMACY With Company and Baby Company, Sophie Mörner has carved a space in the Lower East Side—for friends and for family. BY COCO ROMACK PORTRAIT BY BARBARA HAMMER

“We met at the gallery. Cajsa

came to the grand opening of Capricious 88, as it was called then,” says the gallerist and photographer Sophie Mörner on a cold, winter afternoon. She’s perched legs-crossed atop a neon pink faux fur-tufted chair beneath a tall window overlooking the edge of Allen Street in New York’s Lower East Side, gesturing towards her wife, the sculptor Cajsa von Zeipel, who stands in the doorway clutching a resin-cast visage of two faces interlocked in a tongue-frenzied kiss. The couple, who had an extravagant wedding on a farm outside Stockholm last summer, share an office-studio space speckled with von Zeipel’s towering mixed-media humanoids, unmarked save for a small sticker on the door reading “Shut Up.” “We didn’t know each other at all, but we had Googled each other a lot,” says von Zeipel. “And when you Googled Sophie, especially back then, it was all these weird horse photos and family pictures. So I was like, who is this crazy person?” The studio is just down the hall from Baby Company, the newly-launched extension of Mörner’s Manhattan gallery, Company. It’s a smaller space than its parent, which opened in 2015, but Mörner prefers it that way for the close-knit vibe it lends its programming. On a recent day, that included a panel discussion moderated by the photographer Angal Field, whose documents of their friends—relaxing by the Pacific or stretched out in bedrooms—illuminated the walls. “It’s all about company: friendship and hanging out and companionship,” Mörner says of the space’s namesake. Her salt-and-pepper hair is tied back, and a gem glued to her canine tooth flashes as she speaks. “It’s nice to have a space feel more intimate.” Intimacy. It’s the connective thread that weaves throughout Mörner’s career, in the spaces she keeps as well as the work she creates. Take her most recent project, a photographic series exploring themes of submission and trust: Mörner, who moonlights as an equestrian, imagines scenes of bondage by tying women by rope to horses. “It’s about the tying, the

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constraining, and trust,” she explains, noting that many of her models have never been around the animals in such close proximity. “It creates a kind of a tension. And they have to trust me 100 percent.” Likewise, as the proprietress of two exhibition spaces, the book publisher Capricious—named for the photography magazine she founded in 2003 and that ran through 2016, which became an annual photography award in 2017—she’s drawn to artists who have “very intimate relationships to their work,” curating a roster that includes feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer and Yale-trained collage-maker Troy Michie, as well as von Zeipel. “It becomes a lot like a self-portrait, of sorts, or something that really represents them,” she says. Raúl de Nieves, the Whitney Biennial alum whose painstakingly time-intensive process involves hand-gluing thousands of tiny, glittering plastic beads until they form elaborate costumes and decadently textural abstractions is one such example. Influenced by the indigenous crafts of his native Mexico, de Nieves’s largest work to date became one of the buzziest pieces at December’s Art Basel: a functioning carousel of sparkling beaded horses, a dragon and a mother figure in a downward-dog pose. “But that is all his making,” says Mörner, who took a chance when she gave de Nieves his first show with Company in 2016. “I supported him along the way, and we continue to do so, but he has that force, you know? An artist just needs someone to believe in them.” “Not everything brings in money but, for Sophie, that’s not the overall goal,” says de Nieves, while preparing his first solo museum show, on view through April 28 at the Cleveland Art Museum. His collaboration with Mörner, as with many among Company’s roster, began as a friendship. “It’s more about having this moment in time to create these experiences for people—to create people through experience,” he says.

Artist, publisher and part-time equestrian Sophie Mörner founded Company gallery in 2015 as a place for friends to gather around art. Late last year, Company spawned Baby Company, expanding the gallery’s program and extended family.

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Cathy Leff: What came ﬁrst, your interest in fashion, art or ﬁlm? Marketa Uhlirova: I always loved fashion and film. They both promise a sense of transformation into something else and transport you somewhere else. I studied art history, focusing on modern and contemporary art. My master’s thesis examined video art in the turbulent social and political times of then-Czechoslovakia from the 1970s to the 1990s. Later, while studying contemporary art curation at Bard College, I assisted Andrew Bolton, who is now head curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. At that time, he was working at the V&A Museum, finishing his book, The Supermodern Wardrobe, and starting to work on the exhibition, “Bravehearts: Men in Skirts.” He taught me a lot about structuring my ideas. In 2006, I cofounded the Fashion in Film Festival in London with costume designer Roger K. Burton and the art curator Christel Tsilibaris. None of us had a formal background in film studies. We approached the subject through the lens of artists’ moving-image works and early avant-garde cinema. What are the current debates around fashion and cinema? Fashion cinema is a growing academic field. Scholars primarily have been interested in how cinema popularized and democratized fashion by bringing it to the masses, and how costume, in the broadest sense (accessories and make-up) has been vital to cinema’s constructions of race, gender, class and national identity. But there also are those who are less interested in what cinematic costume means, looking instead into the affective and performative powers of dress in film and how the two marry. Fashion cinema cannot be easily reduced to language and ideological constructs. Has your curatorial approach changed since the festival launched? Yes and no. I always try to introduce new ways of framing the relationship between fashion and film. We’ve had festivals spanning the entire history of film. We also have focused on a single director. One festival consisted only of debates. I gravitate more to chunky ideas, such as spectacle or movement, that are fleshed out through an array of films that include fiction features, documentaries, newsreels, commercials, artists’ shorts, fashion films, process films, among others. What do you have in mind for the upcoming Miami festival? When you invited us to curate a festival this winter for and on behalf of the Miami Design District, cinema historian Tom Gunning and I were in the middle of working on the 10th anniversary celebration of the London Fashion in Film Festival. We were inspired by a project we first tested with you in Miami in 2016, “Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream.” I also was finishing my PhD on fashion in cinema, which grew from a decade of curating and publishing. Both events put me in a reflective mode. Certain ideas started to come into sharper relief, ideas that may have been implicit in my programs but never were fully articulated—such as my penchant for juxtaposing commercial cinema, including features, commercials and various promotional films, with artist and avant-garde moving-image works. I was not thinking of it as an end goal but more as a method through which to arrive at something fresh and unexpected. Needless to say, there have been real ties between avant-garde productions and moving image commercials. In Miami, I want to talk about these links more openly, if only to ask again what tensions they represent for image-makers today. I am thrilled about the collaboration between the Miami Design District and Miami International Film Festival, which enables us to have this conversation there. Vitoria de Mello Franco, whose work we are showing in the Miami festival, represents a younger and new generation of fashion filmmakers. I can’t wait to present her feisty ideas.

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THROUGH THE LENS OF FASHION Marketa Uhlirova is the co-founder and director of the Fashion in Film Festival and a co-producer and coeditor of The Inferno Unseen (2017), a new J\[ VM [OL \UÄUPZOLK ÄST I` /LUYP Georges Clouzot, which screens in March during the Miami edition of the festival. *H[O` 3Lќ who has known Uhlirova since 2015, checks in with the curator in advance of the screening. PORTRAIT BY MARION SAUREL

COURTESY OF NOWNESS (MINE); CINETECA DI BOLOGNA (RAPSODIA SATANICA)

Clockwise: In Mine, a short film from production duo Tell No One, contemporary dancers gracefully chase after each other in Louis Vuitton, La Perla and Bottega Veneta in a ballet that ignores the gendering of fashion; a still from Nino Oxilia’s 1915 silent film Rapsodia Satanica takes the story of Faust and replaces the male character with a woman; Uhlirova combines her backgrounds in art history and fashion to explore and engage new notions of fashion in film.

¸0 HS^H`Z [Y` [V PU[YVK\JL UL^ ^H`Z VM MYHTPUN [OL YLSH[PVUZOPW IL[^LLU MHZOPVU HUK ÄST ¹ —Marketa Uhlirova

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,TT` (^HYK ^PUUPUN ÄSTTHRLY Kristi Jacobson V]LYJVTLZ HU` VIZ[HJSL [V ZOLK SPNO[ VU [OL \U[VSK Z[VYPLZ PU OLY N\[ ^YLUJOPUN V\L]YL VM PU]LZ[PNH[P]L KVJ\TLU[HYPLZ VU L]LY`[OPUN MYVT MVVK PUZLJ\YP[` [V [OL WYPZVU Z`Z[LT BY RACHEL SMALL At the end of Kristi Jacobson’s Solitary, a documentary profiling inmates in solitary confinement and the corrections officers at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia, the camera rests on the pale face of a prisoner named Randall, who was sentenced at the age of 20 for shooting a gas station attendant to death during a robbery attempt. In the film’s opening sequence, we learn of his upbringing in a small town outside of Charlottesville: “Grew up dirt-poor, wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks,” he says in a voiceover, as the camera pans over streams and forests of the Albemarle County wilderness before arriving at a concrete intersection framed by worn down bungalow-style homes. “Dad was an alcoholic and a drug user. For the most part, he was absent. I was the middle son”—on screen, a

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gas station appears, red numbers on a weathered white sign advertising the prices—“so no matter what happened, I always got beat for it.” A car drives down a tree-lined highway off into the distance. “Going to school, we were, by far, the poorest there.” A red brick building materializes behind a group of knotted tree trunks. At “poorest,” we see Randall for the first time, wearing a white flannel shirt, bags under his eyes as he looks off-camera at his interviewer. We now see Randall handcuffed to a metal table in a white room illuminated by the sickly grey of fluorescent lighting. “Now I’m doing 1,214 years in the state of Virginia without parole. That’s pretty much it,” he says, with a resigned shrug and melancholic half-smile. Later in the film he explains

PHOTO BY NELSON HUME AND/OR COURTESY OF CATALYST FILMS

ASK ME ANYTHING

The solitary confinement cells of the Red Onion State Prison in Virginia, where Jacobson shot her most recent film.

that he had needed the money in order to prevent his grandmother’s stove from being repossessed. He shares that he tolerates solitary confinement by “fantasizing…I create entire landscapes in my mind. Sometimes it’s childhood places that I’ve been, like the woods when I was growing up.” The camera advances through a clearing littered with leaves and sticks. The ache of memory is palpable as we see Randall in his eight-by-ten-foot cell before the film ends with the bang of a metal door. It’s a gut-wrenching moment, and the gravity of it is a testament to Jacobson’s skills as a director and producer. “I set out to make a film that exposed how widely we use solitary confinement and the extremely detrimental, devastating effect of that, but I didn’t know what that meant until I set foot inside Red Onion and gained the type of access that I gained,” she says. “It was then that the film became much less traditional in terms of our editing style—more about repetition and rhythm and immersion versus using a three-act structure.” Released in 2016, Solitary marked something of a shift for the New York-born documentarian. “In some ways, I think I truly found my voice in making it. I’m much more comfortable in the gray versus the black and white; I’m much more comfortable pushing people to feel discomfort.” The broader issue confronted by the film is one that has preoccupied Jacobson since her college years at Duke, where she majored in sociology with a focus on criminology and juvenile justice. She first observed the inner workings of the court system through an internship with the Wake County Courthouse Juvenile Court in Raleigh, North Carolina. “I thought I’d pursue law, but I couldn’t get over how visibly broken the system was,” she says, of the juvenile justice system. “Those who are affected know this, and those who

are not embroiled in it, needed to understand,” she adds. “It drove me to seek a way to channel my passion for changing it, and filmmaking became the obvious path for me.” Post-graduation, she moved to New York and eventually landed at Cabin Creek Films, a studio founded by the two-time Academy-Award-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple, who went on to become her mentor and lifelong friend. “It was where I learned everything I know,” explains Jacobson. “She was my education, period.” It was under Kopple’s supervision that Jacobson directed her first feature-length film, American Standoff, which followed the Teamsters Union over two years, beginning with the election of James P. Hoffa (son of renowned labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa), as the organization struggled to maintain power in the early 2000s. Since American Standoff was released in 2002, Jacobson, in addition to racking up more than a dozen producer credits, has directed seven documentaries on a range of topics, from A Place at the Table (2012), which explores food insecurity in the United States, to more personal projects, like Toots (2006), a biopic on her grandfather Toots Shor, a legendary figure of New York nightlife in the 1940s and ’50s. This past December the Discovery Channel debuted her latest short, Take Back the Harbor, which follows students at the Harbor School, a New York City public school focused on environmental science, through their year as they collaborate with the Billion Oyster Project, a “citizen science” initiative dedicated to restoring the once-thriving oyster population of New York Harbor. “Of my independent work, the thing that ties it all together is that at some point someone said ‘This is not possible,’ or ‘You can’t do this! No.’ And so I think the way I choose my subjects is that when people start saying ‘No,’ I start saying ‘Yes.’ So that’s, quite simply, it.”

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Independent March 7-10, 2019 10th Anniversary Edition Adams and Ollman Portland Air de Paris Paris Alden Projects™ New York Anglim Gilbert Gallery San Francisco The approach London Arcadia Missa London Hervé Bize Nancy Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Berlin CANADA New York Carlos/Ishikawa London Chapter NY New York C L E A R I N G New York / Brussels Company Gallery New York COOPER COLE Toronto Delmes & Zander Cologne Derek Eller Gallery New York Emalin London Thomas Erben Gallery New York Fleisher/Ollman Philadelphia Galerie Christophe Gaillard Paris Garth Greenan Gallery New York Institute of Contemporary Arts London Karma New York Karma Bookstore New York Anton Kern Gallery New York Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery New York David Kordansky Gallery Los Angeles the Landing Los Angeles Loevenbruck Paris LINN LÜHN Düsseldorf MAGENTA PLAINS New York

Marlborough New York / London Kai Matsumiya New York moniquemeloche Chicago MKG127 Toronto The Modern Institute Glasgow Morán Morán Los Angeles Galerie Nagel Draxler Cologne / Berlin New Museum New York Night Gallery Los Angeles Ortuzar Projects New York Maureen Paley London Parker Gallery Los Angeles Franklin Parrasch Gallery New York Peres Projects Berlin PHAIDON London / New York Printed Matter, Inc. New York Reyes Projects Metro Detroit Ricco/Maresca Gallery New York Rossi & Rossi Hong Kong / London Richard Saltoun London Kerry Schuss New York SculptureCenter New York Southard Reid London STANDARD (OSLO) Oslo The Sunday Painter London Take Ninagawa Tokyo Timothy Taylor New York Galerie Barbara Thumm Berlin Tilton Gallery New York Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects New York Rachel Uffner Gallery New York White Columns New York

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South London-born Jenn Nkiru PZ [OL ]PZPVUHY` ÄSTTHRLY KLÄUPUN OLY TPSPL\ :OL»Z ^VYRLK ^P[O ;OL *HY[LYZ HUK (Y[O\Y 1HMH HUK SH\UJOLZ OLY JVSSHIVYH[PVU ^P[O .\JJP H[ -YPLaL 3( BY AMAH-ROSE ABRAMS PORTRAIT BY GABBY LAURENT

Filmmaker Jenn Nkiru blew up

in 2018. Her visual language has captured the moment by combining found footage, assemblage and a surrealist dreamscape-infused aesthetic that seeks to redefine the way we see blackness. June saw the release of Ricky Saiz’s video, Apeshit, for Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s joint project The Carters—and for which Nkiru was a second unit director. Shot in The Louvre in Paris with choreography by Antony Gormley collaborator Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, it has been heralded as a cultural touchstone. In September, Nkiru’s short Rebirth is Necessary (2017) was released. A meditation on blackness, Rebirth is Necessary is a manifesto of a film celebrating Nkiru’s heroes. Our interview takes place just before Christmas and as London slowly shuts down around us, Nkiru is working right up to the last minute. “It’s like waiting for a bus and then 10 come at once,” she says. “I struggle to say no because—how could I work for this amount of time and say no now?!”

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Born in Peckham, South London, Nkiru was surrounded by an array of cultures with neighbors from the Côte d’Ivoire, Colombia, Vietnam and the UK. She recalls being inspired by hearing music from all these places. Inspiration still always starts with a track. “You hear music and you hear people enjoying themselves and you imagine what that enjoyment is,” she explains. “Sometimes at night you would hear all these different cultures interact. I have always liked sound or noise; it gives me comfort.” At 20, she left London to study at Howard University, where she furthered her love for cinema, especially African cinema. The school offered a depth in the field that would have been difficult to find in the UK. Nkiru’s short En Vogue (2014) features artist Arthur Jafa as second unit director, his presence putting Nkiru in salubrious company. In the last year she has also made videos for Kamasi Washington and Neneh Cherry, cementing her place in a cultural movement that connects to a lesserexplored literary and spiritual canon relating to blackness and black heritage.

IS NOW It’s an aesthetic that rejects outmoded stereotypes and taps into a less superficial viewpoint speaking to, as Nkiru calls it, “the black interior.” Some have called it Afrosurrealist, some Afrofuturist, but its roots trace back to the likes of Funkadelic, Alice Coltrane and the Black Arts Movement, remixing these elements for our times. These ideas are summed up in Rebirth is Necessary, a cavalcade of audio, visual and philosophical references. “Rebirth is Necessary is so layered and loaded,” Nkiru explains. “To me, it’s my dearest piece of work to date. It came at a time when I was frustrated as an artist; I wasn’t really being given the opportunity to make the works that I wanted to make using the language and approach I wanted to use. There wasn’t that level of confidence in my work.” What felt like a gamble to Nkiru has paid dividends, and she is now getting to make the work she wants. Her upcoming commission with Gucci for Frieze’s inaugural Los Angeles edition, BLACK TO TECHNO, running February 15–17, explores the roots of techno music in Detroit. She terms

it an experimental documentary short. “Music heads know that techno is a black sound and that it started in Detroit,” Nkiru states. “I’m looking at techno and its relationship to Berlin, as well, and from an Afrological standpoint, not just asserting techno as a sound—but also something that is sonic, geopolitical and racial.” Whatever she does next, it will be true to her vision. Is there one story from her journey she is dying to tell? “I don’t have that single burning story over everything else that I want to make, but I do have a single feeling that supersedes everything else I want to express.” When pressed, Nkiru refuses to be drawn on the specifics of the feeling she drives to embody or the precise message she wants to convey, but what she maintains is her passion for getting her work to be seen. “I am being led instinctively but at the same time I want to affect so many realms—I want to do commercials, I want to do music videos, shorts, feature films. I don’t want to pigeonhole myself by using one medium. For me, the biggest thing is the message.”

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ELEVATION PLAN

An architect by training, Giancarlo Valle digs deep into his projects, bringing his peripatetic upbringing into everything he takes on—from infrastructures to interiors. BY MIEKE TEN HAVE PORTRAIT BY MATTHEW MORROCCO

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The designer at home with some of the models he’s created for his interior clients.

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“You almost can’t separate architecture

and interiors, and the problem in the United States is that the two are very segregated. I think it hurts the project,” opines Giancarlo Valle on the American way of creating buildings and the spaces therein. Valle, whose eponymous Manhattan firm probes the intersection of architecture, interior design and furniture making, works through these disciplines with a historical approach. “You look at the established mentors in architecture—Gio Ponti, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier—and they did a little bit of everything,” he says. It is through this combination of forms that Valle separates his practice from the paradigmatic rigor of a straightforward architecture or interior design firm, and his approach has paid off; he has been garnering accolades from top design magazines both here and abroad since establishing Studio Giancarlo Valle in 2016. “We have a newfound appreciation for a lost craft that is often so industry-driven. We’re taking on fewer projects, but we take on more in them, starting with the bones. That is how we distinguish ourselves,” he says. While his approach might be novel, Valle has a pedigreed background. Having studied art and then architecture at the University of Michigan, Valle received his Master of Architecture from Princeton in 2010. “There the focus was on scholarship and it was not so applicable. Postmodernism still existed, but it was more conceptual than it was about building,” he recalls. After graduating, he went on to work for several high-profile firms, including Snøhetta and SHoP Architects. He also took on projects of his own, including Phillip Lim’s store in Los Angeles and a studio and retreat for Marilyn Minter, who he met while working for Stan Allen. “Giancarlo came up with some spectacular ideas after we commissioned him to do our furniture as well. We loved everything he did,” says Minter.

“We have a newfound appreciation for a lost craft that is often so industry-driven. We’re taking on fewer projects, but we take on more in them, starting with the bones. That is how we distinguish ourselves.” —Giancarlo Valle But it was the DUMBO apartment that he shares with wife Jane Keltner de Valle, Architectural Digest’s Style Director, and their children that sent Valle down the decorating rabbit hole. Calling it an “obsession” he wanted to perfect, he turned an erstwhile industrial loft into a warm, layered home, punctuated by strong recurring shapes and unexpected color combinations. Furniture by Milo Baughman, Pierre Jeanneret and Line Vautrin jostles with Native American textiles, Ethiopian chairs and works by contemporaries like Green River Project and Sam Stewart. The peripatetic nature of his childhood informs both his interiors and his own furniture line. One of his more well-known pieces, the Smile Chair, was loosely inspired by the carved forms of Ethiopian furniture. “We acquired a lot,” says Valle, who was born to Peruvian parents of Italian descent and spent his childhood living in San Francisco, Caracas, Chicago and Guatemala. “Our homes were filled with pieces from Peru, Lagos, Ethiopia. It was a weird, rich mix of dark woods and painted things. I hated it at the time—no one got it. I look back on it now and I want it all, and I want to filter it.” The designer is currently collaborating with Domeau & Pérès on a limited-edition chair for Les Ateliers Courbet and is hoping to delve deeper into upholstery. “Stone, wood and the materials of architecture are so familiar; in a way, they could be a default. But the challenge of understanding upholstery—I have so much respect for it.” While Valle may experiment with distilling and reforming aesthetic traditions, his reverence for the historical is the prism through which he creates and edits. Throughout his office are fantastical maquettes, a modernist dollhouse dream. In one, Valle is testing room layouts for a current project, deploying scale models of iconic chairs by Pierre Paulin and a sofa by Jean Royère. While most practices stick to 3D renderings of projects for clients, Valle’s maquette approach is refreshingly anachronistic and somehow more visually digestible. “You learn so much through the process, in just understanding the scale. We are always in dialogue with history in some way. That is the essence of design to me,” says Valle. “Today, we’re not stuck to a specific style, but it’s beyond ‘eclectic.’ I hate that word. What does it mean, anyway? You need a point of view.” 106 culturedmag.com

A few of Valle’s iconic designs, clockwise: The velvet and faux-shearling Smile Chair (2017); the Tapestry Chair (2018), which incorporates 1760 Aubusson tapestry; a detail of the library Valle designed for Kevin Wendle’s family home in Rhode Island; Valle’s loft in DUMBO holds a vibrant mix of his own designs and pieces by Milo Baughman and Ron Rezek.

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Sex, Aliens & Surrealism Is surrealism the answer for a sexless era? Slutever’s Karley Sciortino thinks so. BY MARQUITA K. HARRIS PORTRAIT BY NATHAN JOHNSON

For more than a decade,

Karley Sciortino has been our patron saint of sex. Through her Slutever blog, which launched in 2007, Sciortino has guided the curious and expanded the imaginations of those whose knowledge of sex started and abruptly ended with the missionary position—a Carrie Bradshaw for the MySpace generation. But while her ruminations were always loaded, they were rarely ever just about sex. Slutever.com is now home to an archive of our sexual evolution over the past 10 years, the cultural zeitgeist wrapped up in provocative packaging. From delving into needed conversations about sex work and polyamorous relationships to examining the complexities of human fantasies, no topic has ever been untouchable. Many now know Sciortino as the Breathless columnist for Vogue.com, where she explores her own dating revelations, and as the host of the Slutever docuseries on Vice. She’s also in the midst of promoting her first book, Slutever: Dispatches from a Sexually Autonomous Woman in a Post-Shame World, which was released in February 2018. All of these projects—the book, the column, the show—are extensions of what she is known for the most: having very real discussions about sex and relationships. Now, Sciortino is in a new phase of her ever-evolving career, one tied even more to fantasy than any of her previous projects. “It’s a surreal, end of the world sex-comedy,” she says about Now Apocalypse, a series on Starz she co-wrote with director Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin, The Doom Generation, Riverdale, 13 Reasons Why). “It’s a story about these four friends in their 20s who are trying to make it in Los Angeles and figure out their lives, while having a lot of sex and experimenting with different types of sexualities and relationships.” One major aspect of the story? This is all happening in the midst of an alien conspiracy theory. Make no mistake, Now Apocalypse isn’t your typical coming-of-age trope about overly privileged 20-somethings “trying to make it” in the big city. Actor Avan Jogia plays the curly-haired charmer Ulysses, who enjoys biking while vaping and fantasizing about his hetero(ish) doofusbro roommate, Ford, played by Beau Mirchoff. “[Ulysses] is seeing aliens and having these sort of ominous dreams that feel somehow important,” she explains. “He’s being given visions about the fact that aliens are taking over the world. But as

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an audience, it’s really difficult to tell whether the aliens are real or whether they’re a hallucination.” We also have Carly (Kelli Berglund), an aspiring actress who performs sex work through a webcam service. In the first episode, we see Carly wield her ingenuity and dominance by making one of her clients help her read lines mid-session. While Carly (with a “C”) and Karley (with a “K”) are wildly different women—Sciortino has noted that while she worked as a dominatrix in her 20s, she was never a cam girl—you can’t help but wonder if she’s based on Sciortino herself. This wasn’t her idea. “When Gregg [Araki] came to me he said, ‘I want there to be this character called Carly, who I’m sort of imagining as a younger sister-like version of you!’ I thought, Okay, that makes sense. I can write someone in my own voice,” Sciortino says. “I’ve come to realize that there is a comparison—despite him saying ‘no one will care, her name’s with a C.’ It’s like, well…” she trails off. Sciortino did, however, leap at the opportunity to create a sex worker character that didn’t depend on the damsel in distress or “stripper with a heart of gold” clichés that overwhelm television and film. “Often when we see a sex worker on screen, it’s this stripper addicted to coke and she’s a sad, tragic victim, or this sex worker that ended up in a dumpster in New Jersey,” she reflects. Until this series, Sciortino’s work was rooted in reality. In Araki’s Now Apocalypse, LA appears awash in a dayglow patina; everything looks shiny and new. The characters are bold and exaggerated, the humor is dark, the sex softcore and glossy. It’s a fantasy realized. With this new series, Sciortino was given full reign to tap into her creative subconscious. It’s a side her fans have never seen before. In late 2018, The Atlantic published a story, “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” that highlighted a 14 percent drop in the amount of high school students experiencing sex—of all kinds—for the first time. The amount of sex Gen Xers and Baby Boomers were having also dropped in frequency over the years. The reason? Take your pick: Hookup culture? Less pressure to bone than in eras past? Better access to quality vibrators? Anxiety? Option paralysis? All of the above and beyond? Sure. It’s not the first time a story like this caught the attention (and ire) of the internet.

Karley Sciortino’s Slutever platform has grown from blog to book to television program, with her frank thoughts on sex and dating now set against an alien conspiracy theory.

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Naima Ramos-Chapman in her Brooklyn bedroom wearing Gauntlett Cheng’s Paper Polo and Paper Sweats from their Spring/Summer 2019 collection.

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NATURE

OF BEING

ON THE

Deferring to silence over sound and feelings V]LY HJ[PVU ÄSTTHRLY Naima Ramos-Chapman is charting a new course for storytelling. BY MONICA USZEROWICZ PORTRAIT BY EMMA CRAFT

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So much happens in Naima Ramos-Chapman’s 2016 short film, And Nothing Happened—so much, and so slowly. Like a dream, ceilings crack open, bodies disappear. An unnamed young woman, played by Ramos-Chapman, eats, then doesn’t; masturbates, then eats. She stares blankly at her Jungian animus—a boy-self. Something like two days pass; eventually, she recounts to an unceremoniously cheerful lawyer the sexual assault that sent her here, back home with her mother, strange and sedate. Mostly, she says nothing because, Ramos-Chapman tells me, “Spoken language can be limiting. But I think sitting, listening, being with someone: there’s so much there. The films that typically move me are often about what’s not said.” Silence is metonymic for whatever’s stirring beneath it, like water. Ramos-Chapman thinks like water. And the day we speak, it’s raining, unseasonably wet for a Miami autumn. “This weather sucks,” I text her. We don’t meet up at the park, like we’d planned. We talk on the phone; I watch the rain. She’s here working on another short film. Ramos-Chapman stays busy. The New York artist and filmmaker is also a director and writer; she is sometimes an editor for, and occasionally actor in, Random Acts of Flyness, the HBO show directed by her partner, Terence Nance (you may remember the heartbreaking musical segment she directed for Episode 2, “Nuncaland”). Her film, Piu Piu, since premiering at BlackStar Film Festival in 2018, has been traveling the festival circuit, having already screened at the Tacoma Film Festival and Urbanworld to name a few others, and is scheduled to screen at Slamdance this year. In 2017, she was a fellow at the Sundance Institute for Screenwriting Intensive and worked on her feature-length script, Yeve, or Sad Songs in Languages I Don’t Understand, currently in development. All of this happened after years of working with other mediums, including writing— which is likely why she’s a generous interview subject. She likes to work with other people and share the process, even now. “What’s it like,” she muses, “to create a film in which you facilitate a space, hand off directorial duties, ask other people to shift the perspective? Capitalism, and even the film industry, thrive on making it all about an individual, pretending it didn’t take so many different minds to make it.” Ramos-Chapmans talks an endless stream, a flow. “Sorry,” she says, after everything, “that was a ramble.” She is tireless, and tireless at imparting her energy to you. She brings you along: to Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she grew up (“The pace was different from other parts of New York. Things would move a little slower.”) To Howard University, a “difficult two years I’m very thankful for—you learn how to talk, exist, collaborate.” To her childhood living room, watching Turner Classic films with her mother. Her words are a stream-of-consciousness, touching all the crevices. Even at her most social and collaborative, she is naturally singular. She grew up that way: not solitary, but preternatural, genuinely weird. “I’d go to elementary school dressed as the Fonz, saying ‘’Eyyy!’” she laughs. “I got made fun of. It was too old a reference for people around me to understand.” Ramos-Chapman attended dance classes at age two; she was subsequently kicked out for being too rambunctious a toddler, but later excelled. “The joke was on them,” she says. She was a strong dancer, able to jump and turn with a kind of speedy precision. “I got to the top

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level, but my teachers said I was not the right size to be in a company. I had broader shoulders. I was taller. A lot of racialized stuff would happen in ballet—the tights are not your skin color; hearing that your hips and butt are too big can be really demoralizing.” After attending The Alvin Ailey School for Dance on scholarship for four years, a stint in journalism and an apprenticeship at The Barrow Group for Acting, she arrived at filmmaking—partially encouraged by Nance, who produced and DP’d her first short film. Filmmaking felt like the best fit: a practice that allowed her to write, perform, and engage in her own authorship. “Performance and storytelling, to me, don’t feel that different,” she explains. In Piu Piu, which screened at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, a woman is followed silently by a man; fear and paranoia become dancing monsters, more gestures than bodies. It is, in some ways, a sequel to And Nothing Happened, where trauma becomes languid, banal dejection. Heartsore and still moving, albeit like molasses. It’s not always the catalyst for pain that deserves screen time, says Ramos-Chapman. “When I watch films, and something brutal happens, I want to know how the person feels. How they’re recovering. The worst part of my own assault wasn’t the 20 seconds it took for it to happen— it’s how it embedded into my psyche.” She adds: “Sometimes terrible things happen and you can still experience joy—beauty—saddled up alongside tragedy.” After And Nothing Happened’s release, Ramos-Chapman received emails of gratitude. Fans told her they’d related to the film in how it is plain and surreal, the way trauma is both. “I feel like so many of the horrors in the world are because people are not interested in being introspective, in sitting down and dealing with what’s happening inside,” she says. Ramos-Chapman’s favorite filmmakers deal with what she describes as the ontological nature of being: she names Arthur Jafa, Julie Dash, Charles Burnett. Also, Mister Rogers—Fred McFeely Rogers—who once asked children, “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” “Oh my god, did you see Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the Mister Rogers documentary?” she asks, suddenly. “I want to be like him. Dedicated to honoring people’s feelings.” When we were both little, Mister Rogers made us feel less alone in the largesse of our emotions, our physical smallness. “We’re all channels,” she says. On cue, the sun came out and spread its rays like a blanket. The rain stopped, she kept flowing. “Sometimes we get things right. Some things we say are honest, true and godlike.”

Ramos-Chapman wears many hats— writer, dancer, actor. These days, her varied backgrounds come together in her work as a filmmaker.

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The Muse Candyland, subway maps, Jackson Pollock’s wild abstraction: for fashion historian Colby Jordan Mugrabi, inspiration is everywhere. BY CAIT MUNRO

Colby Jordan Mugrabi is not your average blogger. If you frequent a certain caliber of art and fashion events—like the Chanel haute couture show in Paris, which she recently attended—you’ve likely noticed her. But unlike other young women in her position, Mugrabi’s website, Minnie Muse, doesn’t feature brand sponsorships or painstakingly itemized pictures of her outfits. Instead, Mugrabi deftly catalogs and connects the worlds of art, fashion, architecture and design, linking Comme des Garçons to Andy Warhol and the aesthetic of McDonald’s to Jean Paul Gaultier. “No one really focuses on approaching the four disciplines from a landscape perspective,” she says. “They focus on them singularly but not necessarily as entities that have forever influenced one another. So I took it upon myself to create that content.” Twenty-five-year-old Mugrabi is married to art dealer and collector Alberto “Tico” Mugrabi, and is the daughter of businessman John W. Jordan. She grew up in Chicago, where she was a part-time contributor to Teen Vogue, before moving to New York in 2011 to attend NYU. She began working on Minnie Muse as part of her self-designed course of study in art history and fashion business at the Gallatin School, and celebrated its relaunch in 2017 with an event attended by her friends Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Thom Browne and Phillip Lim. “I always loved the name Minnie Muse,” Mugrabi says. “I came up with it when I was a little girl, because when

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I was eight years old, when all my friends wanted to be actors or singers, I wanted to be John Galliano’s muse.” A few years later, she met the designer—she’s since stayed in touch with him—and he later remembered her because she was “the only 15-year-old from Chicago who was obsessed with him.” In a world of fast fashion, the infinite scroll, and nonstop celebrity content, Minnie Muse posts feel considered and authentic. Mugrabi says her ideas come from conversations, or walks down the street in New York. She does much of her research not online, but at the Costume Institute at the Met. “I always go in with research questions and come out with a hundred others,” she laughs. And though Mugrabi has over 13,000 followers on Instagram, social media stardom isn’t a priority. What is a priority is growing the site’s readership and the Minnie Muse brand as a whole. Mugrabi is currently working on launching Merch, a Minnie Muse-branded product line, which will feature stationary as well as a limited-edition range of hoodies. She’s also hired her first employee, who helps with site operations. “I wanted to create such a strong brand identity— through the content I create and the connections that I make—that someone, somewhere could see a fork in a restaurant and it would remind them of Minnie Muse for some reason,” Mugrabi says. “Now I’m in this moment where I realize, obviously, that this is a business, and I want it to grow.”

Growing up in Chicago, Mugrabi always knew fashion was her calling. Now, she spends her days at the Met’s Costume Institute researching the connections between fashion, design, architecture and art for her website and soon-to-launch Minnie Muse line.

COURTESY BFA

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THE CEREBRAL SUBTLETY OF ROSETTA GETTY With artist collaborations essential to her practice, the designer is expanding [YHKP[PVUHS KLÄUP[PVUZ VM MHZOPVU BY ALEXANDRA PECHMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY GABBY LAURENT

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Getty at her Los Angeles home, where she displays work by the artists with whom she collaborates.

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When entering Rosetta Getty’s LA home, one almost immediately encounters a gallery-like space filled with large-scale pieces by emerging artists like Olympia Scarry, Rosha Yaghmai, Hayden Dunham—and, as in a gallery, nowhere to sit. Getty’s eye for artists and commitment to showing them reaches much further than these walls: Dunham recently collaborated on Getty’s eponymous label’s Resort 2019 collection, creating pieces that meld her practice with the brand’s vision. She is just one of several young artists to work with the designer (most recently, artist Anna Ostoya inspired Pre-Fall 2019) in a kind of partnership that has become the brand’s calling card. In the past two years Getty has also worked with the artists Alicja Kwade and Analia Saban. “Artist collaborations in fashion have been going on since the beginning,” Getty tells me over lunch, under a vine-covered ceiling in the more than 100-year-old house. “We took

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it to another level and inspired people to think about working with artists differently.” Getty began collecting art as a teenager, while working as a model. Her first acquisition was a Robert Motherwell bought at an auction. In conversation, Getty chooses her words ponderously—“I’m a space case,” she joked—and is prone to wander into her own thoughts about art and fashion (“It’s sooooo beautiful,” she cooed, recounting a piece from a past season). That kind of loose, creative energy informed the start of her label in 2015, with the charge that every season would also deal with contemporary art or art history. Resort 2015 ambitiously riffed on the artists of pioneering gallerist Betty Parsons; references in subsequent seasons include Carol Bove, Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Louise Bourgeois. Describing the clothes Getty designs requires a vocabulary similar to the one used when describing a piece of art.

HAIR BY DAX SARMIENTO; MAKEUP BY ASHLEY CORNETT. FASHION AVAILABLE THROUGH ROSETTAGETTY.COM.

Getty with an Intermission painting by Piero Golia. Getty wears the Sleeveless Cropped Front Pullover and the Tuxedo-bib Striped Shirt from her namesake line.

The unabashedly cerebral collections meld complex construction with subtle comments on femininity: she pulled some pieces for our photo shoot that included a satiny taupe jumpsuit, a bucket-hat visor and some crisp asymmetrical blouses. Getty has recently collected works by Juliana Huxtable and Amalia Ulman; with the latter, the relationship of designer and artist led to a unique exchange. After Ulman wore archival Rosetta Getty in an Instagram performance, Getty bought the resulting piece for her home in New York. (“We should give her more clothes,” Getty muses offhandedly.) The more recent Dunham collaboration “started with this fascination with Home Depot, and using things from the hardware store to create beautiful pieces from basic utility items,” explains Getty. One such result is a textile pattern based on the underside of a carpet pad. Dunham also created an installation for the brand’s New

York showroom, a tradition for artists who collaborate with the brand. Saban remembers being worried at first about what the process of designing for Fall 2018 would look like. “There was a moment in our collaboration when I wanted to propose staining her pristine clothes, including a beautiful cashmere sweater, with a drop of paint that resembled a stain of wine or coffee,” she recalls of her instincts for working with Getty. “I was very nervous because I still didn’t know her sense of humor. But once I showed it to her, she loved it.” Currently, Getty is trying to find a semi-permanent place to exhibit the various showroom installations. On her decision to collaborate primarily with women artists, Getty says: “Right now, I really feel like it’s important to promote women—especially in this field, because it’s not been easy. Women haven’t had the same opportunities available to them as men, so as a woman I think it’s the right thing to do.”

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“I like to say all roads lead to Marfa,” jokes Michael Phelan, the artist and founding director of Marfa Invitational, an art fair and immersive installation debuting April 4 through 7. “Literally, the world comes to us.” Ever since Donald Judd turned a former army base in West Texas into a contemporary art mecca in the 1970s, the tiny town perched on the edge of the Chihuahuan desert has gained an almost preternatural appeal. More than 200 miles from the nearest airport, artists, gallerists, musicians and cultural arbiters have flocked to Marfa on a sort of pilgrimage; most have emerged proclaiming that the experience is nothing short of transcendental. That’s certainly true for Phelan, who fatefully settled in the town in 2005. Arriving in Marfa to install a commission for the contemporary art space Ballroom Marfa, Phelan found boundless creative energy and inspiration in the town of merely 2,000 people. Purchasing and converting a 4,000-square-foot former gas station into a live/work compound, Phelan mounted United Artists, Ltd. gallery, which would come to show leading contemporary artists like Carol Bove and Wade Guyton. He found love in the process, marrying fellow gallerist Melissa Bent after she joined the gallery in 2013. Now, alongside his business partner Kenneth Bauso, Phelan is launching Marfa Invitational to bring some of that desert magic to the art-collecting masses. With just 10 galleries exhibiting 10 artists at the newly constructed Saint George Hall, an adjacent part of the Hotel Saint George, the event is intentionally intimate, a way of preserving Marfa’s spiritual allure. “I wanted to give collectors time to really experience the work while filtering out the distractions and noise of mall-like fairs,” says Phelan. A selection of contemporary galleries, chosen for their outsize influence, will form part of the inaugural fair. New York’s Marianne Boesky is presenting Svenja Deininger’s intimate abstract paintings; Sargent’s Daughters will bring along Emily Furr’s looming, blood-red canvases charged with phallic innuendo, and Miami’s Bill Brady gallery will show the haunting, figurative works of Tomoo Gokita. Blending dynamic installations with artist talks, cocktail parties and mingling in dramatically vast landscapes, Marfa Invitational aims to pare the art fair experience down into a solemn, almost sacred affair. “This is about reaping what Judd first experienced,” says Phelan, “and making space to view art in a unique and singular manner.”

It’s a family affair. Marfa Invitational founder Michael Phelan and his wife Melissa Bent, who is on MI’s board of advisors.

The Market Comes to Marfa

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DON’T BLINK

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BY JASMIN HERNANDEZ PORTRAIT BY RES

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Ja’Tovia Gary what films or filmmakers touched her as a child, my research already tells me it’s people like Shola Lynch, Julie Dash and Ava DuVernay. The Dallas native starts to recount cinematic memories she shared with her father over the phone. “I remember our dad showing us Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, when I was like nine. It’s talking about intimate relationships, there’s cursing, there’s sex scenes. I remember being taken by the music performances and the colors on screen. He’s casting people in purples and blues and reds. I didn’t have any language for all that, but I remember thinking these people look really good, this is the place I want to live.” Gary, 34, a current Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, now has that language, and lures viewers into her cinematic universe of found footage, Black icons and an abounding psychedelic aesthetic that grips. In her film, An Ecstatic Experience (2015), vibrant color splatters wash over black and white footage of Ruby Dee, who is re-enacting a dramatized performance based on Fannie Moore, a former slave. The film mesmerizes with its hypnotic animation and Dee’s impassioned storytelling. “I wanted people to feel an out-of-body experience,” Gary explains. “I liken it to the Holy Ghost. In the church you feel it, like when the temperature in the room shifts, they’re singing, the drums are hitting, and the choir is working things up, and you feel this kind of quickening in your body, but also in the space.” A similar spirit pulls in Cakes Da Killa: NO HOMO (2013), Gary’s electrifying mini-doc about then-underground, queer rapper now turned legend-in-the-making Cakes Da Killa, a.k.a Rashard Bradshaw. Gary and

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Bradshaw met through Tumblr, Gary asked to collaborate, and their director/ subject chemistry instantly translated organically onscreen. Bradshaw’s vulnerabilities and lyrical ferociousness come alive. “What really makes our collaborations work is trust,” he shares. “I can trust Ja’Tovia to let me do me. It’s also always a blessing to work with another Black artist to tell our stories because the message doesn’t get too misinterpreted.” Shuttling between Brooklyn and Cambridge, the former actress and voice-over artist is at work on her debut feature-length documentary, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, for which she is interviewing family members, friends and former lovers. “It’s a self-portrait in many ways, but it’s a selfportrait via the people closest to me,” she explains. Gary began around 2013–14, but the project’s genesis was an undergrad film, Deconstructing Your Mother, where Gary told her mother’s backstory. “When I got to grad school I was really inspired to think about how I can continue with this impulse to investigate myself and the people closest to me. So, I’m really interested to have a Black woman self-actualize—what does that look like? Are we trapped in these cycles? If my mom and dad behaved a certain way am I prone to this behavior as well?” “Ja’Tovia Gary takes the forceful and distressed politics of this moment and makes them shine through film, speech music and the diary of inner voices. She takes history and conflict and revelation and winds them into one another to create something new and strong,” says Peter L. Galison, the current co-director of the Film Study Center at Harvard. “She’s an artist of creative resistance—just what we need.” Gary executes this masterfully

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

When I ask artist and ﬁlmmaker

Two stills from Gary’s An Ecstatic Experience (2015), a short film with Ruby Dee re-enacting a performance based on Fannie Moore, a former slave whose story was documented in the 1930s.

with Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) (2017), pairing two contrasting realities: herself in a pastoral landscape at Monet’s country home and Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook livestream of her fiancée Philando Castile’s murder. “I was at a residency in Giverny when the murders of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling and the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida happened. I’m in this garden in northern France, in the lap of fucking luxury, losing it a little, no shade. I’m the only Black person there. I was feeling my own body’s vulnerability. When people ask me what this is about, I say it’s about Black women’s bodily integrity, or the lack thereof.” Gary, a southerner with degrees from Brooklyn College and the School of Visual Arts, is a self-described “fallen debutante,” who was born and raised in Texas, but came of age in New York City, helping, in 2013, to found the New Negress Film Society, a collective of Black women filmmakers uplifting Black female narratives. Her work is included in the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection and last year was part of “On Whiteness” curated by Claudia Rankine at the Kitchen and “Four” at We Buy Gold, a roving NYCbased art space founded by Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels. Gary also had her first solo show “A Care Ethic” at UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design and Architecture Museum last year, before starting off 2019 in the Hilton Alscurated group exhibit, “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin,” at David Zwirner, presenting her first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Frank Elbaz and receiving a Creative Capital grant. Gary’s avantgarde films are chilling, enthralling and seductive—it’s impossible to view the world the same after witnessing her cinematic gems.

“I remember our dad showing us Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, when I was like nine. It’s talking about intimate relationships, there’s cursing, there’s sex scenes. I remember being taken by the music performances and the colors on screen. He’s casting people in purples and blues and reds. I didn’t have any language for all that, but I remember thinking these people look really good, this is the place I want to live.” —Ja’Tovia Gary culturedmag.com 127

God Save the Curator

0U OLY ÄYZ[ PU[LY]PL^ ZPUJL SHZ[ `LHY»Z 46*( KLIHJSL Helen Molesworth YLÅLJ[Z VU OLY WHZ[ HUK ^OLYL ZOL PZ NVPUN UL_[ BY SARAH THORNTON

“Helen has proven integrity.

There is no undermining her. She has meta-meaning,” says Madeleine Grynsztejn, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, who has collaborated with Helen Molesworth, the former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, on a number of exhibitions, including an acclaimed Kerry James Marshall retrospective. “Helen is not insecure in her judgment. She has great expertise and vision. Great curators have strong opinions and stand by their convictions. Harald Szeemann, Lynne Cooke, Okwui Enwezor—Helen is one of those,” says dealer David Zwirner. Molesworth stands for a kind of brave, clever idealism, even outside the art world, where she has garnered namechecks on TV shows like BoJack Horseman. So, it is no surprise that widespread disbelief met the news of her dismissal from MOCA LA last year. Many speculated about the motives behind the ostensibly impulsive act by Philippe Vergne, then the museum’s director. Had he been manipulated by a right-wing contingent of the museum board to believe that his job depended on her expulsion? Were he and Molesworth fighting about the museum’s indiscriminate representation of white male artists? “I was fired without warning for no cause on March 12th, 2018, and the rest is history,” says Molesworth with a raucous laugh in her first interview since then. “It was a total debacle,” she adds. Through the very public ordeal, the curator was happily distracted by Phoebe, her Boston Terrier puppy, and supported by her “north star,” Susan Dackerman, her wife of 18 years, who is currently the director of Stanford University’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts. The press speculated about Molesworth’s failure to schmooze rich patrons and her uncompromising working style, which could be rough on installers. But many saw her as a martyr to a museum with a troubled political history. As artist Lorna Simpson puts it, “Women who have a point of view and stand by it are often punished. Just because you get rid of Helen Molesworth doesn’t mean you have solved ‘the problem.’ No way, motherfucker.” Indeed, “the problem” did not go away. Vergne “resigned” after a Board meeting at the Bel-Air Hotel two months after he ejected Molesworth. (A sign of its dysfunction, MOCA LA Board meetings were at that time held at various West Side hotels to spare trustees from having to drive downtown.) “We, the Board, cannot fire or hire any staff, other than the director,” says Catherine Opie, an artist trustee. “If Philippe had asked about firing Helen, we would have said, ’Are you kidding?’” Molesworth admits to a “general antipathy to authority and bureaucracy.” She attended a math and science high school in Manhattan while living in Queens, but specialized in truancy—spending afternoons in repertory cinemas and wandering around the museums “looking at cool shit,” as she puts it, “anything to stay out of the cold.” As a college student, Molesworth was a self-declared “academic grifter,” finding inspiration in a State University of New York (SUNY) course that examined the French Revolution through the works of Francisco Goya, Jacques-Louis David and Ludwig van Beethoven, and at University of California San Diego, where she met, for the first time, people her own age who called themselves artists. “Her undergraduate transcript looked like a rap sheet, but it was clear that she had an enterprising mind,” says Hal Foster, the art historian who supervised Molesworth’s PhD in the 1990s.

The experience of writing her PhD thesis, “At Home with Marcel Duchamp: The Ready-Made and Domesticity,” emboldened the young scholar. “It made me fearless. If I could tackle Duchamp, if I could be that lonely and hard-working, then I could do anything,” she says. After a stint at SUNY teaching and running the campus art gallery where she found “the classroom miserable and the gallery a blast,” Molesworth moved to the Baltimore Museum of Art. The first thing she did there was re-install the contemporary art galleries. “Because of the PhD, I had a big story of art in my head,” explains Molesworth. “I found my drive to diversify permanent collections. They are the beating heart of the art world. If you can change the collection, you can change the public story of art.” Molesworth took this mission to jobs at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Harvard Art Museum and then Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, curating ambitious shows that disrupted the grand narratives of art history. “Part Object Part Sculpture” (Wexner Center for the Arts, 2005) brought a lot of overlooked women artists and a psychoanalytic framework into a discussion of the ready-made and the custom-made. “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s” (ICA Boston, 2012) re-evaluated the decade in light of a complicated story about race, AIDS and the women’s movement. “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957” (ICA Boston, 2015) offered a persuasive revision of mid-century modern art history. Praise was also showered on Molesworth’s rehang of MOCA’s post-war collection, which put works by Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg into conversation with the likes of Ruth Asawa and Lee Lozano. For Molesworth, the process of installation is invigorating. “Works do not have meaning by themselves,” she explains. “Installing is an extraordinary honor.” Where is she now? Molesworth is splitting her time between northern and southern California, working on a series of podcasts about post-war women artists for the Getty Research Institute and writing a memoir about art, love and freedom. “It’s about how art altered how I think about myself,” she explains. Writing runs in the family. Her brother, James, a critic and senior editor at Wine Spectator, is an “extraordinary translator of sensory experience,” as she puts it. Molesworth herself is searingly articulate. It is a talent that MOCA LA patrons may miss. “Helen’s explanations of art are like poetry,” says Chara Schreyer, a collector and board trustee. “She has the ability to put words to paintings that make them come alive. Her knowledge is deep and wide and, most importantly, she has wonderful wit.” Molesworth’s final show at MOCA LA, “One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art,” is on view until March 11.

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The Healer

Adelita Husni-Bey’s New Museum exhibition puts American immigration WVSPJ`·HUK [OL WLVWSL P[ HќLJ[Z [OL TVZ[·MYVU[ HUK JLU[LY BY ELIZABETH KARP-EVANS PORTRAIT BY LIA CLAY

Earlier this year, artist and pedagogue Adelita Husni-Bey’s site-specific installation Chiron opened at the New Museum, spotlighting a group of protagonists in the global immigration crisis. “There is no law to save most people,” one of the haunting first lines of the exhibition’s namesake film Chiron (2019) rings out into the cavernous, blue-lit gallery. Voices continue, projecting a mixture of frustration and compassion regarding immigration policy in the United States. “We’re having to prove that these places are bad and that we’re good in order to win,” says a pragmatic young man. “We’re perpetuating… the myth that we’re the savior.” Curated by Helga Christoffersen, the site-specific installation is Husni-Bey’s first institutional solo presentation in New York and includes three video works. Postcards from the Desert Island (2010–11) shows students in an experimental French elementary school grappling with selfgovernance and models of organization in a Lord of the Flieslike environment. The two-channel video installation 2265 (2015) was created with members of Authoring Action—a group of teenage authors led by Nathan Ross Freeman—and shows the teens exploring the possibilities of populating Mars and the resulting capitalist colonialist structures produced from occupying new territory. Chiron features lawyers from the pro-bono New York law firm UnLocal, Inc., who outline their fight for the rights of undocumented immigrants and their families within the United States legal system. Husni-Bey’s longstanding interest in how societies organize politically through the law becomes evident through the mingling voices of weary lawyers, precocious teens, and sing-song students. Within the exhibition, the viewer is overwhelmed with questions about the origin of rules and their arbitrary enforcement. These queries manifest in a sea of floor-to-ceiling banners that glow with text written in UVsensitive white ink—excerpts of United States immigration law from c. 1882–2017. Spanning more than a century, the laws provide historical context for those discussed in Chiron, employing viewers to consider how different groups of people came to the United States and who has historically benefited from the country’s legal system upon entry. Born in Milan, having studied in London, and now living in New York, the topics Husni-Bey addresses are rooted in personal experience: “I think ‘displacement’ would be too strong a word for me,” she explains, “but I certainly moved a lot between Libya, Italy and the UK, and had the capacity and privilege to do that… to forge community.” Perhaps due to this, most of Husni-Bey’s projects begin with collectivity,

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employing collaborative pedagogical models in a workshop setting to produce and record material. In this way, she has created photo essays, radio broadcasts, publications, and archives that form the foundation of her film work— which has been included in the Venice Biennale, where she represented Italy in 2017, and in “Being: New Photography 2018” at the Museum of Modern Art. The making of Chiron also began in 2017 when Raoul Anchondo and Christhian Diaz, board members from UnLocal, asked Husni-Bey if she would be interested in developing a workshop for their organization. The exhibition takes its title from the Greek mythological figure Chiron, an immortal centaur who is notable for being an intelligent and nurturing educator and natural healer. Ironically, Chiron eventually does succumb to death, a healer who could not heal himself. While working with UnLocal, the term “secondary trauma” became a touchstone of conversations. “Secondary trauma, or as I prefer to call it, after Sara Ahmed, ‘emotional depletion’ happens when the work you do to change the institution becomes overwhelming,” Husni-Bey explains. “It takes a toll on your person, on your body, somatically. It’s often associated with activism or social work.” Husni-Bey’s workshop with the law firm examines this trauma through the lens of American policies around immigration. Chiron, subsequently, is about how the constant struggle to fight systemic oppression generated by the United States legal system leaves a wide array of communities with exhausted leaders, healers who have no time to heal themselves. The film also does well to address the seemingly arbitrary application of legal protection and the disadvantage faced by many immigrants who have already made it to the United States and made the country their home. There is a chilling moment when, in the mundane setting of an office conference room, fluorescent lights humming, one lawyer recalls the government’s threat that offering legal aid to undocumented immigrants in order to procure documentation could potentially qualify as aiding and abetting a criminal. In Chiron, Husni-Bey reemphasizes the brutality of borders, but she also focuses on a seldom-talked about piece of the current global immigration crisis: the broader effect a broken legal system has on communities working within the law. We are asked to consider our own protection under the law in relation to others, and why this is. With this understanding, only then can we begin to collectively heal.

Adelita Husni-Bey manipulates light in order to create her striking videos on view at the New Museum through April 14.

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BY CALEB MATHERN PORTRAIT BY YAEL MALKA

PATTERN MAKER

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PHOTO BY PLASTIQUES, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND EMALIN, LONDON

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Conceptual artist Jessica Vaughn uses

Installation view of Vaughn’s “Exit Strategy” at Emalin.

the readymade tradition to confront issues of representation and documentation inside quotidian American infrastructure. Her familiar pieces examine both micro and macro power hierarchies within institutions of labor. The Brooklyn-based artist keeps coming back to data mined from her hometown of Chicago, reasoning, “It is important for the materials to relate to a specific social history I can speak to.” Duchamp’s readymade model dictates re-contextualization. Vaughn’s materials require economic re-evaluation. Finding poetic space within the rigid bureaucratic systems of manufacturing entities, her research-heavy practice tests which lines to structures of power remain open, pointing to the everincreasing cracks in the master narrative. Last year was a whirlwind for Vaughn who ended 2018 with her first international show, “Exit Strategy” at Emalin in Shoreditch, London, after a homecoming at Expo Chicago in September. The artist ended 2017 with her first solo exhibition “Receipt of a Form” at Martos Gallery in Chinatown, Manhattan, where she is currently represented. Her debut featured a large wall installation series titled After Willis (Rubbed, Used and Moved) (2017), displaying rows of decommissioned upholstered bus seats from the Chicago Transit Authority which she acquired directly from CTA subcontractors. This sort of investigation to locate expressly specific works is essential across her practice. Though, she admits, “I don’t need the audience to know that it is a Chicago seat from 1998 to 2011,” a year that saw more than 532 million in ridership alone. In a series of works riffing on the idea of detritus, she shifts discussion from statistics surrounding public usage to records left by industrial waste. The artist adheres scraps of seat upholstery, freshly patterned in an internationally ubiquitous transit motif, to plexiglass and lays the abstractions unceremoniously on the floor. Acutely aware of the solemnity gallery space can signify, by using discarded byproducts Vaughn puts focus on the periphery. “I am drawn to the particulars of how things are made—what constitutes the entirety of a material and how this is directly or indirectly related to the final outcome of how we all live with this material.” After studying for her MFA under the late Terry Adkins at the University of Pennsylvania, Vaughn spent a year making the commute from Philadelphia to a fellowship at the Queens Museum before moving full-time to New York in 2012 to participate in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. At her studio in Brownsville, the artist demos exhibitions via models and mockups. The multi-disciplinarian works in whatever mode best suits the project. “If it’s about sculpture, then I work with sculpture; I don’t think about sculpture with a capital S,” she explains. Vaughn’s latest sculpture, Depreciating Asset: Variable Dimensions (2018) from “Exit Strategy,” follows commuters into the workplace. Comprised of the metal-framed guts of office cubicles, the upturned structural components lie on their side, not so subtly upending bureaucratic design. By sourcing through pre-existing partition production for this piece, contractors are made into unwitting collaborators. Nodding to Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cube series (1974)—his 122 systematic formulations of incomplete cubic sculptures— Vaughn utilizes minimalist convention to undermine our established hierarchy of material value, not unlike Donald Judd did with cheap concrete and aluminium. Refracting multiple lines of inquiry inside some pretty poker-faced works, Vaughn’s interventionist practice furnishes few clues, prompting broad questions like, “What narratives do objects carry and how can they open up the record?” Martos Gallery Director Ebony L. Haynes notes, “In today’s context, Vaughn’s work is increasingly crucial to a discussion that leans dangerously close to stasis or even regression.” Vaughn will realize her biggest show yet this fall with her first museum exhibition at the cavernous Dallas Contemporary. culturedmag.com 135

A still from Us (2019)

Artist Madeline Hollander talks about her hand in Jordan Peele’s forthcoming thriller, Us. BY KAT HERRIMAN

Ring ring went fate. Artist Madeline

Hollander answered. It was a call from Ian Cooper, her friend, fellow artist and Jordan Peele’s producing partner, seeking choreographic advice on a scene for the director’s soon-to-be released thriller, Us. “Ian knows my tendency to push choreography into uncanny or creepy territories. My first meeting with Jordan at Monkeypaw Productions felt like we were picking up a conversation that had started a while ago,” Hollander tells me almost a year after this first encounter. She continues: “We immediately began working through scenes with the storyboard artist and talking through the characters’ psychological and physiological qualities and dualities. Jordan would outline a character’s attributes, history, and relationships and then I would pitch ‘signature moves,’ postures, gestures, and physical idiosyncrasies that aligned with his vision. It all moved very quickly and intuitively. I walked out totally invigorated and drenched in sweat.” I anticipate the same feeling when leaving Us. I’m not one for horror movies—usually watching them betwixt my fingers—but apparently Hollander isn’t either. “I have trouble getting through a full film but I love when horror crosses into the world of slapstick,” she says. “I actually watch them mostly for research purposes and movement inspiration. The scene where Regan crab-walks backwards down the stairwell (too fast) made a huge impression on me and iterations of that have worked their way into several choreographies.” In the past years I’ve seen firsthand the distortion and perversion of familiar moves that creep into Hollander’s own endurance-based performances which grapple with everything from the international

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sand shortage to the incoherent translation of Heimlich maneuver. She mentions Arena (2017) when a line of dancers jerked across the sand trailing an endlessly circling beach rake like zombies until the sun set. As far as scale, Peele’s star-filled thriller blows all Hollander’s past projects out of the water pushing the artist to develop new strategies for communicating her ideas and motions across an entire set of actors and extras rather than a troupe of trained dancers. “I ended up singling out several extras that I knew had dance backgrounds to become “leaders”—essentially creating an impromptu team of undercover movement assistants who would be responsible for guiding their own group through the trajectories,” she explains. “This was a huge revelation because it meant I could pre-rehearse the scene with my team off-set. I still ended up sprinting constantly around set and lost my voice daily, but it was a huge help.” While Hollander couldn’t reveal any specific scenes before the March 22 premiere, she spoke generally about the tempo of fear and how it matriculates through the body. “Horror invites tampering with everyday speeds, directions, and patterns,” she says. “Catastrophe moves too slow, limbs move too fast and automatic reflexes are off— but it’s subtle. Slight physical shifts that might be imperceptible—for example, having an actor stand with their feet slightly too far apart or too close together—can significantly alter the energy of a character or scene.” We are waiting on tiptoe for Us, and if you are too, head to culturedmag.com for an extended interview about the art of horror with Peele and Hollander.

COURTESY UNIVERSAL PICTURES

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PHOTO BY CINDA FIRESTONE, COURTESY OF THE WISCONSIN CENTER FOR FILM AND THEATER RESEARCH

Emile de Antonio imitates painter Larry Poons cropping a work in Painters Painting, his 1972 portrait of the post-war New York art scene.

In February 1969 in Boston, Emile

de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig—a cutting documentary condemnation of U.S. policy in Vietnam— received its official theatrical premiere. By then, de Antonio had cemented a reputation as a rabble-rouser of the mid-century American establishment. His earlier nonfiction features poked gaping holes in the straightforward narratives this country’s authority figures like to proffer about their deeds. Point of Order (1964), sculpted from nearly 200 hours of CBS kinescopes detailing the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, outlined the famously unhinged fearmongering of the Wisconsin senator—while refraining from presenting McCarthy’s across-the-aisle colleagues as unblemished interrogators. The film exposed the overall procedural buffoonery of a government body conducting an unfocused investigation for a national-television audience— as when McCarthy and Joseph N. Welch, the chief counsel for the Army and deliverer of the storied “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” inquiry, engage in a standoff over the meaning of the word “pixie.” Rush to Judgment (1967), which de Antonio completed in collaboration with the lawyer Mark Lane, tore apart the credibility of the Warren Commission’s assertion of a lone actor, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the 1963 Dallas assassination of John F. Kennedy. Pig elicited such intense passions over its jeremiad against America’s ignorant involvement in Southeast Asia that several attempted premieres were aborted owing to vandalism or threats of violence. Yet for someone whose work caused such notable hysteria in its day, de Antonio stands presently as a somewhat sidelined figure in the 20thcentury documentary canon. Occupying a status of “relative obscurity,” as Ed Halter termed it in a 2018 essay for 4Columns, de Antonio’s movies are difficult to access on the typical streaming outlets, and are certainly less frequently shown than those by contemporaries, like the direct-cinema practitioners Albert and David Maysles or the still-working institutional purveyor Frederick Wiseman. Robert Greene, the director of some of the most acclaimed documentaries of recent years (Actress, Kate Plays Christine, Bisbee ’17), recalls that, even as an employee at the legendary Kim’s Video & Music, the de Antonio offerings were slim pickings—some stray VHS tapes, including one of America Is Hard to See (1970), about Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for the 1968 Democratic nomination. “When he made those movies, he was in the conversation,” says Greene. “And then none of the stuff was available after that.” But efforts have been made in recent years to buck this trend. In April 2016, the Whitney

Museum of American Art hosted a weekend of de Antonio screenings— an appropriate venue given the director’s manifold associations with the movers and shakers of the New York art world. “He was a sort of impresario, a raconteur, an incredibly erudite man,” offers the Whitney’s Donna De Salvo, who helped organize the three-day de Antonio event. “He had an extraordinary understanding of power, structure, and capitalism in general.” (Notably, when the new downtown Whitney debuted its first show, in 2015, it was with a de Antonio-esque title: “America Is Hard to See.”) Later in 2016, the Museum of Modern Art unveiled a digital restoration of Drunk aka Drink (1965), a movie de Antonio didn’t want released in his lifetime; directed by his close friend Andy Warhol, it displays de Antonio gulping down an entire quart of J&B scotch and lapsing into incoherence. Last year, Metrograph organized an exceptional de Antonio retrospective that included fresh 35mm prints of Point of Order and Pig. Cinda Firestone was a college student when she first saw Pig, which, like a lot of de Antonio’s left-of-center movies, found a fervent audience on university campuses across the country. She would go on to interview de Antonio during her tenure as a journalist at Liberation News Service, and then to collaborate with him, as an assistant editor, on de Antonio’s Painters Painting (1972). “His documentaries didn’t fall into a certain mold. They’re all very different. He opened things up for a lot of documentary filmmakers,” Firestone observes—including herself, who made her first movie, the pivotal prison documentary Attica (1974), after meeting him. “He was always very supportive of young filmmakers and young people in general. I thought that was a really nice quality about him,” Firestone adds, recalling a moment when de Antonio asked her, “‘Isn’t that what older people are for? To help younger people?’” For Greene, de Antonio’s legacy likewise looms large. “The biggest inspiration to me is, How can you make politics personal?” says Greene, who, as an undergraduate, was particularly moved by a set-up in Painters Painting in which the artist Robert Rauschenberg speaks to the camera while perched atop a ladder. “I think of that moment a lot. Why was that so singular? It taught me that every image needs to be an idea. That moment changed the way I think about art. Rauschenberg on top of that ladder—he doesn’t get there by accident. He and the filmmaker have agreed that this is the way to do this. That is the hallmark of what I want my cameras to do.” This lofty mission of formal experimentation and essayistic checks on

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the U.S. ruling class didn’t always seem a likely calling for de Antonio. A second-generation Italian-American born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1919, de Antonio was raised in financial comfort and entered Harvard in 1936, the same year as JFK. He joined numerous leftist student societies, but his heavy-drinking habits caught up with him and he was eventually expelled, according to the telling in Randolph Lewis’ Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America (2000), after “he set fire to an elevator … and then doused a university official with a fire hose.” He went on to odd jobs and a Second World War stint in the army. Later, he moved to New York to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University, where he held onto his disrespect for academic orthodoxy. Meanwhile, his gift for socializing remained undiminished. During the ’50s, he fell into fast friendships with now-canonical participants in the postwar New York art scene: Warhol, John Cage, Frank Stella. “He impressed people because he was so cocksure,” says art historian and critic Barbara Rose, who first crossed paths with de Antonio around that time. Even amid all these connections, de Antonio didn’t seriously catch the moviemaking bug until he saw Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Jack Kerouac–narrated Pull My Daisy (1959), now considered an emblem of the Beat Generation and the New American Cinema movement that would consolidate in the early ’60s. In Point of Order, de Antonio reached his conclusions solely through his sly, achronological arrangement of the CBS recordings. With Rush to Judgment and Pig, he began to administer original interviews, although he still relied greatly on chunks of footage sourced from elsewhere: network television, foreign-language documentaries, little-seen clips buried in archives around the world. This tendency points to another

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core function of his work: media criticism. De Antonio was distrustful of television and its ability to streamline complicated stories for the masses. Rush to Judgment, for its part, assails the Warren Commission but also discovers culpability in a shell-shocked media conglomerate that bought too easily into the party line about Oswald. Some of that movie’s most quietly terrifying moments occur when ordinary, Texan observers to the Dealey Plaza bloodshed explain where they initially heard the motorcade-directed bullets coming from—only for them to admit that subsequent media reports led them to disbelieve their own memories and concede that the shots originated at the Texas School Book Depository, where the Warren Commission claimed they did. As the ’70s dawned, de Antonio turned to the business of the U.S. presidency. America Is Hard to See (1970) reverentially relates Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for the office from two years prior. Far more acrid, Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971) mounts a stinging indictment of sitting President Richard Nixon, functioning partly as a spiritual successor to Point of Order, in that de Antonio considers Nixon’s emergence as a Republican standard-bearer a byproduct of the hysteria for which McCarthy laid the groundwork. De Antonio’s next movies clung more closely to the types of people the director considered his peers. Painters Painting provides a loving profile of many of the generationally influential artists with whom de Antonio fraternized and collaborated: Stella, Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman, Hans Hofmann. In the comparatively tense Underground (1976), which emits a spellbinding sense of danger, de Antonio, the cinematographer Haskell Wexler, and the editor Mary Lampson (all of whom share authorial credit) embed themselves within a cluster of

COURTESY OF THE WISCONSIN CENTER FOR FILM AND THEATER RESEARCH

“He was a sort of impresario, a raconteur, an incredibly erudite man.” —Donna De Salvo

Emile de Antonio and Robert Motherwell talk during a break in the filming of Painters Painting (1972).

members of the Weather Underground, the radical left-wing organization. Given that the movie’s subjects were then among the most wanted people in America, Wexler’s camera photographs them at obfuscating angles: through mirrors, behind their heads, draped in eerie silhouette. In between deeply considered political remarks, the young activists toss off darkly humoristic asides to the crew—“Join us on the floor,” “My right leg is asleep”—that underscore the physical discomfort of the production and the larger reality of living under the scrutiny of federal investigators. J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime FBI head who directed the vindictive policing of such dissenters, supplies the connective tissue of Mr. Hoover and I (1989), de Antonio’s fascinatingly weird, digression-prone last movie. De Antonio, who died at 70 in December 1989, appears on-screen for much of Mr. Hoover and I, unfussily facing the camera head-on in blazer and

purple turtleneck. De Antonio’s to-the-lens, sometimes-hyperbolic decrees encompass not just Hoover’s harmful career but also autobiographical recollections from the documentarian’s past. Interspersed among these addresses are tranquil scenes of household mundanities: John Cage preparing a loaf of bread as de Antonio looks on; de Antonio receiving a laugh-filled haircut from his sixth wife, Nancy. The movie demonstrates the ironic irreverence, political resolution and mountain-high personal contradictions that made de Antonio such a singular entity—a hobnobber among the elite who used his connections and charisma to finance gallantly confrontational reflections on the U.S. political apparatus. Decades on, his work persists in awakening the sentiment—as true today as it was during the ’60s and long before—that the journalist Penn Jones Jr. voices at the end of Rush to Judgment: “Something is wrong in the land.”

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THE LONG TAKE Kevin Jerome Everson focuses his lens on the people behind the scenes, illuminating the quiet humanity of the everyday. TEXT AND PORTRAIT BY ERIN LELAND

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Kevin Jerome Everson has been making films for more than three decades; a selection of his work screens at the Centre Pompidou in March.

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It is hard to stop watching Kevin Jerome Everson’s films. There are 160 in total, including nine features. The pace and voice of primarily African-American professionals from the dry-cleaning plant, the ranch, the bowling alley factory, the welterweight boxing ring, the city cab, the election precinct, are the lens through which viewers watch minutes pass. With films now in major museum collections throughout the United States and an upcoming solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Everson’s earliest interactions with artmaking took place at University of Akron, where he completed his BFA in photography and sculpture, one hour away from his birthplace in Mansfield. “Even one hour away, at that time, felt like forever away,” Everson says of his first departure from home. In Mansfield, his father worked as a mechanic, his mother as a bank teller and manager. For the duration of the 57th Edition of The Carnegie International, on view until March 25, Everson’s 480-minute film plays in the sunken first floor of the museum. Park Lanes (2015) follows an eight-hour work shift in a bowling alley factory. A still camera records dripping, steaming mechanical parts hung out in the air to dry. To the untrained eye what would otherwise look like scrap pieces are the wooden innards to a bowling pin. Recognition of every bolt and stitch within an archaic workshop is the job description, the expertise, of the laborer. Park Lanes echoes an earlier film of Everson’s, Quality Control (2011), set in a dry cleaner in Prichard, Alabama. Long shots record the back-end of the dry-cleaning business: the bagging station, the steaming station, the ironing station—with high focus on such acts as pressing the cuff, the hem. Like many of his films, ambient conversation between employees speaks to the heart of the matter in the last lines: “It’s not only just pressing. It’s a lot of little small detail stuff that goes in quality.”

“I don’t make work for the audience. I care about the subjects.” —Kevin Jerome Everson At 54 years old, Everson has been attuned to the places he’s lived for three decades; his films watch, with meticulous attention, the goings-on directly around him. Often, the Midwest and the South are the sites for his observational studies. The first location ideas for a portrait of Everson included points between Mansfield, Ohio and Columbus, Mississippi, the location where he awaits permission to shoot a film at an Air Force base. In the end, the portrait was scheduled for New Year’s Day in Cleveland, the site of Everson’s film Sound That (2014), where workers for the Cleveland Water Department listen for leaks in plumbing underneath the roads of a suburban neighborhood. A number of people in Everson’s cinematic portraits wear headlamps. In R-15 (2017), the vignetted camera lens follows an employee into an attic while he investigates the heating and cooling insulation underneath the roof of a house. The camera autofocuses, blurring the image while trying to find a focal point in the dark. The headlamp scans an empty space, and points to searching as the subject of the film. What does work look like? What is the worker looking for? Investigations as old as time, Everson is a witness to this search. “I don’t make work for the audience. I care about the subjects,” Everson tells me. Shot in real time, the duration of labor is felt and becomes an emotional clock. An expanse of time encourages the mind to wander in search of an identification with the mind of the employee, whose secret thoughts lay behind silent tinkering. Odd jobs are set up against daydreams. Everson recounts that on long drives in and out of Ohio, he prefers to listen to the voice of a speaker on a podcast rather than music. Finding voice is another subject of Everson’s films. Ear, Nose and Throat and Shadeena (both 2016) form a double-perspective about coming clean and the process of confession, through the star of both: Shadeena. In a voiceover during an ear, nose and throat check-up, Shadeena confesses to seeing a murder outside her home. In the companion film, Shadeena, she retells the story straight to the camera in a single take. Her reticence is gone, her character markedly different from one film to the next, reiterating the construction of the confession and of all storytelling. With a direct look into the camera, she speaks with her eyes. She speaks to the power of the eye-witness. She has the final word.

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Everson and his daughter, Matilda Washington, prepare an ironing board for a film shoot in Columbus, Mississippi.

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Collapse

of Time Combining dance, theater and installation, MacArthur “Genius” Okwui Okpokwasili dips into the past, subtly elucidating its bearing on the present. BY CATHERINE DAMMAN

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NAIMA GREEN

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Always responding to her environment, artist Okwui Okpokwasili snakes her way through the seat of a chair by Josef Hoffman. culturedmag.com 147

Okwui Okpokwasili has been a wicked daughter; a bedraggled, long-limbed ballerina in love with a race car; the proprietor of a remote saloon; and the devil herself. Her riveting stage presence features in productions by many of the country’s most innovative theater makers (she played the aforementioned roles in Young Jean Lee’s LEAR, Richard Foreman’s Maria del Bosco, Richard Maxwell’s Cowboys and Indians, and Jim Findlay’s Electric Lucifer, respectively). In her long-standing work with the choreographer Ralph Lemon, Okpokwasili has experimented at the limits of the form: Together, their working process has included everything from a 12-hour durational experiment in silence to a performance of extended keening. Dedicated patrons of New York’s downtown performance scene know that Okpokwasili’s name in a playbill signals a chance to bear witness to the performer as author. Her supreme intelligence is always respectful of the material and yet nonetheless transformative. The recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant, Okpokwasili endows each gesture and intonation with multivalent resonance. In the flourished extension of a hand, the lowering of the eyes, or the lifting of the chin, Okpokwasili conjures the ways that past events haunt action in the present tense. Raised in the Bronx, Okpokwasili is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Her own work often takes her autobiography as a prism, refracting it to summon other narratives—deeply rooted, often gnarled, still a site for new life. With great formal inventiveness, her performances plumb histories

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of colonization and the African diaspora; the ongoing legacies of violence that structure black life in America; and the creativity and power that has endured, even within varying degrees of terrible unfreedom. This spring, her latest work, Adaku’s Revolt, premieres at Abrons Arts Center. In English, “Adaku” translates to “daughter of wealth,” and the performance tells the story of one such girl who resists the standards of beauty imposed on her by others, including the alteration of her hair—its rituals, its searing tools and its loaded semantics. Describing her thinking to me, Okpokwasili speaks in the vocabulary of sense memory: Not only the burn of a hot comb on one’s ear, but also the more chronic fear of freshly-straightened hair getting wet, an unceasing, anxious tensing against the rain. Adolescence, that quivering precipice churning with hormone and urge and defiance, likewise anchors Okpokwasili’s 2014 performance, Bronx Gothic, an epistolary novel come to life. She reads from furtive exchanges in an extended monologue, which she enunciates in two distinct vocal registers: One a queasy coo of drawn out syllables and vocal fry, the other an emphatic baritone. The two voices, resounding from one body, articulate the conversation between one young girl, untutored, who asks about breasts and semen and orgasms, and another, more knowing, who boasts her sexual knowledge while grappling with its entwinement in trauma. Yet the craft of the work allows the cordon that distinguishes the two girls to slacken, and for this uncertainty to evoke, generatively, all the ways that desire evades certitude. One scene recounts a dream of being on the beach. A haze of

SPECIAL THANK YOU TO MATERIAL LUST WHOSE WORK IS AVAILABLE THROUGH MATERIALLUST.COM

Okpokwasili stretches out on Material Lust’s Twin Peak Sofa for Green’s camera.

partially remembered scents and temperatures, in the associative logic of the unconscious, swiftly morphs memories of pleasure into those of pain. First the sandy idyll is too hot, the ground scalds; then, the ocean’s cool promise of relief betrays, becoming a tidal wave of boiling blood. The experience of wading into unknowing is, in Bronx Gothic, extended to audiences, who enter a darkened space in which Okpokwasili convulses for a terrifying duration, her back to the audience. For this section of “quake movement,” she whips from skull to sacrum, elbows jabbing outward and head bobbing. Sometimes her hands whirl in a sped-up version of the gesticulations that can accompany fervent language; the audience senses urgency, but not necessarily its cause. In a documentary about the work’s creation by Andrew Rossi, Okpokwasili shares footage of the performance with her parents. We watch them watching her. Her mother immediately has her own lens of interpretation, connecting the movements she sees her daughter enacting to dances “based in the history of the culture.” She then demonstrates her own dancing on the spot, right there in the living room, shedding her crimson suit jacket to better move, to be unencumbered. For her Poor People’s TV Room (2017), Okpokwasili shares the stage with a multigenerational cast including Thuli Dumakude, Katrina Reid and Nehemoyia Young. The work takes as one starting point the Nigerian Women’s War of 1929, a revolt against British colonizers in Nigeria. Okpokwasili’s husband and frequent collaborator, Peter Born, co-wrote and directed the piece; the sets and lighting of his design offer audiences

exercises in skewed perspective. The performers are sometimes partially obscured behind a cloudy plastic scrim, or lying supine on a table, a live feed projecting their images upright to create the illusion of a living room. Choreographic strategies bring the women’s bodies together, then apart. In some moments, one performer might give her weight over to another; in others, she might act as a shadow, moving almost in unison, but not quite. The ensemble also acts as a chorus, with voices swelling in harmonic refrains of “have I swallowed enough?” and “look at this body, boy.” While the work does not recount a straightforward narrative of the historical event, it crafts new possibilities for address out of the etymological resonances of “egwu,” which in the Igbo language connects protest to performance—to dance. Some of this research similarly informed Sitting on a Man’s Head, which Born and Okpokwasili presented at the 2018 Berlin Biennale. An experiment in “collective utterance,” participants engage in conversation with the performance’s facilitators, and then share in improvising songs of grievance and joy. One anecdote is perhaps exemplary: Born had a fruitful conversation with a father and young son just outside the installation. The boy was eager to experience the work, but did not want to remove his shoes, as was required. Moments later, Okpokwasili spotted the kid, astride her husband, who was crawling on all fours. Desires were permitted and alternatives were sought out. A body’s faculties were put to new use. The child’s feet never touched the ground.

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It’s About Time The German collector Julia Stoschek has one of the world’s largest time-based media troves. This year, the new MOCA Los Angeles trustee is bringing her vision of contemporary art to the biggest global audience yet. )@ ;,+ 366: 769;9(0; )@ Ǹ0905 Ǹ04Ǹ,2

When you’re a wealthy collector

and Larry Gagosian tries to sell you a work he knows you admire, you just buy it, right? That might be how the interaction would usually go, but not so with Julia Stoschek, one of the foremost collectors of time-based art, namely film, video, and the like. She first saw the work that got her interested in the field—Douglas Gordon’s elephant-themed, three-channel Play Dead; Real Time—at Gagosian some 15 years ago, and it launched her on a journey that has formed the 850work Julia Stoschek Collection (JSC), now with branches in Düsseldorf and Berlin. But much later, when the famed dealer tried to sell her a version of Gordon’s piece, she declined. “It was the price,” she laughs. Likely, she could have afforded it, descended as she is from the billionaire family behind a famous German car parts empire. But Stoschek, 44, doesn’t always do the expected thing or make the expected choice. “I really try to acquire masterpieces,” she says of her approach. “Sometimes it’s not possible to get the masterpieces and then I’ll wait. For example, Matthew Barney and Jeff Wall are very important artists but they’re not part of the collection. It’s important, really, to have the right piece and not collect names—that’s not what I’m not doing.” The list of artists in the JSC is long indeed—around two-thirds are American, including Doug Aitken, Joan Jonas and Mike Kelley, and there’s a heavy European representation, particularly from Germany. In the latter category are Mika Rottenberg, Rosemarie Trockel and Andreas Gursky (who happens to be her ex-boyfriend). “It was a very important and intense time, and inspired me very much,” she says of her time with Gursky. As for having his work in the collection,

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“For sure!” she says. “He was incredibly generous.” No matter the artist, Stoschek goes in-depth. “I follow an artist over a long period of time, because I think it’s important to have a deep involvement,” she explains, noting that there are only 255 artists represented among the 850 works. Stoschek has come a long way from her days as a business student (in Bavaria, where her family and the business are based) who, in her words, “crashed into the art world” in the early aughts. This year marks a major pivot for the collector. For a decade, Stoschek lived above her trove in a spectacularly renovated industrial building in Düsseldorf (which is still open to the public), but now she has moved to Berlin and separated—somewhat at least—her personal life and her collecting. She created a branch open to the public in a brutalist style 1968 building in Berlin’s Mitte district, but lives across town with her young son. And she hired a full-time curator for the first time, Lisa Long, who helps program both spaces. “It was fantastic, but also very intense,” she says of the Düsseldorf years. “I think now I need a little bit more privacy.”

“I follow an artist over a long period of time, because I think it’s important to have a deep involvement.” —Julia Stoschek

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BOTH INSTALLATION VIEWS BY SIMON VOGEL

Having Long on board means that for the first time, starting in March, the exhibition spaces will show artists who aren’t officially in the collection (yet). In Düsseldorf, a Rindon Johnson show opens March 29, followed later in the year by A.K. Burns and Sophia Al Maria; in Berlin, the program is launched by Renate Lorenz and Pauline Boudry on April 25, with Jon Wang and Meriem Bennani to come after. The title is “horizontal vertigo,” inspired by the writing of Trinh T Minh-ha and emphasizing what Long calls “a multiplicity of narratives and identities, moments of blur, uncertainty and absence.” Long, who is American and based in Germany, was particularly drawn to Stoschek’s famed conservation program, which can make or break a collection like Stoschek’s. “Time-based art is so ephemeral and so difficult to keep and store,” says Long, who adds that the way the collection is cared for is “impressive—server structure, backup, communication with galleries and artists. They are even thinking about what happens when certain technologies are no longer available.” Stoschek has shown a lot of foresight in this area. “We have two people taking care to clean files once a year to keep them alive and hopefully give them to the next generation,” she says. As she looks to the next chapter of collecting, it’s clear to her that buying finished artworks is only so helpful. “Increasingly, I want to support artists with production costs,” she explains. “These days, it’s so hard for emerging artists to get their works made.” Most immediately, part of the JSC will be seen in São Paulo in March. Can an American venue be far behind? Probably not. Stoschek says she’s interested in partnering with an existing institution at some point to show the artworks, but she won’t be opening her own space. And a certain West Coast city will be getting a lot of her attention, given that Stoschek has accepted Klaus Biesenbach’s offer to join the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (she was also on his board at MoMA PS1). “I’m the first German to be on the MOCA board,” she says. “I’m looking so forward. I will spend January in LA because I haven’t traveled so much there recently, and I want to see the new institutions and gallery spaces.” Known for her fearless and forthright approach, Stoschek adds that for her, the timing is right to take on new challenges: “After 10 years going to New York, I really decided that now I have to conquer LA.”

An installation view of “A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions (Featuring Ming Smith, Frida Orupabo and Missylanyus),” Arthur Jafa’s 2018 solo show at Julia Stoschek Collection’s Berlin museum. Opposite: Installation view of “Generation Loss,” a 2017 video-only exhibition curated by Ed Atkins for Julia Stoschek Collection’s Düsseldorf outpost celebrating its ﬁrst decade.

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02.14.19 I’m Laughing with You A Perennial Eden Fool’s Mate Marathon Man Hounds of Love Why and Wherefore Fake Out, Fake In Reality Check The Stranger A Seat at the Table

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I’M LAUGHING Broad City pioneered a new model for the young and hopeful of New York with its ZPUJLYL [HRL VU [OL ZP[JVT 5V^ PU [OLPY ÄUHS ZLHZVU JYLH[VYZ Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer turn their attention to the blank canvas ahead.

WITH YOU BY KAT HERRIMAN PRODUCED BY RAQUEL CAYRE STYLED BY KATIE CHRISTOPHER

P H O T O G R A P H Y

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B Y

T I N A

B A R N E Y

Artists Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer began their television hit, Broad City, over a decade ago. Here, Jacobson wears a Rachel Comey suit with Lizzie Fortunato necklace and Glazer wears a jacket and dress by Nomia with Alison Lou earrings in front of an Isa Genzken work from 2010.

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Two stills from Broad City Season 3, an episode called “Two Chainz” in which Jacobson’s character accidentally ruins an artwork in search for approval.

You graduate from art school. You get a job for money, maybe three. The tedium lasts longer than you first imagined and you wonder if you are really an artist, writer, musician after all. Then one of your friends is legitimized by an exhibition at a real gallery and panic sets in. You buy a shirt the day of the opening to prop yourself up and wear it out of the shop. You realize too late it still has a metal detector affixed. You fidget with the tag all evening in increasing haste when your legitimized artist friend comes over to bemoan your former roommate’s penchant for petty theft. At the worst moment—they are fetching you the show’s curator for a potentially lucrative introduction—the blue ink heart of the security device bursts, misting their minimalist white composition, ruining it along with your chances of being discovered this evening as anything other than a klutz. This is one of the many fumbles that colorize Broad City, a Comedy Central show, anchored by Abbi Abrams and Ilana Wexler—two barely fictional, New York-based 20-somethings trying to find their way into the city’s creative Milky Way. The gallery accident is among several art world trips built into Broad City’s narrative thanks to Abrams’ character, an aspiring illustrator hustling for her big New York break. All this to say: I could relate by episode one. The 2014 debut of Broad City on Comedy Central coincided with my first two years in New York, years in which I experienced my own financial, romantic and professional struggles including a series of firings for impertinence, scandalous dressing and a closet full of auction catalogues

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I emptied into the recycling rather than sorting. This left lots of time for binge-watching television. It turns out being a freelance writer who dabbles in fashion and culture is nothing like Sex and the City or Girls. Money keeps you up at night, and in Broad City, I found an honesty in the absurdity and desperation of Abrams’ art world designs as she mops the pubic hairs off the floor of a fictionalized Equinox bathroom, dreaming of recognition. I followed their first season of misadventures diligently from my parents’ Hulu account in the apartment mostly paid for by my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend while writing round-ups of lipsticks I couldn’t afford for W magazine. I idolized Ilana and Abbi’s sincere desire to see their vision through without losing the ability to see the humor in the climb and its disappointments. Now safely cemented on the other side of fame’s glittering shores, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, the writers, producers, stars and inspiration behind Broad City, laugh. We are seated in a dining room on the Upper East Side, surrounded by an impressive Isa Genzken light-years away from the first episodes of Broad City, which were written and filmed in the gaps of a day-job carousel. “We were doing comedy and seeing what was there to be made,” Glazer says of the time. Her odds and ends included babysitting, social media managing, and transcribing DVD interviews for VH1; Jacobson worked in a bakery, and both did their time in food service. “It’s funny to say in a place like this but looking back, we feel lucky that our parents cut us off because it created this box. It created parameters for our lifestyle and our creativity. It made our art urgent.”

STILLS COURTESY OF COMEDY CENTRAL

Produced on a shoestring and often after dark a decade ago, the first web episodes of Broad City drew on the directors’ experiences dealing with rejection and the hierarchical opacity of the art and film worlds. “The pursuit of art on the show for my character is so similar to my pursuit of art in real life,” Jacobson says. “The art and film worlds are such daunting environments in which to try to make it. I think part of the reason people liked Broad City is because it was this meta-experience of the characters being sincere, and we are. This friendship is completely real and it shows.” I concur. Even sitting across from Glazer and Jacobson, I find myself being forced to remember that their lives and relationships are indeed separate from the characters they play. “There’s so much coyness and irony these days,” Glazer adds, piggybacking on Jacobson. “I love how Abbi’s character really just wants to be a successful artist. She’s not pretending that she doesn’t, she’s really trying, which I really relate to our real selves and our journey to make Broad City.” Certainly for Jacobson and Glazer, a combination of unabashed earnestness and sweat equity paid off. Over the course of the next four years, Broad City evolved from a web series into an official pilot, which was then picked up by Comedy Central where it gained a cult following over the course of four seasons. In January, they launched their fifth and final season—a choice the producers made in an effort not to vitiate what they’d set in motion. “I feel like we’ve raised these kids, Abbi Abrams and Ilana Wexler, and we’re sending them to college,” Glazer says. “We didn’t

want to just go until it got canceled. We wanted to choose to end it so that it could end as strong as possible. We chose this ending to honor the characters.” “People think about the last episode a lot,” Jacobson chimes in. They don’t reveal many spoilers during our discussion, but they do mention that the characters visit MoMA. “I got to go there when it was completely empty,” Jacobson brags with a smile. Last year, she created a 10-episode podcast series for the institution in collaboration with WYNC called A Piece of Work, in which she unpacked specific objects from the collection with other celebrities, curators and artists. In her mind, the podcast’s mission was to reach out to those who might feel lost in the white cube. “If you didn’t grow up with art or you didn’t go to art school, you feel like an idiot going in to look at something you don’t understand. I love that I got the opportunity to pull all that apart,” Jacobson explains. “Someone can tell you the history of the artist’s life, but when you look at it, it’s totally about your experience. I wanted to give people permission to form their own opinions while learning about the history without shame.” Yet she winces when I refer to her as an artist in conversation, a subtlety Glazer immediately clocks and addresses: “Of course you are! I’ve always appreciated that Abbi’s art school experience allowed me to consider myself an artist, because that couldn’t have happened in another partnership. I always felt discounted and now that the show is ending, I think I have some space to be like, ‘Fuck no, I am an artist.’”

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“I think comedy is considered a lower art form because it’s more accessible, but I think accessibility is a badge of honor and inaccessibility is a sham.” —Ilana Glazer

I draw comparisons to fine art contemporaries like Bailey Scieszka and Casey Jane Ellison, who play versions of themselves in both scripted and improvisational performances in galleries and museums. These institutions might seem daunting at first, but even their audience and expectations are shifting, as exemplified by Jacobson’s collaboration with an institution like MoMA and the soon-toopen Shed in Hudson Yards. If Björk and Pipilotti Rist can occupy the same galleries, I can close my eyes and imagine a future where shows like Broad City, Strangers with Candy and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (please) could too. “I think comedy is considered a lower art form because it’s more accessible, but I think accessibility is a badge of honor and inaccessibility is a sham,” says Glazer. “I’m so proud to fill the space that we have. I actually think Abbi in the show is also worried about calling herself an artist because she’s not legitimized by any of those systems. We deal with that this season because it’s something we struggle with as writers and producers.” The next chapter for both Glazer and Jacobson will include the production of narratives other than their own. They are working together and individually on producing several shows and specials, including two for Comedy Central, one live action and one animated. “It’s so interesting to use what I’ve learned from Broad City to ask the right questions in order to figure out the best way to help that person tell their story,” Jacobson says. “It’s a whole other set of tools and it’s rewarding to work on narratives you otherwise would have no access too.” I ask them if they are nervous to start over after a decade of dedication to Broad City. “It’s like we’ve been in this Broad City hole and now that I’m seeing it is really over, I’m able to observe the space between Ilana Wexler and Ilana Glazer. I feel like I gotta go out there to fill and inspect that gap,” Glazer says. “For now that means I need to be in the streets to see what is out there. I haven’t been on a listening tour in years. It’s the only way to build on what we’ve done.” I try to obey, tuning into my neighbors on the subway ride home. I see a strange adult man tell a little girl in a tutu she isn’t a princess. She bops him on the head with her wand. A poster for Hilma af Klint’s fantastical Guggenheim show is behind them and I laugh at the symmetry. Like all great artworks, Broad City has refined my ability to see.

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Jacobson and Glazer make themselves at home on the Upper East Side surrounded by contemporary masterworks by artists including Frances Stark, Louise Lawler and Alan McCollum, and Sturtevant.

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GLAZER WEARS PROENZA SCHOULER TOP AND RACHEL COMEY SKIRT WITH LIZZIE FORTUNATO BRACELET. JACOBSON WEARS PROENZA SCHOULER TOP AND BOTTOM WITH LIZZIE FORTUNATO EARRINGS. SPECIAL THANKS TO LAUREN ANCONA FOR HER FLORAL MAGIC. HAIR BY MARCEL DAGENAIS; MAKEUP BY DELINA MEDHIN.

A PERENNIAL EDEN PORTRAIT BY OLIVIA LOCHER

Shirin Neshat has

fundamentally shifted the way we see Iran, Islam and women as a whole. Fariha Róisín spent a morning with the acclaimed artist, digging into the ideas that drive her work and the complexities of its creation and reception.

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Groundbreaking artist Shirin Neshat in her New York home and studio, which she shares with her partner and collaborator, filmmaker Shoja Azari. culturedmag.com 165

When my father evokes images of Iran, he speaks of gardens—rose bushes, fragile and bloomed. Hossain Sabzian crying and clutching a bushel of pink in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up. The vivid green of Iran’s pastures, the brightness of its fuchsias, the rawness of its blood reds. The early historian Herodotus wrote of Iran’s kings taking a pleasure in gardening, and told of how the Charbagh, a landscaping layout based on the four gardens of Paradise from the Qur’an, came to be. Gardens are an integral part of Iranian lore, of Iran itself. The garden is also a motif that repeats in the works of Iranian artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat. In her film Women Without Men (2009)—based on the novel of the same name by leading Iranian renegade Shahrnush Parsipur— the garden is where the women of the film return for safety. “Women Without Men is about an orchard where women run to take refuge, and it becomes a sanctuary,” Neshat tells me as we sit in her Bushwick studio. “It is about a garden that people who are afraid in the world run to; a place where you feel free to be naked, to be yourself.” Much of the film and the story it takes from is predicated on the garden, both literally and metaphorically. The garden motif is the beating heart of the film. I met with Neshat on a frigid Sunday morning in mid-January. She had invited me to her home and studio, and as soon as I entered the space I was astounded by the beauty around me. It was a sincere reprieve in a harsh city like New York, with high ceilings, light wood interiors, walls cascading with books in English and Farsi and Persian carpets covering a sleek cement floor. Along the back of the glorious main room there were plants that lined the wide windows, small emblems of comfort: trees of spirulina green and flowers standing tall in towering glass vases. Her partner and frequent collaborator Shoja Azari (who co-directed Women Without Men and many of her other films, and also stars in Neshat’s video Turbulent) sat in a black leather chaise reading Leonard Cohen’s posthumous book of poetry, The Flame, while taking wispy pulls of his Juul. Both of them were curious about my life in a way that felt comforting, and I was eager to tell them. In a way, I felt like I had returned home. We eventually walked downstairs to Neshat’s light-filled studio, encountering human-sized prints of stills from Neshat’s recent film Looking for Oum Kulthum. Eventually, we sat down and began our conversation over coffee (for me) and a bowl of raisins and prunes for us to share. Over the years, I’ve consistently followed Neshat’s work. The images in her photographic series Women of Allah (1993–97) are seared into my brain because they were an important first for me: In these pieces I saw, for the first time, a (Muslim) artist take photos of women cloaked in chador without fetishizing them. And these women felt powerful, equipped with agency— wielding handguns, their stances were strong-willed and their look was

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¸0M 0 OH]L [V ZWLJPÄJHSS` [HSR HIV\[ 0YHUPHU J\S[\YL UV[ VUS` PU T` TV[OLY»Z NLULYH[PVU I\[ HSZV PU T` V^U NLULYH[PVU HUK L]LU [VKH` ^VTLU HYL [OL TVZ[ \UY\S` YLILSSPV\Z JVUMYVU[H[PVUHS ILPUNZ PU [OL LU[PYL ZVJPL[` ¹ —Shirin Neshat

Allegiance with Wakefulness (1994) is from Neshat’s first body of work, Women of Allah, which considered the role of women in the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. culturedmag.com 167

A video still from Rapture (1999), among Neshat’s most poetic meditations on gender politics in Iranian culture.

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PHOTO BY LARRY BARNS, COPYRIGHT SHIRIN NESHAT, COURTESY GALERIE JÉRÔME DE NOIRMONT, PARIS

“The women of Iran, historically, seem to embody its political transformations. So, in a way, by studying women you can read the structure and the ideology of the country.” —Shirin Neshat infectious. To this day, the images are iconic, a synecdoche for the sprawling impact of Neshat’s work. Part of this legacy stands because Women of Allah is a vivid juxtaposition to the existing images of Muslim women, which the Western world has little curiosity for. As the scholar Hamid Dabashi writes in Shirin Neshat: The Last Word, “She demystifies the act of veiling via an orchestration of the face, simultaneous with choreography of the body.” The images are inscribed with the Persian poetry of the late iconoclast Forough Farrokhzad, whose work was a profound inspiration for Neshat. “Had it not been for her words, I would not have made the images,” she tells me. One piece reads: “Weary of divine asceticism, in the middle of the night in Satan’s bed / I’d seek refuge in the slopes of a fresh sin.” It’s this interlacing of the divine with its opposition which hit (and still hits) as such a powerful exploration of oneself—especially coming from a Muslim woman, herself. This entire series questions what it means to be subjugated, while coyly asking: Who is really doing the subjugating? There is no monolithic experience of being a Muslim woman. But, to me, Neshat’s work on Muslim womanhood is a challenge to the powers that have compressed us into contradictions. “Women were basically seen as objects and a battlefield for men’s ideology. What’s really interesting is that it’s so far removed from reality,” she says astutely. “If I have to specifically talk about Iranian culture, not only in my mother’s generation, but also in my own generation and even today, women are the most unruly, rebellious, confrontational beings in the entire society.” In a 2010 TED Talk, Neshat surmised, “The women of Iran, historically, seem to embody its political transformations. So, in a way, by studying women you can read the structure and the ideology of the country.” So much of her work questions the interiority of Muslim women in a way never before deemed possible—and, as such, her output has often been misunderstood. In accordance with the relative lack of understanding around Islam, many early critics couldn’t quite fathom the message of her work. Writing in The New Republic in 2001, Jed Perl criticized Neshat for not having a viewpoint. “All that a viewer gets,” he wrote, “is a generalized mood, a kind of artsier MTV.” Perl’s incomprehension perfectly illustrates the risks that come with non-Muslims writing about Muslims: the tendency of playing too hard into the Orientalist messaging and depicting us incorrectly, muddying our placement or siding us with fundamentalism. Neshat understands that conflict, though, and plays into it; she taunts the viewer into self-reflexivity. In The Shadow Under the Web (1997), she places four vignettes of a woman in a chador running through Istanbul, almost chanting, breathing with a beat. It’s the way Neshat positions the body as juxtaposed against its environment that’s so powerful. These women (four, or one?) existing, rapturously. Is she tormented by sadness, by anxiety? We may never know, but she’s beating with life, with a pulse that feels alive. In Rapture (1999), a group of women in a wide frame is contrasted with a group of men in an adjacent frame. While the men fight in their frame, in the other the band of women stands in unison, a throat chant drawing them solace. At times we hear Qu’ranic verses or the muezzin call to prayer spread through the work, like a compass.

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While we talk, we discuss the vast riches of Islam’s legacy and its sincere impact on our lives. You can tell that her upbringing— being both Iranian and Muslim—has played an important role in her life, let alone her art, and how it’s determined the pastiche of her being. It’s incredibly compelling to watch such a resilient artist rely and lean on spirituality as she does. It’s humbling, and it makes me feel closer to her. When I ask her who inspires her, she speaks of Tarkovsky, but also of the women of Iran, including Farrokhzad, Parsipur and others she’s met along the way; of Rumi, her homeland and the orchards of her youth. She speaks of the thrill of “living

on the border of immigrants,” about her life in New York City, her adopted home, and how she exists in a state of constant metamorphosis. We discuss the loss of color in Iranian society, of the palpable pallidness post-revolution and the austerity that has soaked into the fabric of Iran’s collective imagination. She houses all of this; she’s multiplicitous. The beauty of Neshat and her work is that she’s in always in conversation with herself. Nothing is ever dull. Like a true Iranian garden, she’s a sanctuary. But she’s also a rose: pushing boundaries, simultaneously beautiful and caustic and, in special moments, opulently in bloom.

Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017), Neshat’s most recent film, is the story of the legendary Egyptian singer intertwined with Neshat’s own personal narrative as an artist and filmmaker.

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FOOL’S MATE

Wielding the most humble of materials with certainty, artist Derek Fordjour is toppling expectations and enjoying the game along the way.

BY JENNIFER PIEJKO PORTRAITS BY PHILIP CHEUNG

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Fordjour in the Boyle Heights studio where he created the works on view in “JRRNNYS,” his Los Angeles debut at Night Gallery through March 2. culturedmag.com 173

“I use a knife as much as I use a brush, and I use charcoal as much as I use paint,” artist Derek Fordjour explains, gently shuffling through the fragile, heavily textured canvases that line the floor of his temporary Boyle Heights studio. His signature palimpsestic composite portraits reveal layers of shredded newspaper pages and skinned corrugated cardboard between washes of blazing neons and smudges of charcoal. “I never feel that all the labor it takes to get to these surfaces is a waste. You never know how it’s going to work out. There’s some chance in it.” Fordjour’s elevation of these humble, mundane materials is a reference to the hand-me-downs he grew up passing along to relatives in Ghana—clothes that would eventually resurface in family photos—as much as it is to the Global South, a notion that people of color occupy a certain physical and psychological position regardless of geography. “People there tend to use a collage, or gumbo, aesthetic of working with scraps. Putting these torn or broken pieces next to a pristine work or space like a museum feels really honest and democratic.” Fordjour often expands his undulating surfaces into multidimensional spaces, such as with PARADE, a carnival fantasyland he created within New York’s Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling in 2017, complete with popcorn and fresh hay. Alluding to Harlem’s rich history, his installation of eight large-scale mosaics, also titled PARADE, was commissioned by New York City’s MTA for the nearby 145th Street station. Starring a line of majorettes and drummers, the mosaics depict the area’s legacy of African- American parades, beginning with the 1919 celebration of the Harlem Hellfighters—New York’s all-Black World War I regiment—and continuing with the African-American Day Parade, which began during the Civil Rights era and is still active today. Further down Manhattan’s West Side, the Whitney Museum commissioned the mural Half Mast across the street from its main entrance. Installed last fall, the mural shows a vibrantly-hued dense crowd scene and deals with gun violence: police officers, students, targets and civilians all share the same small space, which is occasionally dotted with the buoyant balloons and beloved teddy bears of victims’ makeshift sidewalk memorials. “JRRNNYS”—Fordjour’s first major solo show in Los Angeles, on view at Night Gallery through March 2—presents STOCKROOM Ezekiel, a site-specific threesided room that is his most intricate, and perhaps most revealing, work to date. After creating BACKROOM, a shanty-style stockroom inside Josh Lilley Gallery’s booth for Art Basel Miami Beach late last year, and UPPER ROOM at Robert Blumenthal Gallery in 2015, which was based on a prayer room his Ghanaian mother maintained in his childhood home in Memphis, STOCKROOM Ezekiel offers more insight into his conceptual process. “I’m thinking a lot about incarceration and my own experiences with the criminal justice system, and growing up in the ’90s and seeing the crack era, and where we are now with sentencing.” The installation’s name honors the life of Ezekiel Archey, a convict laborer who worked under

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Alabama’s brutal convict leasing program in the late 19th century. The installation closes in on you: the 12-foothigh wooden walls hold up grids of a thousand small cubbyholes inside the room, accessed by sweeping through meat-locker-like plastic sheeting curtains. Some of these “cells” are populated with small objects, and some are upholstered with designer fabrics recognizable from the early aughts’ logo-mania days: Gucci Gs and Louis Vuitton’s unmistakable monogram in browns, grays and reds, representing what the artist refers to as “modern material ambition”; others are left in their raw state. Still other articles are made from the unmistakable stiff orange cotton of prison uniforms. Some cells host gleaming Mercedes-Benz hood ornaments; there are a few blue-and-white discs plucked off of BMWs. One cell holds an elegant, vintage alarm clock, while others still contain a single—or a few—scuffed-up, precariously stacked billiard balls. Or a dart. Or a baseball. “There are a few things that are recurring for me, one of which is my interest in games. There’s something of a gaming logic to most of my inquiry.” For STOCKROOM, Fordjour fabricated several hundred hand-sized busts from the same mold in a variety of materials—including resin, copper, dirt and plaster. The small, traditional statue is familiar, if uncanny: “This one references a historical bust and the Tuskegee Airmen,” he explains, a nod to the African-American Air Force pilot group that fought in World War II, the first to do so in the U.S. Armed Forces. “But then again, their leather helmets make them look like sportsmen, or game pieces, too,” he adds. “I’m interested in how our bodies are larger in relation to this figure, and so we feel that they’re expendable. We have lots of autonomy or dominion over them.” They light up intermittently in differing configurations, programmed on an Arduino board. “The whole thing functions as a gaming board, too,” Fordjour explains. So, is this a system in place here, or is this design given over to chance? “Right...” he laughs.

“I never feel that all the labor it takes to get to these surfaces is a waste. You never know how it’s going to work out. There’s some chance in it.” —Derek Fordjour

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Fordjour’s Worst to be First II and Second Day of September, opposite, (both 2019) are emblematic of the artist’s process— created through a combination of painting and collage.

“I’m thinking a lot about incarceration and my own experiences with the criminal justice system, and growing up in the ’90s and seeing the crack era, and where we are now with sentencing.” —Derek Fordjour 176 culturedmag.com

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Marathon Man Alex Da Corte’s colorful contribution to the Carnegie International requires more than binge-watching. Cat Kron straps herself in for the technicolor ride.

Alex Da Corte cares, really cares, about television. While the artist’s video shorts, recognizable by their Pantone color-blocked sets and singular attention to sartorial detail, have prompted comparisons to auteurs from Jean-Luc Godard to Wes Anderson, these works insistently burrow into the less vaunted, existentially humble form of entertainment and squat there, patiently awaiting your gaze. Da Corte’s references are not the highly-produced television programming of recent years but rather those of the boob tube and Saturday morning cartoons—the sort one imagines writer, poet and queer icon Eileen Myles refers to in her allusions to the “tee vee” of her childhood. Rubber Pencil Devil (2018), the artist’s latest work, is a looping, two-hour-40-minute stream of 57 highly stylized videos nestled gemlike in an immersive, open-plan neon funhouse installed at the 57th Carnegie International on view through March 25. These vignettes—populated by performers dressed as life-size versions of characters pulled from vintage popular culture, from the impish brat-

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savant Bart Simpson to the petulant, hookah-brandishing caterpillar of 1951’s Alice in Wonderland—reminded me of Myles’s winking unorthodoxy and dissent, evidencing a resistance to the accepted markers of artistic seriousness while remaining utterly sincere in its intent. Memorable among the shorts are those featuring the artist dressed as the live-action children’s television host Mister Rogers. In costume, Da Corte performs a ritual familiar to viewers of PBS’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—the taking off of coat and shoes and putting on of sweater and slippers—but Da Corte has recast his host as a slinking, insouciant vamp. In character, he crosses and uncrosses his legs, meeting the viewer’s gaze coyly—his deliberate pacing and intent watery gaze identical to that of the beloved personality. As in all of the video segments in this piece, Da Corte has slowed down the video footage to a snail’s pace, evoking the plodding pace of children’s shows catering to very young viewers. Television, a format memorably described by art

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTIST

One of 57 scenes from Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil (2018). Here the artist is dressed as Mister Rogers, just one of the many television characters who make cameos in the piece.

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Two still from Rubber Pencil Devil.

historian Rosalind Krauss in A Voyage on the North Sea as that medium which “differs from itself” (given its lack of a single material support), is a fertile subject for Da Corte, whose work has always evidenced a bent toward the outré and slippery. Rubber Pencil Devil is dense with queer icons of the past century, from Peter Pan to Dolly Parton—so much that one can become distracted by the impulse to catch the references. (I spent considerable time Googling whether “Live + Let Live,” in which an airbrush gun sprays rainbow bands over a woman’s white panty-clad bottom, was indeed modeled after Mariah Carey’s Rainbow tour promo footage, and whether its soundtrack was the bass line from Parton’s single “9 to 5.”) When Mister Rogers debuted

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his program in 1968 with a mandate of respect and gentleness toward children, few cultural gatekeepers could get beyond the medium’s schlock associations, and fewer still were convinced by the Presbyterian minister’s mission to make the television set a friend and mentor to his viewers. Da Corte mines this audiovisual repository tenderly, without emphasizing the oversights of its host or the cultural climate in which it was formed. The segment What Do You Do With the Mad cites the Mister Rogers’ song “What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel,” the children’s host’s reflection on frustration, which closes with the lyrics “for a girl can someday be a woman and a boy can someday be a man.” But despite such sentiments that now register as somewhat dated, Da Corte homes in on Rogers’

greater ethos of inclusiveness. In an email from late 2018 he cited the host’s foregrounding of respect and empathy for difference. These values, now inscribed in Rogers lore—as in the time he sat in a wading pool with Mister Rogers regular François Clemmons (a black, gay-identifying actor who portrayed Officer Clemmons throughout much of the show’s run) during a peak moment of racial tension in this country—are here repurposed as playful, if sometimes melancholy, meditations on difference. Near the end of Da Corte’s looped video, a slumped player clad from the waist down as Big Bird, pours a drink into a massive stemmed vessel lit by a lone light bulb, as Oscar the Grouch looks on impassively from his trashcan. Turned away from our gaze, his mien channels a morose, drunk Joni Mitchell of

the singer’s Blue period, ready to “blow this damn candle out/I don’t want nobody coming over to my table/I got nothing to talk to anybody about.” Yet when the bottle is finally spent, the light abruptly turns on and Oscar The Grouch turns to the camera from his trashcan in wonderment. Rubber Pencil Devil contains too many cultural references explicit and implied, culled from the annals of 20th-century animation, queer iconography, and campy Americana, to chart here. But what’s ultimately underscored is this outmoded vehicle’s capacity to convey compassion rather than merely titillate, and the many ways one can embrace the unconventional or out-of-step to express the messy and true aspects of each of our existences.

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HOUNDS OF LOVE Savannah Knoop shares their “body” of work with Jarrett Earnest and YLÅLJ[Z VU ÄJ[PVU PU[PTHJ` HUK JLSLIYP[`

More than a decade after being revealed as the public face of the fictional author JT LeRoy, Savannah Knoop has a major Hollywood film out about their experience, Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy (2018) and a recent show of new video art and sculpture, “SCREENS: a project about ‘community’ at Essex Flowers gallery in New York. I met Knoop in front of the Russian-Turkish baths on 10th Street, the 126-year-old staple of the East Village that has operated under two different owners on alternating weeks since the early 1990s. “David week” has a computer at the door and caters to a clientele of Brooklyn hipsters and tourists with Groupons. “Boris week,” on the other hand, has a Russian with a ledger book behind the desk, and remains a haven for an eccentric cast of regulars. We’re there for Boris week. Savannah guides me through the lobby, greeting the women behind the desk, who check our wallets, and directs me to the bins of towels and “uniforms”—baggy cloth diapers with elastic waist bands, one-size fits all—then through the locker room and downstairs to the baths. With my shaved head and big beard I fit aesthetically with the schvitzing Orthodox men—as long as I’m not talking, or waving my hands like a faggot, which is to say never. Savannah sports a heartthrob hairdo: undercut, long on top, pulled into a bun. A small towel around their neck mostly covers their breasts, body muscular from years of serious Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I’d been there once before years ago during one of the men-only afternoons. It was very straight, but with a couple guys furtively jerking each other off. “Finally!” I say, settling into a steam room, about the pleasure of the heat and our getting together. “I know—we’ve been dancing feet apart in sweaty rooms for years,” Savannah says. When I wrote about doing an interview, they suggested we meet at the baths, because they’d been making performances and videos there, culminating in their recent show at Essex Flowers. Typical of New Yorkers, after connecting we went into friend-overdrive. Because I didn’t want to cover any areas of the interview beforehand, our time in the baths meanders through talk of love, music and earlier art projects—instant intimacy.

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I’ve known about Savannah since they were revealed to be the embodiment of hustler-turned-cult-“autobiographical fiction writer” JT LeRoy in 2006. As Savannah explained in their 2008 memoir, Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT Leroy, as an 18-year-old their then-sister-in-law, Laura Albert, asked them to pose as Albert’s fictional alter-ego for interviews and public appearances. With the success of JT’s books came friendships with celebrities ranging from Courtney Love to Gus Van Sant, and culminated in a romance with Asia Argento who adapted LeRoy’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things as her directorial debut in 2004. Laura Albert told her version of events in the 2016 documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story. Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy, the new film directed by Justin Kelly was adapted from Savannah’s book, which is being re-issued this year by Seven Stories Press. Savannah is played by Kristen Stewart, with Laura Dern as Albert. After two hours of cycling through steaming heat and icy cold, we went to a nearby Japanese restaurant to talk “on the record.” Jarrett Earnest: When you wrote Girl Boy Girl, it served a very speciﬁc function for you, in terms of processing what happened. Did returning to the same material a decade later allow you to engage it on a less personal level? How did you approach going into Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy? Savannah Knoop: I think that each part of this process has been one of translation. Translation often uncovers questions of form—adapting remembered experiences into a book allows one to untangle a causality, and transforms you, at least somewhat, into a character around a set of events. The process of adapting the book into a film required a different kind of distancing altogether. Real estate in a film is tight. Events have to be compressed, and the moments that stay convey an emotional accuracy that often overrides actual logistics. At a certain point, after doing rewrites of a script for about 10 years, what you feel as a person melds with what you feel as a character—they are the feelings that make sense to the circumstances of the story. And making a film is also inherently collaborative. I noticed on set that I would call the character “Sav,” to

PHOTO BY NIR ARIELI

A still from Savannah Knoop’s performance in the Fire Island Pines, Nosferatu on the Beach (2018) uses every-day objects in a public space while referencing the 1922 German Expressionist horror film.

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distinguish her from me. But on set people called me “Sav” because in the script the character was of course written as “Savannah.” People were making that separation for themselves, and that viewpoint shifts. What I was calling the character and what people were calling me is a byproduct of the nature of this story. But it also points to the fact that, in general, we can never truly understand one another because of how our individual consciousnesses are housed in different points of view. Nonetheless, it is beneficial to try and understand one another as much as possible. This is why it is so important to embrace and celebrate fiction: it is simple proof of the existence and validity of other consciousnesses. After you moved to New York you studied with the legendary artist Vito Acconci. How did that lineage of performance art recontexualize what you did as JT? I’m so thankful to have his pervy consciousness to turn to as a reference, as his student at Brooklyn College, and in the world. Vito’s work always makes me think about the power dynamics of intimacy and betrayal. I felt like an imposter way before I became JT, and Vito’s work serves as reference for me about quixotic conviction and hypnotization—work that doesn’t insist on being pious or “good!” Do you think your experiences as JT relate to your subsequent artwork? You could call me an intimacy hound. All of my work has that engine in common, including playing JT for so many years. Also, I think being JT was pretty addictive in terms of realizing a performance platform. You started to feel as if you could go into a performance all the time. I find that in my art practice, I’m trying to locate a theme that will bring me joy and constant engagement, that adrenaline without that narrative of “exposure.” I’m in it for the long game of uncovering all the different dynamics of an experience, and then comparing and slotting it into other facets of my life. So, when I first moved to New York nine years ago, I found that fetish wrestling satiated many an old JT impulse, and so did/does jiu-jitsu. At this point, I have a whole “body” of work that stems from that world of random contact, spectacle, power exchange and body transmogrification. In the steam room you described it as an activity where you could kill someone but also just like, hug them. Yes, violent hugging with strangers. When you are studying Brazilian jiujitsu, you “roll” with a partner at the end of class—I love how honest the exchange is. You can glean so much from another person when you are struggling with one another non-verbally. There is nothing to hide! It’s also such a rare and generative thing to have a space to swim in conflict with others. It seemed like with JT, strangers would tell him very intimate things about their lives because they had read his “autobiographical” writing. Yes. Because he had been so open in his fiction, and his character in person was so silent and shy he offered this sort of opening for people to share their experiences, almost like a priest in a confessional. Did you ever think Kristen Stewart was going to play you in a movie? No! I kept insisting to Justin that it should be someone that had never acted before—that that would be interesting for the project. He was like, uh-huh, well what about Kristen Stewart instead? And I’m so glad she did it. I never flinch when watching this movie—not even once. That is sort of a miracle! Seeing “Sav” interpreted by Kristen Stewart—did you have a different understanding of the story, or its nuances? She did a lot of research beforehand, and when we spent time together, she was always pocketing my mannerisms for later. She is an amazing imitator. Watching her perform the two characters, I could see how different “JT LeRoy” and “Savannah” were, which was such a clarifying and surprising thing. In my memories, I felt that the two had merged together, and I wasn’t

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sure what I owed to this formative experience and what I had brought to it. All that had been confusing and also haunted me in some way. Being JT for so long with Laura Albert engendered some kind of schism of self—it blurred because we went so deeply into it and for so many years. In terms of the visual look of the ﬁlm, what was important to you to capture? I think that the “Sav” and “Laura” characters’ sense of style was absolutely imperative. Each one of their characters has a complete evolution of self as they go more deeply into JT-land, and it’s almost as if they are externalizing it on their bodies in the film. Getting that right was essential. The JT and Laura looks were aced, but the “Sav” character was less documented and much more particular and specific style-wise, so I ended up contributing to wardrobe all the clothes I had brought along with me, all of my most favorite rags, for the five weeks of shooting. By the end Kristen was wearing sweatshirts as pants, and my favorite Comme des Garçons pants, and a boiled wool T-back tank-top that I had made years before, things that could never have been guessed—or sourced—by the wardrobe department. Do you appear as a character in your project “Screens”? How did your performances in the Russian-Turkish baths begin? I started to do these performances in the baths right around the 2016 election. I was fascinated by the way people would fight about politics in a 240-degree room and be stretching at the same time. The baths are a hybrid of public/ private space and people have amazing body routines in there, especially the regulars who go all the time. Some of the regulars have gone for over 20 years, and Boris week has engendered a very specific sociality that is partly based on him cutting cash deals, as well as keeping the rooms extremely hot. I was fascinated partly by the exhibitionism, but also the seriousness of many routines—for many people it’s actually, I’ve got to stick my tongue out and do my shoulder kundalini hair-flipping thing. People shave and scrub and beat themselves in there. In my performances I would choose moves that were within the codes of the space but also a little off. Things like practicing air marshal signals—guiding planes in on the tarmac. Fake conducting. Or flapping my arms up and down like a flightless bird. Hanging on the side of the cold plunge like Meryl Streep in Postcards: From the Edge. Eventually these performances became the sort of backbone of a 20-minute portrait of the space and regulars that cohabit there, as well as an installation of privacy partition screens, objects that manifest the idea of the body and mind as a filtering system, and question the solidity of states such as insider and outsider. What is it like performing as “Savannah” in “Screens” versus other forms of performances you’ve done? All of my performances are about inhabiting a certain body practice, i.e. how you move differently as a different person. My character in “Screens” is a bit hopeless and grumpy with a penchant towards explosive movement. My biggest question seeing footage of JT has always been: Why did anyone believe this? How did this get so far? Justin and I are always saying it’s like the Emperor’s New Clothes. That is a big question for the audience and something we try to tackle in the film. And often the question is not only that it’s barely believable, but also why wouldn’t you believe it? We really are following certain contracts and codes with one another, to the extent that we don’t even realize it. It seems like that is what “Screens” is dealing with also. I think so. Even breaking the code just a little bit is a lot. That is what the privacy partition screen signifies in the project. The “Screens” shows us something is there but also blocks our view. It’s a contronym. Frames it. Right. And then lets you do what you like with that information.

PHOTOS BY MAX RUNKO

“All of my performances are about inhabiting a certain body practice, i.e. how you move KPќLYLU[S` HZ H KPќLYLU[ WLYZVU ¹ —Savannah Knoop

Clockwise from top: Knoop’s sculpture installation and performance, The Two Slit Experiment (2016) at VCU’s Anderson Gallery; Tripod Sweep (2018) at Essex Flowers, New York; installation and performance shot of Abject A and a Half (2015), staged in a closed Ralph’s supermarket in Richmond, Virginia.

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The architect of his own dreams, Kulapat Yantrasast lounges above the pool in the home he designed for himself in Venice, California. 186 culturedmag.com

WHY AND WHEREFORE

The art world’s favorite architect, Kulapat Yantrasast, on how buildings are like people. BY JONATHAN GRIFFIN PHOTOGRAPHY BY TREVOR TONDRO

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On the grey January day we meet at his Culver City studio—as on nearly every other day of the year—Kulapat Yantrasast is wearing a boiler suit. The elegant navy one-piece, the Thai-born architect reveals, is a copy of a Comme des Garçons original, bought in Japan in the mid-90s, that he had specially tailored on a trip to Bangkok. Comme only makes it in two colors; Yantrasast now owns around 30, in assorted fabrics, for every occasion. He wears his black edition, paired with a crisp shirt and bow tie, to fancy galas. Yantrasast’s ubiquitous boiler suit neatly encapsulates his architectural style: functional, comfortable, pragmatic, but also elegant and original— unafraid to stand out in a crowd. His practice wHY, which has offices both in New York and Los Angeles, has designed private residences, public landscaping projects, exhibitions, products and furniture. But it is for his work in the art world—designing museums, galleries, private foundations and a studio for artist couple Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka—that he is best known. He tells me he currently has around 30 projects on the go, including an extension to the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, a renovation of galleries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, a design for the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture and Industry in Riverside, California, and a private museum in Manila, the Philippines. He also created the striking temporary structure for the first Frieze LA art fair in February at Paramount Studios. Ironically, Yantrasast never paid much attention to art as a kid. “Growing up in Bangkok it’s all about the honor of the family, making your family proud,” says Yantrasast. His father was an engineer, his mother a school teacher. He was an A-student and his parents hoped he would be a doctor, so his mother especially was disappointed when he announced his ambition to train as an architect. “Architecture was a middle ground for me between creativity and practicality,” he says. Although he was aware of a few practicing architects in Bangkok, he says he really had little idea of what the profession entailed. What motivated him, he says, was a desire to find identity—“Not only my identity but the identity of the country I lived in,” he explains. He resented the glass skyscrapers popping up in Bangkok, signifiers of global prosperity that reflected nothing of indigenous Thai culture. He was mystified by the black leather sofas in his parents’ home—middle-class status symbols—that were totally unsuited for life in Thailand. “I remember how uncomfortable those were, because they’re very hot in the sun, and they were very sticky because it’s so humid there,” he says. “We all liked to just sit on the floor; we’d never sit on the couches.” Drawn by famous Japanese starchitects of the day—including Tadao Ando, Toyo Ito, Arata Isozaki—in 1990, Yantrasast left Thailand and enrolled in graduate school at the University of Tokyo. He was impressed by the way the work of these architects “all smelled Japanese,” distilling an essence of their native culture. After receiving his PhD, he took a job as an associate in Ando’s office. After eight years, however, he began to feel that his skills were not being fully utilized. “I was missing what I had a talent for, which is colors, variety, the smell of stuff. That kind of human wetness.” He draws a culinary analogy: “Ando’s work is like Japanese food. It’s all about precision and clarity of thought, and the ingredients support that. I was coming from the Thai food culture that is about mixing, blending, improvisation, creating something out of nothing.” From Japan, Yantrasast moved to LA. At the age of 34, he wanted neither to return to Thailand (“to live in my parents’ house”) nor to move to NY, where he feared he would be consigned to loft renovations and boutique interiors. LA offered a sense of freedom, a stronger connection to Asian

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culture, and the possibility of doing real architecture. In 2003 he founded a practice with an old classmate from Tokyo, Yo-ichiro Hakomori, which they called wHY Architecture, workshop Hakomori Yantrasast. In 2012 Hakomori left the practice to return to teaching, and the practice rebranded simply as wHY. wHY’s first major project came about purely by chance. Under Ando, Yantrasast had worked on the new building for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. The director of Michigan’s Grand Rapids Art Museum—at the time in early stages of planning a new building—visited Fort Worth, and fell in love with Ando’s design. She was told that, as luck would have it, the young Thai architect who had helmed the project had just set up a practice in LA. She gave Yantrasast a call. “I was still a kid! I was not even 40 yet!” he says. When the minimalist concrete building was completed, Yantrasast asked the artist Ellsworth Kelly, whose work features prominently in the museum’s lobby, if he thought the design was “Ando-lite.” “No, no, no!” Kelly reassured him. “Ando is Japanese, so his spaces are all about control. You’re a Thai person; you’re very generous. You like people to look here, look there, to have options.” The observation struck a chord with Yantrasast. The Grand Rapids Art Museum remains an important project in his portfolio, but it is classical compared to some of his more recent, more playful and complex work. Yantrasast says it reflected its city—“very Dutch, very Calvinist.” He contrasts it with his design for the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, which was completed in 2016. In his 2009 project proposal, he coined the term “acupuncture architecture,” an approach that has become a wHY trademark. When confronted with the original museum, which had been altered and extended over time, his response was that it was “completely congested.” There was no sense of clarity, of circulation. He felt as if he wanted to put an acupuncture needle to it and “unclog these problems in this body.” “I like to look at buildings as personalities, as bodies with lives,” he says. “When I first see a building, I ask myself, if that building was a person, would I like to know more about them? In a building I look for generosity, I look for a sense of complexity that unfolds over time. I sometimes look for opposite interests within a building. Those are the qualities that I look for in my friends also.”

“I was missing what I had a talent for, which is JVSVYZ ]HYPL[` [OL ZTLSS VM Z[\ќ ;OH[ RPUK VM O\THU ^L[ULZZ ¹ —Kulapat Yantrasast

Yantrasast’s design for the recently renovated (and rebranded) ICA LA is characterized by an open layout that maximizes flexibility of both gallery and office spaces.

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Yantrasast’s vision for the renovation of the Africa, Oceania, and Americas galleries at the Met includes three sleek and lumnious spaces that allow for a dialogue between the contemporary architecture and historical objects.

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“I like to look at buildings as personalities, as bodies with lives. When 0 ÄYZ[ ZLL H I\PSKPUN 0 HZR T`ZLSM PM [OH[ building was a person, would I like to RUV^ TVYL HIV\[ [OLT& 0U H I\PSKPUN 0 SVVR MVY NLULYVZP[` 0 SVVR MVY H ZLUZL VM JVTWSL_P[` [OH[ \UMVSKZ V]LY [PTL 0 ZVTL[PTLZ SVVR MVY VWWVZP[L PU[LYLZ[Z within a building. Those are the qualities [OH[ 0 SVVR MVY PU T` MYPLUKZ HSZV ¹ —Kulapat Yantrasast

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Yantrasast at home—literally and figuratively—in his signature boiler suit.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JEREMY BITTERMAN, RAFAEL GAMO, JOE KRAMM

wHY’s 2014 renovation of David Kordansky’s LA gallery—In a former martial arts training center and auto body shop— reinvigorated the space while preserving the original bow-truss wood ceilings.

The $50 million project to renovate the Speed Art Museum, Kentucky’s oldest art museum, began in 2009 and concluded in 2016. wHY’s additions included two new spaces and a sculpture garden.

wHY’s design of R & Company’s TriBeCa showroom.

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FAKE OUT, FAKE IN Bandulu toes the line between branded and bootleg. BY ISABEL FLOWER PHOTOGRAPHY BY EMMA CRAFT

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Pat Peltier began selling his embroidered bootlegs in 2013 under the name Bandulu Street Couture. The brand remains a handson operation. Here, the designer is dressed in the hand-embroidered Carhartt face mask, vintage Champion crewneck and hand-embellished vintage Levi’s jeans.

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At ﬁrst the splatter looks like paint—the last thing you’d want on a new T-shirt you just paid $100 for. But this delicate “drip” is actually scrupulously embroidered, one in a roster of visual puns that Bandulu is becoming known for. As Pat Peltier, the brand’s founder, points out, what looks like paint is thread, what looks like a fragment of a Spalding basketball is a terracotta planter, what looks like an infant-sized Nike Air Force 1 is in fact a tiny wax candle. As this kind of careful attention to detail would suggest, Bandulu’s clothes, objects and accessories are almost always 1 of 1. The brand doesn’t manufacture materials or use traditional “blanks.” Instead, Peltier himself thrifts used clothing to upcycle—a process in which a discarded item or waste material is transformed into something worth far more. Peltier was an artist before he was a designer. Disenchanted with studying animation in school, he turned to more hands-on materials and media. He had also long collected vintage sport- and streetwear, but time in the studio took a toll on his closet. In an effort to resurrect articles of clothing that had been splattered with paints and glazes, Peltier started embroidering onto and over the stains. He found that these processes of creative repair were quite therapeutic. Friends and even passersby inquired about his handiwork, assuming the interventions were deliberate. Within a year, Peltier rolled out his first collection. Bandulu—which means “fake”—avers to be both an art practice and a brand, consciously rejecting the customary expectation that the two are mutually exclusive. And Peltier likes to emphasize the wide range of his influences, which cross industries, disciplines and even cultures to encompass everything from the painterly abstraction of Monet to the irreverent innovation of Dapper Dan and creative shapeshifting of KAWS. When Bandulu’s first collection came out Peltier was living in Boston, first for school and then while working for the sneaker and streetwear boutique Bodega, where he ascended to head designer. Nearby thrift and Goodwill stores were overflowing with local school and sport merchandise, especially made by Champion. At the same time that Bandulu was emerging, Champion was also experiencing a renaissance, coinciding with a renewed pop-cultural interest in sportswear. This classic American brand, which turns 100 next year, was a natural choice for trend-savvy shoppers when it was suddenly cool to wear track pants again. The company (founded by brothers Abe and William Feinbloom in 1919 and acquired by Sara Lee Corporation in 1989) had a history of being a template brand, the master blank for amateur, college-level and even professional sports teams. And, as the iconic “C” logo had traditionally been embroidered, it was the logical complement to Bandulu’s painterly, three-dimensional embellishments. Soon, Peltier was sourcing other brands too, such as Nike and Converse, drawing from whatever tees, sweats, jeans, hats and even sneakers he could find. Adorning, inverting and swapping preexisting graphics expanded to logo flips (an SMU hoodie now reads “SMH”). But Bandulu’s explorations of branding, identity and authenticity are playful rather than sardonic. It is true that, like much art-adjacent meta fashion, singularity and scarcity are fundamentals in Bandulu’s value-equation. But in an industry teeming with young brands vying to represent niche concepts, styles and materials in the mass market, Bandulu attempts

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Bandulu’s strategy for turning “trash to treasure” lays bare the multiple, disparate, even fraudulent patinas of luxury.

the opposite, repurposing the most wildly available, diluted brands in the world to make something one-of-a-kind. And in a global economy where growth—and success—are imagined to be infinite, Bandulu is decidedly finite. Five years later, with the help of a few assistants, the brand still produces unique items, made by hand in Peltier’s studio in Brownsville, Brooklyn. To the extent that it destabilizes the status of authenticity and originality in today’s consumer culture, Bandulu’s clothing is also a reflection of the precarious contemporary condition of fashion at large. Bandulu’s tagline is “you know it’s real if it’s fake.” Fakes—whether knockoffs, counterfeits or bootlegs—are not technically illegal unless so similar to their “real” counterparts that customers are genuinely unable to tell them apart. But how closely are we expected to look? At first, Peltier actively avoided sharing close-up images of Bandulu’s designs, which contributed to some amusing miscommunication about how the pieces were made. The recognition delay one experiences glancing at Bandulu’s signature splash of “paint” is not unlike the effect of the distorted dimensions of “Damier Signature” checkers on a bootleg Louis Vuitton wallet, or Payless’ notorious four-stripe rendition of the Adidas Superstar. Familiar but foreign, each pretends to be something it’s not and produces that moment of perceptual rupture we experience when an object both entices and eludes us. Artists have long used a similar approach—some would argue that artists’ most fundamental task is to help us see the familiar in new ways. Peltier seems to consider every avenue of interaction between Bandulu and its consumers, or “viewers,” from the magazine spread to the e-shop page, extending this rupture into the marketing and positioning of the brand as a whole. Perhaps what makes Peltier an artist is not just that he paints or sews, but rather that he reframes

Larisa Sterling, a friend of the brand, shows up the Statue of Liberty in the Bandulu Champion logo choker and vintage Champion shooting shirt.

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Peltier uses the drop release to sell his couture wares through an online shop and Instagram. Here he puts on the hand beaded vintage Celtic’s snapback. Opposite: Sterling in repose on Governor’s Island as the fog rolls in.

our perceptual relationship to things we thought we knew. But how fake are these “fakes”? In a surreal twist of our global marketplace, “fakes” are often made in the very same factories as the “real” goods. Vendors have adapted to the times, now referring to their wares as “replicas,” promising that they are truly identical to the real thing. And though “fast fashion” is usually condemned as particularly detrimental, it’s a mistake to presume that the categories of fast fashion versus luxury fashion versus everything in between represent any material difference beyond the arbitrary semantics of branding and marketing that so insidiously delineate our realities. High-end and budget fashion labels manufacture their goods through the same subcontractors with the same materials, workers and resources. Some brands have engaged tongue-in-cheek satires of this artifice to produce real profits. When Virgil Abloh was called out for using Rugby Ralph Lauren blanks to produce Pyrex Vision screenprinted shirts for 15 times the cost, he printed a quote from his critics on a new batch of rare concept wares. During a phone conversation in early September, Peltier told me that the first Nike logo T-shirts were manufactured with Champion blanks. I thought about that a lot in the days that followed. Bandulu’s strategy for turning “trash to treasure” lays bare the multiple, disparate, even fraudulent patinas of luxury. Their “Canal Street Special” sweatpants ($333) juxtapose the brand’s own logo with the logos of frequently bootlegged monoliths from Gucci to The North Face. The item description on the e-store reads “vintage Champion sweatpants, all logos machine stitched cotton, available on Canal Street as well.” Whether we like it or not, we are all embedded in these intersecting systems of production and consumption. But, unlike many other brands, Bandulu doesn’t leave us with just another limited-edition, fashion-aboutfashion graphic tee, made in Bangladesh but unwilling to talk about it. (Peltier and I also discussed how tired we are of graphic tees, generally.) Instead, it takes as subject matter the construction of branding as well as the realities of its own supply and manufacturing chains. All institutions are brands and all brands share an ideological playbook, whether we are talking about Louis Vuitton or Harvard. What also becomes clear is that anything can be branded, and that what designates one from the other, or the real from the fake, is actually quite arbitrary. Champion becomes Nike, Nike becomes Bandulu. As this distinction unravels, so does fashion’s usual symbolic bundling of production and product, exposing instead the vast—and all too literal— discrepancies between the two.

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CHECK

REALITY Orit Gat spends a day in a virtual reality museum.

Photography By Larry Fink

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“Stay on your mat!” the attendant shouts, as one guy clumsily wanders away from a zombie slowly moving toward him. “You’re dead, you’re dead. The zombie got you.”

“What happens in this game?” a guy asks the attendant helping a group of middle-aged men with their VR headsets. “You shoot zombies.” It’s a four-person game called Arizona Sunshine. The premise is a combination of a Western and a zombie flick. The four players load up on guns and rifles, and the game is set up in a square so that Player 1 can spot a zombie coming behind Player 3, who is busy shooting the attacker in front of Player 2. In this dark, small side room of VR World, the players are lined up in front of a wall and flat-screen televisions in front of them show what they see. Headsets are attached to short cables: in the game environment, the players can’t move from their corner in the square. “Stay on your mat!” the attendant shouts, as one guy clumsily wanders away from a zombie slowly moving toward him. “You’re dead, you’re dead. The zombie got you.” Arizona Sunshine is on the second floor of a small office building on East 34th Street in Manhattan. Right by the Empire State Building and next door to a WeWork is this new hybrid of museum, arcade and attraction. VR World is one of a number of similar places in New York City—there are two in Downtown Brooklyn and two on the Lower East Side, and in May 2018, Facebook operated a pop-up in Soho for people to demo its Oculus Go headset—but VR World is the biggest such space in North America, with dozens of games, 360-degree films, and other headset-involving

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experiences. Upon walking in, visitors receive a queuing bracelet and a hygienic cotton mask to buffer their skin from the headset; even though much time is spent waiting between games, most visitors keep their masks on, giving the appearance of white-clad Zorros. While you wait, you see into other people’s games—every set comes with a television screen above it, so that the players’ experience is viewable, 2D, to anyone around. “You gotta punch the guy!” an attendant says to a girl. It’s Hanukkah and I arrive at VR World on the heels of a large group of 10-year-old Orthodox Jewish girls and their mothers. Everyone who comes to VR World must buy a two-hour or full-day ticket, and the accompanying adults, who initially seem hesitant, quickly join in. A woman is doing a VR Google Maps experience that allows you to simulate flying over the world or zoom in on a specific location. She starts typing an address in an Orthodox part of Brooklyn, and the girls surrounding her are oohing and aahing about the familiar streets, seen from a subway ride’s distance away. I wonder to myself how different VR World is from everything these women and girls may experience in their day-to-day lives, with the half-naked female characters dancing in the music games and the male employees touching them as they help set up the headsets. But then, the Google Maps is an experience that allows you to explore the world. The woman leaves her own street and returns to the search bar. I see her type J E R U and wonder to myself if she’s ever been to Jerusalem.

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I can’t stop looking at these dismembered limbs with endless surprise that they are, somehow, an extension of myself.

I consider the novelty of the experience for this woman, but it’s all new to me as well. As a girl growing up in the 1990s, my brother would play Nintendo at friends’ places. He was invited to birthday parties at arcades and I had a Gameboy with Tetris on it and no other games (my brother took them all). I’ve never played a shooter game, I’ve never raced a car, didn’t even have a Sims family going. I used to think gaming was about quick, constant decision making, but at VR World I realize how embodied the experience is. With a headset over my eyes and controls in my hands, I keep looking at how my fingers gripping the controls translate into the game: here are my gloved palms holding a bow and arrow, there are my arms slipping into a spacesuit, beforehand there was a gun in my huge, masculine fingers. I can’t stop looking at these dismembered limbs with endless surprise that they are, somehow, an extension of myself. When I proposed this piece, I thought I would write about this experience like David Foster Wallace would. I thought that—like the American essayist who described how he did not enjoy a luxury cruise (in the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) or a country fair (which becomes a curiosity distant from any other experience Wallace could ever imagine in an essay called “Ticket to the Fair”)—I would feel isolated. I would notice the electric wires everywhere, the cheap walls separating one game from another. I thought I would constantly ask that very Foster-Wallacian question, “Is it fun?” And it is fun. I’m not as cynical as I thought I would be. But still, I see a bit of Foster-Wallace-World. The attendants wear shirts imprinted with the writing “Dream awake 4 E 34.” On the day I was there, I was surrounded by women. Most of the attendants are men. There’s so much handling of equipment and touching, and much of it is awkward. You’re meant to lift a hand if you want to get out of a game before you’re done playing, and they are meant to give you directions on how to play. There is so much contact with other people, so much explaining that happens. Even though you’re meant to put on a headset and check out, VR World is not isolating at all. Except for me. I’m a little lonely. Even Foster Wallace had someone with him—“Native Companion,” he called her—at the state fair. I’m one of the only adults here not accompanying children or working as an attendant, and it feels like being undercover. I wish I had a friend to see it all with me, to witness and giggle and shoot zombies with. I feel so lonely I decide to play something more personal, less shared: Tilt Brush, which allows you to paint in 3D space, presented in a green screen–clad corner. As I wait, I see that the girl playing is drawing a snowman in a mountainous landscape. She’s roaming the green floor and, onscreen, rotating around a mannequin, shaping it into a snowman, then changing colors, adding a carrot, a scarf. A few minutes later, it’s my turn. The game restarts and I step into her mountain scene. Where she had a snowman, there is now a pedestal. I play with the controls and realize you can choose the environment. I switch to outer space. Instead of a drawing tool, I opt for snowflakes made of light, which I scatter with my right hand. It’s a seven-minute game. I know I should be drawing, but I just want to stand there and look. Under the headset, I’m smiling. I’m rooted in the middle of a green screen and all I see are bright, light snowflakes falling down on the galaxy.

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THE STRANGER Using gloriously colored pastels and inspired by the arcane, the Swiss artist Nicolas Party is a beloved outlier on the contemporary scene. BY TED LOOS

Installation view of Nicolas Party’s “Pastel et nu” at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, 2015.

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND THE MODERN INSTITUTE/TOBY WEBSTER LTD, GLASGOW

“A tree might seem one of the most banal things, but the meaning and the metaphor in a ZWLJPÄJ P[LT·H MHJL VY H JH[ VY ^OH[L]LY P[ PZ·PZ ]LY` PTWVY[HU[ MVY TL ¹ —Nicolas Party

When the Magritte Museum in Brussels shipped some of its wellknown René Magritte paintings to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for an exhibition there, curators chose 38-year-old Swiss artist Nicolas Party to fill the void, literally. On the museum’s empty walls they hung Party’s mysterious, intensely saturated pastels. In spirit, they evoked something of the Surrealist master himself. Party works in a figural vein, depicting mountain landscapes, a picture of an owl or a tree, a pair of stylized human faces. Even though you can read the shapes, each image always carries with it an uncanny strangeness. The forms are cleanly and sharply delineated, but the lack of smudges, drips or any messiness doesn’t make them any more fathomable. The art world has taken note of Party’s talent, which refreshingly fits no known current trends. In 2017, he had a solo show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, and he is now represented by Xavier Hufkens Gallery in Brussels, the Modern Institute in Glasgow, Gregor Staiger in Zürich and Karma in New York. Party’s art-historical reference points are not the usual ones you hear from contemporary makers: Ferdinand Hodler, the Swiss landscape painter; Giorgio Morandi, the ethereal still life artist; and Odilon Redon, the French symbolist who utterly mastered the pastel. “I’m the opposite of a lot of other artists,” says the affable Party, seated in his Bushwick studio and surrounded by his artworks. “I have very few references after the American revolution.” He doesn’t mean 1776, but the 1950s and the New York School’s shift to abstraction. “Weirdly enough, it’s why my subjects are important,” says Party. “They’re symbolic. A tree might seem one of the most banal things, but the meaning and the metaphor in a specific item—a face or a cat, or whatever it is—is very important for me.” Party currently lives between Brussels and New York, but is shifting his life to the American side more and more. He was born in French-speaking Lausanne, Switzerland, and started drawing early. “Since as far as I remember, my family always told me, ‘You’re an artist,’” he recalls. “I was really having a lot of satisfaction with it at a young age. Still to this day, the moments that I feel the best are when I’m in my studio.” He sold paintings to his family, and even to his dentist, as a teenager.

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Still Life, 2017

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, KARMA, NEW YORK AND THE MODERN INSTITUTE/TOBY WEBSTER LTD, GLASGOW

For a time, he led also a double, mildly lawless life as a graffiti artist. He began locally. “My friend had a little moto, and I would be on the back and we would head off,” Party says. “I started slowly. I was doing the train tracks a lot and then in the streets, in the city of Lausanne a little bit.” But he then expanded to other countries. “That was obviously super fun because we would draw all day long with 10 other friends, taking the car at night. That’s the best thing ever, right? Because you get chased by the police. I got caught a few times.” Party managed to transition into polite society, getting a BA from the Lausanne School of Art and an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art. Although he spent a decade or so working in the gig economy, he was always making his own art, tending toward two dimensions but also working in sculpture; to this day, he makes 3D-printed objects and paints them, too. Finding one’s medium is one of those crucial life passages for an artist—with Party, you can almost hear the click of something falling into place. “I love pastels so much,” Party says. “I came to them because at one point I was doing oils, and my main problem was that I couldn’t stop editing the painting. Oils allow you to endlessly retouch.” There’s a perfectionist streak in him, as there is in pretty much all artists. “With pastels it’s kind of the exact opposite,” he says. “You can layer and layer, but you can’t start over. The nature of the medium is much more direct. Nothing dries or is wet—it stays exactly how it is.” Party’s color sense is very distinct to say the least. “I’m always trying to get away from the high contrasts, but it just keeps going,” he says. Party uses a huge variety of tones, and there’s not a lot of repetition, except for an ultramarine blue that crops up in multiple pictures. He has some 2,300 different hues stacked up in boxes in his studio. “It’s more like house painting,” he says. “You have the options, and you choose this one.” As for the source of his palette, “You never know where your tastes are from,” he says. “But for 10 years I did a lot of spray paint. And basically you use super strong contrasts for a very obvious reason: It has to be very visible from far away.” From Party’s own perspective, his current success and acclaim is as much a puzzlement as the scenes he depicts. It’s not that he’s disingenuous, it’s not that he’s not grateful; he’s just aware that luck is a factor. “Some great artists don’t sell, and some very bad artists sell a lot,” Party says. “Every artist that starts to sell a lot will have this strange relationship with that fact—but they’ll always take it.” He laughs, but something of the deadpan effect of his pictures comes through in his reaction, too. Acknowledging that life is a mystery somehow becomes him. “It doesn’t mean it’s good, it doesn’t mean it’s bad,” he adds. “It’s just what happened.”

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“With pastels you can layer and layer, but you can’t start over. The nature of the medium is direct. Nothing dries or is wet—it stays exactly how it is.” —Nicolas Party

Red Portrait, 2018

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, XAVIER HUFKENS, BRUSSELS AND THE MODERN INSTITUTE/ TOBY WEBSTER LTD, GLASGOW

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The brilliant artists behind the hit YouTube series Zhe Zhe are smuggling comedy back into art one episode at a time. BY EM GALLAGHER PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANA HOEY

The Zhe Zhe cast ditches the city for Dana Hoey’s upstate farm. Fowl followed. From left: Ruby McCollister, Emily Allan Leah Hennessey and E.J. O’Hara.

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On-screen stories of young women in New York are old as film itself: from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Sex and the City and Girls. These stories about the half-formed, flailing time of early adulthood had wide appeal in their heydays—showing us complicated women who did things like have casual sex and experience bouts of depression. But these narratives left much to be desired. The rise of DIY internet-based series like Broad City and High Maintenance offers something new—a fresh sensibility where we can begin to see ourselves, perhaps for the first time, reflected on the screen. It was in this brave new internet playscape that the fictional band Zhe Zhe hit the scene. The web series follows the intoxicatingly delusional, celebrity-obsessed bandmates Jean D’Arc and Mona de Liza, played by Leah Hennessey and Ruby McCollister, who are at constant odds with their evil exbandmate Chewie Swindleburne, played by Emily Allan. The three Zhes are blinded by their Warholian pursuit of fame for fame’s sake, endlessly pining for musical careers they make zero moves to advance. Offscreen, however, their work ethic is quite the opposite. The Zhe Zhe cast are involved in every aspect of the show’s production—acting, writing songs and imagining the farcical universe of “post-apocalipstick New York” alongside collaborating director E.J. O’Hara and cinematographer Max Lakner. “With Zhe Zhe, I feel like our minds merged and gave birth to a weirder, deeper and more intelligent mind. It has a will of its own,” Hennessey reflects over a small mountain of Italian cheesecake at the gaudy East Village institution Veniero’s. It is this collective mind that produces the show’s unapologetically sacrilegious humor (the band members are self-proclaimed gender-benders, yet source lyrics from Judith Butler with no apparent understanding of their meaning) and its prophetic social commentary (greed and corruption in one early episode is epitomized by a room full of suited men in orange wigs years before Trump would be elected president). “People say to us, ‘that’s so Zhe Zhe,’ or ‘everything is getting more Zhe Zhe,’” McCollister jokes. “Oftentimes it feels like we’ve created a hell for ourselves to live in.” Hell, or maybe a utopian vision of what filmmaking can do even with the most limited of resources. Ripley Soprano, a member of the skate crew and feminist art collective Brujas who has also collaborated on the band’s live performances, credits the Zhe Zhe crew for their commitment to an anticapitalist project. “The web series is truly DIY. When one of them gets some dough from a grandma or a day job, they pool their resources and funds and pull together a crazy but necessary costume, or some small detail—a poster that hangs in a character’s room, a wig, whatever—that lays out bread crumbs for an upcoming plotline. They are so dedicated to making every single detail of the show memorable and striking.” When Zhe Zhe launched on YouTube in the fall of 2013, it was one of the first internet sitcoms of its kind—it was only four years earlier that

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Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s webseries-turn-network hit Broad City surfaced on the same platform. Both shows offered a depiction of truth, even within over-the-top comic frameworks. In a 2015 Grantland profile of the comedy duo, Glazer identifies their project as emerging from a desertlike atmosphere of how women really think and behave. “Every girl I know shits and talks about it and fucks and talks about it. And people are like, these women are filthy! And I’m like, not compared to my friends. The show may be a cartoon version of us, but the cartoon sometimes gets closer to reality than anything,” Glazer says. In its second season, Zhe Zhe has found its sharpest tool of critique so far—using the language of film itself to rewrite its rules and limitations. This unfolds most potently when the crew embarks on a shot-for-shot recreation of the ’70s cinema classic Five Easy Pieces. Never is Jean’s particular brand of vampire narcissism more well employed than when she emulates the brooding Jack Nicholson character, or Mona’s vaudevillian physical comedy more delightfully dithering as Karen Black’s waitressgirlfriend act. We are treated to soliloquies that nail down the thesis of the show, like Jean professing: “I genre hop a lot, not because I’m borrowing motifs from different musical traditions, and synthesizing them to create a unique, subversive sound and political messages—just because I want to be famous.” “When we started Zhe Zhe, there was all this hype around girls and film,” says Hennessey. Yet the very conceit of ‘girls and film’ lumps together diverse and unpinnable lived experiences. It also makes it a duty to ‘represent’ all ‘girls’ to the point of illegibility. Rather, Zhe Zhe constantly toys with fiction, unlikability and contradiction with their completely selfmade project.

“With Zhe Zhe, I feel like our minds merged and gave birth to a weirder, deeper and more intelligent mind.” —Leah Hennessey

Improv always makes its way into the Zhe Zhe sauce—just ask Tiny the goat, our extra for the day.

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It wasn’t easy to say goodbye to Hoey’s menagerie in Rhinebeck. Deery, the donkey, gave us a hug for the road.

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SEAT AT THE TABLE YOUNG CHEFS AND MIXOLOGISTS ARE SHAKING UP THE ART WORLD, TAKING OUR PALATES AND MINDS ALONG FOR THE RIDE. BY MITCHELL KUGA PHOTOGRAPHY BY MATTHEW MORROCCO

Like much of everything in 2019, what we eat and drink has become inherently political, but perhaps even more telling is how we eat. We’ve gathered here a group of creatives working with food and confronting issues like sustainability, cultural autonomy and racial injustice, activating new forms of community in the process. It’s no coincidence that many arrived here from art schools, bridging the gap between kitchen and museum in ways that are increasingly elastic. The group is young, fluent in social activism and drawn to forms of inclusion that are particularly necessary in our fractured society.

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“What I think about when I say ‘healing’ is mending. How can I weave together this idea of our history, our memory, as a people.”

DeVonn Francis “When people hear about my company and hear ‘healing’ they think I’m going to tell them the 10 ways aloe is good for their hair and skin,” says Francis, the 25-year-old founder of Yardy, a NY-based events platform that uses food to activate and heal queer and migrant communities of color. “That’s not what I mean at all.” Instead, through dinner parties that fuse elements of performance art and Black radicalism, Francis is interested in holding space for marginalized bodies and forgotten histories. In the process, he’s reconciling the dislocation he experiences around his identity as a queer first-generation Jamaican American. At a dinner last May—he served pepper shrimp with a squid ink aïoli—headphones seemed to sprout from the soil of unpotted plants presented against the space’s white walls. They contained candid recordings from women in his family about immigrating to America. “What I think about when I say ‘healing’ is mending,” says the Cooper Union graduate. “How can I weave together this idea of our history, our memory, as a people?”

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Whether it’s developing the drink menu for Mission Chinese Food’s ﬁrst opening or for oneoff events for White Castle, Arley Marks approaches drink-making from multiple angles.

Arley Marks A few summers ago, Marks felt compelled to taste the seawater while spearfishing in Montauk. He was surprised that it contained “a lot of umami,” comparing the “complex flavor” to that of an oyster. He incorporated the water—which he extracts from the same spot, five gallons at a time—into a drink called the Ocean Martini: pasteurized sea water, Material vodka and a splash of vermouth. It’s his favorite cocktail at Honey’s, the buzzy mead bar he manages in Bushwick—connected in turn to New York’s first meadery, Enlightenment Wines, which he co-owns with Raphael Lyon. Foraging sustainable ingredients and combining unexpected flavors informs the 34-year-old’s approach to drink making, as does his background in sculpture and furniture design. When Eckhaus Latta unveiled their exhibition at the Whitney Museum this summer, Marks built a punch bowl out of a deconstructed flat-screen television that illuminated his cocktail—watermelon, coconut water, bitters and Material vodka—with an iridescent fuchsia. Whether it’s developing the drink menu for Mission Chinese Food’s first opening or for one-off events for White Castle, he approaches drink-making from multiple angles: “I think of them as individual sculptures.”

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“I’m making something that is going to sustain you, but it’s also often meant to be a challenge and provocation.”

Alida Borgna “The food I make is an expression of the place I’m in,” says Borgna over the phone from Tuscany. The 27-year-old NY-based chef is traveling throughout Italy with her all-female food collective, The Taste of Memory, to shoot a documentary on the sagra, a series of community-run food festivals centered on regional dishes and ingredients. Borgna sees the local gatherings as a form of “joyful activism,” a glimpse into the potential of a more communally-engaged food culture. As a chef, “I want to create spaces where I am breaking boundaries for people and trying to encourage them to interact with each other,” she says. From Touching Taste(buds), a supper club run with cooking partner Gabrielle Badawy that encourages diners to be more conscious consumers, to constructing meals centered around “edible landscapes,” forcing diners to consider “the fragility of the landscapes we live in,” Borgna sees food as a twopronged approach. “I’m making something that is going to sustain you,” she says, “but it’s also often meant to be a challenge and provocation.”

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“It’s deﬁnitely a show, and the kitchen’s a stage. Everyone’s watching.”

Michael Stember When he was a freshman at Stanford, Stember became a sushi fanatic for one simple, if highly ambitious reason—to qualify for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Suspicious of carbo-loading, the captain of the university’s track team hosted weekly dinner parties with his teammates, a kind of “sushi art club” fusing elements of performance art with the high-octane protein of sustainable raw fish. Stember made it to Sydney, and after retiring from the sport he founded Sushi Belly Tower, an underground dinner series. The roving international pop-up, which sometimes took place in Stember’s Los Angeles loft, was animated by spectacle—the self-taught chef would break down an 18-pound aquacultured salmon into artfully constructed sashimi platters drizzled in nut oil, as a live band played cuts from Nirvana and the Talking Heads. “It was an adventure,” says Stember, who’s 40, “and I cared about that adventure so much.” Today he’s replicating that spontaneity at Ponyboy, his new bar, restaurant and concert venue in Greenpoint. From the open kitchen, Stember serves up modestly priced fish tacos next to his upwards-of-$300 omakase—delivered with the gusto of a natural showman. “It’s definitely a show, and the kitchen’s a stage,” he says. “Everyone’s watching.”

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PORTRAIT BY BALARAMA HELLER

“Ingredients are words in a sentence structure. It’s a vocabulary that I can shift around and do weird things with to communicate ideas.”

Amanny Ahmad For Ahmad, a 29-year-old artist and self-taught chef, food is a language that allows her to have difficult conversations. Last summer, through the menu at her month-long residency at the Lower East Side restaurant Dimes, the Cooper Union graduate addressed her Palestinian identity in relation to the devastation of agricultural land, culinary theft and colonialism. But she also managed to make the dinners festive, celebratory, even—a rebuttal to the idea that Palestinian representations revolve solely around trauma. “Through the culinary I could address issues in a way that was really affirmative of Palestinian culture and identity, rather than in an aggressive, argumentative way,” says Ahmad, who was born in Salt Lake City to Palestinian immigrants. Her incorporation of foraging into her culinary practice is another cultural affirmation, a skill she cultivated as a child during trips to her family’s village in the West Bank. In searching for ingredients, Ahmad is looking for new ways to communicate. “Ingredients are words in a sentence structure,” she says. “It’s a vocabulary that I can shift around and do weird things with to communicate ideas.”

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Gustav Stickley, Server, Circa 1902; Marblehead Pottery, Vase, Circa 1909; Dirk Van Erp, Table Lamp, Circa 1910. Photo: Radek Travnicek courtesy of Robert Kaplan

COLLECTING DESIGN: HISTORY, COLLECTIONS & HIGHLIGHTS In the only program of its kind, design historian Daniella Ohad highlights the major areas in the collectible design marketplace: Scandinavian, American, French, Italian Mid-Century Design, Contemporary Design, Studio Movement, and Design Fairs. Ohad hosts some of the world’s leading experts who share their knowledge and passion about the areas of their expertise. A visit to a design auction and a fair brings to light the most current directions in modern and contemporary collectible design.

KELLY BEHUN

FELIX BURRICHTER CHRISTIAN LARSEN

CRISTINA MILLER

ZESTY MEYERS

Full Program – Ten Sessions Tuesday mornings 10:30am-12:30pm, February 19 through May 7. Registrants receive free access to a design market report conducted by DeTnk, valued at $300, plus a free subscription to Cultured Magazine. Classes take place at AIA New York | Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Pl, New York, NY 10012. To register, visit aiany.org/collectingdesign or call 212-358-6112.

DANIELLA OHAD

LARRY WEINBERG

ROBERT KAPLAN

COME BE INSPIRED AT T H E N E W WO R L D S Y M P H O N Y, A M E R I C A ’ S O R C H E S T R A L A C A D E M Y A LABORATORY FOR THE WAY CLASSICAL MUSIC IS TAUGHT, PRESENTED AND EXPERIENCED

MI AM I B E A C H , FL N W S . E D U - 3 0 5. 6 7 3 . 3 3 3 1

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Immersed in whimsy, Misha Kahn»Z )LSS`ÅVW *VSSLJ[PVU YLPTHNPULZ MHTPSPHY P[LTZ HZ M\UJ[PVUHS VIQL[Z K»HY[ 7YLZLU[LK PU WHY[ULYZOPW ^P[O Prospect NY [OL SH[LZ[ *\S[\YLK *VTTPZZPVU PZ 2HOU»Z ZOPTTLYPUN WVVS ÅVH[ [OH[ ^PSS OH]L `V\ SVUNPUN MVY Z\TTLY

Misha Kahn’s Bellyflop Pool Float in PVC and dichroic film measures 5.5 ft x 3.5 ft x 7 inches and is available in a limited edition of 250 for $185.

“The pool ﬂoat design came out of a series of work cast inside of vinyl molds—the holes, in this case, were made to give the concrete or resin inside a sense of levity. When we were discussing a pool float, it made sense to reference this series because they’re both made using the same plastic material. We looked at the textures and patterns of some chairs, and considered what could translate into a float. I’d been thinking a lot about the one-upmanship of the pool float world, how each year something more bonkers comes out: a taco, an everything bagel, a David Shrigley swan. I was tempted to throw my hat in that ring, but when I thought about what I would want in my pool, I was drawn more to camouflage. The results are these beautiful bubble objects that almost blend in to the background. Almost.” —Misha Kahn Available on 1stdibs.com/dealers/cultured-commissions

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