Aspen Art Museum Summer 2023 Edition by frieze.com

ASPEN ART MUSEUM With: Nairy Baghramian, Kerstin Brätsch, Allison Katz & Florian Krewer

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Where Ideas Begin: M O D E R N & C O N T E M P O R A RY WO R K S O N PA P E R

OPENING JUNE 2023 SOTHEBY’S ASPEN, 534 EAST COOPER AVENUE, ASPEN, CO 81611 SOTHEBYS.COM/PRIVATESALES | #SOTHEBYSPRIVATESALES DAVID.SCHRADER@SOTHEBYS.COM | CHRISTINE.HELLER@SOTHEBYS.COM WILLEM DE KOONING, UNTITLED, CIRCA 1960 © 2023 THE WILLEM DE KOONING FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

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December 15, 2023–March 24, 2024

Cauleen Smith: Mines to Caves

Aspen Art Museum

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637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, CO 81611 aspenartmuseum.org | 970.925.8050 Hours: 10 AM–6 PM, Closed Mondays Admission to the AAM is free courtesy of Amy and John Phelan

AAM exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by the AAM National Council.

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ZEINAB SALEH in the company of

KATHARINA FRITSCH June 22–July 22, 2023

Aspen Art Museum

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637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, CO 81611 aspenartmuseum.org | 970.925.8050 Hours: 10 AM–6 PM, Closed Mondays Admission to the AAM is free courtesy of Amy and John Phelan

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Board of Trustees John Phelan, Chair Melony Lewis, Co-President Amnon Rodan, Co-President Mary Scanlan, Secretary Justin Douglas, Treasurer

In the midst of a bustling Aspen summer, we at the museum have been thinking about what it means to gather together in this wonderful corner of the world. This is my third Aspen ArtWeek as Director of the Aspen Art Museum, and with each year, I become more aware of the importance of this convening, and how this time shapes the evolving identity and mission of the museum. Artists, writers, musicians, philanthropists, thought leaders and scores of other creative, talented individuals band together in the mountains for a week of energized exchange and celebration. Friendships are forged, debates are had, discoveries are made. It is, in its own way, a temporary cosmos, but one that has immeasurable, lasting benefits for the museum and the communities we serve. Relationships and dialogues, particularly those driven by artists, form the backbone of this issue of our summer magazine, but more broadly, fuel the ways in which we envision the museum’s future. ArtCrush honoree Nairy Baghramian is celebrated on the cover of this issue. An enduring visionary, Baghramian will complete a major commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this September, before which, she will create a significant exhibition and outdoor sculpture here in Aspen with us. Nairy’s cultivation of meaningful friendships is beautifully articulated in Amelia Stein’s profile of the artist, as well as a compilation of testimonies by Baghramian’s treasured peers, gracefully compiled by writer Laura McLean-Ferris. Ahead of their major exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum in summer 2024, artists and friends Kerstin Brätsch and Allison Katz discuss each other’s practices and their influence upon one another. In a study of Florian Krewer, whose exhibition currently unfolds across our lower-level galleries, writer Hiji Nam pinpoints relationships as the key subject of his paintings. And Terence Trouillot interviews Ulala Imai, ahead of her show, which forms part of “A Lover’s Discourse”—a new series of artist-led presentations here at the Aspen Art Museum introducing unexpected dialogues between artworks from different generations. I would like to take this opportunity to express my immense gratitude to our ArtCrush event chairs, Chandra Johnson, Jamie Tisch and Sara Zilkha, for their enthusiasm and vision for an unforgettable gala. I would also like to thank the inimitable Molly Epstein and Abigail Ross Goodman for chairing the Collector Committee for ArtCrush 2023 and helping us gather some incredible works for auction—all of which will be on view at the museum July 26 through August 3. As ever, I am indebted to our fearless board of trustees, chaired by John Phelan and led by the remarkable Melony Lewis and Amnon Rodan, as well as the entire team of the Aspen Art Museum, whose unyielding enthusiasm is a constant source of inspiration and energy. On behalf of the board and staff, it is a pleasure to welcome to the museum this summer our visitors and friends from near and far. Across high and low seasons, our building is a nexus for artistic progress, accessible to all, for free. Here’s to another extraordinary year of conversation, ideas and unprecedented experiences.

Sarah Arison Barbara Bluhm-Kaul Chris Brown Janet Crown Domenico De Sole Marcy Edelstein Bruce Etkin Joe Felson Christy Ferer Barbara Gamson David Ganek Steve Hansen Toby Devan Lewis, In Memoriam Nancy Magoon Nicola Marcus Susan Marx Paul Pariser Kelli Questrom Nancy Rogers Gayle Stoffel Jamie Tisch ArtCrush 2023 Gala Co-Chairs Chandra Johnson Jamie Tisch Sara Zilkha

Nicola Lees Nancy and Bob Magoon Director Aspen Art Museum

AAM Magazine

Produced by Frieze Studios for the Aspen Art Museum Editor Project Editor Senior Editor Art Director Designer

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Matthew McLean Sara Harrison Chris Waywell Lauren Barrett Christopher Lacy

Head of Branded Content & Studios Content Operations Manager (interim) Assistant Producer Studios Assistant Special thanks to

Francesca Girelli Claudia Kensani Saviotti Arianna Trabuio Sherie Sitauze Kristina McLean and Stella Bottai

The AAM is grateful for the support of Prada. Additional support provided by: CULTURED, Steven Shane of Compass Real Estate, Harbour, J.P. Morgan Private Bank, LALO Tequila, Lugano Diamonds, Margarita Bravo, Sotheby’s, UOVO

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Kerstin Brätsch

Unstable Talismanic Rendering_ Psychopompo (with gratitude to master marbler Dirk Lange), 2017 Pigment, water color, ink and solvents on paper, 108 x 72 inches (274.3 x 182.9 cm)

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CONTENTS

6 LEVITY AND GRAVITY The 2023 ArtCrush Artist Honoree, Nairy Baghramian, is the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum this year. Amelia Stein explores Baghramian’s practice of “grouping” as a way to give form to sculptures, collaborations and friendships.

11 SPATIAL RELATIONS Nairy Baghramian’s work occupies a nexus of relationships, cooperations and dialogues with designers, curators and fellow artists. Four of her most significant collaborators talk to Laura McLean-Ferris about how some of Baghramian’s key projects manifest this spirit of connectivity.

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20 AFFINITIES Artists Kerstin Brätsch and Allison Katz were once college roommates. In the subsequent years, the paths of their careers have crossed and recrossed through friendship and collaborations, as they discuss with curator Patrizia Dander.

24 A LOVER’S DISCOURSE A new series of artist-led presentations opens this summer at the Aspen Art Museum. “A Lover’s Discourse” juxtaposes recent works by early-career artists with pieces they selected from private collections around Aspen. Participating artist Ulala Imai talks to Terence Trouillot about her dialogue with image-making, past and present.

28 CODE OF CONDUCT (FAQ)

34 YOUTH ART EXPO The Aspen Art Museum’s biennial youth exhibition has been at the heart of the institution’s wider community for more than 40 years. Its 2023 program, inspired by masks and puppets, was another gem.

38 THE ASPEN COMPLEX The International Design Conference in Aspen was a hotbed of debate around the role of cultural aesthetics in 20th-century life from 1951 to 2004. What could its model of forward-facing research and fellowship look like in this century? Emily King and Prem Krishnamurthy consider its far-reaching influence.

44 BODY DOUBLES Disconcerting duplications and pairs abound in the work of German figurative painter Florian Krewer, whose show “everybody rise” is showing at the Aspen Art Museum until September 24. Hiji Nam looks at a troubling language of dreams and resonances.

48 MEET THE ARTISTS

On the Cover Nairy Baghramian in her studio in Berlin, May 2023 Photography Christian Werner AAM Magazine is printed in Canada by Imprimerie Solisco

Explore the artists who are contributing works to the 2023 ArtCrush auction, including painters, photographers and sculptors.

60 BLANKET COVERAGE In a unique meeting of old and new creative processes, the Aspen Art Museum invited contemporary artists to collaborate with a 170-year-old Scottish weaving mill. The results are vibrant (and snug).

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Exhibitions

Nairy Baghramian, the 2023 ArtCrush Artist Honoree, stages a major solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum this summer. Amelia Stein explores Baghramian’s practice of “grouping” as a way to give form to sculptures, collaborations and friendships.

LEVITY AND GRAVITY Opposite Nairy Baghramian in her studio in Berlin, May 2023 Photography Christian Werner

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Every part has a role to play in Nairy Baghramian’s work. Although she is very much a sculptor, a recent recipient of both the prestigious Nasher Prize and the Metropolitan Museum in New York’s 2023 facade commission, she is deeply attuned to performance and thinks in groupings, even within a single work. Showing contingency as well as contradiction is part of her method. This is apparent in the construction of the works—in her various techniques of casting, molding, carving and joining, and in her formal language of bends, droops, arcs and blobs. It’s also there, sometimes indirectly, in the titling of her works or exhibitions, which always in some way anticipate and respond to the conditions of their setting and the dynamic unraveling of perspective an audience brings. “Grouping” is Baghramian’s chosen word. She prefers it to “series” or “collaboration”—no forced harmony. A grouping can be an ongoing body of work, like the large, colorful polyurethane and silicone Sitzengebliebene/ Stay Downers (2016–), or a selection of works for a specific exhibition. It can also describe Baghramian’s relationships with other artists, including the interior designer Janette Laverrière, the contemporary choreographer Maria Hassabi, the midcentury architect Carlo Mollino, or the modernist writer Jane Bowles. Their work might appear in or alongside Baghramian’s own work—in her forms or titles, or when she turns a solo into a group show. In the case of Laverrière, Baghramian found what is still the only monograph of her work in a bookshop in New York in 2007. In it was a photograph of Laverrière’s work, Entre Deux Actes: Loge de Comédienne—Between Two Acts: An Actress’s Dressing Room, a collection of furniture she presented at a design salon in Paris in 1947, designed for her friend, a professional singer, who had suddenly stopped performing, left Paris altogether, and disappeared. After learning that Laverrière was still alive and living in Paris at the age of 98, Baghramian traveled to meet her. The two began an intense and productive dialogue that evolved into ideas for new work, and when Baghramian was asked to do an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in Germany, she invited

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Laverrière to restage Entre Deux Actes. She later called their partnership a “co-existence”. The new version of Entre Deux Actes II—Loge des Comédiennes (2009) was an installation by way of impression. Each original piece was either reduced to its bare structure or cursorily exaggerated like shapes in a dream. The colors were inverted and shadows solidified, using logics of memory and afterimage. The reimagined work felt improvisational and playful: a tiger skin rug was replaced by a chalk outline. Baghramian’s work is never funny ha-ha, but it has an incredible way with irony, sharp in the way that history is—tragedy not excluded. In the original Entre Deux Actes, Laverrière gives her friend one more appearance, a private moment of space and time, in the form of an ensemble. In the restaged work, there’s still no body there. But the missing actress re-finds her audience in a new, uneasy context, and Laverrière and Baghramian work up complicated dynamics of disap pearance and presence with a group of elements as forms of life. How can a work be not like itself? I’m trying to identify some irreducible element of Baghramian’s practice that is to do with relationships. She herself has titled more than one exhibition ménage. At Performa 19 in New York, Baghramian staged Entre Deux Actes (Ménage à Quatre) (2019) for which she installed the actress’s reimagined quarters along with Mollino’s erotic Polaroids, and a durational work by Hassabi where the dancers got very close but never touched. Their co-existence relied on a micron of autonomy. The dictionary definition of ménage is household, which also says a lot about desire and sublimation, about split infinitives and trust. That there is never just one body in Baghramian’s work is maybe clear by now. She often uses the example of doing away with the “to-scale” individual used in architectural models. Harder to account for is that there’s every body and there’s no body. Even when a work—bent over in sections of mottled pink and white marble reinforced by cast stainless steel—is called Knee and Elbow (2020), Baghramian’s approach to the body is figural rather than figurative: about impressions

Above Nairy Baghramian working on the exhibition ‘Modèle vivant’ in her studio in Berlin, May 2023 Opposite, top Nairy Baghramian, Dwindler, 2018 Opposite, bottom Nairy Baghramian’s studio in Berlin, May 2023

Nairy Baghramian’s exhibition “Jupon de Corps” runs from June 22 to October 22, 2023. More information about the exhibition and related events can be found online at aspenartmuseum.org

and exchanges. Her complex bargains of levity and gravity, her insertion of multiple, contradictory vantages, and the almost animistic drive her work seems to have toward formal evolution, are always in service of the subtle body of sculpture rather than the human body of mind and heart. Baghramian is conscious of display, always bringing it into the work. Frames, struts, stands or other supportive or interruptive apparatuses are often part of the grouping of a work. Sometimes the rigid or sharp or generally unyielding metal that otherwise plays a remedial role is left alone to make a structure, as in Scruff of the Neck (2016): bare, arcing lines of polished aluminum or steel intersect with one another and the wall. They leave the mind nowhere to hide. Except in the titles, which are also lacerating in some instinctual way. This feels important to spell out because of how reflexively and easily the modes and methods of collectivity in Baghramian’s practice can get softened. What looks organic is really hard, cast silicone. Baghramian works with context, not influence. She isn’t interested in collecting what she likes. She is interested in figuring difference, in making work that edges ever closer to what sculpture really is for her—a way of putting things together heterogeneously—somewhere between the audience and the object. This third body again. I can only try to make a shape around it. Both knotted ends of Treat (Marrowbone) (2016), a large wax bone, feel like fists approaching my solar plexus. The Portraits (2016), a grouping of framed C-prints or Baryte prints of billowing smokestacks, subtitled: The conceptartist smoking head, Stand-In, make “me” neither here nor there. All of these are gathered together again for “Jupon de Corps” at the Aspen Art Museum— another reconfiguration or working through of iteration, proximity, timeliness and boundaries. The universe is expanding—meaning the distance between things or the scale of space is growing. Baghramian’s universe expands via the innovative and complex ways she keeps the pieces as close as possible while holding them apart. In her first co-existence with Laverrière, La Lampe dans l’Horloge (2008), or The Lamp in the Clock, named for the Surrealist writer André Breton, Baghramian made a “room” of freestanding colorful walls for Laverrière’s iconographic mirror sculptures, or “useless objects,” inside Berlin’s Schinkel Pavillon. The “useless objects” were the designer’s last works—homages to her creative and political heroes. The walls showed the works and kept them hidden, to an extent. Baghramian was dealing with how to strike a concomitance or equality of output and energy in a cross-generational partnership, against the still-pervasive trend of recuperating “lost” practitioners in contemporary art. When she remade a version of the installation within Work Desk for the Ambassador’s Wife (2019), a posthumous show with Laverrière at Marian Goodman, she redesigned (dissolved) the walls in Plexiglass. It was still about interiority, but more in the way that air is interior to the legs of a table. Baghramian brings systems of analysis to work in order to change her own structures. It might be too much to call this infrastructural. So I will say

instead that she shows the mechanics of work. Work Desk for the Ambassador’s Wife included maquettes and drawings by Baghramian that were never meant to be made into sculptures. In Modèle vivant (2022) at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Baghramian seemed to wonder what artwork might look like from an archaeological perspective—that is, dug up after it has become extinct. New work—including enormous, fossil- or dental mold-like impressions on elaborate dark blue, green and violet powdercoated metal stands, and geometric aluminum panels suspended from the ceiling on polished stainless-steel poles, with other, coarser aluminum elements and C-prints of flies on animal skins attached—were all arranged around works from the museum’s collection. If the job of Baghramian’s sculpture was in some ways to be analogy, the historical works were asked to sincerely and somewhat anachronistically model how time changes shape. Live models. Life models. Imagine being responsible for making—or being—a model of life. Baghramian was intending something, I think, about artistic process and labor. How much can I rely on the artwork, or figure of the artist? What will she give me to help me understand? A recurring figure in the work since 2008, perhaps a counterpart to Laverrière’s actress, is the male escort, as in the exhibition, The Walker’s Day Off (2008) at the Kunsthalle BadenBaden. He needs structural support too; he bears the weight of our demand for charm and novelty. Beauty, a currency in every sense, is a complicated part of his job. Baghramian’s studio is in an industrial part of Berlin—something she does not want to fetishize. But it is where the actual mechanics are. When she first moved to the city with her family from Iran in the mid-1980s, it was customary for new buildings to receive colloquial nicknames, like the Washing Machine or the Oyster. This is something Baghramian thinks about: the shortest distance from alien to understanding, the economy of language and images, the way form enters into circulation through experience. Her sculptures must contend with the world they inhabit, one obsessed with legibility and output. How do works so heavy and in so abstract a language stay tenable; how do they live a life rather than only gesture at one? I really believe that form and its challenges are fundamental, and I think Baghramian does too. Form is the organization of meaning; it is nimble and living. Baghramian’s ability is in part to leverage the medium of sculpture in circulating formal ideas. As she wrote in Frieze Masters magazine in 2018, “My view on the present through the lens of the past is diverted by meandering around my surroundings and my own history”. The works address the anxiety and frustration and joy of universality as well as subjectivity. They will remain possible. They and I and she and all of it are just another part.

Amelia Stein is a writer, editor and teacher. She lives in London, UK.

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Exhibitions

Nairy Baghramian’s work occupies a nexus of relationships, cooperations and dialogues with designers, curators and fellow artists. Susanne Titz, Paulina Olowska, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Charles Aubin talk to Laura McLean-Ferris about how some of Baghramian’s past projects manifest this spirit of connectivity.

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Susanne Titz Director, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany I first saw Nairy’s work when she had an amazing installation titled Fourth Wall/Two Female Protagonists (2005) as part of her solo show at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne, Germany, that year. I realized she was thinking about the way a work can be both art and display as well. This interested me because I felt she was producing the entire space, as both artist and curator—an approach that connects to the Museum Abteiberg’s history. Artists collaborated with Johannes Cladders during his directorship here (1967–85), as a way of thinking about the institution, thinking about the role of art in the public sphere.

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When I invited her for a solo exhibition, Nairy responded that it would be much better to work in a constellation. The show we eventually planned, “Open Dress” (2014–15), with Lukas Duwenhögger, Lutz Bacher and Danh Võ, was more like a play: the museum was the stage, and it happened in four rehearsals. I like the term “rehearsal” because every part of the exhibition was in a state of flow. It was not set, showing the audience: “This is it, this is the result”. Instead the audience was invited to think about the possible reasons for what was there. For the first rehearsal we hung Lukas Duwenhögger’s paintings, which were rarely seen at that time, alongside other half-unwrapped works and crates. On the floor was Lutz Bacher’s Big Boy (1992)—a work based

on a puppet used in therapy sessions with kids who have been abused and who are not able to speak about things—but which has been scaled up about ten times. There was a 15th century Portuguese Christ figure in Danh Võ’s Dirty Dancing (2019) installation, and Nairy’s table sculpture from Formage de tête (2011), which always reminds me of an autopsy table or a butcher’s shop. Everything looked so rough and raw and so physical—very fleshy, in a way. For the subsequent rehearsals we produced a number of other scenes with the same objects. I think when Nairy was working on “Open Dress” she was concerned with how artists were being controlled or defined by others and being put in a position where they couldn’t define their own exhibitions. She was thinking of

Above Nairy Baghramian, Vierte Wand/Zwei Protagonistinnen, 2005. Courtesy: Wilhelm Schürmann Collection, Herzogenrath; photograph: Thor Broedreskift

the public presentation of art as something that needs to be determined and argued for by the artists themselves. This chimed so closely with ideas I had about the rewriting of art history since 1960. At that time, artists were much better informed than the curators, art historians and critics, and in a way, they taught everybody to change the modes of exhibition and the terms of art production and art presentation. I think Nairy is an artist who always reflects all of this, while also presenting sculpture that is itself, formally, so autonomous, so seductive. Her work creates a discourse around objects and the sculptural process that she is undertaking.

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Paulina Olowska Artist For a very long time, Nairy and I were always in conversation about our roles as women in art. We came from different backgrounds but we both had a sense of angst, and a desire to change the position of women. She was always inspirational to me in the radicality of her speech, and in the way she looked for answers through connecting to women artists from other generations. I’m a painter, while Nairy approaches things more from the point of view of sculpture: sculpture as a body, as a three-dimensional form. But we share a sense of narration, of building a story within a show. In the 2011 Venice Biennale I loved her presentation Formage de tête, in which

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she worked with the idea of sculpture belonging to the kitchen. So there were tables, reflections, hooks. It reminded me of the film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). There is always a sense of a question or a proposal in her exhibitions: the role of the artist doesn’t end at all when a work is made. For “Off Broadway” at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco, she invited other artists to be part of a structure where works would come on and off the “stage”. At that time I had been struggling to renovate a huge neon of a volleyball player on a building in Warsaw. Nairy asked me if I had any work about that, and we chose a neon that said Dancing (2007)—another piece I tried to renovate in Warsaw. It was a good choice because it is like a public

sculpture, so I felt it related to Nairy’s work as well as the theme. When I saw her installation Scruff of the Neck (2016) in a collection display at Tate Modern last year, it gave me shivers of pride because I really feel that every time, she moves the ancient subject of sculpture forward. She really grabs sculpture and connects it to the oddest things such as dentistry, dog bones, the tongue, skin, lips and so on. It seems to relate to appetite. I want to see her work more and more because every time she touches a new nerve of corporeal sensitivity. Nairy is one of my muses. She’s an absolute artist in a way, and I’m fascinated by watching her create work over the last 20 years and seeing her political engagement, her outspokenness and the way she really stands up for other

Above Nairy Baghramian, Scruff of the Neck (LL 23/24 & LR 26/27/ 28), 2016. Courtesy: Tate, London

artists as well. She is also not afraid to “play with the boys”. She can take on the big guys of sculpture like Claes Oldenburg and Franz West. There can only be one Franz West, right? Don’t fuck with Oldenberg. But Nairy, she does it in her own way. And she’s better.

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Hans Ulrich Obrist Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London When I first met Nairy, she was doing a residency at Studio Voltaire in London, and I made a studio visit together with Julia Peyton-Jones. We were absolutely blown away by what we saw. Nairy told us about the fact that she had come out of performance and dance, and had started to almost break down choreography into sculptural elements. So her sculptures in that sense were always connected to the body and to prosthetics and fragments: that was something which very much struck me at the time. I started doing studio visits when I was a teenager, and when I was 17, Fischli/Weiss sent me to see Rosemarie Trockel in Cologne, Germany. Rosemarie

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was really happy that I was visiting younger artists, but she thought I should also visit more pioneering artists. And she particularly talked about the idea that many extraordinary women artists hadn’t had enough visibility. She believed that I should always ask when visiting a city if there were pioneering artists whom I should visit. So since then, I have applied the Rosemarie Trockel methodology, which also led us to make a studio visit with Phyllida Barlow, as many younger artists told us about her. The nanosecond that Artforum’s end of the year issue arrives, I always go to the section where artists talk about other artists, because I love the idea of the artist’s artist: the generosity of artists talking about other artists. And I always remember this tiny paragraph that Nairy wrote about

Phyllida’s work. I thought it was fascinating, and that there was a real trans generational dialogue, and so that was the initial prompt for us to do a two-person show with them at the Serpentine in 2010. Nairy once told me that for her, sculp ture should have the possibility to not fulfill expectations, and maybe sculpture could change what we expect from it somehow. We felt that both she and Phyllida were brilliantly fulfilling that in such different ways, and thought it would be interesting to combine them. There was some very interesting asymmetry about their approaches because obviously, if the work was too similar, I think there would be something slightly reductive. I always think that genealogy can be a problem. Paradoxically, it reminds me of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s book on Sylvia Wynter, Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020). In it Gumbs

Above, left Nairy Baghramian and Phyllida Barlow, Nairy Baghramian Klassentreffen (Class Reunion), 2008, installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2010. Courtesy: © Nairy Baghramian and Heins Schürmann Collection, Herzogenrath; photograph: Raphael Hefti Above, right Nairy Baghramian and Phyllida Barlow, Nairy Baghramian Londoner Türsteher (London Bouncer), 2010, installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2010. Courtesy: © Nairy Baghramian and Serpentine Gallery; photograph: Raphael Hefti

writes so beautifully about the fact that her relationship to Wynter is not one of genealogy. It’s not like her work would be derived from hers genealogically, but that she is always thinking with Wynter. And that resonated with me a lot because that’s what I have always done with Édouard Glissant. It’s not a genealogy, it’s a toolbox. Nairy has always shared my conviction that we need to protest against forgetting. In this digital age, we can assume that information leads to more memory, and one can see this in her collaborations with Janette Laverrière, the extraordinary Swiss-French designer. So Nairy has always had in her practice that idea of talking about and working around artists from previous generations whom she admires and then connects to with her work. The work has such incredible potential as public art, as we have seen in the last

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couple of years. Each time we collaborate, for me, there is another window that opens into another dimension. Most recently, I saw in her studio an amazing body of drawings which I had no idea about. I just think there are probably so many facets to Nairy’s work that we don’t even know about yet. It has only just begun.

Below Nairy Baghramian and Maria Hassabi, with Janette Laverrière and Carlo Mollino, Entre Deux Actes (Ménage à Quatre), 2019, installation view, Performa 19

Charles Aubin Senior Curator and Head of Publications, Performa, New York A lot of Nairy’s sculptures allude to the idea of a prosthetic, or extension, or replication of limbs and body parts. She thinks in a very direct, corporeal sense, and the materials she uses (wax, rubber, resin …) often have a kind of tactile appeal. They make a direct call to the viewer in a physical way. During a studio visit back in 2018, Nairy told me about an installation that she had presented at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany—a collaboration with the designer Janette Laverrière called Entre Deux Actes II—Loge des Comédiennes, which was a reconfiguration of one of Janette’s designs from 1947, as an installation. It’s a green room for a singer. At the time, when she told me about this project, I was simultaneously in conversation with a space on Fifth Avenue in New York about partnering for Performa. It’s called 1014 now, but it was the old Goethe Institute building—an empty townhouse from 1907, facing the Met. I felt there was something to explore around its domestic aspect, and this is where the performance Entre Deux Actes (Ménage à Quatre) was eventually held. What I think is very special about Entre Deux Actes (Ménage à Quatre) is the way that Nairy is a true collaborator. She has a studio practice that she keeps private, but she also often makes space for projects that are more open-ended in their relationship to other artists. The green room with Janette was done very respectfully. It was not Nairy as a visual artist taking over the legacy or what this older modernist designer represents. It was a conversation. Nairy created the conditions for a very mindful collaboration. In New York, she also included her collection of Carlo Mollino photographs in the installation. They’re erotic images that the Italian architect and designer made in the 1960s, in secret, with a series of women who he would dress for the occasion in wigs and lingerie. These photoshoots were a performance for one, and that was something that Nairy was interested in. For Performa, we invited the choreographer Maria Hassabi to join in. Together, Nairy and Maria were very interested in seeing how you can mix up, or turn upside down, the quality of some of the spaces in the townhouse. So for instance, the parlor became Janette’s green room, and the ballroom the site for Maria’s very intimate duet—a space where you would usually expect to find group dances, social dances. Every time I see a show by Nairy, I feel as if I learn something new about sculpture and what it means to be a sculptor, whether as I said, that is the relationship to the body, or the relationship to matter, materiality and processes. Also, something that I find unusual and very impressive in Nairy’s work is that she does not really repeat herself, and yet you sense that her approach is consistent. Her engagement with sculpture, formally and conceptually, and her ability to push the limits of the medium makes her work unique. Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator. She lives in Turin, Italy.

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Nairy Baghramian is this year’s recipient of the Aspen Art Museum’s Award for Art, which is awarded at the museum’s annual ArtCrush Gala. For details of Aspen ArtWeek & the ArtCrush Gala please visit aspenartmuseum.org

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Exhibitions

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Exhibitions Former college roommates, artists Kerstin Brätsch and Allison Katz have a long history of sharing spaces for thinking and making throughout their careers and collaborations, as they discuss with curator Patrizia Dander.

Opposite Stills from Kerstin Brätsch, Allison Katz, Adele Röder, Georgia Sagri, Bahamas Composition, It’s Our Pleasure To Serve You, 2008. Courtesy: the artists

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PATRIZIA DANDER Allison, Kerstin, it’s a real pleasure to talk to both of you ahead of your projects at the Aspen Art Museum. Imagining both of you in the same institution is beautiful for many reasons, but first and foremost, because it means that once again you are cohabiting an institutional space. Even if this time you’ll be present with very different and independent projects, this speaks to your long history of sharing a space of thinking and making. Maybe we start at the beginning. It would be nice to hear from both of you when and where you met and what drew you to one another. KERSTIN BRÄTSCH We met in 2008 at Columbia University; we both did an MFA there. ALLISON KATZ Well, wait, actually, we were in school together, but also just by sheer coincidence or you could say, destiny, we were also roommates. I moved into your apartment in December after my first semester. So we got to share domestic space as well as this rigorous university setting. PD So how did you then start collaborating? I know you’ve always had an intense dialogue, but then you really started working on projects together. KB The first collaboration was It’s Our Pleasure to Serve You, the nondancing dance group named after New York deli coffee cups. AK I felt an immediate affinity with you, Kerstin, at school and felt really inspired and activated by your practice in ways I didn’t totally understand. From the beginning, so much of our conversation was natural, but also the way we both questioned things. We had an appetite for the same things, even if our paintings never looked the same—there was always a shared instinct to question. KB Yes, a curiosity. I was really drawn to your questioning of figuration and your ability to express that by analyzing material intuitively and translating it into language. The way you emerged within the painting process, but somehow looked at it from the outside. We didn’t talk so much about painting per se, but it was more about a common approach and interests, looking at things in similar ways. A shared humor or lightness. AK Almost like opposites attract in terms of visual endpoint. I was so drawn to your abstraction and this nonobjectivity that I couldn’t ever commit to. I always needed an image to get beyond it, whereas— KB —for me, it was the exact opposite. PD Thinking about your history of working together, I came back to an early video piece of yours with Georgia Sagri and Adele Röder—filmed during a trip to the Bahamas in 2008. It is a beautiful black and white travel video which shows three young women—the two of you and Georgia—walking around, performing in front of the camera. I like the casualness of it, and also the slapstick moments. The most striking aspect for me, though, is the role-playing—you take turns to fill the roles of actress, tourist, model, image maker. This way of slipping in and out of different roles that either you want to occupy or that you find yourself in as (female) artists or as painters, really feels like something that’s still very much at play in your respective practices. Could you describe if, and how, this aspect from 15 years ago still figures in your work?

AK That’s such a good question. I feel like the best thing about the dance group (that wasn’t really dance or performance), was its spontaneity. We worked with a script that we could then manipulate. In some ways that was also how we painted. KB We had a very fluid sense of ourselves and what we were doing, and how we would relate to space and each other. Spontaneity was key, but also this mix between authenticity and irony. This trip and essentially the video happened because our friend had to get her visa renewed. It wasn’t like a commentary—we were in the moment. It was almost like a spider’s web where we went in different directions and then came back again. A moment to breathe. And as painters, we opted to work in a medium we didn’t feel at home in. PD One can totally sense the intuitive approach to the situation in the video. But at the same time, there seems to be something very on point about this: what does it mean to be a female performer in front of a camera? And how to undo these roles and attributions? I have a sense that this still holds today in terms of the way both of you think of your practices. How you, Allison, basically, use language and painting, moving in and out of different representational systems. While for you, Kerstin, it’s a lot about who you collaborate with and in what constellation. This video already seems to open up a lot of the questions that you are looking at in your work. AK It’s so true. We were very clear from the start that we could balance our doubt with our belief and vice versa. By being together, we could risk not painting. I personally felt that I needed the group to try out these ideas, away from the canvas. I came back to the frame with more bravery and freedom based on this shared experience. Even today, I still take a sense of permission from Kerstin’s practice. KB Yet all these questions you just raised, Patrizia, were abstract and not really formulated when we started painting. Within the non-dance group, moving our bodies, using our gestures, our facial expressions—it was so literal. It was all about a certain dispersion of the self. In terms of translating this into painting, my German professor before Columbia was not a painter, so for me it’s still about a relational aspect in painting and how to relate painting to the body, whether it’s psychic, physical, social or mental. All my different approaches, with artisans, collaborators, or within different mediums—it’s still the same investigation. PD As you said, Allison, you come from very different angles in your approaches to painting, despite your many shared interests. You have a strong leaning towards language—using motifs like words, you create an idiosyncratic syntax or even a visual language of its own. AK Every painter begins with their own handwriting, the way they unconsciously make a mark. I believe in that, but I also want to challenge it, to push that so-called natural instinct horizontally, into as many variations as I can. It’s like seeing how many painters I can be. I’m not striving to consolidate into a single voice. I think of painting as a conversation, a multiplicity of voices driving the act. I also mean that

literally, on a practical level, language generates visual ideas for me. Writing, reading, speaking. The naming that goes along with looking is the ultimate game of creation. Rhyme, wordplay, slips of the tongue, chance, euphemism, quotes … all these everyday poetics open up pictorial possibilities. PD The way you describe markmaking as a tool to embody different ways of painting is, I think, something that is very closely connected to your practice, Kerstin. You literally do just that. By bringing other people in to constantly change your practice through the skills and material knowledge they can provide, as master marbler, stucco, mosaic or stained-glass craftsmen. KB In my case, there’s a certain delay and extension of my signature via the craft processes. You work within the same parameters in painting: light and color. But it’s my brushstroke materialized as stained glass. If I use a tradition like marbling, a liquified painting where you exchange the brushstroke with a drop of ink, that is a questioning of conventional painting practices. Or with the stucco marmo that creates something solid with powder: It’s like the painterly pigment has crystallized and collected time, creating a fossil painting. These artisan practices aren’t painting per se, but when you look at the translational gap of natural forces—heat, water, fossilization—from a painter’s perspective, that changes. You achieve new conditions of painting through a different materiality. PD Talking about self-dispersal, I was really struck by the amount of trust that the two of you have. I think one of the most poignant examples is, when you, Allison, wrote a lecture for and in the name of, Kerstin. What interested you in doing that? AK For me, it was an opportunity to really put into practice this idea of sharing and to see how it is both a challenge and an opportunity for expansion—to really believe that your voice is made up of other voices. Through love and trust, one can take a risk and see what new thoughts emerge. I was really grateful because it’s actually quite a novel thing to take on someone else’s voice. I felt entrusted with that weight but was also really inspired by speaking not as myself. There’s a lot of freedom and humor in that. It loosens up ideas of self and it demonstrates how ideas exceed any one person or moment. Kerstin and I could be attracted to the same thing but through our different embodied experience, we will do something different. So even the idea of an idea gets undone, and becomes much more ephemeral and giving. PD Kerstin, can you talk about your experience of working with so many different people in so many different ways? KB My art-making is a space where different practices come together—that extends into different media and different people. As Allison just mentioned, it’s based on trust that builds something which is almost ineffable or unpredictable, because one plus one is not two. One plus one becomes a third entity. With my collaborators I have a shared life experience, and they have to be as willing as I am to walk into the unknown; to be able to see a new perspective. I’ve been painting for decades, but I walk into the moment

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Exhibitions with the painting as if I’ve never painted before and may discover something unfamiliar in the familiar. PD In closing, can we talk about the projects that you have coming up for the Aspen Art Museum? In very different ways, these rely on either imagined or actual conversations or collaborations. In your instance, Allison, your research into Pompeii, while your proposal Kerstin, relates to your history of collaborative making. Allison, what are you currently thinking you might be doing? AK First, I just wanted to say, the fact that we are exhibiting at the same time is a coincidence. And I feel this is one of the gifts of our friendship, that these things happen, whether or not we even plan them. I love that. In Aspen I am going to be researching artworks from local, personal collections to create an exhibition around origin stories of display based on the design and use of Ancient Roman houses. I am looking at the ways in which certain ideas of identity, framing and value originated in this mixed-up use of domestic, public and mercantile space. I am hoping to be able to borrow fragments of frescoes and other objects from the archives of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, in Italy, where I was recently a Fellow, to transplant them into a contemporary context and think about how artworks are relational and can be seen anew within different conceptual frameworks. Based on this structure, I will also present my own new paintings, created in response to this archeological research, but which dovetail with pre-existing subjects and motifs, since these themes have been preoccupying me since I first started painting! KB Hearing you explain this is fascinating, your starting point is the remnants of mosaics and ruins, while I’m using that technique. My rooftop commission takes up the idea of our daily profane space, the home, and how it gets extended outwards, almost into a transcendental realm: I’m working on mosaic benches for people to sit on and stained-glass constructions for climbing plants and nesting birds. I consider the mosaic a traversable painting facing the sky, allowing body, nature and art to merge into each other. The lifespan of the artwork can stretch into a different paradigm of time by including natural life. AK Exactly. I think there are so many affinities just through things that we’ve always been interested in, but in this context, it’s almost exaggerated in a really exciting way. PD And I think that is really beautiful in relation to Pompeii. Through the volcano erupting, the city was conserved. If this natural disaster had not occurred, we might not even know about Pompeii because it might have fallen apart and rotted. It really raises the question of, what is the life of art? It feels very pertinent to our time— these questions of preservation, in view of the energy crisis and climate change. I see a whole firework of connections popping up between the two projects you have in mind.

Patrizia Dander is Head of Curatorial Department at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany.

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Below, top Allison Katz, The Cockfather, 2021. Courtesy: the artist Below, bottom Allison Katz Pompeii Circumstance (Hippolytus), 2023 artist’s posters shot in situ at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, January 2023. Courtesy: the artist and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii; photograph: Amedeo Benestante

To receive news of Kerstin Brätsch and Allison Katz’s upcoming projects and keep up-to-date with all our news, sign up to our newsletter via our website aspenartmuseum.org

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Exhibitions Below, top Kerstin Brätsch, Single Brushstrokes in Lead (Elephant), 2019. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Heidi Bohnenkamp Below, bottom Kerstin Brätsch, Stone Mimicry, 2021. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Andrea Rossetti

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Exhibitions “A Lover’s Discourse”, a new series of artist-led presentations opening this summer at the museum, juxtaposes recent works by early-career artists with companion pieces they have selected from private collections around Aspen. Participants include Guglielmo Castelli, Chase Hall, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Zeinab Saleh, Issy Wood and Ulala Imai, who talked about her dialogue with image-making, past and present, to Terence Trouillot.

A LOVER’S DISCOURSE TERENCE TROUILLOT Ulala, can you tell me a little bit about your contribution to the exhibition “A Lover’s Discourse”, on view at the Aspen Art Museum this summer. The work you’re presenting is aptly titled Lovers [2023] and depicts the Peanuts characters, Charlie Brown and Lucy van Pelt, suspended in a thicket of trees. I know this is an ongoing series so I’m curious to know what inspired you to make this work? ULALA IMAI The first time I worked on the tree motif was in my yard. My garden is not colorful. It’s simple, with just a row of green trees. I came up with the idea of putting Charlie there in a green outfit and Lucy in a red outfit, then had the idea of lining them up.

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Opposite, top Ulala Imai in her studio in Kanagawa, Japan, May 2023 Photography Keita Goto Opposite, bottom Ulala Imai, Lovers, 2023. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Kei Okano

When I put them side by side and let them sit on the branches of the trees, they gazed into the distance. Sometimes they looked positive, sometimes they looked lost in reminiscence. This is a theme I have been working on for several years, changing it up from time to time. TT I know a lot of your work is inspired by your own childhood and you often paint still lifes of your own childrens’ toys. Is the series “Lovers” an example of this and if so, what is your relationship to these characters from Peanuts? UI When I started painting toys, it began with a display cabinet showing a small collection of souvenirs that my grandmother, who enjoyed traveling in Europe every year, had collected little

by little over time. It was a series of various characters brought together in one setting called “Gathering”, which I have continued to paint for many years. “Lovers” was originally inspired by a vintage Steiff monkey I had in my collection and a yellow bear, which I don’t know where it came from. I painted them together and at first, the series was called “Hold”, as I showed them play-fighting. Somewhere along the way, they became a mysterious couple: one of them restrains the other, who somehow appears resigned to this act. The Peanuts series started when I bought Charlie and Lucy soft toys in a flea market somewhere on my travels. I was drawn to the combination of red and green outfits and the simplicity of the smiley faces.

When I made this work, I was planning an exhibition at Nonaka-Hill in Los Angeles. The front of the gallery is marked by a retro electric sign, a remnant from its former use as a dry cleaners. It was my first solo exhibition in the United States and this sign made a strong impression on me. When I imagined the work I could see through the sign, I wanted to paint big “Lovers” paintings. This show in the US led me to actively work on large paintings. TT The exhibition in Aspen is titled after Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments [1977], a theoretical book looking at “fragments”, as it were, of love. Can you discuss how your work speaks to this idea? UI In the chapter of the book, “souvenir / remembrance”, I was very

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sympathetic to the lyrics of Puccini’s opera, Tosca: “‘The stars were shining.’ Never again will this happiness return just this way. Anamnesis both fulfills and lacerates me.” Roland Barthes says that “the imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn’t move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection …”. My solo exhibition at Union Pacific in London in 2022 was titled “Reminiscence”. My works are very ordinary paintings that capture a moment in mundane, everyday life. Each day seems to be a repetition of the same thing, but in reality, time is definitely moving on. The source of my work is somewhat sentimental, coming from the feeling I have every day that I will never see this wonderful moment or situation again. I am especially struck by the joy and sadness of young lovers I see on the streets, who see nothing but each other. Knowing that their passion cannot last forever, I am tempted to use soft toys to preserve their happiness in my paintings. This is one of the recurring motifs in the “Lovers” series (2020–ongoing). TT The premise of the show in Aspen is to invite contemporary artists to showcase their own work alongside pieces borrowed from private collections in the local community, selected by the artist. I know, as of today, you are still deliberating between two works: Thomas Moran’s Grand Canyon of Arizona From Hermit Rim Road [1913] and Georgia Engelhard’s White Mountain [c.1930s]. Both works are quite different from each other and, more prominently, from your work as well. And yet, both works hail from two different periods/ traditions of American landscape painting. Can you tell me a little bit about this choice and perhaps how landscape painting comes into focus in your work, particularly “Lovers”? UI In romantic landscapes of the Hudson River School, or in images of snowy mountains by Engelhard, lovers are often shown leaning against the branches of a riverside tree, conversing about hopes for the future. I think either pairing feels positive and natural; I am looking forward to it. I felt that a sculpture was needed in the exhibition and I immediately thought of Austrian artist Soshiro Matsubara’s work with

UPCOMING PRESENTATIONS Zeinab Saleh: June 22—July 22, 2023 Chase Hall: July 27—August 27, 2023

lamps. I feel that his romantic works will enrich the presentation. TT As a Japanese artist, can you speak a bit about your relationship to Americana and US culture, particularly mainstream and popular culture? Is there a critique being made on your part or is it more personal than anything else? UI I was born and raised in Japan. When I painted familiar motifs in oil, I had no qualms about the fact that they were American or European in feel. Japan is known for its unique otaku culture, but the motifs that I myself deal with are very personal and I have never consciously tried to put them in any context. TT What does your painting process entail? Can you give me a snapshot of what your studio practice looks like? UI I generally take pictures on my iPhone, print them out on paper and then paint on canvas as I look at them. My studio takes up most of the living room of our family home. There is not much of a boundary between my personal and professional life. I work while spending time with my family, and I work while cooking. TT Humor seems to permeate your work as well. Can you talk about how it becomes a subject for you? UI At first, I do not have a partic ular theme in mind and I choose elements at random and arrange them. But as I rearrange them to achieve a satisfactory composition, change the cast and consider dramatic lighting, a story naturally emerges. It’s always funny and makes me laugh. I hope that each viewer will interpret the work according to his or her mood at the time, but I am also more than happy if they see it as just a still-life painting. Perhaps the humor in my work is a fine line between frankness and silliness. TT Aside from childhood toys and your use of landscape, or specifically foliage, you often paint food in various permutations. How has food become a significant player in your oeuvre? UI My favorite place in the house is the kitchen. My childhood dream was to be a pastry chef. I wanted to whip cream and frost cakes all day. It was definitely Western painting that sparked my interest in painting food. As a child, I was shocked by the expressive power of oil paintings, which are more realistic in terms of texture and even ripeness than the depthless, flat paintings of Japanese painting. I love oil painting. I prefer still life and landscape paintings to other subjects, and food is a wonderful motif that easily appeals to the viewer’s five senses. When my eyes grew tired of looking at academic paintings in pursuit of realism, Manet’s still lifes, depicting food in a fresh and delicious manner with a few brush strokes, gave me another shock. I thought it was very cool. I think oil painting is the best way to express the freshness of food. I feel this especially when painting buttered toast, where I use a knife to apply butter-colored oil paint to the canvas as if I were actually spreading butter on toast.

Ulala Imai: September 1—October 1, 2023 Stanislava Kovalcikova: October 6—November 5, 2023

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Guglielmo Castelli: November 10—December 10, 2023

Terence Trouillot is senior editor of frieze. He lives in New York, USA.

Issy Wood: December 14, 2023— January 14, 2024

Ulala Imai’s show runs from September 1 to October 1; it is part of the ongoing program “A Lover’s Discourse”. Discover more via our website: aspenartmuseum.org

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Redefine Outdoor Comfort AUSTRALIAN BORN. HANDCRAFTED SINCE 1976

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Reader,

Irena Haiduk, Code of Conduct (FAQ )

Irena Haiduk currently lives and works in the year 2136. She is available through a dimensional transmitter that locates her Biotic Tag, a form of embodied ID marker that allows her to separate her physical body from any level of her consciousness. Two years ago, Nicola Lees and Haiduk met in Aspen, Colorado, and began a conversation about finding forms to hold art, the exhibition as a medium and exhibition design. They took a long green walk with Lees’s dog Lutz and spoke about the rehabilitation of the camera, traditionally used as an image-capturing apparatus. This optical intelligence, incepted as a weapon, “shoots” things to possess them, and uploads the evidence: a culmination of centuries of technological development focused on the eye. Haiduk reported that following the 21st century Climate Cataclysm, the camera gets restored to its original use, meaning a chamber or a room, a place where images can accumulate over time in an embodied, intentional way, and where this process can be witnessed in public. The camera could host again. It formed a studio, a place artists offer to the world, a place for study where one can give up control of oneself to learn something about oneself. This loss of control, letting the unknown in, is akin to being possessed by a demon. This kind of hosting turns possession on its head and challenges the idea of safe, inert display and collection. Instead of embalming, preservation and eternity, instead of inanimate assets inside exhibitions— a demonstration, demon, demos, monstera, a living public studio, where to host allows letting other(s) work through you, to become another self. Haiduk’s own work is invested in relationships between aesthetics and economy, image ecology and the way that economic infrastructure leaves clear aesthetic marks. She believes that to work in an aesthetic field rooted in making desires, to make art today, is to share the responsibility for what aesthetic economies maintain. Desires, many of them powered by art, brought us here. As our planet becomes impossible to physically inhabit, it is urgent to ask again, from many directions and on every level: what is art for? Can it find forms that do not make us want to dispose of ourselves? At this time, Haiduk offers an orientation, the same that Lees underwent in 2022, to prepare ground for different conversations to come. Note that this procedure auto-generates your individual Biotic Tag, one that you may use in future encounters.

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2135 LT (Linear Time) 1377,Pi–B CT (Carbon Time)

Smoothing . . .

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Welcome to the Altamira Cave Complex (ACC)! Before entering, note that the Complex is self-sealing and sensitive to pings, whether conscious, subconscious, unconscious or physical. All visitors, regardless of waking state, activate an instant host glare corresponding to the language, physiognomy and position of their Biotic Tag. Your Biotic Tag ping triggered this set. Due to Halley’s Comet, only dream state visits are allowed at this time. Your Dream State Entry Permit Request is approved. Since your source is positioned in the extreme of Orion Spur, epigenetic recording is possible. Altamira Cave Complex does not auto-record. Use self.

The following questions will help orient your Biotic Tag.

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Smoothing . . . Who can visit Altamira Cave Complex? Only those authorized for dream state visits can enter ACC. To qualify for entry, kindly proceed with the following ACC Dream State Entry Permit.

Produced for ITA (2021–22) and Frieze + AAM (2023)

Who is currently housed at ACC? Majority of “Western Masterpiece Painting” from 1403 LT until 1968 LT, formerly protected by UNESCO Cultural Property Laws, are housed at ACC. In 2054 LT, when Cultural Property Protections were suspended and invalidated, these former assets were given as Re-Animate Objects and released from their collections. They arrived at ACC for repair procedures in 2077 LT, when systemwide ownership codes were replaced with charters of use. Following reclassification, these Re-Animate Objects no longer required strict preservation conditions mandated by previously encyclopedic museum collections, insurance companies and philanthropic holdings of the 20th and early 21st centuries LT. At the current time marker, conservation and preservation are isolation-grade crimes: forceful imprisonment and embalming. Depending on their generation, our residents have each endured somewhere between one and three centuries (LT) of conservation. To recover, they are placed in ACC for a hekayear CT quarantine. Why were they placed under a hekayear CT quarantine? Art Recovery Initiative of 2077 LT has selected these Re-Animate Objects carefully over a period of a dekayear CT. Their inestimable financial valuation, museological display and storage requirements were marked detrimental to the founding of a New Image Ecology. This initiative, art field-wide, was tasked with restoring sensual degradation and optical drives responsible for 21st century LT Climate Cataclysm on Earth. In their original exhibition context, the residents of ACC were tagged as broken, distressed and unsafe for the New Image Ecology. Their recovery starts by allowing them to feel time again, to heal from the stigma of eternity—a condition prized by their former hosts, who treated things as property. As Re-Animate Objects, the ACC regards them as reanimate beings requiring rehabilitation, nourishment and, ultimately, living. Is it safe to enter AAC? It is not safe to enter Altamira Cave Complex lacking the mandatory Dream State Permit. Seizures and permanent trauma may likely occur and lead to biotic Sense-degradation and dream paralysis. Dream State Permit allows visitors to understand the historical context and use of residents at the time of their creation, their exhibition and their role in building the Western Aesthetic Canon, responsible for the array of deadly drives that culminated in the Climate Asset Wars in the first half of the 21st century LT. The permit also allows the images inside to imprint safely onto your unconscious vent. It is equally important that your visit does not trigger the kind of gaze the residents are recovering from. Why was Altamira Cave Complex chosen as a host? Altamira Cave Complex was chosen in 2077 LT because of its archaic use properties. The last century brought an aesthetic reckoning. In the early 20th century LT, a group of artists noticed that the cave paintings, previously thought rudimentary, exhibited qualities vastly more sophisticated than the new art of the artist-group’s own time. The “contemporary”, relating to the art of the present, was abandoned together with the linear time acceleration. The cave paintings encompassed all media simultaneously: scoring, drawing, printing, stamping, painting, sculpture, performance, music and—with the addition of fire’s stroboscopic effect—animation and narrative cinema. They were not owned, but living architectures. The artists wondered at length. They struggled to understand how the first recorded artworks had already been what “contemporary art” now claimed to be for the first time. Had a 38,000 year-long intermission (LT) transpired unnoticed? They narrowed the point of art’s sharpest decline to what was called Enlightenment in the West and its descendants.

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The Enlightenment put light (lux, sol), a radiation that makes vision possible to the human eye, in a binary with darkness. Light denoted knowledge and the Enlightenment shed light on the unknown, the dark. At ACC, lightness is familial to darkness. It denotes a lightening up, a buoyancy. Its dust and dirt are some of the finest, the faintest ever recorded. At ACC, enlightenment denotes a process of adding layers of micro-pearl dust onto Altamira Cave residents’ already pristine structures. In 2057 LT, Altamira was the first site equipped with a dimensional translator, the device allowing it to speak. It was also the first to volunteer as a recovery site through its own speech channel. Is ACC dust and dirt synthetic? At ACC, both occur naturally. In 2054 LT when Cultural Property Protections were suspended and invalidated, the preservation of the Altamira Caves as a World Heritage Site ceased. Sedimented dust and dirt showed as micro-pearls with no measurable physical weight. Further tests implied that, if charged with the Xi magnet (Xi-mag), the dust would remain aloft, floating and growing denser over time. In 2058 LT, ACC placed Xi-mag chargers at 20-meter intervals, thus creating a micro-pearl dust atmosphere in perpetual suspension. As the residents arrived, the first step in their recovery was being Fi-charged and pinned against the dim cave walls. Fi-charge attracted the Xi-charged dust, which covered the residents fully upon entry. The ACC provides continuous dust and dirt sedimentation to those who were prohibited from aging and feeling the passage of time. As a first step in feeling time, the residents feel the falling of dust. The dust cover acts in three ways: embracing the residents by making them lighter; physically releasing the hold of conservation; and, nullifying residents’ derivative value as speculative property. The ACC gifts the dust and dirt to the residents and through it, its codes of use and life. Under this influence, many of the residents develop their own relationships to the dust and allow parts of it to be incorporated to create new forms. Some residents grow thicker and others thinner, some change color, some move. These forms cannot be predicted. The process of recovery is different for each resident. Can the visitors of ACC witness this form shift? Certainly, as this is one of the primary motives to enter. The Dream State Permit charges your Biotic Tag with a slight Z-magnet (Z-mag), so that as you enter the ACC the micro-pearl dust in your path swims away from you. Since the caves are not lit, except by the naturally occurring oculi, shift to somatic senses to supplement vision as needed. Note that as you near the artworks leaning at the base of the cave walls, your approach may or may not shift the dust around them. Each resident has a Z-mag block in case they do not want to be disturbed. If they allow the dust to shift, the dust particles they have already incorporated will remain in place. Regardless, you may move as you please through the cave and remain as long as you like. In Dream State Visits the ACC can be comfortably occupied by 280 biotics, but every one of your co-visitors manifests, to you, as an elongated vector shifting the micro-pearl dirt. Are all the residents of ACC arranged in the same way? No. Two kinds of exceptions are present: 1. ACC has felt some physical movement of its residents beyond dust incorporation. Those remain unrecorded to provide privacy. The residents are not subjects of study. They can be visited only if they seek company. ACC provides them with the option. 2. Certain residents arrived with occupancy instructions prescribed by the Art Recovery Initiative, for the initial period of their stay. For example, in the ACC entrance hall, two residents received such prescriptions. With their permission we will use their prescriber’s argument notes as examples A and B below.

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2135 LT (Linear Time) 1377,Pi–B CT (Carbon Time)

Example A

Begin Argument Notes Example B: Stilleven met vergulde bokaal

ACC places Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer in the middle of the ACC entrance hall, where it greets residents upon arrival. A small, U-shaped channel on the ground supports it. In this way, the maximum dose of micro-pearl dirt is immediately charged. Upon dispossession, the auditory hallucinations of this resident ceased instantly. Over the last two dekayears CT, the back of the painting has grown a face with olive-green eyes. It will remain unvisited until further notice.

This painting, called Still Life with a Gilt Cup, was painted in 1635 LT by the Dutch still life painter, Willem Claesz Heda. His work was almost strictly stilleven (or “dead nature” as in the French, nature morte, the Russian, натюрморт, and the Spanish, la naturaleza muerta). Heda’s compositions often included pewter, silver, gold, damask, tapestry, oysters, salt, lemons, glass, porcelain, tea, exotic fruits and mother-of-pearl among other rare and luxurious items. Slight color accents enhanced Heda’s refined, low-key palette. Heda’s shine and light had at the same time immense detail and differed vastly from his colleagues’ more energetic arrangements.

Begin Argument Notes for Example. A: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer This painting was called Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Caspar David Friedrich painted it circa 1818 LT. Previously this work of German Romanticism qualified as a masterpiece. A male, pink-skinned, Caucasian, blond subject, with a narrow, straight back, square and tight buttocks, thick wiry, muscular legs covered by a dark navy overcoat, stands with no help from his cane atop a tall cliff or a mountain summit. His hand is stroking his left thigh. His head is between two hillsides, inhaling the vapors below. The subject turns his back to the viewers. This position was termed Rückenfigur (in German Der Rücken denotes the back of a human body). Unlike in traditional portraiture painting, where a posing subject faces us, Friedrich championed people with their backs turned and fronts obscured. The rest of the painting (scanning from the bottom up) depicts a horizontal band of mist holding a range of near rocks with trees, covered by a second layer of mist, two intersecting plateaus, a third horizontal band of mist, then hills and mountain ranges on the left met by a vertical cliff on the right receding into a horizon line and a thinly-clouded day sky. The Wanderer gazed over the landscape, feeling what is canonized as fernweh (in German fern = “far” + weh = “pain”, meaning sickness or longing for the faraway, antonym of Heimweh, from the German heim meaning “home”, thereby “homesickness”). The Wanderer resides at ACC with three prescription arguments: 1. The Wanderer’s fernweh formalized and transmitted the idea of ambiguous, unconditionally available landscape, extended to the earth’s horizon, depopulated of its expendable inhabitants. The Wanderer is a double of the colonial explorer who aimed to own the whole world, its unknown parts especially. The Wanderer could not live with the unknown. His desire meant a freedom over all to capture, define, map, grid, list, rename and rebuild. From the terra firma atop his cliff, he surveyed all. Where will he go next? What will he next acquire? Master? Voiceless lands called. Freedom itself became his possession, an asset to trade, gift, rescind. Like fire he consumed the world. 2. The Wanderer modeled a noxious spectatorship: to those following he says looking is enough. His spectatorship incited no action, regardless of what transpired ahead. 3. The companionless, certain Wanderer’s position forced viewers to follow his turned back. The summit beckoned, the panorama steps away. A bit ahead, we are where he is, in a way who he is. This abstraction is Friedrich’s most dangerous device: to beckon us to join the Wanderer in his desire to walk, look and see alone. As one. End Argument Notes for Example A: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

Example B Stilleven met vergulde bokaal prescription mandated that for the first dekayear CT of its residence, the painting be placed, face-up, on a freestanding rock left of the entrance to the ACC. Just now this resident has absorbed enough micro-pearl dust to have lost 300mg of mass. It is now a warm clay gray with slight yellow accents and allows Dream State Visits.

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Stilleven resides at ACC for three prescription arguments: 1. Each thing here depicted—placed just so, as though coming from nowhere—flows from colonial conquest and economic warfare. The violence of this taking and those violated are fully absent from the scene, and this absence varnished over, presented as so much living, so much difference miraculously made still. Yet as much as the painted stuffs, Heda’s panel itself was a prestigious object: still more movable finery positioned to incite further extraction. 2. Stilleven obscures a line of meaning blatantly present in all paintings of its kind. It classes things, administers life. The lemon is peeled, the butterfly is alive, the fabric is inanimate, as is the salt as well, the cup is a thing, the bird is an animal. These classification codes are buried one floor below the surface, and catalog a second intelligence, separating what is living and what is dead, training their spectator to think they know the difference. Ultimately, such a thinking eye gave itself the freedom to decide what lives or dies, what is human and what is thing. It imagined that mental looking alone transformed the very states of the beings and things of the world. 3. Stilleven is the progenitor of product photography. In the light of Climate Asset Wars, all pictures inciting desire for consuming alienation and abstracting violent production form a kind of catalog. This catalog serves as a reminder that it destroyed everything it pictured. End Argument Notes Example B: Stilleven met vergulde bokaal Smoothing. . . Are Prescription Argument Notes available for all residents of ACC? No. Only the residents open to Dream State Visits make their argument notes available. Before you approach, to keep you both safe, their notes will imprint on your unconscious vent. Your current psy-notes will imprint on theirs. If you have any additional questions and concerns the host glare will hear them now. Smoothing . . . To proceed, grant access to your psy-notes now. Smoothing . . . To complete your Dream State Permit and initiate charge recalibration of your Biotic Tag, ping now. Smoothing . . .

Enter.

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Liza Lou, Going to California, 2021 (detail)

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A SPE N A RT M USE U M

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Learning

YOUTH ART EXPO The Aspen Art Museum’s biennial youth exhibition has been at the heart of its wider community for more than 40 years. Its 2023 program was another gem.

How can museums nurture the next generation’s artistic talents? How might a child’s creative confidence blossom when their artwork is exhibited on the walls of a gallery versus the door of a refrigerator? At the heart of the Aspen Art Museum’s education program is the biennial exhibition, the Youth Art Expo. Generating and gathering over 1,000 artworks made by K–12 students from throughout the Roaring Fork Valley and towns beyond, it is a collaborative, ambitious and one-of-a-kind project that has played an important part in the museum’s history since it began back in the 1980s. The 2023 edition took up the theme of “Puppets, Masks and Storytelling” and was organized by the education department in collaboration with the Puerto Rican puppetry collective,

Poncili Creación, founded in 2012 by twin brothers Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro, and the New York non-profit, MAPS (Music, Art, Puppet, Sound), founded in 2017 by artist Rachel Sherk and musician Aaron Rourk. This year’s exhibition opened on April 29th with a day-long celebration including pancakes, music and dancing rollerskaters. The headline event, however, was a set of raucous, interactive performances in the exhibition, set to energizing electronic music with intricately designed, handmade puppets that combined monstrous lifeforms with elements from the natural world. Featuring the four artists that comprise the two duos, as well as participating teens from the museum’s ongoing “Art in the Field” program, the performances were captivating, wild, full

of laughter and uninhibited screeches. Towering puppets loomed and babbled over a delighted audience of young and old alike; seemingly inanimate objects sprung limbs and came to life. Surrounding the cacophony were puppets made by the featured young artists. In short, it was a joyous synthesis and potent reminder of the diverse, powerful creativity of youth. The exhibition was on view for the whole of May, with masks, costumes, monsters, magic landscapes, birds in flight, stages for ad hoc performances spread across two floors of the museum—over two thirds of the space. Hugely popular with the wider community, the team welcomed many new faces and a great number of people were inspired to visit the museum for the first time.

Below and Opposite Images from this year’s Youth Art Expo and related events. Courtesy: The Aspen Art Museum; photographs: Simon Klein

Learn more about our learning programs, including our summer workshops, via our website: aspenartmuseum.org/ learning To support these initiatives, you can donate or become a member: aspenartmuseum.org/join

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A series of free, drop-in workshops were held at the museum in March and April, providing materials and mentorship for those wishing to participate and make their own puppets on site. The Aspen Art Museum is dedicated to taking this work down-valley, and mobilized to bring their lessons and supplies to educators throughout the Valley and to the towns of Gypsum and Rifle, offering teachers in the area adaptable lesson plans, information, materials paid for by the museum and instructional videos developed by guest artists. Schools could tailor their projects to their own needs and interests—whether the time available was 40 minutes or 4 months—the aim was to offer something flexible and inclusive, to encourage creativity for all. And for budding artists from around the world, anywhere with an internet connection, the museum provided free, artist-made tutorial videos via its website in both Spanish and English, allowing children to create wherever they were: at home, school, community spaces or in the great outdoors. This remarkable opportunity to be taught by two of today’s most inventive performance duos, was granted to as many children as possible. This is a vital component of the education department’s mission: to create shareable, modular lessons led by artists that transcend the walls of the museum and inspire as many students as possible. For the children involved, this was an extraordinary opportunity to receive support and inspiration from a community of creatives; to be allowed total freedom and a nurturing space in which to explore and express their ideas. Then, at the end, they were able to present their works to friends, family and the wider public within the walls of a world-renowned museum. Feeding enthusiasm and building confidence for the next generation, Youth Art Expo gives an essential platform to the young voices in the region and celebrates the energy and creativity of local youth.

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Nairy Baghramian Photographed by Juergen Teller

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A SPE N A RT M USE U M

SU M M E R 2 0 2 3 E DI T ION

Aspen Heritage

The Aspen Complex, edited by Martin Beck, draws on the events of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen, which marked a turning point in design thinking and had a lasting impact on art, architecture, ecology and social movements. In the context of this history, the Aspen Art Museum asks Emily King and Prem Krishnamurthy what it would feel like to bring a global conference to Aspen in the 21st century.

THE ASPEN COMPLEX Opposite Students from Northern Illinois University create a “sculpture” of wrecked cars near the Paepcke Amphitheatre where the 19th International Design Conference is being held, Aspen, June 1969. Courtesy: Denver Post and Getty Images

EMILY KING I wanted to begin by talking about the values that the International Design Conference in Aspen was aspiring to when it began in 1951: the idea, promoted by its founder, Walter Paepcke, that the captains of industry were responsible for the cultural life of the USA. These were then pretty com prehensively rejected at the conference in 1970. But how do they sound to you now? PREM KRISHNAMURTHY There’s something idealistic and utopian about them. That moment of 1950s America—the belief that there’s no contradiction between capitalism and consumption and environmental questions. It was of course a very, very different moment from 1970. In the ’70s and ’80s—that’s when the financialization of the world blew up. Reading Alice Twemlow’s essay in Martin Beck’s book about the 1970 Aspen conference, it’s interesting to see how that event prefigures ideas that later end up in culture at large and in the art world in particular. The conflict that happened there between different

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modes of presentation and participation—between a frontal, lecture-heavy, informational mode, and a more experimental, relational, participatory mode that involved games and workshops—it took a while for those ideas to make it into the art world, for example. Design is often a bit ahead of the curve. EK Having had a conventional history of design education, initially I bought into Aspen just as it was sold—a glorious bringing of good design to commercial corporate activity. When you look at that era of graphic design, it’s very stylish, which seduces you into buying the idea that design could improve corporate America in a really straightforward way. PK I found it really fascinating that the talks delivered at the Aspen conference were published as texts for distribution to attendees beforehand. It’s harder to critique a presentation when you hear it in real time than when you have the chance to review it at your own pace. It takes more presence to be responsive to what’s happening in the room, responsive to what’s happening in the world in the moment. Now, even

though you can often read a transcript of a conversation, it seems we’re becoming an oral culture again. We listen to podcasts, to books. EK We were meant to have been a visual culture, but do you think that has shifted? PK I think it’s happening. You still have a lot of visuality—TikTok, Instagram—but life now has become about multitasking. We are so used to trying to compress our time doing multiple things. Listening to a podcast while we run, for example. I’ve been trying to go back to monotasking and spending less time distracted. I’m actually really optimistic about how the pandemic has shifted our modes of interacting with other people. A 50-minute frontal lecture with five minutes for questions at the end already feels like old technology and a format that should be relegated to the past. EK There was also that high point in recent times when suddenly TED Talks were absolutely venerated, but I think everyone’s a little bit over them now. There was even a time when Davos seemed exciting. It’s true for

all these modes and then everyone reacts against them and just wants the exact opposite. PK The TED Talk seems a great example to bring up because it’s the apogee of the lecture form: the pitchperfect, smoothed-out 15-minute talk. Of course, it’s useful because it can spread important ideas and go viral. But the presentation is so standardized, so unidirectional. This smoothness characterizes so many of our interactions today. It’s about fast consumption of ideas. EK Is there a need for a reaction, something that moves us away from that? PK The pandemic made it clear that bumpiness is part of life. In terms of formats: I imagine that a similar conversation was happening 50 years ago, and probably, a similar one in the Bauhaus in the 1920s, and in Black Mountain College in the 1930s. There is a constant cycle of modes. EK Thinking about the IDC in Aspen, if we imagine the model to be a speaker, an audience, and the community at large, is there something in

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A SPE N A RT M USE U M

M AGA Z I N E

Aspen Heritage

Above Local Aspen Flora. Courtesy: The Aspen Art Museum

that model that’s worth reviving? Could you recast all the agents and somehow revive the conference? PK The question that immediately comes up is: would it be specifically a design conference, given the ways in which art and design are so entwined with each other now? EK But, in fact, even by the end of the 1950s it was already becoming much broader, including philosophers and sociologists and the like, and later members of the avant-garde—people like John Cage who appeared in 1966. They’d already pushed that boundary. PK You’re right. Maybe that boundary was more porous in the 1950s and became less so in the ’70s or ’80s. EK That also makes you think about cycles, because people talk now about blurring the boundaries as if that’s something new. I always think that boundaries are hardened by capitalism. If people are buying stuff, they want to know what it is and suddenly the boundary hardens somehow. But let’s try and imagine what Aspen would ideally be if it were revived now. What format would it take for you? PK An example close at hand is the experimental symposium in Washington DC called “How Can We Gather Now?”, for which Asad Raza and I served as co-artistic directors. The question that it posed came out of the work I was doing during the pandemic to try and create experimental

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participatory Zoom events juxtaposing multiple modes—conversations, seminars and readings, but also movement, mindfulness, dance and karaoke. In Washington, I brought an interest in different modes of communication and scales of interaction—the individual, two people, the small group, the whole conference, to create intimacy, belonging and connection in community. Asad brought the idea of activating all of the senses. EK Was the aim just to gather? PK It was to learn about gathering and to practice forms of gathering. A generous exchange between strangers. And that seems to have been a motivation behind the original design conference too. Conferences are places where there is “content”—people are sharing specific ideas—but they’re also as much about the participants just being there, together. EK In a way, it’s almost the opposite of a meeting in that there is no agenda. PK The goal is that people meet each other and develop an agenda or purpose together through that encounter. At a conference, relationships are formed and continue to develop. The symposium becomes a proxy for creating more diverse forms of community moving forward. It’s important to hit different modes of presentation or interaction to engage with a broader constituency. It’s not a one size fits all format.

EK In Aspen in 1970, they swapped their name badges, which actually looked quite interesting. I thought it was weirdly simple and great. PK A lot of the things they were doing resonate so strongly now. And in fact if you did them at a conference today, they might still seem out of the ordinary. These activities have become the province of corporate team building exercises where you have specific formats for interacting, but actually, I think that sometimes we do need to introduce protocols like this. Otherwise there’s a tyranny of structurelessness, to use the phrase from ’70s feminism. It’s really important to have structures that can open up different kinds of dialogue or dialogue between people who wouldn’t talk otherwise. EK Can we discuss the fascinating section at the end of Eli Noyes and Claudia Weill’s short film about the conference when Reyner Banham, as chair of the closing session, tries to rally the attendees into a consensus. Presumably that was a conference tradition to conclude with consensus and a set of action points shared by all. I was wondering how you feel about that, because that obviously was not what the 1970 participants wanted, and I don’t think we’d look for that in a conference today. PK Conflict is important. It’s necessary to be able to sit with discomfort, particularly at the moment we’re in now, politically, socially—thinking about racial inequality and injustice. In 1970 they expected everybody to agree instead of accepting that given the range of people in the room, disagreement was a given. Having multiple opinions being heard, and not trying to streamline it to a single solution is sometimes the most meaningful approach—keeping contradictory ideas in a container at the same time. EK I guess the idea is you need consensus to create a solution. They clearly believed that you cannot move forward without that. Can the conference achieve anything if the members remain fundamentally opposed? PK I think it’s essential that a conference or a gathering makes space for truly different things. It sounds as if in the next edition the organizers took up many demands of the 1970 conference, including more participatory exercises, games and ideas well outside design. As Alice Twemlow points out, the radical challenge of the 1970 conference was absorbed by the next one. In my mind, though, hybrid solutions are almost always more resilient—even in a decision-making process. If one set of people are nominated top-down, other people are nominated by their peers, other people might be nominated from a bottom-up open call, then you end up with a more interesting grouping. EK How would that manifest itself physically—thinking of a design solution? Was the tent a problem? PK Yes. I think the tent was trying to make everything happen in one place. We have the designers, we have corporations. We come into a tent, we all come to a shared idea. It’s an optimistic, idealistic mode of democracy that you can debate these things out and you’re all going to agree at the end of the day. I just don’t think that’s the way things work. Have you read The Extended Mind [2021] by Annie Murphy Paul? Its basic argument is trying to debunk the notion that thinking happens in the brain. It shows how thinking happens in the body,

in gestures, in spaces, in objects and in relationships with others. If you took that as a roadmap for how to organize something like this, you’d start to move towards a more interesting place. Just the act of getting up and relocating to another space changes how you interact. It also creates a richer embodied experience. I recently created a five-day workshop in Austin as part of a performance festival. Each day happened in a different location with a different mode: a participatory talk; a meal where people gathered outside at a restaurant; a walk along the river; a karaoke party; and a cookout where everyone prepared food together. EK It slightly reminds me of a friend of mine, the brilliant cultural critic Judith Williamson, who had a fantasy about doing a design history conference where you’d arrive at the venue and they would say, “There is no conference. Do exactly as you please.” But coming back to Aspen, if it were to happen now: what can possibly justify everyone flying in? PK That’s an even better reason for it not to be frontal presentations because nobody needs to experience that synchronously. Even in teaching since the pandemic, many people I know no longer spend a session delivering a presentation or bringing somebody in to give a guest lecture. They have that presentational part recorded, share it with people be forehand, and then use the time together for discussion. To justify meeting in person it requires maximizing what can happen in the room that’s unexpected, in the moment, responsive. Bringing different people together is really important. If it’s all going to be the same people who already know each other, it’s not worth it. At most symposiums or gatherings you sit at lunch and just meet somebody and talk with them. Those things are almost accidental. They’re seen as being positive by-products but they’re not intentionally designed. You’re not maximizing those opportunities. EK The most successful thing I’ve done on those lines was a conference I attended in Svalbard with a perfumer. We had two scents and we were going to divide the conference in half depending on which they preferred. We had quite preordained ideas about what that would mean. Instead people just gave us extraordinary stories about their memories of smell—long anecdotes about their childhoods. People spoke in a completely different way. It was quite surprising because our whole idea of neatly dividing the conference in two and somehow setting up an opposition just went out the window. PK That sounds great! What is important there is that you were attuned enough or the organizers left enough space that you could respond. To quote adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy [2017], she advises, “Less prep, more presence.” I’m paraphrasing, but she goes onto say something like, “In any group of people in a room, there’s a conversation that can only be had between those people in that room. Your job as a facilitator is to find that conversation.”

Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, curator, author and educator. He is based in Berlin, Germany, and New York, USA. Emily King is a writer and curator. She lives in London, UK.

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Exhibitions In approaching Florian Krewer’s paintings, it’s useful to think of the psychoanalytic dictum that everyone and everything appearing in our dreams are parts of ourselves. Doubles proliferate in Krewer’s pictures; as creatorobserver and participant in the world he depicts, his painting process is one of the subject reflecting on himself as object. He utilizes boldly expressionistic figuration inflected with the visual language of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)—the resurgence of figurative art in 1920s Germany that produced some of the most iconic, bewildering and affecting images of the interwar era—crossed with the flour ishes of German expressionism’s aggressive subjectivity. Krewer’s paintings present the contemporary moment at the height of its efflorescence and in all of its dreamlike perversity to disclose what and how we desire, and the fractured facets within personality, sexuality, friendship and domination. Yet these are not self-consciously intellectual, conceptual or historical paintings. Instead, they spring from a boyishly intuitive hand that channels innocence with the occasional lubriciousness of his homoerotic imagery and tableau. Marginalized bodies and social outcasts are often arranged in agglomerations, engaged in balletic dance and movement with improvisatory, spontaneous enthusiasm, as with in the air (2018) and everybody rise (2019). In conversation (2019), hooded figures seem to thrust out of the picture plane and parade through an assemblage of perspectives: embodied tops, bottoms and disembodied shadows; gendered, racialized, predominantly youthful bodies; hungry and breathing bodies; suffering and humiliated bodies; and bodies in pleasure and in pain. Krewer anatomizes how the body is marked by and yields to the multiplicities of desire, power and pleasure, tracing the dismemberment of man by largely stripping him of specific characteristics, time and place. He breaks down the self by splitting up the component parts and embodying them in separate figures, animals, or as doubles that often seem interred in their own separate worlds or engaged in frustrated attempts at communion, as in camouflage (2019), pass the lights (2019), new day (2020) and dog songs (2021). In ursa minor (2021), the head of a roaring sun bear bursts from a mountainous landscape while a nude male figure bends over in the foreground, inviting the viewer to gaze upon the mass of pink skin surrounding his sex. Despite its explicit nature, the painting hardly seems intended to arouse; most viewers are more likely to regard it with disgust than erotic titillation. These personas reveal themselves as versions of the artist’s other selves, ones erupting from the unconscious and acting both antithetically and complementarily to his conscious mind—shadows, reflections and split dichotomies between gods and monsters, angels and ghosts, virtue and vice. In deploying the body and its politics as the site of libidinal tides and projective fantasies, Krewer is aware that it is both biological fact and social and historical idea—one that carries dissonant registers of meaning and symbolism. There is, after all, no meaningful individual body-ego without the social interface produced by the gaze and touch of the other. The body is both an object for others and a subject for

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BODY DOUBLES the self, a source and prey of power, a corporeal car which we variously augment with prosthetics and sanitize, beautify, discipline. The artist’s own body is covered in symmetrical tattoos from top to bottom, like a somatic archive or self-dissection created by the Rorschach test of his skin which has preserved, erased, scratched-out and written-over its various layers of history. “All that is outside, also is inside,” observed Goethe. The central theme that emerges in Krewer’s practice is that of relationships—the ways in which we live in both want and conflict with ourselves and others, and the symptoms of the divided self that can become legible through individualized despair. In the black, bleak picture captive (2020), a male figure lies in bed, facing the viewer, while

a demonically deranged red-eyed panther pounces at him from behind, emerging from the walls with fangs and claws drawn. It is both a form of emotional algebra and a collaged com position of the remote distances and alienation that exists within and between subjects. (Compelling art is never about safety, but about what threatens safety.) Krewer’s portraits often convey moments of conflict, frustration, insomnia, anxiety, violence, avoidance and frigidity, but also the artist’s attempt to make himself whole through passion and illumination. Krewer’s is a desire which is omnivorous and agnostic in orientation, articulating even a desire for his own annihilation, a desire to devour and be devoured by all. Mining what lies between binaries, he revels in the space

Above Florian Krewer, touch, 2022. Courtesy: © Florian Krewer and Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London Opposite Florian Krewer. Courtesy: The Aspen Art Museum; photograph: Josh Paige

“Florian Krewer: everybody rise” is on view through September 24. Support cutting edge programming and join an exciting community of art lovers by becoming a supporter of the Aspen Art Museum. Visit our website: aspenartmuseum.org

between private and public, projection and perception, surface and cavity, producing spectacle from the mental shallows of experience and memory. The conundrums of identity, agency and frustrated satisfaction are the central cruxes of Krewer’s pictures, which depict how we live in sometimes nurturing, sometimes toxic, somatic and semiotic environments. He is attuned to how one’s dreams move into the reality of action, and how from action the dream may well begin again. It is an aesthetics of pure mutation, one oriented towards the future, towards the reprogramming of desire.

Hiji Nam is a writer and editor. She lives in New York, USA.

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Exhibitions

Above Florian Krewer, crossed legs, 2022. Courtesy: © Florian Krewer and Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London Right Florian Krewer, everybody rise, 2019. Courtesy: © Florian Krewer and Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London

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SUMMER PERFORMANCE REVIEW

STARRING

KING PRINCESS EVAN MOCK MAYA HAWKE MILES GREENBERG REMI WOLF LUKAS GAGE ANNIE HAMILTON SADIE SINK

SUMMER PERFORMANCE REVIEW

NATASHA LYONNE

STARRING

MAYA HAWKE

Makes Her Own Time Machine Photographed by Ellen von Unwerth

EVAN MOCK KING PRINCESS MILES GREENBERG REMI WOLF LUKAS GAGE ANNIE HAMILTON SADIE SINK

STARRING

EVAN MOCK

CHLOË SEVIGNY and SINIŠA MAČKOVIĆ

KING PRINCESS MAYA HAWKE REMI WOLF LUKAS GAGE ANNIE HAMILTON MILES GREENBERG SADIE SINK

AN UNTOLD LOVE STORY Photographed by Roe Ethridge

REFRAMING THE NARRATIVE

A LIFE WITHOUT CAU SE IS WITHOUT EFFECT

DISPLAY UNTIL 11/28/2022

JANE FONDA BY JENNY HOLZER

ANNUAL YOUNG ARTISTS LIST / FEMALE CREATIVES RE-CONCEPTING FOOD / THE PHOTOGRAPHIC REALM OF ART AND ACADEMIA

58 culturedmag.com

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MEET THE ARTISTS

Meet the Artists

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Works by these artists and more will be auctioned in support of the Aspen Art Museum during ArtCrush 2023. Each work has been generously donated by artists and their galleries, including ArtCrush Honoree Nairy Baghramian, Kerstin Brätsch, and many more. Discover some of the participating artists here and view the complete selection of works in person at the AAM from July 26 to August 3, or online at sothebys.com/aspenartmuseum Compiled with the support of the AAM’s Collector Committee and co-chaired by Abigail Ross Goodman and Molly Epstein, the exhibition brings together over 50 artists across a wide range of disciplines.

Korakrit Arunanondchai Work kindly donated by the artist and Clearing Korakrit Arunanondchai sees himself as a storyteller. In his own words, cited on Moderna Museet’s website, where he had a solo exhibition last year: “As the author I exist in between the image and the audience, in the air of the room, telling the story. I am never completely inside one world or another.” Working with video, sculpture, painting, music and performance, merging them into new hybrid forms, Arunanondchai begins with the personal, and from there expands outwards. Raised in Bangkok, and now living between there and New York, he draws upon his family history as well as the history and politics of Thailand and South-East Asia. His interests span time and history, the geopolitical and the spiritual, folklore and technology. Often working with regular collaborators, in his performances he explores the power of gathering. In 2012, Arunanondchai created a “denim painter character” for himself, choosing to use denim as the support for his paintings. In an interview with the Art Newspaper in 2021, he explains: “I wanted to make a story or narrative around the word denim. For me, con temporary art has always been this globalizing force. As soon as someone painted on a canvas, that’s when they entered the Western canon of painting. Painting with a capital “P”. I felt like I wanted to paint on denim because denim constantly signifies Western globalization and the soft power of America.” Arunanondchai has exhibited extensively around the world, including solo exhibitions and performances at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022); Kunstverein Hamburg and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (both 2021); and Secession, Vienna (2019). His work is in prominent collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, UK; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Last summer he staged an outdoor performance here in Aspen with director Alex Gvojic (in collaboration with Tosh Basco).

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Meet the Artists Opposite Korakrit Arunanondchai. Courtesy: Kukje Gallery; photograph: Chunho An Left Charles Gaines. Courtesy: © Charles Gaines and Hauser & Wirth; photograph: Fredrik Nilsen Below Chase Hall. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Grace Ahlbom

Charles Gaines Generously donated by the artist and Hauser & Wirth Since the 1970s, conceptual artist Charles Gaines has employed a variety of media in a dedicated exploration of systems. In the 1970s he began a series called “Walnut Tree Orchard”, for which he photographed trees, subsequently converting the forms into a numbered grid, then layering these silhouettes one on top of the other. Grids and trees are methods and motifs which have endured, and throughout his career he has created two main bodies of work: “Gridwork” and “Black Language”. Music has played a prominent role in his practice, again shaped by the use of systems; converting political manifestos into musical scores, he recasts the letters in the text into notes and rests, determined by a simple set of rules. In an interview in frieze in 2022, Harmony Holiday asked the artist if he is still suspicious of the imagination, as he once declared in a talk, and Gaines replied: “The thing I want people to consider when we talk about my work is that it hasn’t been produced by the imagination—even if you can still respond to it as you might any other work of art. I’m not saying that there’s no such thing as imagination or intuition or subjectivity, but I think they’re all constructs. Modernist art is built upon the myth of subjectivity: that it’s a universal language which transcends local, cultural, social and political interests.” Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles, where he taught at CalArts for 30 years, until his recent retirement. He has exhibited extensively since the 1970s, published his writings, and is the recipient of numerous awards: in 2022 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2019 received the 60th Edward MacDowell Medal. His work is held in key collections around the world including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC. In November of this year the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami will stage a major survey of Gaines’ work spanning 30 years from 1992 to 2022. Chase Hall Generously donated by the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Online auction closes Saturday, August 5th, 12pm MT at sothebys. com/aspenartmuseum Live auction takes place Friday, August 4th at 8pm MT, at the ArtCrush Gala Phone and absentee bids accepted. For all enquiries, email bid@ aspenartmuseum.org No buyer’s premium! View and bid on works at sothebys.com/ aspenartmuseum

Visit the museum and view the ArtCrush Auction Exhibition July 26—August 3, 2023.

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Working across a variety of media including painting, sculpture, photography, video, audio and artists books, in recent years Chase Hall has come to prominence above all for his paintings and his own take on Black figuration. In a short film by Nowness Hall explains, “Blackness is not monolithic, so I am just me and my life so far is what I am trying to share”—and in particular he is concerned with presenting and exploring his own biraciality. The self-taught artist has very much forged his own path in terms of materials: he uses unprimed white cotton as his ground and combines coffee with paint. Brewing the coffee in a variety of ways and grinding the African beans to varying degrees of fineness, he is able to create a vast range of brown pigments, of different hues and textures. Regarding his choice of canvas, in an interview in 2022 in W Magazine with Emma Leigh Macdonald, he explains:

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Meet the Artists “Painting with the voids of canvas is an attempt to understand cotton as a conceptual white paint. Cotton acts as light, it acts as emptiness, and it acts as a conceptual play on how this material is showing its weighted history.” The use of cotton and coffee, and their complex histories and connections to slavery, trade and exploitation, brings an added dimension to Hall’s paintings of figures at work and leisure. Starting from the personal, he looks to the past and the present to examine issues of race now and through history. Hall lives and works in New York. His works are held in prominent collections around the world, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Hall will exhibit at the Aspen Art Museum this summer as part of “A Lover’s Discourse.”

Left Peter Halley. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Roxanne Lowit

Alex Israel Work kindly donated by the artist and Gagosian

Peter Halley Work kindly donated by the artist and KARMA

Visit the museum and view the ArtCrush Auction Exhibition July 26—August 3, 2023.

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Profoundly inspired by growing up in New York, Peter Halley is fascinated by the organization of social space, the communication networks that govern it, and the evolution these technologies have undergone during his career. Since the 1980s, when Halley and his fellow neo-conceptualists came on the scene, he has exhibited extensively around the world, producing a remarkably consistent body of work. Describing his paintings as “diagrammatic” rather than abstract, the tessellating, interconnected squares, rectangles and lines, are his “cells”, “prisons” and “conduits.” As a student Halley read Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color (1971)—a text which would influence him throughout his career—while later on he became interested in the writings of the French post-structuralists. In a conversation with Tom McGlynn for the Brooklyn Rail in 2018, he remarks: “From Foucault, I gained the insight that any attempt to borrow from a culture outside one’s own is impossible. Your interpretation will always be filtered through your own cultural lens.” In the same conversation, he describes walking and cycling the streets of New York as a child, experiencing the scale of the buildings, the noise and the crowds as a “futuristic nightmare”, and even now he describes being in Midtown Manhattan as like being “in a tropical storm”. In footage on his website from 1994, Halley describes his workplace as “more like an operating room than an artist’s studio”. Painted with extreme precision, the large-scale canvases present hard-edged geometric forms in bright and fluorescent colors, offset by black. The surfaces have a rough texture thanks to the application of Roll-A-Tex—every DIY enthusiast’s quick path to nubbly walls. Speaking with McGlynn, Halley remarks, “I think, at heart, my work has a parodic element. Using Roll-A-Tex, for example, was a parody of painterly texture, and the prison had a parodic relationship to the modernist square.” Based in New York, in addition to his visual practice, Halley teaches, writes and was the cofounder of Index magazine. His work is included in

numerous prominent museum collections including, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Below Alex Israel. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Jack Pierson

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Alex Israel’s work is all about his hometown. Honing in on the city’s celebrity culture, he shot to fame with two series of interviews, “As It Lays” (2011–12/2018–19), in which he asked questions of famous local figures. The self-portrait silhouette, which was the logo for the series, developed into a body of paintings. Fascinated by the city’s sun-soaked pop culture, he has since taken its iconic visual imagery and made it his own. “Lens” is a series of large-scale sunglass lenses, made in bright shiny plastic, that lean against the wall, while in 2017, Israel tapped into West Coast beach culture with SPF-18, a feature-length teen surf drama which was screened on Netflix. This subject matter was then further explored in his aluminum-cast sculptures “Self-Portrait (Wetsuits)”, and his painted reliefs, “Waves”. Next up, “Fins”—a series of giant, immaculate plastic surfboard fins. Israel has collaborated extensively and diversely: he has created bags for the French fashion house, Louis Vuitton, and more recently the packaging for their perfume, City of Stars, as well as working with the high-end luggage company, Rimowa. In 2016 and 2017 he joined forces with acclaimed novelist Bret Easton Ellis on a series of paintings for two exhibitions: inspired by LA, Ellis contributed texts to overlay on Israel’s chosen stock backdrops. The artist also has his own line of sunglasses, Freeway, and clothing, Infrathin, a range of unisex vegan athleisurewear. Speaking about his eyewear in Interview magazine in 2010, when it was first launched, Israel said: “I see sunglasses as the symbol of Southern California: they’re objects

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Meet the Artists that change the way we see things, and that’s an interesting way of thinking about art.” Israel’s work is held in prominent collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Left Spencer Lewis. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Ruben Diaz

Spencer Lewis Work kindly donated by the artist and Josh Lilley There is an explosive energy to Spencer Lewis’s paintings. Working with mixed media on either jute or cardboard, Lewis himself speaks of attacking the surface. The violence of his mark-making is augmented by dragging and throwing the jute around the studio, imbuing the work with a sense of raw dynamism. Born in 1979 in Hartford, CT, Lewis studied first at Rhode Island School of Design, before completing an MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles—where he continues to live and work. The traces of an interest in postwar abstraction that began in Lewis’s youth are evident throughout his work; Hans Hofmann and Joan Mitchell come to mind, amongst others. However, writing in Mousse in 2022, Ben Street observes: “Easy as it is to see his paintings as straightforwardly inhabiting the territory of mid-century abstract painting, to do so would be to miss their play with its tropes.” He goes on to add that “Lewis marshals the trappings of modernist authenticity”, not in an attempt to subvert but instead “to prod them for signs of life”. Dense layers of vibrant strokes, emerge from the center of each canvas to form an unruly, abstract mass, in which each mark is seemingly vying for space, fighting for dominance. Wide and narrow lines and patches of yellow, orange, blue, green and pink crackle with energy atop the grungy brown ground of the natural jute or its paintsaturated surface. Speaking on the Deep Color podcast in February last year, Lewis commented, “part of being an artist is being opportunistic”. In his paintings this translates to an innate sense of freedom, and a visual expression of an internal struggle to be in the moment and seize the opportunities it brings.

the side of the oven is adorned with a quote from Emily Dickinson: “She rose to his requirement, dropped the playthings of her life, to take the honorable work of woman and wife.” While Kitchen was a solitary endeavor, Lou subsequently extended her interest in labor into a practical concern by establishing a collective in Durban, South Africa, which she ran from 2005–20, where local women produced handstitched beaded cloth. Working across a variety of media, these glass beads became the cornerstone of Lou’s practice. In a more recent body of work, she has depicted cloud formations, and while she continues to paint on and chisel away at these woven beads, the finished works are far more minimal and delicate in palette, conjuring an ephemeral, ethereal beauty. Lou was born in NY and is now based in LA. She has exhibited exten sively around the world, including solo shows at the Aspen Art Museum (1998); Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2002); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2013). She is a recipient of both a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Howardena Pindell Work kindly donated by Garth Greenan

Below Howardena Pindell. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Nathan Keay

Painter, filmmaker, archivist, critic and activist, Howardena Pindell has been making and showing work for nearly 60 years. On graduating from university, where she studied painting, she took up a post for the next 12 years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she was the first Black curator. On leaving MoMA, she took on a teaching job at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she is now a full professor. And back in 1972, she was a member of the group of women who founded A.I.R Gallery in New York. Working across a variety of media, Pindell’s work engages with social issues of homelessness, AIDS, war, genocide, sexism, xenophobia and apartheid. The consistency of her concerns is noteworthy: working with spray paint and

Liza Lou Work kindly donated by the artist and Lehmann Maupin

Right Liza Lou. Courtesy: the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul and London; photograph: Mick Haggerty

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Liza Lou came to prominence in 1996, when she first showed Kitchen (1991–96) at the New Museum in New York. Five years in the making, this full-scale, highly detailed recreation of an American kitchen, in which the surface of every element is encrusted with tiny shimmering beads, is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Throughout her career, Lou has challenged negative perceptions of craft and set out to give value and respect to labor—from a gendered perspective. The sense of wonder prompted by her beautiful, intricate works has always been undercut by an edge. In Kitchen,

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Meet the Artists stencils created by punching holes in card, she began making richly textured abstract paintings with a circle motif in the 1970s. But, as she explains in an interview with Alayo Akinkugbe in AnOther magazine in March this year, this fascination for the circle is firmly rooted in her childhood: both via the gift of a microscope she received as a small child, with which she inspected the drinking water in her hometown of Philadelphia, and her recollection of a trip with her father to northern Kentucky, when it was still segregated, where she was given a mug to drink from with a large red circle on the bottom—a system to avoid Black people sharing crockery with white customers. This continuity of subject matter is also apparent in two of Pindell’s film works: Free, White and 21, made in 1980, in which Pindell recounts to camera her own experiences of racism, was followed 40 years later by Rope/Fire/Water (2020), in which she combines personal anecdotes with historical material, detailing lynchings and racist attacks in the US. Pindell’s work is held in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Left Cauleen Smith. Courtesy: the artist; photograph; Joshua Franzos Below, left Phillip K. Smith III. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Lance Gerber

Phillip K. Smith III Work kindly donated by the artist and Hexton Gallery

Cauleen Smith Work kindly donated by the artist and Morán Morán Based in Los Angeles, Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist working across a diverse range of media. She is perhaps best known as a filmmaker and during her MFA at University of California, LA, she embarked on making a feature-length film. Completed in 1998, Drylongso is the story of a young black woman studying photography. Addressing issues of gender, race and identity, it went onto garner much praise and receive a number of awards. Throughout her work, Smith deals with African-American identity and Black feminism. The breadth of her interests and sources is remarkable: the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, as well as the legendary Sun Ra; literature, including the science fiction writings of Octavia E. Butler; the work of Paul Thek; Afrofuturism; flora; and the Shaker religion. Much of her practice is rooted in delving into an eclectic range of archives. In an interview with Flash Art in 2019, she outlined her approach: “Even though I’m a filmmaker, I have a profound resistance to representation of the figure […] So for me the archive is about all the things that cannot be replicated and rendered, about interiority instead of about representation. I don’t think I hold myself to very high ethical standards when it comes to archives. I go into archives to answer my own questions or find new questions to ask.” Fascinated by the possibilities of the imagination, in the same interview Smith explains: “I’m actually just interested in the wondrously inventive ways that people survive trauma without subjecting those around them to its reenactment.”

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Smith, who has an upcoming exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum this winter, has exhibited extensively around the world, staged screenings at international institutions and film festivals, including Sundance and in Smuggler Mine here in Aspen last year. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the 2022 Heinz Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. Her work is held in key collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is Professor at CalArts School of Art, LA.

Phillip K. Smith III grew up in Coachella Valley and after heading east to study both art and architecture at Rhode Island School of Design, he returned to Southern California, making Palm Desert his home. Creating light sculptures and large immersive installations, this setting is at the very core of his practice, as he plays with ideas of space, form, color, light and shadow, environment and change. Smith’s breakthrough work was Lucid Stead (2013), in which he modified a traditional homestead shack in Joshua Tree, transforming it with mirrored strips that gave the impression of transparency, but instead created a reflective structure in dynamic relationship with the sky and land around it. Constantly experimenting with new processes and materials, his fascination for the desert, focus on light, and clean, minimal aesthetic, have led to inevitable connections being made to historic figures such as Donald Judd and James Turrell. The pure, simple, geometric forms and reflective surfaces are inspired by the sky and barren landscape of the desert; informed by the quality and shifts of light, Smith creates works with ever-changing colors. As they transform in response to their setting, the experience of the audience is constantly evolving. In an interview with Franceasca Seiden in Whitehot magazine in 2016, the artist observed: “These works make us step away from our pattern, our life, our work, our errands and our conversations, and allow us to see sublime beauty shifting and changing before our eyes. Those are the moments that make life worth living.” Smith has created temporary works around the world, including at Coachella Music and Arts Festival (2014) and Salone del Mobile, Milan (2018). He has held solo exhibitions at Palm Springs Art Museum and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (both 2022), as well as numerous permanent commissions, such as the Detroit Skybridge (2018) a reactivation of a defunct pedestrian walkway linking two towers.

View and bid on works at sothebys.com/ aspenartmuseum

Visit the museum and view the ArtCrush Auction Exhibition July 26—August 3, 2023.

Sara Harrison is a freelance editor. She lives in London, UK.

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Aspen’s #1 Broker STE VE N SHA N E

970.94 8 .6 005

steven.shane@compass.com

Steven Shane is a broker associate affiliated with compass. Compass is a licensed real estate broker in Colorado and abides by Equal Housing Opportunity laws.

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Phillip K. Smith III

REFLECTED LIGHT

Most known for his large-scale public and private light-based installations, Phillip K. Smith III debuts a collection of intimately-scaled reflecti e works inspired by the artist’s recent solo exhibition at the Palm Springs Art Museum. Smith’s work is now on view at Hexton Gallery, please inquire for details.

H E X T O N M O D E R N + C O N T E M P O R A RY aspen@hextongallery.com t: +1 970.925.1616 www.hextongallery.com @hextongallery

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Art Green September 7– October 21

Garth Greenan Gallery 545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, Richard Van Buren November 2–December 16 www.garthgreenan.com

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Josh Lilley 40 - 46 Riding House Street, London, W1

Benedetto Pietromarchi September 1 - 29, 2023

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Shop

BLANKET COVERAGE In a unique meeting of old and new, the Aspen Art Museum is inviting contemporary artists to collaborate with a 170-year-old Scottish weaver. The results are vibrant (and snug).

Left Giles Round in the studio in London with The Maroon Bells Blanket, May 2023 Photography Will Grundy

Visit the online store here:

The Maroon Bells Blanket by Giles Round 92% lambswool, 8% cashmere 55 x 70 in US$1,000.00

Or come by the museum, where Aspen Art Museum members receive a 10% discount

The next installments in the series will be two blankets by Florian Krewer, produced on the occasion of his first US institutional solo exhibition, “everybody rise”, on view at the Aspen Art Museum until September 24, followed by a blanket by Shara Hughes, who had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2021.

Possession Obsession is a specially curated shop at the Aspen Art Museum

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In a continuation of the Aspen Art Museum’s commitment to magnificent craft and unexpected collaborations, the museum is teaming up with storied Scottish wool mill Alex Begg, founded in 1866, on a series of artist-made blankets. Proceeds from each sale go to supporting the museum’s exhibition program. In 2022, the museum embarked on a collaboration with Giles Round & Casa Estudio to create The Maroon Bells Blanket. The vibrant blanket takes inspiration from the graphic color palettes of pop art and the iconic Maroon Bells mountain range near Aspen. Set against an azure sky accented with buoyant clouds, sprouting from psychedelic terrain, the bold image of the mountain is both recognizable and surreal. Cast in soft shades of pink and orange, the two commanding peaks appear inviting, almost diminutive. In spite of being legible as one of the region’s most iconic geological formations, Maroon Bells is given a new, gentler identity by Round in this witty, reimagined landscape. Giles Round (b. 1976, London) lives and works in London & St Leonardson-Sea, UK. Round embraces art, design and architecture, using various techniques and approaches including ceramics, furniture, painting, print and sculpture. Round’s work has been included in exhibitions at Brighton CCA, Brighton, UK (2020); the Hepworth Wakefield, UK (2018); Wellcome Collection, London, UK (2018); and Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2017). Casa Estudio was founded by Round and designer Andrés Ros Soto. Focusing on the design of exhibitions, furniture and print, their work is characterized by bold use of color, pattern and geometry.

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JOIN US. Unlock access to ASPEN ART MUSEUM exhibitions, special Members-only previews, curator-led tours, and more while supporting programming in the Roaring Fork Valley. * General Memberships start at $50 and even more benefits await with our Director’s Circle, starting at $3,000. Explore all Membership levels at aspenartmuseum.org/join. If you have any questions, please reach out to Liza Sakamoto at 970.925.8050 × 161 or lsakamoto@aspenartmuseum.org.

Aspen Art Museum

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637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, CO 81611 aspenartmuseum.org | 970.925.8050 Hours: 10 AM–6 PM, Closed Mondays Admission to the AAM is free courtesy of Amy and John Phelan

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