Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2017 by Gagosian Quarterly

ver time, the role of the art gallery has adapted, but at its core the mission has always been to support artists in bringing their ideas into the world. Since its founding by Larry Gagosian in 1979, Gagosian Gallery has continued this tradition on a singular scale. For the last fifteen of those years it has been my privilege to develop a publishing program here that is both scholarly and innovative: my team has produced hundreds of books, essays, articles, and videos that have contributed to the dialogue of contemporary art. We are now proud to bring our readers a new concept in art-magazine publishing, a platform to which our artists, curators, and collaborators will have unprecedented access. We take you behind the scenes, into the studios and through the galleries, pursuing an understanding of the different ways in which galleries and artists can work together. It has been my honor to build this magazine and bring it to you. Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2017

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald Executive Editor Derek Blasberg Managing Editor Shannon Cannizzaro Text Editor David Frankel Associate Editor Darlina Goldak Design Director Paul Neale Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility

Contributors Angela Brown Michael Cary Serena Cattaneo Adorno Mark Francis Anna Heyward Deborah McLeod Louise Neri Ira Nowinski Olivia Salazar-Winspear Thanks Azzurra Alliata di Montereale Douglas Flamm Emily Hodes Jona Lueddeckens Alex Magnuson Lauren Mahony Max Teicher Lilias Wigan Ealan Wingate Kelso Wyeth

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Founder Larry Gagosian

Advertising Manager Mandi Garcia

Published by Gagosian Media

Advertising Representative Michael Bullock

Business Director Melissa Lazarov

For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries Advertising@gagosian.com Distribution David Renard US Distribution by SpeedImpex International Distribution by Pineapple Media Ltd Distribution Managers Andie Trainer Kelly McDaniel Production Melissa Scragg Prepress DL Imaging Printed by Pureprint Group

Cover Rudolf Stingel

Louis Vuitton Blossom Collection

louisvuitton.com

Richard Prince: I Changed My Name, 1988 ÂŠ Richard Prince Acrylic and screen print on canvas (142.5 cm x 198.7 cm) Calvin Klein: Classic Denim Shirt (Calvin Klein Jeans Est. 1978) Photographed at Rubell Family Collection, Miami

Sterling Ruby: FLAG (4791), 2014 ÂŠ Sterling Ruby Bleached and dyed canvas and elastic (443.23 cm x 871.22 cm) Calvin Klein: Classic Cotton Briefs (Calvin Klein Underwear Est. 1981) Photographed at Rubell Family Collection, Miami

888-DYURMAN

DAV I D Y U R M A N . C O M

Table Solvay & Fauteuil Direction – part of the Jean Prouvé Collection Developed by Vitra in Switzerland, Design: Jean Prouvé, 1941 & 1951 Go to www.vitra.com/dealer to find Vitra retail partners in your area, or email info@vitra.com.

www.shop-us.vitra.com

CONTRIBUTORS

Christopher Wool

Negar Azimi

Richard Calvocoressi

Christopher Wool is an American artist who lives and works in New York City and Marfa, TX. He recently co-curated Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975.

Negar Azimi is a writer and the editor of Bidoun, an award-winning magazine and curatorial project with a focus on the Middle East and its diasporas. She is currently at work on a book about the 1960s and ’70s in Iran. Here, Azimi takes us behind the scenes of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

Richard Calvocoressi is a scholar and art historian. Calvocoressi was a curator at the Tate, London, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and director of the Henry Moore Foundation. Here, Calvocoressi discusses his latest curatorial endeavor, an exhibition on the British artist Michael Andrews.

Derek Blasberg Derek Blasberg is a writer, editor, and New York Times best-selling author. In addition to being the Executive Editor of Gagosian Quarterly, he is Vanity Fair’s “Our Man on the Street” and the host of the television show “CNN Style.” In this issue, Derek interviews Nicolas Berggruen about the future of The Berggruen Institute, takes a tour of Los Angeles with Deborah McLeod for My Town, and interviews Craig Robins, cofounder of Design Miami and developer of the Miami Design District, for In Conversation.

Paul Noble

Katy Siegel

Paul Noble is a British artist who is most well known for his meticulous drawings, unique and elaborate worlds that combine image and text, place and space, the metaphysical and time. He has created an artist’s book using drawn images especially for this issue.

Katy Siegel is the Thaw Endowed Chair at Stony Brook University and Senior Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her exhibitions include Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, and High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–75. She is the author of Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art.

Susan Ellicott

Christopher Bollen

Susan Ellicott is a writer, broadcaster, filmmaker, food entrepreneur, and frequent traveler between London and the United States. A former television correspondent for the BBC and political writer for The Times in Washington, D.C., Ellicott has appeared on CNN, ABC News, and comedy news shows including Politically Incorrect and NPR’s Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!

Christopher Bollen is the Editor at Large of Interview magazine. His third novel, The Destroyers, will be published by Harper Publishing in June of 2017. Here, Bollen writes the first part of his four-part short-story series, St. Kit of New York.

David Frankel David Frankel is the recently retired Editorial Director of The Museum of Modern Art, where he worked for twentyone years. He was previously Managing Editor and then Senior Editor at Artforum magazine, for which he writes regular reviews. Frankel is also the Text Editor for the Gagosian Quarterly.

Katharina Grosse Katharina Grosse is a German artist who lives and works in Berlin. She approaches painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity. Here, Grosse reflects on the impact Cy Twombly’s art has had on her.

Opposite page, top row: Photo by Aubrey Mayer Photo courtesy Negar Azimi Photo by Miriam Perez Opposite page, bottom row: Photo by Pier Guido Grassano Photo by Georgina Starr Photo courtesy Katy Siegel

Diana WidmaierPicasso

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Diana Widmaier-Picasso is an art historian who specializes in modern and contemporary art. She holds master’s degrees in law (Paris-Assas) and art history (Sorbonne). She wrote her thesis on the art market of the seventeenth century and is the author of numerous essays. For this issue, Widmaier-Picasso discusses some of the themes present in her recent exhibition, Desire, which was on view during Art Basel Miami Beach.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. He was previously the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in 1991, he has curated more than 300 shows. Here, he leads a conversation between Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis.

This page, top row: Photo courtesy Susan Ellicott Photo by Alexei Hay Photo courtesy David Frankel This page, bottom row: © Katharina Grosse 2015; VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2015; Photo by Andrea Stappert Photo courtesy Diana Widmaier-Picasso Photo by Kalpesh Lathigra

SPOTLIGHT

PICASSO

The story behind the sculpture that Diana Widmaier-Picasso highlighted in Picasso’s Picassos: A Selection from the Collection of Maya Ruiz-Picasso. Text by Michael Cary After the birth of their son, Claude, in 1947, Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot began to spend time in the town of Vallauris, near Cannes in the South of France. Vallauris was the home of a ceramics industry that fascinated Picasso; he was eager to explore this new medium, and in 1948 he and Gilot settled into a small house in the town, La Galloise, so that he could work with the craftsmen at the nearby Madoura pottery. After the birth of their daughter, Paloma, the following year, Picasso acquired a building nearby, a decrepit former perfume factory called Le Fournas, and turned it into a studio in which to paint, sculpt, and store the growing volume of ceramics he was creating. His route there on foot led past a field that served as a dumping ground for the local potters, who used it to dispose of broken pots, tools, and leftovers of metal and wood. Here Picasso would collect whatever caught his eye and carry it to the studio, adding to the scrap already present in the disused factory. Over the next few years the possibilities he saw in this pile would reinvigorate his sculptural practice; from this detritus he would construct some of the greatest sculptures of his career. “One of the first sculptures Pablo made in the perfume factory was La femme enceinte” (The Pregnant Woman, 1950), Gilot would recall. He wanted me to have a third child. I didn’t want to because I was still feeling very weakened even though a year had passed since Paloma was born.

I think this sculpture was a form of wish fulfillment on his part. He worked on it over a long period of time, I suppose from a composite mental image he had of the way I had looked while I was carrying Claude and Paloma. The breasts and distended abdomen were made with the help of three water pitchers; the belly from a portion of a large one, and the breasts from two small ones, all picked up from the scrap heap. The rest was modeled. The fact that the figure was only about half the normal size gave it a grotesque appearance. It had almost no feet, it swayed perilously, and the arms were too long. It always looked to me like a child-woman recently descended from the ape.1 The ape comparison was not far off the mark; Picasso was concurrently working on sculptures of a baboon (Le Guenon et son petit, 1950–51) and of a goat (La Chèvre, 1950), both pregnant, no doubt also to inspire Gilot. Yet the circumstance of the fetishlike construction of La femme enceinte reinforces her totemic purpose: she is a fertility goddess, and, as Diana Widmaier-Picasso has pointed out, should be seen in light of the two casts of the Lespugue Venus, an ivory figure of the Upper Paleolithic period, that Picasso had long kept in his Paris studio.2 The art historian Elizabeth Cowling has proposed that La femme enceinte should also be seen as a response to Edgar Degas’s sculpture of the same subject (1896–1911), an uncommon one in sculpture

Opposite: Pablo Picasso, La femme enceinte, 1959, plaster, height: 43 ½ inches (110 cm). Photo by Rob McKeever Right: Françoise Gilot and Pablo Picasso at Madoura Pottery, Vallauris, 1953. Photo by Edward Quinn, © edwardquinn.com Far right: Plaster version of La femme enceinte I (1950) in progress, Le Fournas, Vallauris, 1950. Photo by Robert Picault

in general and in Degas’s and Picasso’s oeuvres in particular. The two works share several similarities, especially the symmetry of each figure’s pose. Degas’s figure, however, is a psychological study: it depicts a woman confronting the strangeness of her changing body, and expressing concern or love for her unborn. Picasso’s, on the other hand, is a stoic vessel, and under her plaster skin her distended stomach and breasts are made from ceramic pots— literally containers for water, the medium of life.3 Picasso kept the 1950 plaster original of La Femme enceinte for the rest of his life, often placing her in a commanding position in his studio to keep watch over its contents. (She now lies in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.) She appears as such in the painting Femme dans l’atelier (1956), and in a number of photographs of the studio at La Californie, the villa in Cannes that Picasso acquired in 1955. Between 1951 and 1953, an edition of three bronzes was cast from the figure. In the ensuing years, Picasso altered the plaster intermodel from that casting, adding the anatomical enhancements of navel and nipples and more solid feet to stand on. This second state of La femme enceinte was cast in a numbered edition of two in 1959.

1. Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 320. 2. See Diana Widmaier-Picasso, “Between Form and Medium,” in The Sculptures of Pablo Picasso (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2003), p. 15. 3. See Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso Looks at Degas (Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2010), pp. 205–7.

1943

with text by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and photographs by Brassaï.

May: Pablo Picasso meets Françoise Gilot in a Left Bank Paris restaurant, Le Catalan.

April: Birth of Picasso and Gilot’s daughter, Paloma.

1946

Spring: Creates the second sculpture of a pregnant Gilot, Femme enceinte (Spies 347.I), made from plaster and a palm frond.

April: Picasso begins to live with Gilot in Paris. August–November: While Picasso and Gilot vacation on the Côte d’Azur, he is invited to use rooms in the Château Grimaldi, Antibes, as his studio. He creates a number of works in situ and donates others to the Château, which will become the first Musée Picasso in 1966.

1947

May: Birth of Picasso and Gilot’s son, Claude. Winter 1947–spring 1948: Picasso begins to work in ceramics at the Madoura workshop in Vallauris.

1948

Sometime this year, makes the first of four sculptural portraits of Gilot pregnant, including Petite femme enceinte (Spies 335.I). May: To be closer to Madoura he acquires a small house, La Galloise, in Vallauris.

1949

January: Publication of Les Sculptures de Picasso, the first study of Picasso’s sculpture, 32

Summer: Acquires Le Fournas, a disused factory building in Vallauris, where he sets up one studio for painting and another for sculpture. A room connecting the two is used to store the ceramics that he makes at the Madoura workshop.

1950

May: Begins La femme enceinte, 1er état (Spies 349.I). The work inaugurates a burst of creativity in the artist’s sculpture over the next few years.

1951–53

Casts an edition of three bronzes from La femme enceinte, 1er état. Summer 1951: first signs of the breakdown of the relationship between Picasso and Gilot.

1952

Summer: Picasso meets Jacqueline Roque, who works at the Madoura pottery shop in Cannes. Roque will become his mistress and the two will marry in 1961.

1953

September: Gilot leaves Picasso, taking their children with her to Paris.

1955

April: Picasso purchases the villa La Californie in Cannes. After he and Roque move into the villa two months later, he will install a number of bronze casts of his Le Fournas sculptures on the grounds.

1956

April: Picasso paints Femme dans l’atelier, depicting Roque sitting in a rocking chair staring at La femme enceinte across the studio at La Californie.

1959

Picasso creates the second state of La femme enceinte (Spies 350), working from the plaster intermodel used to make the bronzes in 1951–53. The base is inscribed with what appears to be the date “15.3.59,” although the “9” is unclear. Photographs of the intermodel by André Villers, dated 1958, confirm the absence of the nipples and navel at that point, making them a late addition to the second state.

OBJECTS FOR LIFE

Jeff Koons, you’ve just donated your piece Bouquet of Tulips to the City of Paris and the people of France. What does this sculpture represent for Franco-American relations? JEFF KOONS Jane Hartley, the American ambassador to France and Monaco, contacted me with the idea of giving something to the French people. And this is a work that really tries to celebrate relationships and the values of liberty and solidarity that Americans and the French hold dear. It is also an offering of remembrance to the victims of the terrible tragedies that have happened in France over the last two years. At the same time, we want to give hope to the surviving family members, and a sense of optimism for the future. OSW You were the first contemporary artist to exhibit work at the Palace de Versailles, in juxtaposition with the very historic heritage pieces there. What does France mean to you personally, as an artist? JK When I was seventeen, I had my first art-history lesson in college, and I remember my teacher showed us Manet’s Olympia and spoke about the different images in that painting and how the black cat might have had a different meaning in nineteenth-century France, and the bouquet of flowers being offered—there was a bouquet of flowers—the woman lying down. And all of a sudden I realized that art can bring all the human disciplines together, and this is through French culture and through Manet and Courbet and Poussin, really the celebration of the arts I tie so directly to France. OSW In the recent presidential election in the OLIVIA SALAZAR-WINSPEAR

United States, you were a supporter of Hillary Clinton, pointing out that she’s a strong supporter of the arts. Now that she won’t be moving into the White House, what is your role as an artist? JK My role as an artist is to be the best human being I can be, to be the best artist I can be, and to continue to promote and share the values that I believe are important to civilization and to our communities. And I hope that the Bouquet of Tulips is one aspect of that. It displays the type of values that I’m speaking about, which are very dear to all of us. OSW How much do you think art can affect or even change politics or society? JK Well, I think that art lets people empower themselves. Art isn’t really the object. Art is when you look at something and you experience it, you realize what your potential is and that your parameters can be broader. That’s art. OSW Surfaces are often a key part of your installations and sculptures, and sometimes we as viewers can see ourselves in those reflective surfaces. How important is the viewer to the experience of your art? JK Completely. And you know, it’s not just my art. The viewers are very important. There’s an art historian at the end of the nineteenth century, Alois Riegl from Vienna, he was the first art historian to speak about the beholder’s share. And the beholder’s share is that the viewer completes a work of art— that a work of art can take you to a certain point of view, it can create a certain context for you to view a situation, but then there’s a certain amount of ambiguity that the viewer finishes. I embrace this completely, because what happens from that moment,

it’s really the interest of the viewer, what they are fond of, what their perception can allow them. OSW When we look at some examples of your work, using objects that are not normally associated with decoration or art, it brings to mind the French artist Marcel Duchamp. What does this artist mean to you? JK Oh, Duchamp is very important to my work. I like to believe that I’ve been continuing the dialogue with the readymade and the idea of the objective. Over the last several decades, Duchamp’s work has become somewhat dry, overintellectualized by academics, and I like to believe that I’m involved in reinvigorating and making the ideas that Duchamp worked with accessible and free and open to people the way I think they were intended to be. OSW In recent pieces you’ve made reference the old masters—Titian, Degas, Boucher even. That seems not necessarily an obvious comparison with your style. Can you tell me how that feeds into your artistic process? JK Family. You know, for me, it’s about genes and DNA and the way our biology works, the type of connectivity that we have. Our cultural lives have the same type of connectivity. So I’m a different person since I came across Manet’s work. And Manet was a different human being after he saw Goya, and Goya after Velázquez, and Velázquez when he came across the Greek sculpture of Ariadne. So through art, through that connectivity you get from your cultural life, that can change your genes. Opposite: Jeff Koons, Bouquet of Tulips, 2016 © Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons speaks with Olivia Salazar-Winspear about donating Bouquet of Tulips (2016) to the city of Paris in response to the recent terrorist attacks of 2015–16.

KOONS BOUQUET FOR PARIS

Jeff Koons, Bouquet of Tulips, 2016

Art is a powerful tool that brings people of all ages, colors, creeds, circumstances, and backgrounds together. It is a source of inspiration and hope for the future. The Honorable Jane D. Hartley, Ambassador of the United States of America to France and Monaco Jeff Koons, Bouquet of Tulips, 2016 © Jeff Koons

DISCOV ER MOR E ON BER LU T I.COM

C.T. S.T. Katharina Grosse reflects on the work of Cy Twombly.

When I think of Cy Twombly, two scenes immediately come to mind. The first is from Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Lévi-Strauss. I recall the author describing negotiations between an Indian chief and a white man, which involve a barter. During the conversation the white man takes notes. The chief interprets the white man’s act of writing as a gesture of authority, so he imitates it in order to demonstrate his own competence to his entourage. In pretending to write, he proclaims his leadership, ostensibly negotiated on an equal footing with his interlocutor and qualified by this perspective of writing as a mark of distinction and proof of civilization. The second scene is from my own childhood. I must have been four or five at the time. My father always kept in his office unused diaries, notepads, and notebooks, and would occasionally give them to me. I loved these little books and scribbled them full, without knowing how to write a single letter or word. One day I gave one of them to my little friend next door, telling him that he must read it because I had written it for him. Now I don’t know whether back then I was pretending, or if I really felt that I had written something for him that he could actually read. I assume that the game seemed so real to me that I had convinced myself. I was simply anticipating my future writing. One day I would know how to write, therefore I was able to write. Imagine my astonishment the next day when I went to fetch my friend to go out and play. He opened the door just a crack and passed the note38

book out to me. With a surly face he told me, first, that he couldn’t play with me, and second, that his mother had told him that there was nothing written in the book that could be read. It wasn’t real writing. And with that he shut the door. I stood there on the spot for a moment, unable to comprehend what had caused this sudden rupture in my negotiations. In the cases of the Indian chief, me as a child, and Cy Twombly, there is no attempt or preparatory study, no sketch of any kind. Everything is sudden, torn out, resulting in a certain excitation of the senses. Twombly’s act of writing is a kind of direct script. And, contrary to the general idea that his writing resembles that of a child, I would say rather that it is archaic. I even think it precedes the spoken word. It speaks of something that is happening or that will happen yet, and it affects me like spoken language, direct and immediate. What is written there strikes me like a word divested of sound. It is an effect that I also recognize in Simone Martini’s gold-ground paintings from the early Renaissance, such as the Annunciation in which the Virgin hears something that she already knows. In both Martini and Twombly, the actuality of the communication seems so urgent that it is beside the point whether or not I am aware of what is being announced. For me, Twombly’s paintings are voyages in time that divert a linear understanding of time by doubling back and detouring off the path of our imagination. If, aided by his paintings, one looks from the most distant past back toward the future, writing is both a prescription and a model. Thus, his oeuvre deploys its power precisely out of this fullness of the future, which bears within itself all that is past and present. Yet I can also see how Twombly superimposes these temporal lenses such that I find myself both in the present day and in ancient Greece at the same time. In this way, too, I do not need to align my lived experiences; rather I can follow each in its vital necessity. Twombly does not use ancient poems, mythical texts, and echoes of cave painting to prove the past, but rather to show that a linear sequence of events merely serves to put our own thoughts in order. This is why the references to mythical events are so appropriate, because they represent happenings beyond past and future. Thanks to this ingenious conception of time, he opens the past and the future to each other to create a much more dynamic present. Contrary to spoken language and music, painting does not follow chronological succession; thus it has no beginning or end. There is no duration of contemplation that can be defined. All of the layers or levels of a picture, including the coats of paint applied at different moments in time, are simultaneously present in the visual result. While viewing the picture, one can constantly exchange or recombine the skeins of paint or the narrative acts. Into this synoptic character of the image Twombly implants cinematographic fragments, for example scenographic instructions, narrative excerpts, lists of characters, and sketches that call to mind choreographic scores. This scenaristic material piles onto the surface of the picture. By thus fusing the temporal strata in the painted image, he intensifies the simultaneity of duration and event, which reaches its climax in the viewer’s here and now. All that is recounted across the space of myth affects me like breaking news, in direct contrast with the time that it takes to actually make these works. In Twombly’s art I experience this coincidence of long evolution and instantaneous event, without one canceling the other. In Fifty Days of Iliam: Shield of Achilles, these two extremes meet and fuse—in the

Cy Twombly, Fifty Days at Iliam: Shield of Achilles, 1978 (detail), oil, oil crayon, and graphite on canvas, first of ten parts: 75 ½ × 67 inches (191.8 × 170.2 cm) Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo by The Philadelphia Museum of Art/ Art Resource, NY

Twombly never loses time. Everything is urgent. He never leaves room for the slightest hesitation in finding the right tool or noting down a fleeting thought, but he puts precisely in play what arises in the moment. Katharina Grosse

superimposition of lettering, the scrawls that coil to evoke the shield form, drifting to the left of the picture while giving the impression of standing still. He depicts the shield not by representing it but rather by endowing a colorful scrawl with a verbal aid that forms the defining contour. The shield is born out of action, and vanishes the same way. It flickers only for a brief instant in the thickness of the plot, never transforming into the actual object. Wonderful. Twombly never loses time. Everything is urgent. He never leaves room for the slightest hesitation in finding the right tool or noting down a fleeting thought, but he puts precisely in play what arises in the moment. Numbers, diagrams, word snippets, punctuation marks. Wax crayon on a gray-green ground like a blackboard. The directness of the notation process means that the traces of the painting tools resemble more those of the hand, finger, or body. Everything seems to arise from an emergency. In opposition to this urgency is a disconcerting density of narrative, and the expansion or condensation of numerous strata and temporal forms. It’s hard to reconcile all this: the coexistence of urgency and density, and the assumption that the story stems from a time of which we have no knowledge. Yet it is precisely this seeming incompatibility that creates the level of excitation that marks every Twombly image. First of all, there is their sexual dimension, which is constantly and emphatically present in the form of cunts, breasts, and penises that penetrate the picture from every direction. But besides genitals, the birth of Venus, and little copulation scenes everywhere, in Twombly’s hands even motifs that have no sexual connotations are arousing. This frisson struck me in my first encounters with Twombly’s drawings. They were the first drawings I ever saw. As a child, my parents took me through the museum at Bochum University, and I ran through the rooms saying to myself, “Here’s a picture with a toothbrush in it. Why would anybody put a toothbrush in a picture?” Yet even this toothbrush was drawn with the same urgency and excitation that does away with all limits of time. Everything Twombly draws can derive sustenance from no matter what: a secret message, a universal text, other pictures and diagrams. Twombly’s paintings make me extremely alert. In the untitled, fifteen-meter-long painting of 1994 that fills an entire wall in the Menil Collection, Houston, Twombly projects me into an unprotected visual space that opens wide between the painted markings. This pictorial space opens up with such refinement that I cannot exit the painting by falling toward the base in accordance with the laws of gravity; rather I must die in the cottony stuff in free fall, directionless. And what if I didn’t exist, but my death wasn’t fatal? Or take the series devoted to the Battle of Lepanto in the Museum Brandhorst, Munich. Hardly had I seen the paintings than I immediately knew that something atrocious had happened here. The paintings triggered in me such a violent premonition of horror that I felt almost deceived when I read that they represented the attack on Ottoman navy forces by a fleet of the Holy League in the Gulf of Patras in 1571. I sensed the full extent of the horror before even learning that in this battle that lasted just a single day, 40,000 men perished and the entire Turkish fleet was all but destroyed. Harsh and brutal suffering resides in these images, at once clear and encrypted. And Twombly shows it exactly like this so as to rid the emotions of their logical and historical functions and render them to us without bias. It doesn’t always help to follow the paths that Twombly sets in his paintings, because they are full

of false clues or red herrings. They do not lead to any one conclusion, but rather disperse and unravel as one follows them. For sure, he had himself photographed in sites of antiquity, deftly staging his search for traces—there are even photos of him perched on a donkey on a Greek island—but one would be wrong in taking these sites as references. They are, rather, echo chambers intended for his own internal vitality. They are at once theaters where things happen and dividing lines that Twombly casually yet consciously employs to distance himself from contemporary popular culture and his own time. In the same vein, Twombly does not sign his works in order to authenticate them or accord value. He does so in order to add one more mark to the countless others in the picture. In their interleafing and temporal simultaneity, his images function like blocks of stone carved into incessantly over time— with incidental comments, poems, declarations of love, graffiti, and symbols. They are places both private and public. The sheer abundance in Twombly’s paintings gives the impression of having been torn from something, as if one would tear from the ground a clump of grass complete with its roots, soil, insects, and microbes and exclaim, “Look at this!” What is produced in this torn-out thing is delivered unflinchingly to the magnifying glass of the blank canvas. Nothing is mediated. Then the battle for survival on this clump of earth begins, growing acute and harsh. Everything teems and swarms; directions change from top to bottom and back again to the sides, along the edges, glancing toward the abyss, grasping for the center. It soon becomes clear that the clump will never return home again. What we see is a flood of transplantations. Things are swallowed to be spewed out again. What would happen if the torn clump were let fall only to gather speed; where would the uprooted script, the breasts, and the echo of myths fly? What rumblings would result! Not to mention the rude awakening that existence does not know history, because life can only be lived as an unrepeatable event. As a child, I experienced this over and over again, in split seconds of insight where I thought I could see everything in the world at once. All of a sudden I am reminded of the ways in which Brazilian artists dealt with imported European culture. I think of The Anthropophagite Manifesto (1928), where Oswald de Andrade challenged the canonical dominance of Europe. Cannibalize the best of others and reject whatever isn’t useful: for de Andrade, this was the only way that Brazil could achieve growth and affirm its autonomy. Eating and shitting as an anarchic transmission belt of the reversal of forces. Overturning all rituals that promise power. Tearing and separating. When, for instance, Twombly paints a large patch of color and writes “Aeneas” next to it, he exposes the identity and physical presence of the person in making them enter into two separate fields. And, immediately, I transpose and apply this manner of separation to myself, such that I begin to be able to experience myself as something apart from my own name. In this way, Twombly makes available to me a gigantic space that engulfs everything without a sound.

Translation from German by J. W. Gabriel, edited by Louise Neri. First publication of this text for the retrospective on Cy Twombly at Centre Pompidou appeared in French in Cy Twombly, Jonas Storsve (ed.), Paris, Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2016 , pp. 111-14.

marni.com

THE BIGGER PICTURE

NICOLAS BERGGRUEN The investor and philanthropist discusses the future of the Berggruen Institute with Derek Blasberg

Opposite: Photo by Jay L. Clendenin Following: Photo by Nathanael Turner

WE WILL BUILD A CENTER, A MODERN-DAY SECULAR MONASTERY, AS A PLACE FOR PEOPLE TO WORK, THINK, CONVENE, AND ALSO LIVE.

icolas Berggruen was born in Paris, went to boarding school in Switzerland, attended university in New York, and began his investing career in London. What followed was a legendary career in finance and a life spent primarily in hotel suites and airplanes around the world. A half-decade ago, Berggruen shifted his career ambitions, dedicating himself to the Berggruen Institute, “an independent, nonpartisan think tank which develops ideas to shape political and social institutions.” He also had a son and a daughter via surrogate and decided to base himself in Los Angeles. Derek Blasberg sat down with the philanthropist to talk about the goals of the Institute as well as its new permanent home in Southern California, a 450-acre campus designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron. At the Institute’s foundation, what are its ideals and goals? Very simply, I want to speak to the ideals behind the political systems that have the most influence on our lives. We humans have developed political systems and structures that have shaped who we are. If we want a degree of influence, we need to come up with new ways of thinking in regards to political systems and the concepts behind them. Which are the most impactful? The most informative? These concepts are difficult and they are long term, but I feel that we can make a difference. That’s why the Institute was founded. Just to give you an idea, it’s just the framework and background. Where are you from, what’s your background? I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and my family is mostly of German descent. Like you! That’s what I thought. So let’s look at that: if you’d grown up in Germany, your life would have been totally dif-

ferent had you grown up in East Germany or West Germany. I’m saying this to illustrate how political systems really do make a difference. The other thing is what’s behind those political systems, the ideas that shape them and that we should be conscious of. You mean the actual people, or the ideologies? Good question. In most cases we’re talking about single thinkers. They are even named after those people: Christianity is named after one man, Confucianism after Confucius, Marxism after another man. Again, ideas shape who we are and the political systems we grew up in and live in. They define our lives. So the Institute is totally devoted to studying political systems, comparing them, coming up with structural political ideas, meeting informants, and then looking at cultures and ideas in general— but not just from a Western standpoint. From the beginning we have been working on a new world of ideas, not just St. Louis traditions or Paris traditions, which is where I grew up, but also places from Japan all the way to Turkey. We have been very interested in other cultures. Have you always been interested in other cultures or is this political awareness something you realized more in adulthood? When I was a teenager I was a voracious reader and I loved politics and history and became obsessed with the world of ideas. I read way over my head, lots of philosophy, but I also read about political systems. They were French-focused at the time, but when I was lucky enough to start traveling the world I saw there were other ways of thinking, and that got me even more fascinated. The idea of truth was what I sought. If you travel and get exposed to different cultures, you see that the idea of truth, or of how to organize a society or live a good life, is not a single monopoly. It is not a law. It is fluid.

So let’s briefly talk about your travels. What do you think have been honest or truthful places that you have visited? Would you say that the United States is on that list? Well, each country has its own version of truth and honesty. They all have a local version of what constitutes truth and rings true. It changes, there are bad ways and good ways, but again I feel very strongly that you have to respect local cultures. This has actually been a problem for America: we feel that we have the truth and we need to export the truth. When America invaded Iraq, the idea was, “We have a good system here, Iraq should adopt it too.” Obviously it didn’t work, because their idea of truth—good or bad—is so far from ours; there was no chance we could just invade another country and convert it in terms of our culture. The most successful empires have resembled the British Empire and the Ottoman Empire, which always respected local cultures. To go back to your question, I think some countries may in theory be better run than others but I’m not sure that there is one truth. Why did you leave the investment space and the companies you created to focus on the mission of the Berggruen Institute? In my case it’s very personal. First, I came back to my roots, the politics and philosophy that I thought about as a teenager, which I just found so much more interesting. Second, there are more interesting people. Someone like Larry Gagosian, when he built a business, was creating a world and interacting with amazingly creative people. My version of business was much more financial and not very interesting. If you build a Google, fine, that’s fascinating. But what I was doing was not that interesting. What I’m doing now is much more interesting and much more valuable.

THE IDEA OF TRUTH WAS WHAT I SOUGHT. IF YOU TRAVEL AND GET EXPOSED TO DIFFERENT CULTURES, YOU SEE THE IDEA OF TRUTH, OR OF HOW TO ORGANIZE A SOCIETY TO LIVE A GOOD LIFE, IS NOT A SINGLE MONOPOLY. IT IS NOT A LAW. IT IS FLUID.

You’re building a business of intelligence. I’m trying to help to create a world that fosters intelligence. I think intelligence is very valuable, very necessary, and we are going to need it in the future. Earlier this year you announced that you were going to open up a new campus in Los Angeles. Tell me about that. We found the most incredible plot of land—450 acres near the Getty Center. It’s basically two mountains, it has the most incredible view and it’s incredibly peaceful. We will build a center, a modern-day secular monastery, as a place for people to work, think, convene, and also live. In that sense it’s going to quite unique. We selected Herzog & de Meuron as the architects and they have put together plans that are nearly final. They are doing the master plan and the main building, and then we asked a couple of other architects to help on some small pavilions. What are some of the activities that you hope to conduct there? It will be the work of the Institute itself, work in the sense of ideas, and also of political reform but purely on the idea side. Thinkers will be able to meet there, live there. There will be conferences and workshops. Will you have a permanent faculty? A small permanent faculty, yes. We currently have fellows from different universities and we’ll look to supporting people from other places around the world. Today we have fellows at places like Stanford, Harvard, and NYU, but equally importantly at Tsinghua and Beijing, the two leading universities in China, and also at Oxford and in India. My theory is we’ll never have a monopoly of good peo46

ple and ideas, nobody ever does. So, the opposite: we want to empower people wherever they are and wherever they want to be, and do it across cultures and across disciplines. If we said we were only going to work with people on the hill in LA, we would limit ourselves way too much. Can I ask why you chose Los Angeles as the place to center the Institute? Is it the weather? Exactly! No, it happened naturally for me, and it’s quite personal. I grew up in Paris, then lived forever in London and New York, what I call traditional city environments. LA is sort of the opposite. I was drawn to it because it’s a very free and open place, physically but also mentally, which I find quite extraordinary. Even though it’s not a real city, you have all the elements of a real city if you want them. You’ve got interesting and creative people in every field possible, but they’re not concentrated, as in an urban environment. So I started spending time here, and started spending time with some professors from UCLA in philosophy and political science. Then it happened naturally: I met more people that I liked, I started working on California reform, which we did, and brought in a few more people and one thing led to the next. When you were younger were you aware of something like the Berggruen Institute that you’re modeling this after, or did you think this is something that the modern world is newly in need of? The world definitely needs to invest more in the concept of ideas. Politics as usual hasn’t done so much in the U.S. or anywhere else. When I was a kid we didn’t have something in a formal way like this, or at least I didn’t know about it. But I think the Institute is the result of outside factors in the world. You’ve been a collector of contemporary art for a

long time. What is it about the world of contemporary art that you find attractive or compelling? I just love art for every reason possible. One, it’s beautiful; two, it’s stimulating; three, it’s alive. Contemporary art by definition is alive. The nice thing is, I was lucky to grow up in an environment where there was art around me, and then wherever I would travel I would always go see whatever the culture produced, in great art museums but also in churches or temples, whatever there was in terms of art to be seen. Life continues through art. The most permanent thing that any culture produces is art. So my next question is, What are the parallels between the worlds of art and politics? They are related in that when a culture expresses itself in political systems and political life, it is mirrored by the art that is produced, and has been throughout history. You’ve always had a relationship between power and art, in every way, from the pyramids through Greece, Roman times, China, Renaissance Italy, and continuing today. The relationship between culture, power, and art is close. Do you think the world would be a better place if more of us were artists? Well, you can’t have a world of just artists! I think the world is going to change, and this is coming. I think one of the challenges we’re going to have is traditional occupations are going to diminish, there are going to be fewer of them, and people are going to work less in traditional ways. There’s going to be more space for artistic endeavors, more space for artists, and in that sense I think there will be more artists. I don’t know if the world needs more artists, but there will be more artists.

Jess photographed by Craig McDean w w w. s a c a i . j p

BEHIND THE ART

TARZANA ON THE MOVE

For two days last September, the veteran journalist Susan Ellicott couriered David Hockney’s masterful 1967 painting from London to New York. This is her timeline.

08:00 Monday September 19, 2016, West London On a count of three, two tall strong men in gloves and reinforced boots roll a ten-foot-tall crate out of a hangar on an industrial estate. They make it look easy, but this is highly specialized work: in the crate is an irreplaceable work of art, The Room, Tarzana (1967), a painting by David Hockney on loan from its owner to Gagosian Madison Avenue for a show that will open within days. The men arrived from Amsterdam a half hour ago. Employed by one of Europe’s top art-moving companies, they’ve driven through the night and taken a ferry across the English Channel. Now—with me traveling along as a courier to witness every step—they’re about to return by a slightly different route.

You might assume that a painting, like people, would fly direct between the major art capitals of London and New York, but artworks this size are too big for the standard cargo services at London’s Heathrow Airport. The only way to get Tarzana to Manhattan in time to appear as a key piece in Madison Avenue’s Nudes show, alongside works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani, is to truck it via the Channel Tunnel from England to France and then by road to the Belgian city of Liège, where it will board a dedicated cargo-only 747 at a specialist freight airport. For insurance purposes—even though the truck will be tracked by satellite—a courier must go along. So here I am.

Opposite: David Hockney, The Room, Tarzana, 1967, acrylic on canvas, 95 3⁄8 × 95 3⁄8 inches (242.3 × 242.3 cm), private collection

22:30 The air smells of hay and horses: twelve elite show-jumpers are waiting to fly on the same 747 as Tarzana. A forklift driver stacks cardboard boxes of jeans around the artwork’s crate to give it stability on the pallet and build a shape to fit the curve of the plane’s interior.

23:00 He binds the load with industrial plastic film and a net for added security.

23:30 The sealed load is sent by conveyor belt to a storage area.

08:30

16:00

The drivers triple-strap the crated painting and, in a separate crate, its boxed-up frame to the side panels inside one of the trailers they’re hauling. The other contains art headed to Frankfurt and Basel. Click—they padlock the rear door and pull up a security bar. Off we go, dwarfing every vehicle on the road.

A shuttle takes the drivers to a passenger car. A Bulgarian insists on standing up to give me his seat. Everyone sits in silence or nods off for the thirty-minute undersea journey. A single female co-driver and I are the only women.

10:30 Dover We pull into the parking lot at the port of Dover. A customs official tells us it’s a “30 minute” wait. The drivers look skeptical— last week they waited eight hours. In a spartan lounge overlooking the English Channel and the famous not-so-white cliffs of Dover, we wait with drivers of trucks carrying goods between the United Kingdom, Poland, Spain, Bulgaria, France, and Germany. I take a seat with a view of the truck. The drivers fuel up on coffee and cigarettes.

13:30 Finally, after three hours, we get clearance and drive nine miles back inland to the Channel Tunnel entry point for passport and security checks.

14:40 After a full x-ray of the truck, we descend a ramp rimmed by electric fences and barbed wire and drive onto a cargo train.

18:00 Calais One hour later, but two hours on the clock given the one-hour time difference between England and France, we arrive in the French port of Calais. Setting off toward Liège, the Dutch drivers snack on peanut butter sandwiches and yoghurts. One takes a nap on a bed in the cabin while the other drives. Through the wrap-around windshield I get a panoramic view of French, then Belgian fields, villages, and church towers from my cabin seat.

22:00 Liège Navigating in the dark around a tiny traffic circle, our driver pulls the truck into the airport forecourt. We go through a passport check and put on high-vis vests. The driver reverses into an unloading bay, micro-adjusting the position of the truck’s rear doors with the help of hydraulics so that they open seamlessly into a giant hangar. Men in overalls clock onto their night shifts, greeting each other with a Belgian-style single kiss on the cheek. A team rolls the crates onto a pallet set in the floor.

Artwork © David Hockney. Photo by Rob McKeever Timeline photos by Susan Ellicott

10:00 The agent in his SUV follows the truck into Manhattan, waving his ID pass to police at traffic lights to avoid getting separated.

12:00 We reach Madison Avenue. Gagosian staff arrive to direct the unloading, unpacking, and carrying of the artwork into the gallery.

13:00 The “placeholder” for Tarzana is replaced by the real thing.

24:00 I get to my airport hotel and set my alarm for 02:15.

02:45 Tuesday September 20 An agent picks me up and returns me to the airport hangar after another passport and security check.

03:00 I sit on a pallet and drink a vendingmachine hot chocolate.

03:30 Outside, a 747 flown by the freight company TNT Express is waiting, its gutted belly a trellis of computerized metal tracks that slide cargo into place hands free. A yellow X-shaped crane works like a massive pair of scissors to raise pallets of cargo into the hold from a line of waiting trucks.

04:00 On go refrigerated medicines and high-value electrical goods.

04:30 Last in are the Hockney and the horses, sedated to minimize their stress.

04:45 The horses’ two grooms and I climb 50

a flight of metal steps leading to the nose of the plane. There are no flight attendants, just two pilots. Behind the tiny galley and its coffee machine are six seats and a cabin with two beds. The pilots deliver a safety briefing and point out an ejector hatch and metal “ropes” we must hang onto for dear life to break our fall if we should eject.

05:00 Take-off feels slow and magical. As one of the pilot explains, “We’re 360 tonnes fully loaded. We don’t make sudden movements.”

05:05 We climb over the lights of Liège, away from the breaking dawn, against the customary flow of passenger aircraft flying eastward from the United States to Europe. Partway over the Atlantic I take coffee to the pilots, who are eating M&Ms.

07:00 We land at JFK in perfect sunshine. I clear immigration and wait beneath the wing of the aircraft to watch Tarzana unloaded onto a flatbed truck and whisked to the other side of the airport to clear customs.

09:00 A ground agent picks me up in his black SUV and we meet a duo of art handlers who load the painting and its frame into an empty truck.

“ONE OF A KIND” BOCCI 73.19 DESIGNED BY OMER ARBEL

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Thomas Houseago, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol

Works by

and more from the Broad collection.

Free General Admission Tickets at thebroad.org

ÂŠ Thomas Houseago. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.

Cy Twombly : Blooming, 2001-2008, (detail), Private Collection © Cy Twombly Foundation, Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio © photo : Studio Silvano, Gaeta - © Centre Pompidou, communication and partnerships department, graphic design: Ch. Beneyton, 2017

EXHIBITION UNTIL APRIL 24, 2017

CY TWOMBLY CY TWOMBLY

Media partners

With the support of

Grand mécène

The exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of

CY TWOMBLY FOUNDATION

NEW YORK, 1975 In 1975, David Reed exhibited a series of new paintings. Christopher Wool, a young artist at the time, saw the show and it struck him with force. Wool discusses with Katy Siegel the memory of those paintings and the New York art scene in 1975.

ATY SIEGEL How did you react, Christopher, when you saw David Reed’s brushstroke paintings at Susan Caldwell’s gallery on West Broadway in 1975? CHRISTOPHER WOOL It was somehow an important show when I saw it. It’s stuck with me for a long time. The paintings haven’t been shown much since then so I’ve always wanted to see them again. I was at the New York Studio School for one year, fall 1973 through spring 1974, and I must have known about David, he’d been at the school before me and was considered a founding student. I was nineteen years old, just starting to see shows, when I saw that show. KS So why did it stay with you all this time? CW I thought they were extraordinary paintings. Now that we’ve been able to see them again, that’s not a misremembering—they’re very strong. They also capture something for me—going through all this, I think you and I have discovered that they were quite unique in a certain way. David was investigating certain Post-Minimalist things that were of the moment for sculptors but that not so many painters were able to address: the idea of process becoming image. I guess the one painter who would stand out in that respect would be Robert Ryman, but David took it a big step beyond, I think, and with more of an emphasis on the process part. The other artist I think was close was Cy Twombly, his blackboard paintings. KS If you were describing the work to someone who hadn’t seen it, what would you say was so strong about it? CW What’s great about the paintings is that they are a visualization of how to both make and read a painting. You start in the upper left and then go left to right and top to bottom, the way you read a book. Twombly’s blackboard paintings are composed somewhat similarly (and of course have their own reference to writing). KS People say that so often about Twombly but I’ve never thought about it with David. CW With him it’s not so much a reference to writing, it’s like, if you’re going to cover a canvas, how do you do it in the most economical or least compositional way? KS So, two things: first, this makes me think of your word paintings, which I had never thought about that way, in terms of the relationship between the way you cover a painting and reading and writing. CW I hadn’t thought of that, but I guess it’s true. When I was doing those paintings, especially at first, I was trying to avoid pictorial composition. As paintings they were written rather than composed. KS And you solved the famous problem of the corners—how to make them part of the composition, or whether to ignore them completely. CW I don’t know if I solved it but I avoided it. Clement Greenberg would have been aghast. KS The second thing is that a lot of artists from that time talk about making work in a sort of working class, hand-labor kind of way, like laying bricks or tile—making work in a really practical way instead of composing. CW That was particularly true for sculptors working with the idea of truth to materials. Painters didn’t really have an equivalent for the kinds of industrial materials that sculptors were working with. KS Both Vija Celmins and Chuck Close, though, working around the same time, have talked about building their compositions brick by brick. Did that

Previous: David Reed at Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, 1975. © 2017 David Reed/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Lisa Kahane. NYC Left: Richard Serra, Splash Piece, 1969, installation on the outside front wall of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in the exhibition Op losse schroeven. Situaties en cryptostructuren (Square pegs in round holes: structures and cryptostructures), 1969. © 2017 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo © 2017 Robert Fiore/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art Right: Jackson Pollock painting Autumn Rhythm, Number 30, 1950. © 2017 The PollockKrasner Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Hans Namuth

[Pollock] had to have remarkable faith that the process would lead to fully realized statements . . . . with Autumn Rhythm, Pollock allowed the form to emerge out of the materials and out of the process. For me, as a student, this idea of allowing the form to emerge out of the process was incredibly important. Richard Serra, 1995

appeal to you, that interest in making something that wasn’t fussy or pretentious or arty? CW Oh yes, of course. KS Where did that come from for you, do you think, that sort of horror of fussiness? You’re much younger than those artists. CW Well, I’m naturally fussy, much to my own horror. Fussiness kills, and the Reed paintings are a great example of an artist refusing to be fussy, which of course creates all this pictorial tension that’s so much a part of this work. KS You’d only just come to New York—were you aware of things like “This person’s a third-generation Ab-Ex, this person’s Color Field, this is another kind of artist”? CW Yes, I think so. I read art magazines, mostly old ones. I was learning quickly. It’s the art world, not rocket science. KS I don’t think of this as a great time for expressiveness, so I wondered if David’s paintings looked expressive to you as well as literal and materialist. CW They did, but I don’t think the issue of expressionism was so important at that time. And formalism was also something to avoid—“Kill the corners.” That’s what was great, those paintings had both. I think that’s what people were seeing in them. That’s what I saw in them—they were some of the ideas that painters might have been thinking of but he was also capturing what some of the sculptors were doing in terms of process, someone like Barry Le Va, or Richard Serra with his thrown-lead pieces. Would you use the word “expressive” in talking about Serra’s thrown-lead piece? KS I think people don’t, but maybe we should. CW I think I do. It’s a step beyond Jackson Pollock in terms of getting away from image, but it’s still expressive in the same kind of way. KS One thing I’ve always been interested in is how wrong art history gets the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and later artists. There were lots of things about the Abstract Expressionists that bothered or embarrassed younger artists—overheated rhetoric or what seemed like ego or whatever—but it’s so interesting to look at the notes of Richard Pousette-Dart, whom you studied with, and see how much they’re about the experience, the journey, the voyage. CW Oh my God. There was no one quite like Pousette-Dart. He believed that the experience of making a painting was more important than the painting itself. That’s a different notion of process from what the Post-Minimalists were doing, but it is again a focus on the act of making a painting as opposed to the image. So is that then “expressionism”? KS I think people forget how much the Abstract Expressionists were interested in the experience rather than in something finished. That sort of hardening of signature style came later. CW Yes. From Pousette-Dart and the New York School to Serra and the thrown-lead pieces, a lot of art is talked about as one generation rejecting another and moving on. I think it’s more of a continuation. KS Maybe that’s something you can see better from a distance. When you’re right in the moment, all you see is how you’re different from the people a little older than you, but from a distance you see continuity and similarity. CW I think David has spoken about Pollock, Pollock was important to him. I don’t know what Serra feels about the throwing-lead piece and Pollock—I would assume he acknowledges a connection. 58

James Nares, Pendulum, 1976, Super 8 film, black and white, sound, 17 min. © James Nares

Left: David Reed, #70, 1975, oil on canvas, 76 × 11 inches (193 × 28 cm). © 2017 David Reed/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Rob McKeever Opposite: David Reed, #64, 1974, oil on canvas, 76 × 56 inches (193 × 142.2 cm). © 2017 David Reed/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Rob McKeever

KS Yes, Serra has said that the idea that the form in a painting like Autumn Rhythm came out of the process was important to him as a student. The difference might be that the rhetoric around sculpture like Serra’s is that it’s antiexpressive, it’s to do with pure material and a kind of impersonal action, whereas the rhetoric around Abstract Expressionism and that older New York School is more personal, it’s an expressiveness that includes emotions as well as physical feelings. CW I guess I would agree with that, but probably less than what it felt like at the time. If you look back at David’s 1975 paintings or the thrown-lead piece, they seem less different from their predecessors than they might have back then. KS Looking at those paintings, now that we’re looking back, do you see a lot of variation in the work? Does each painting look individual? CW Yes. KS Does it look serial? CW It was a consistent body of work, but I don’t think serial. David was even changing the color of the white background, and doing many more experimental things than you realize at first. There may have been a little feeling of seriality, though, in the fact that they were either red or black and that he combined them in the show. I think that was a typical Post-Minimalist strategy. KS To reduce the number of factors. CW Yes, for sure, and exactly what David did so successfully in these works: he reduced color to monochrome, reduced illusion and pentimenti, and made composition nonpictorial by literally covering the canvas. KS So the thing that came out most was the variation in the material and how it behaved in different paintings. CW Yes, the process of making the paintings was the subject of the paintings and the materials had to be handled appropriately. But ultimately these paintings are pictures as well. I was aware of that right from the beginning, and that’s what was exciting. The Studio School was really about painting as pictures, so I would guess that was its influence on David. The idea that focusing on process could be the way you create a picture became quite important to me. KS What is it about that that’s important to you? CW That’s difficult to answer because it seems so obvious to me. . . . the fact that you can make a picture without trying to make a picture seemed very liberating. I guess it’s a picture-making strategy for an abstract painter. To rely on process is to make a painting without relying on the usual formal considerations that were supposed to define a successful painting. You’re making a painting by pretending you’re not, in a way, though pretending isn’t the right word. KS Do you fool yourself? CW Sometimes I try … It’s not about fooling, though, it’s just about focusing on something else. I would have a painting with certain elements and I would paint over the black images in pink, say, and that would create a shape, a shape created not out of compositional necessity but simply out of the process of overpainting the image, and that shape would become its own picture. It could only be that picture by going through that particular process. I think David’s the same. He had this idea of horizontal brushstrokes covering the canvas from left to right, and that became a kind of action picture. KS In response to the same question, the Pop artists say, “We don’t want to worry about what to paint

Above: Polaroids taken by Christopher Wool on the occasion of his exhibition at the Cable Gallery, New York, June 5–July 21, 1984. © Christopher Wool Opposite: Barry Le Va, On Center Shatter-or-Shatterscatter (within the Series of Layered Pattern Acts), 1968–71, five glass panes, installation variable, overall: 2 ¾ × 57 × 72 ¾ inches (7 × 145 × 185 cm). © Barry Le Va

so we’re just going to pick these stupid figurative things and copy them.” CW Yes, that’s a similar strategy in a way. I don’t like the word “strategy” but that’s a strategy to make a painting without caring about a certain part of traditional painting. David was doing something similar but with a different set of factors. And here I find similarities to what Josh Smith has achieved with his name paintings and his palette paintings and Wade Guyton with his use of the inkjet printer. KS Maybe that’s a continual problem after the 1940s: how do you make a picture when there’s nothing you have to do? Barnett Newman said something like, “We make pictures without relying on any known shape. We don’t use geometry, and we’re not European, so this is a metaphysical act, because we have to make it all up from ourselves.” So without a theory (which all of those people were against), and without an academic set of standards, what do you do? Relying on materials, or setting up a situation, or saying that action is enough, are ways to go. CW Yes, and Andy Warhol asked Brigid Polk, “What should I paint?” He wanted other people— KS —someone else to tell him. CW Yes, and that was his liberation. I think it’s similar, and I think it’s a post–New York School thing. KS Despite that continuity, though, it feels to me like you and David are right on the cusp, an intermediate moment. The painters five years older than you I don’t think contact that, and I feel like you do.

It’s hard to pinpoint but yes, I think we were the cusp generation. That year of 1975 is shortly before this quite particular moment when postmodernist thinking and examination start. KS I feel strongly that David’s paintings in that show were not just the end of something but the beginning of something. You can see that in the painting he showed in the 1975 Whitney Biennial: this is a single painting with two panels and the second is a version of the first. So the first canvas is process that becomes a picture and the second one is almost all picture, or at least a very different kind of process— remembering rather than inventing. CW Exactly. Robert Rauschenberg’s Factum I and . . . II [1957] play with that relationship, as do a lot of works by Jasper Johns. KS Around the same time, in the mid-to-late ’70s, Jack Goldstein is making his early films like Shane and The Jump, which take an action that turns into an image and repeat it over and over again. And the mid-’70s are when Cindy Sherman is starting in Buffalo. I feel like David belongs to that context as well, there’s a connection to the early Pictures Generation. CW I did not see the Pictures show [at Artists Space, New York, in 1977, curated by Douglas Crimp] but I was starting to be aware of some of those artists. There were different aspects in what was developing in postmodernist thought at that time. One had to do with narrative and pictures and real life; that was not where my interest lay. The part that was important to me was the notion that the modernist idea of the masterpiece was either CW

no longer possible or no longer necessarily an objective. Where the Abstract Expressionists had still been wedded to the modernist concept of the masterpiece, the postmodernists suggested that there were alternative ideals and possibilities to the Greenbergian idea of the perfect painting. I think in a way those artists were expanding on something that was already there in Post-Minimalism. KS The difference is that with the artworks that are considered Post-Minimalist, like the work in AntiIllusion [at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1969, curated by Marcia Tucker and James Monte], those artists really aren’t so interested in image. And the thing that what people used to call postmodernism adds is that while, yes, there’s the sense of the antimasterpiece, there’s also an interest in imagery. CW It actually went further: there were many who ruled out abstraction. When they talked about painting, it was about painting as picture. Abstract painting was not thought to offer any possibilities. KS Without belaboring that “end of painting,” I guess one of the things that interest me about that work of David’s, and it’s the same thing I see in yours, is that it holds together the abstract and the pictorial, the process and the image, in a way that I also see in Georg Baselitz and other people. CW Or Sigmar Polke’s ’60s paintings. KS The problem for me is always when it goes to all image or all process. Those extremes interest me less than the places where they come together. One of the most interesting things for me in talking to you has been the very specific way you talk

August 6, 2016 Finding for Katy my copy of the Whitney Biennial catalogue from 1975, I was astounded to see the illustration of #48 (1974), the painting of mine in the exhibition. My inventory book contains a page for each painting and shows something about the history of that painting, even if it was destroyed, as this one was. I had forgotten completely about this painting, always skipping over that page when looking for paintings for the fall 2016 exhibition at the Rose Art Museum. I repressed the painting, didn’t want to think about it. #48 is a single painting consisting of a pair of double canvases hung near each other. Each double canvas shows horizontal brushmarks beginning on the left, and going across the seam between the canvases; there’s also a single vertical diagonal mark squeezed in on the right side. Chosen for the Biennial by Marcia Tucker, #48 was criticized by my friends, colleagues, and supporters before and while it was up in the exhibition. I was told that I should convince Marcia to replace it with one of the five-canvas paintings with horizontal brushmarks, like #64 or #90. The criticism made me doubt the painting, but now I see that it was perhaps my strongest statement from this time. #48 was returned to my studio on March 25, 1975, and I destroyed it on March 12, 1976. David Reed 64

Above: Cover of 1975 Biennial Exhibition, the catalogue for the 1975 Whitney Biennial Opposite: David Reed, #48, a work no longer extant that was illustrated in the 1975 Whitney Biennial catalogue

about process. Most people talk about it as if it’s one thing, a single choice or way of working, a monolithic preference, as opposed to, say, representation or concept. CW Probably because they haven’t made paintings. KS Dav id loved t he work and he loved t he materiality in the Anti-Illusion show, but he was ambivalent about the critique of illusion, the fantasy that you can do away with illusion altogether. He wanted to remain entirely in the present moment and the act, but he always felt split, seeing himself from the outside, seeing the painting as an image. CW That’s interesting. I suspect I’m just enough younger than David that I don’t remember being forced to think about illusion or illusionism. Or more likely I probably simply didn’t understand the issue in its full complexity. KS So you never had to get over it? CW No. Can’t get over it if you don’t get it in the first place. And it’s one thing for a sculptor to be anti-illusion, it’s a little different for a painter. Are David’s 1975 paintings anti-illusionist? KS In those works he tries to get rid of illusion, to be entirely materialist, and fails. And that’s what those paintings were for him, realizing, “I’m going to try to do what they’re doing,” but the gap always opens up. CW Maybe we’re back to the modernist/postmodernist idea. Postmodernism reminded everyone that there are no absolutes, and that the modernist idea of the absolute was ridiculous in the end. There were no perfect paintings. What was dying was the idea of the masterpiece, not painting as a practice. KS When I learned this material in grad school what seemed strange to me was, it was a critique of abstraction at a time when so many of the abstract artists of older generations were already completely aware of the problems of academicism and repeatability and style. CW And of course there were New York School artists who were already on paths outside of modernist prescriptions—Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, and again Pousette-Dart. KS Yes. As early as 1952 Harold Rosenberg warned that signature styles turn into trademarks, and I feel like Pop art comes out of that awareness that Ab-Ex turned into habits. So I think people were aware of it early on. Habit is a problem for everyone who lives long enough.

Below: Christopher Wool and Katy Siegel installing Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 2016. Photo by Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University Right: Installation view of David Reed’s exhibition at Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, 1975. © 2017 David Reed/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Lisa Kahane, NYC

Embracing the events and incidents that arise as she paints, using a powerful spray gun in place of a paintbrush, Katharina Grosse opens up surfaces and spaces to the countless perceptual possibilities of the medium. She discusses her process with Louise Neri.

KATHARINA

GROSSE 68

Previous: Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2016 (detail), acrylic on canvas, 114 ¼ × 76 inches (290 × 193 cm) Left: Katharina Grosse. Photo by Lorenz Ehrismann

PAINTING ALLOWS ME THE MOST DIRECT TRANSMISSION OF THINKING INTO ACTION. Katharina Grosse

In his pivotal book Expanded Cinema (1970), Gene Youngblood makes a case for the evolution of video art as a viable new genre. The thrust of his title has since been applied to other genres to connote a physical and discursive space for art that is greater than before. I think of your oeuvre as “expanded painting” because you bring the discourse and practice of painting—which usually revolves around one of painting’s many cyclical “deaths”— to a new place. Can you discuss? KATHARINA GROSSE “Painting in the expanded field” suggests to me that one starts with something finite and exceeds it. That isn’t really how I work. For example, I don’t work from the canvas onto the wall. I am not crossing borders, or “transgressing.” Rather, I see paintings popping up everywhere; the painted image is a contribution of reality that is introduced into an existing network of other images. And this is an old tradition—I am not inventing it, but I understand how to handle it as a contemporary painter. Color is not topical; it is not linked to space. It is totally independent of site, surface, or even object. These are key points in my work: how I manage to develop painting as intricate patterns of emotional information, and that painting can appear anywhere. LN Painting has existed in the world for as long as human beings have, from cave paintings to frescoes to numerous other instances. At this moment in this particular field, however, it is largely confined to canvas, perhaps as a function of commodification. KG Very good point. It also has to do with the individual drifting toward such a radical subjectivity as to be completely independent of any power-inflicted network. And this is where I digress. Unlike traditional painting on canvas, my approach to painting is explicitly incongruent with the intended site. Moreover, it reveals the gap between the medium and the site; it is fragile, tenuous, temporal. Its presence in situ underscores these qualities. Cave paintings or frescoes or architectural paintings or volume-oriented paintings are always accorded space OUISE NERI

within the wider web of images, whereas I don’t really use space that is “given” to me in the hierarchical fabric. LN “Transgressive” may not be the right term, but you certainly do overtake space. There is an almost Baroque impulse at work in your interaction with space as a painter. You penetrate it, invert it; a complete upheaval occurs. This is not a typical approach for either autonomous painting or painting in a more public context. KG The spatial conditions coexist with the painting; it is a reciprocal relationship, an ecology. If I take the situation away, the painting disappears too. Painting imposes a contrary idea; for me it is a medium that makes us experience paradox, rather than antagonistic or dialectic situations. LN What do public commissions mean for you? KG Painting allows me the most direct transmission of thinking into action. Working in the public realm, I can develop images of direct, nonlinear, and nonlogical energy that generate clusters of compressed emotions. I see my paintings as unmediated prototypes or models of these emotions, devoid of manipulation or interface. LN So how do you perceive your role as an artist in society? KG To enact and produce images of what I would describe as the condition of radical subjectivity. My paintings are the direct physical residue of my thinking, and visual statements of my individual authority. I intend them to articulate for others the very experience of alternatives, of the abundant possibilities of life, of agency, of being able to choose. LN Technically speaking, you use compressed spray rather than relying on the standard hand and brush. This immediately confers a certain sense of power and freedom, because spray is a propulsive technique with which you can cover great expanses of territory quickly. KG I use a range of tools to dramatically shift scale, so that I can propel myself out of the scale that I negotiate in everyday life. This is an open experimental field that I am part of; there is no hierar-

chy. I am not the author but an equal agent to color, time, volume, and so on. I am moving in and out of it all the time. LN Many years ago, watching you paint a site, I considered the fact of your being sealed off from your own process by the protective gear that you wear. KG The protective clothing isn’t such an issue. I don’t notice it while I’m working. What is more important to understand is that my supply of material is very ample, so I can move around and paint for a long time without exhausting the source. I don’t have to go back to my paint pot and dip my brush and start again; there is no on-and-off, in and out. The unformed flow of material or paint or color coming out of the compressor nozzle is very interesting to experience. LN Perhaps we could describe the experience as “oceanic.” The conditions—the clothing and the supply line—allow you to be completely immersed. Like a deep-sea diver or astronaut, you can be at once separate from and one with a field of totally other phenomena and stimuli. KG I like this thought. It’s an interesting question, how do I connect with the field or web that is the basis for these moments of intense experience? Being neither totally immersed in the process nor an author outside of it, I have an equal role to the color, surface, time, and volume in terms of my ability to interact. I had a really interesting interview this morning with a music critic about the music I am doing with Stefan Schneider. He questioned whether our actual authorship of the music is less foregrounded because we have a very specific way of developing the music as we play. I disagree, because I don’t think that authorship exists outside or inside or above or below. All the components that I attract or let happen within the field that I am part of and use are on the same level. That’s why I am cautious about using the word “immersed.” LN It actually comes back to the paradox you mentioned earlier. By virtue of its sheer scale, your working process certainly appears to be more im71

Previous spread, left: Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 118 × 78 ¾ inches (300 × 200 cm) Previous spread, right: Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 114 ¼ × 76 inches (290 × 193 cm) Opposite: Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 114 ¼ × 76 inches (290 × 193 cm) Next spread, left: Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 118 × 78 ¾ inches (300 × 200 cm) Next spread, right: Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 114 ¼ × 76 inches (290 × 193 cm) Artwork © Katharina Grosse und VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017 Photos by Jens Ziehe unless otherwise noted

BEING NEITHER TOTALLY IMMERSED IN THE PROCESS NOR AN AUTHOR OUTSIDE OF IT, I HAVE AN EQUAL ROLE TO THE COLOR, SURFACE, TIME, VOLUME IN TERMS OF MY ABILITY TO INTERACT. Katharina Grosse

mersive than that of the painter using brush on canvas. But at the same time, there is a heightened consciousness at work; you are immersed but not drowning. Can you describe what happens while you are working? KG I am very specific about the elements I start with, not only in relationship to smaller groups of paintings that eventuate during the working process but in general. I work within an area that doesn’t use language or references or mimetic images. I don’t use signwriting or photograph-based input. I am fascinated by the image in which no identity whatsoever is being offered. I am interested in an imminent state, where just enough is generated to understand that a pattern or informative structure is about to build. That’s the starting point and then there are many things I want to know about this status, which has to do with the experience of prelinguistic thinking. Everything that happens from daily life—emotions, atmosphere, notions stripped of functions or identifiable names—ultimately one could easily drift into an experience like a sunset and out of it again. It’s like sliding around a Möbius strip: the in and out, the constant shifting of perspective from one surface to another that undoes the concept of the continuum—this experience that enables us to see the flip side. LN And we haven’t even mentioned abstraction. … [laughter] KG No, not yet! LN By being a self-conscious participant in this interwoven continuum of history and art history, how do you consider your own relationship to the orthodoxies of abstraction? KG I work with the residue of painting from the beginning of time. My work has roots in all sorts of areas, some of which are repellent to abstraction, especially that modernist abstraction that has to do with some sort of sublimation of industrial production, or seriality, or generating highly universalized imagery from mimetic concepts. LN Such as? KG Toothpaste landing on the mirror while brushing my teeth, cave painting, Renaissance frescoes,

the ever changing movement on a soccer field during a match, bird shit landing on the windshield, Hanne Darboven’s numerical fields—all this feeds into my impulse to find a totally new understanding of painting. LN And what about the artistic canon? KG The history of abstraction tells a story of progress, which renders redundant all previous “inventions,” throwing them over and offering the new, “right” point of view, which supposedly offers a single perspective to explain the entire world. But that’s not how we look at things anymore; our embrace of uncertainty catalyzes us to generate different paradigms according to a constant and ongoing evaluation within ourselves and around us. It influences how we look at gender, race, society, politics, the need for an artistic canon. Modernist abstraction is about as distant from me as a painting by Perugino. LN There are stochastic approaches to abstraction, based, for example, on uncertainty and trauma, which are deliberate without being prescriptive, compartmentalized, or metered. Take Iannis Xenakis, who applied mathematical theories and principles in creating textural sound compositions inspired by experiential sonic phenomena such as demonstration rallies during World War II, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. KG I share with Xenakis an analytical perspective, but unlike him, I am always in the field, not outside it. I would rather invoke Jimi Hendrix—the music and the person. Listening to his music is like putting my finger in an electrical socket; there is such an acute awareness of the power of transformation as a fluid experience. As a person he was multidimensional, sexy and aware of his sexuality, and truly free. And he fought for this independence and against categorization in such interesting ways. The powerful and extraordinary intelligence that emanates from his music is based on an exact awareness of who he is, how he sounds, what he feels, and what he wants to experience. In his art there is an urgency that I can relate to—to perform, to communicate, to reach out and touch people.

He was a real being in its most shimmering, beautiful, brilliant, and present incarnation. Hendrix inspires me in ways that I cannot find anywhere else, not even in art museums. LN Can we talk a bit more about your process? KG We began by talking about expansion; now we should mention compression. The constant pulse of expansion and compression that makes time shifts possible is a crucial factor in my work. LN Describe how this pulse feeds your process in terms of the exhibition. KG I work on a large number of canvases at the same time—as many as thirty—to generate a flow or stream of thoughts. It’s similar yet different to working on the expanded field of a site-related work. I start compressing disruptive layers together. Sometimes I take one or two paintings out of that process so as to halt them at different moments of time, while others remain in the flow. The stencils are filters that define my input; they block it or let it through. LN Can you speak about the relationship between the canvases and the sites? The conditions are obviously so vastly different. KG Canvases are containers that allow for different temporalities. I can work on them for a day or a year, stepping in and out of my relationship with them. When I work on a specific site with all the extenuating conditions that it entails, I can do nothing but that; I must be completely engaged in that relationship until the work is there. LN For the last year you have been working intensively in the studio, allowing thought forms to migrate across different phases of paintings. KG By choosing to focus more or less exclusively on works on canvas for the entire period, I increasingly intensified the pressure that I charged the canvas with. This often resulted in dense clusters. So, at the end of the year, it was a revelation to witness a process of inversion, where I produced works that were highly emblematic.

With preparations for an LA exhibition in progress, we get a glimpse inside the studio. Photos by Nathaniel Wood.

THOMAS HOUSEAGO

WORK IN PROGRESS

Thomas, you are a hands-on maker in a superphysical practice. But there is spiritual component that one feels. It’s electric here. You are open to the energy that comes in the door, right? THOMAS HOUSEAGO Yeah, that’s true. There is a flow between what’s going on in the studio and in my life generally. Looking back, in some ways my work was a form of healing. In a lot of the work I did in the 1990s to early 2000s, I was almost in an automatic relationship with the object, where it was me and the object, me and the figure, me and the body, in a very tight gestalt, a very tight relationship. In my life I’ve tried to be more porous —I’m trying to have more of an easeful movement between my home, my role as a father, my role as a partner, my role as an artist. Those things used to be much more compartmentalized, much more tense. I’ve moved toward realizing that the kind of lone, creative, tortured individual that some artists are, I am sometimes—that’s reality, that’s part of me, it all depends on your nervous system, it all depends on your history—but I think I’m growing into a more open state about what an artist’s studio can be and what an artist can be, and then hopefully being able to radiate back out. It’s funny, this election: we have this Trump presidency. I was talking with a friend, and I said “God, as an artist, what do we do? It’s so stupid sitting in this room making things out of clay.” And he said to me, “Hey, if you look at the electoral map, these big cities, New York, Chicago, and LA, they were rejecting Trump, rejecting this kind of dialogue about America. These cities aren’t just economic centers, they’re cultural centers, and cultural thought, cultural activity, is part of social awareness. It’s part of a greater willingness to look at differences, at other ways of looking, other ways of thinking.” I was struck by that. New York is not just a financial trading center, LA’s not just Hollywood—they’re centers of culture and thought, they have histories of art, they have museums. DM I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of artists in our society lately. You all are the radical voices in our culture, and we need this now more than ever. Does that feel somehow burdensome to you? TH No, I actually have a different take on that. I think this election was largely decided by disaffected white males who work in close rural communities in the lower middle class. I grew up in that culture. It was a very transformative experience for me to go into art. When I was confronted by the range of options that white men have in British cities like Leeds and Liverpool, art was another whole dimension. It opened up another whole world. It really has taken me twenty years of investigation and thought and research and looking— DM Did anybody in your family think you were Billy Elliott? I mean, was there resistance? TH No, not at all. My mum and my father were both cultured people on some level. We had no money, we were broke, but my father listened to really good music, was a sort of odd guy, and had these strange books he would show me. My mum is also a very complex person. She’s interested in art and music; they listened to jazz and soul and reggae. I grew up in a very diverse population— Leeds has huge Jamaican, Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani communities—so that was a very rich experience. I think people underestimate

E BORAH MCLEOD

Thomas Houseago with Deborah McLeod

IN A WAY THE PAINTINGS WEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;RE SHOWING ARE PAINFULLY OPEN ABOUT THE DIFFICULTY OF MAKING AN IMAGE, THE DIFFICULTY OF MAKING A PAINTING, THE DIFFICULTY OF POSITIONING MYSELF IN THAT PROCESS. Thomas Houseago 82

culture, they think it’s for the elite, the rich, for urban, educated people. I don’t think so: people relate to art and culture and music much more instinctively than we’ve been told. And I agree that art is radical, you’re absolutely right. There’s a great quote, “You can cause a revolution by painting an apple”: Cézanne painted an apple and caused a revolution in the way you look and the way you think about things. People are changed much more by thought processes, much more by pleasure, much more by questions, than they are by being told, or yelled at, or rallied in an angry way. So I don’t see being an artist as a heavy burden. I think it’s an artist’s obligation to emotionally connect, good, bad, or ugly. There are works of mine that are almost like sculptures of the Trump psyche—it’s a cultural trope that’s been there forever. DM Supermale. TH Supermale, but like the Cyclops supermale: the monstrous supermale that doesn’t think in a complex way, that is hurt, that is wounded, bullies. It’s fragile, ultimately. Creative, open, thoughtful, reaching-out discussion is the way forward. One of the dangers of capitalism and the way we have it right now in America is, everything is entertainment. Entertainment is fine but you also need enlightenment, you need to be challenged. If you just have a culture of shopping and entertainment, your field of view becomes very very small. Art has the ability to enlighten and awaken that consciousness. I really believe that. MUNA EL FITURI Your idea of the studio is also about trying to embrace the community. Your studio is set up to absorb children and animals and people who are just interested in looking. There’s that sense that it’s not the Thomas Houseago studio, it’s hopefully going toward being a much more open forum. TH LA is a very creative community. Musicians, filmmakers, architects, actors, younger artists— there’s a lot of energy here that if you’re open to it can be really enriching. I think because the city is so geographically pulled apart, we’ve found the studio is a good place to meet—to invite people over and to meet. DM Like a salon, exchanging ideas? TH Yeah, and discussing ideas from other zones of thought and activity. That’s becoming more and more important to me. The Musée d’Orsay has that great Courbet painting of the studio, where painting and memory and the artist’s life have all merged. I love that idea of the studio being a merging of past and present, and the places you want to go, the fantasy world and the real world—a place able to transform the normal laws that occupy us in our normal lives when we go out in the world. DM Maybe it’s time to make the studio a hotbed of thought, invite astronomers and environmental scientists and chefs and bass players. Historically great ideas and movements hatch this way but we haven't had that lately because we've been prosperous and in a hurry. Maybe we are going to slow down now. TH Artists and art spaces and museums and galleries, we’re all part of a complex phenomenon. You walk into an exhibition, you never really know what it’s about. You walk in and go “What is this?” It is an open-ended discussion. And of course there are artists who are doing real social activism—Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates—a lot of artists are embracing direct involvement in communities. That is an extremely important model.

Opposite: Thomas Houseago, Black Painting 8, 2016, oil on canvas mounted on board, 108 × 72 inches (274.3 × 182.9 cm). Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio

Rather than making more and more gilded spaces, I think we have to move out. Art should be in cities, art should be visible, it has to go out into the fabric of the world. There’s a huge need for that. Look at what Michael Heizer’s doing out in the desert, City: people don’t know about City but everyone is fascinated. I’ve never met anyone who was indifferent to something like that. So it’s not indifference, it’s just that it’s not present enough. Art is about being reminded that certain things are possible. Collaborations between artists and architects, architects and musicians—more of that needs to happen to have more successful experiences. With very little money you can have an extraordinary enlightening experience. It’s about communication and believing that it can happen. In fact certain modes of art are really successful in this regard: acting is an art, music is an art, theater is an art. DM Yes! The more immersive kind. People love environments like Yayoi Kusama’s room of light, Infinity Room, at the Broad and your supercharged sculpture there, Cyclops. Christopher Knight wrote of that work, “Within its fifteen-foot-tall form, Thomas Houseago’s monumental bronze Giant Figure (Cyclops) collapses an ancient Greek kouros, a self-sacrificing Rodin Burgher of Calais, Michael Rennie’s clanking robot bodyguard, Gort, from The Day the Earth Stood Still, a child’s Transformer toy and more.” I thought that was fantastic. TH Yes, that was great. DM You allow all these interpretations—all these things people see are legitimate views of your art. TH Some people have fixed ideas of what figuration should be: either it’s pure pop or it’s high, high heavy-duty. I actually think it’s much more complicated than that. I really was pleased with that review because that is how you look at that figure, it’s real. That’s what looking is. We’ve been through a hybridization of what things look like. I don’t think you can look at the history of art without also being inflected with popular culture, science fiction, animation, advertisements, and all these things. The figure has morphed the same way culture has morphed and we’re still trying to figure out what it looks like, what we look like, what art should look like. Can you make figurative art? Sometimes I’m convinced I can’t anymore, and I’ve stopped. I’m not really making figurative statues anymore. MEF But they’re read as figurative, which brings out how your work resides in the tension of contradiction. That Cyclops is terrifying, but people love to take pictures between the legs. Ultimately there’s something pleasing about that work, it feels warm and embracing. A lot of your abstract works are quite figurative in a way. People refer to them in terms of people, things, animals. TH Sculpture has the potential to do that. It’s both terrifying and reassuring at the same time because it’s giving form, it’s giving space, to these things we feel, these things we dream about, these fears. I believe this idea of manifesting things that don’t make sense, that don’t fit, that are odd, that are mixes, is really important for a society to function well. Christopher Knight mentioned Transformers, those robots, dolls—my generation came through that, it’s deep in our consciousness. And as you look at the history of the figure, or start looking at the way art has moved, there’s a much more troubling blurring than our historians would maybe like us to believe. I don’t think there’s linearity, I don’t think we’re progressing toward 86

ART SHOULD BE IN CITIES, ART SHOULD BE VISIBLE, IT HAS TO GO OUT INTO THE FABRIC OF THE WORLD. Thomas Houseago

something, I think art goes back and forward and up and down. I don’t think the twentieth-century idea of we’re making progress, we’re getting better—that’s kind of a moralistic, elitist view and I don’t think art works that way, I think it moves and shapes and morphs and reflects and imprints. Where we have to be careful is when it doesn’t do that. When art starts only being reassuring and too easy to read is when you’re in trouble. DM In your thinking and creating process, what is generally the seed for a new work? I know you draw a lot, and drawing and thinking are very closely knitted together for you. TH That’s a really interesting thing. There are periods when I’m looking at everything like a child would, I’m like a giant eyeball just taking it in. And then there periods where I’m drawing, points where there are forms and ideas and memories and things I’ve seen that I’m trying to make sense of. I’m almost mixing a soup at that moment. Then there are phases where I’m thinking a lot, listening to music a lot, looking at art, reading the news—I’m an avid news reader. I want to know what’s going on. Researching, I’m a big researcher. I’ll get really fascinated and that kind of bleeds in. DM I know you’re a real student of art history, and it all works its way into the work. TH Yes, but I think the process is mostly coming up against the world and making something that you feel is missing in the world, or making something for someone you love. And sometimes it’s just noticing, “Hey, how do I put form to this? How do I put form to these thoughts? How do I remind people of these possibilities?” As we move forward we have very stark choices: are we going to destroy the planet, are we going to destroy ourselves, are we going to be in endless war? Or are we going to move toward an awareness of our vulnerability, an awareness that we need to be making changes, that we need to be in an enlightened phase? I feel the potential of both. And I feel there are sculptures I’ve made that are really trying to emphasize that, to emphasize the idea of space as a magical entity that’s full of possibility and gives you numerous ways to look and think and feel and experience. DM Your practice has taken a turn, and while you haven’t left figuration behind, you’ve moved into this new dimension with the nested abstracts. Did it start with Moun Room last year? TH That was the first, yes. DM I also see your practice as a bit yin and yang, masculine and feminine, figure and site. TH Yes, that’s totally right. The Rockefeller Masks was the beginning of wanting people to literally walk in and enter the sculpture—the sculpture became a kind of studio, going back to your idea that the studio feels porous. In a way, I’m kind of putting a studio out into the world. The Masks led to the Moun Room which led to the works in the Gagosian LA show, which are becoming more porous, more open-ended. The experience of being in the sculptures is changing—there isn’t one perspective, there isn’t one way to look at them, there isn’t even one way to enter them. They’re multifaceted. DM You offer people the chance to literally get into the work. You also show the front and the back, revealing your process. People looking at your sculpture can see rebar, hemp, they can see process, they can see bits of plaster dangling. You really bare it. TH Yes, I was discussing this with someone, we had this odd conversation about legacy—“How would you like your work to be when you die?”

Muna El Fituri is a writer, translator, and art therapist currently residing in Los Angeles. As Houseago’s partner, his 2013–14 Moun Room is named after her. Artwork © Thomas Houseago

And the thought came up of something being completely unfinished. To some extent I think the idea of finishing a work, it being perfect and that’s it, that doesn’t interest me. I think getting better and missing is much more interesting to me than attaining some kind of idea of what an artwork should be. DM You don’t bury the process. TH No, I want the process right out there. Normally, with all of my work, if you sit with it for a minute you’ll see exactly how it’s made. There’s no tricks, there’s no “How’d he do that?” If I spend a lot of time on it, I don’t care—I can make a really great piece in twenty minutes and I can make a really great piece in two years. And I’m not a skillful person, I don’t have craft. I think some of my best pieces come from a really unskilled place in me and in a way the paintings we’re showing are painfully open about the difficulty of making an image, the difficulty of making a painting, the difficulty of positioning myself in that process. Just the sad loneliness of being in the studio making paintings is a part of them. If you’re feeling emotionally open or you’re feeling strange about the world, being in the studio and mining yourself is a really brutal experience, and that’s in the paintings in a way. And I want to be able to do that, as well as have someone entering a sculpture be able to look at the sky through it, or look at other people through it. DM We have been talking about rhythm and the quality of life here, the feeling here, the meaning of art. Do you work every day? TH Yes. DM And do you come to the studio every day? TH No. DM And do you know what you’re going to do when you get here? TH Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I like to have a plan, I feel very adrift and even scared if I don’t have a plan, but there are also months when it’s tremendously exciting coming in with no plan. I work every day, I’m always thinking about it, I’m always processing my life with work in mind. It kind of germinates, germinates, germinates, and then there are really exciting periods when there’s lots of physical activity. And the guys, the team I work with, we’re in it. We’re in the process of making a work and that’s its own kind of excitement. There’s a feeling of flux and energy. So there are different modes of work and there are different modes in which the studio activates. DM There’s solo work and there’s teamwork. TH Right, and nighttime work. I think the paintings came a lot from nighttime work. DM When you’re alone and it’s dark. TH Yes, alone. The night is a reassuring time for me, a quiet time. It’s usually a pretty great creative time for me. DM Do you ever feel dark about the practice? Think you’re finished and say, “That’s it. I have nothing to add and I am never coming to the studio again?” TH There are many times of such absurd despair in the studio. But no matter how heavy a day’s work or how horrible I think the result may be, by the next morning some part of me is always a bit excited to get back to it . . . To see if something interesting happened, looking for a glimmer I can build on. I am optimistic by nature and I believe in the practice of being creative. Making the space that allows you to look at the world differently— freshly, with endless possibilities—that is a glorious thing. 91

Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews the artist and the writer about their recent collaboration.

Below: Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, Was She in Pain?, 2016, acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 84 × 168 inches (213.4 × 426.7 cm)

Right: Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, The Earthquake, 2016, acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 84 × 120 inches (213.4 × 304.8 cm). Photo by Jeff McLane

ALEX ISRAEL/

BRET EASTON ELLIS

How did this all begin? Well, I lived in New York for many years, and when I came back to Los Angeles—this was roughly around 2006—I was shocked by the burgeoning LA art scene. It was very different than it had been when I left, there were more galleries, and a real sense that something was happening. And I found myself being invited to certain dinners and art openings, so I met a lot of gallerists and artists, including Alex. I was interested in his work, so we became friendly. ALEX ISRAEL As a big fan of Bret’s work for a long time, I was excited to meet him and to interview him for Purple Fashion magazine when I was in graduate school. Bret was a subject on As It Lays, which is an artwork [talk show] of mine, and then we just kind of became friends. So, I asked him if he wanted to do a series of paintings with me. BEE Well, you invited me to dinner at the mall, how could I say no? [laughter] Although the Beverly Center is a nice mall. HUO Alex, you once told me that as a teenager you were inspired by Bret’s work. Maybe you can talk about the impact it had on you and which books inspired you.

BRET EASTON ELLIS

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Well, all of them. The first one I read was Less Than Zero; I read it on the airplane coming home for the holidays during my freshman year of college. And that’s exactly what the main character in the book is doing. So I felt an immediate connection. The book goes on to describe Westwood Village in the 1980s, which is where and when I grew up. So even though I hadn’t met him at that point, I felt as though Bret was a kindred spirit. HUO Bret, can you describe the genesis of Less Than Zero? Was there an epiphany, or how did you come to write the book? BEE It’s crazy, but I was interested in novels as a very young kid, like at seven, eight, nine—not just young adult novels, but books my mom bought. So I wrote a novel when I was fourteen. It was about my experiences—I had done very badly in school, and instead of going to summer school, my parents sent me to a relative’s cheap hotel up in Elko, Nevada, where I worked as a busboy for the summer. And I wrote about that. That was my first novel. At around fifteen or sixteen, I began to make notes for Less Than Zero. It was based on diary entries—it was very journalistic. It was about experiencing LA as a teen in the early 1980s. The book took many forms before it was finally published, but its roots were journalisAI

tic and very influenced by Joan Didion. When I did the final draft of the book that was ultimately published, it had come a long way from its roots and had become a more tightly constructed work of fiction. HUO Joan Didion leads us back to Alex, because she’s also provided inspiration for your work. AI Well, the title for my talk show, As It Lays, is an homage to Play It As It Lays, a novel by Didion. I was also very inspired by her writing. Bret actually speaks about her writing in a way that resonates with how I’ve always felt about it, which is that its minimalism, her very direct way of writing, has a certain clarity that’s always really spoken to me. HUO During your first interview in 2010 for Purple magazine, Alex started the interview by asking Bret “You grew up in the Southern California. What was the best thing about it?” What is the best thing about it? BEE The geography of the place. It was a wideopen space that spread from the ocean to the mountains. You could get from one to the other in about thirty minutes. And it was the light. But it was also the mobility. There was a freedom to roam. And that freedom intensifies when you start to drive and you have a car. That sense of freedom influenced the range of my work; it leaked into other aspects of my life and into the idea that I could go as far as I did, for example, in my fiction. LA culture in the early 1980s, when I was a teenager, was very different. It was a much more innocent time. Things were fun. The beach was fun. Mall culture was fun. California punk culture was coming out of LA at the time. I liked it all. Until I didn’t. Until I started writing Less Than Zero. That’s when the darkness started to come in. HUO Alex, you once said that the light, the water, the waves, the surfers, the sprawl, the cars, the status, and the city’s unique spirit were a source of inspiration for you while you were growing up there. AI Yes, it’s a unique place. And because there’s not much easy public transportation, you really do have a prolonged childhood, until you can drive. HUO There are some darker influences from LA as well. Bret, you once mentioned that the Manson murders had influenced you, along with Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. BEE Well, with the Manson murders, you couldn’t escape from them. They defined the city for decades, still do to some degree. It debunked the friendliness of the city. People used to leave their doors unlocked, but the idea that someone could be roaming the canyons and just decide upon your house, well that kind of carnage really haunted everybody for decades in California; it created a lot of paranoia. And, Alex, for you? I was a child in the 1980s and that was a different moment. Los Angeles had just sent Ronald Reagan off to be president, tons of new development happened in the city, and it was a more optimistic period. BEE Well, there was an exciting pessimism in LA in the late 1970s. I’m older than Alex, so I did experience that as a teenager—the defeat of the 1970s, the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam—and it was a pessimism that was really quite thrilling; it affected the arts and music. Less Than Zero was attuned to that. HUO What prompted you both to go deeper into a collaboration? AI About a year and a half ago, I started working on a feature-length film project, a teen surf movie that I’m making, called SPF 18. But I didn’t know how to write a screenplay, so I had to hire somebody to help me. The movie is about the beach, and it needed to be earnest, for its teenage audience. I wanted to present a positive message to them. So, I contacted the guy who created Baywatch, his name is Michael Berk. We wrote the story together, and then he wrote the screenplay. And all throughout, I was really inspired by the process of working with a writer. I wanted to collaborate with a writer in anAI

HUO

959

Top right: Sunset Strip billboard advertisement for Alex Israel/Bret Easton Ellis at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. Photo by Jeff McLane

Top left: Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, Westside Pavilion Mall, Los Angeles, 2016. Photo by Aubrey Mayer

Bottom: Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, Fourth Tequila, 2016, acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 72 × 144 inches (182.9 × 365.8 cm)

96 Bottom: Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, Karen, 2016, acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 84 × 120 inches (213.4 × 304.8 cm)

Top: Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, Name for Us, 2016, acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 84 × 168 inches (213.4 × 426.7 cm)

979

other capacity in my work, which eventually turned into a more defined and concrete idea to create text paintings. And there’s no one I would have rather worked with, no one who is a more exciting or interesting writer in Los Angeles, than Bret. HUO And then there was the dinner where it all started, right? It would be great to hear what really happened in this dinner, because I know that you collected fragments, and that these collected fragments then led to streaming thoughts. Can you tell us what happened there?

Well, by the time we had dinner at the mall, we had already discussed the project. And my job was to create a narrative, a world that these paintings would take place in, and the text would be a reflection of the images that would also appear on the paintings. In the beginning, I created a world with scenarios set in Los Angeles that had reoccurring characters, houses, narrative trajectories, and began to whittle them down so they were just two or three sentences. During that first dinner, we went over the first batch of them. And there were many, many, many of them. AI And we continued to collect them. Every time we had a new batch of texts to discuss, we would meet up for dinner and go through all of them together. And we just kept narrowing things down. BEE Yes. And then you started to find images that you thought would best juxtapose with these texts— Los Angeles, for a while, was really the subject matter. This process went on and on until we found what really worked best for the show, and created a coherent mood for all of the paintings. HUO Before we talk about the images, I wanted to ask you about the typography—the fonts, the way they are arranged. AI So, once we had enough texts, I began turning them into images, sourcing stock photography BEE

and laying the texts out with the images, and with different fonts. The fonts were culled from the landscape of Los Angeles, so it was The Hollywood Reporter font or the Variety font, a font that’s used for screenplays, or the Whole Foods Market font. That’s how I got started. HUO And then the images. You appropriated them, but it’s not really an appropriation. AI Well, appropriation is more like shoplifting. When we collected images for this project, we were just shopping. We bought them online. We didn’t have to steal. HUO But are they readymades? AI Yes. HUO You’ve used readymades before in your work, using all kinds of props; so it’s a continuation of that, one can say. AI In some ways, yes. HUO It might be interesting to hear a little bit about the timing of the exhibition, because you contextualized the exhibition timing both in terms of the art world and the world of cinema. AI Well, the project is LA focused, and we wanted to present the work in a context that encouraged a heightened Hollywood situation around the art. There’s this annual Oscar-week opening at Gago-

sian in Beverly Hills. It’s a unique coming together of Hollywood and the art world in our city. Do you find the process to be challenging? BEE It is very challenging, much more than I expected. Look, I believe everything should be enjoyable to a degree when you’re creating something, when you’re writing something, when you’re making something. But this posed a set of challenges that could be as trying at times as working on a novel. Now, I’m not saying it was like writing a novel. It was very different. But there was an inordinate amount of emphasis on finding the precise words, that would not only fit together best on a canvas but would also be imbued with a meaning and communicated in a short amount of time. It was a long process. It took about a year: we went through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of texts to get them down to the ones that are in the show. HUO It’s obviously very different from a traditional collaboration between an artist and a novelist or poet, which often gets reduced to a preface, or response to a work. Here it’s really a coauthorship. AI Yes, absolutely.

999

Top, lower left: Opening reception of Alex Israel/Bret Easton Ellis at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, February 25, 2016. Photo by Daniel Arnold

Top, upper left: Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis's The Chef installed at CUT by Wolfgang Puck in New York, NY. Photo by Christian Horan

Bottom: Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, Heat Wave, 2016, acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 72 × 144 inches (182.9 × 365.8 cm)

Top right: Opening reception of Alex Israel/Bret Easton Ellis at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, February 25, 2016. Photo by Alysia Alex © Artillery Mag

100

100 Bottom: Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, 50 Million People, 2016, acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 84 × 120 inches (213.4 × 304.8 cm)

Top: Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, Showbiz, 2016, acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 84 × 168 inches (213.4 × 426.7 cm)

Photos by Joshua White/ JWPictures.com unless noted otherwise

Artwork © Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis

A book on this collaboration has just been published. For more information, visit www.gagosian.com/shop

1011

102

TEHRAN TREASURES

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art was established by former Empress Farah Diba in 1977. Negar Azimi takes us back to the home of one ofÂ the most fabled collections of Western modern art outside of the West. Photos by Sanam Gharagozlou.

n Tehran’s leafy Laleh Park, between the university and the former Hotel Intercontinental, is a low-lying modernist complex of muddy-brown hue. Its main building, which is home to the fabled Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, is made of concrete and spirals into the ground like an oversized corkscrew. A series of light-catchers punctuates the complex, giving it, at least from the air, the appearance of a half-extinguished sand castle. Outside, a pair of reed-thin Giacometti sculptures stand sentry, witnesses to the comings and goings of a city that has seen its share of tumult over the years. Inside, a snaking rotunda branches out into a series of underground galleries that, in the words of its architect, Kamran Diba, “unfolds like a striptease.” A colorful Calder mobile hangs over the staircase and at its base sits a pool of oil, a work by the Japanese artist Noriyuki Haraguchi. It is said that at the museum’s star-spangled opening, in 1977, the Shah of Iran wondered aloud if the oil was real and dipped his hand in. Naturally, his minders rushed to clean the soiled royal hand. Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, the king and queen of Spain, and Thomas Messer, the director of New York’s Guggenheim Museum at the time, were among the guests that evening. The story of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art begins with a series of conversations between the Shah’s third wife, Farah Diba—the Shahbanou—and an Iranian painter of surrealist tendencies named Iran Darroudi. Beyond the odd ministry building that might hold this or that painting, there was no permanent showcase for modern and contemporary art in Iran. The Shahbanou, meanwhile, had been building up her own collection for some years, while also encouraging members of Iran’s leading families and the heads of its most profitable companies to do the same. These collectors were served by a small but lively gallery scene. Having trained as an architect in Paris in the 1950s, the Shahbanou had by the early 1970s emerged as an inspired patron of the arts, supporting a biennial, cultural centers and museums, an international film festival that would stage retrospectives of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Satyajit Ray, an avant-garde performing arts festival in the southern city of Shiraz that hosted the likes of Peter Brook and Bob Wilson, and even an academy of philosophy whose aim was to reconcile Western

philosophy with Eastern mysticism. Before long, Kamran Diba, a young American-trained architect and artist who happened to be the Shahbanou’s cousin, echoed the call for a contemporary-art museum. With the Shahbanou’s blessing, his firm took on the project; a young Harvard-trained architect named Nader Ardalan worked with him closely. From the beginning, the new museum was to be a home for the works of Iran’s own modernists—artists like Behjat Sadr, Parviz Tanavoli, and Bahman Mohasses—as well as for important works of art from around the world. Iran in the 1970s was a frenzied workshop of ideas. The oil boom of 1973 had inspired a spirit of cando-ism with little precedent. Thanks to a muscular, petroleum-fueled development, the face of Tehran swiftly began to change; in came needlelike high-rises, bulky industrial centers, wide highways filled with wide American cars, bowling alleys, miniskirts, and neon-lit restaurants serving exotic foods like pizza and Coca-Cola. Overnight, the number of flights arriving at Mehrabad International Airport tripled and foreign businessmen and soldiers of fortune, it was said, took to sleeping in the bathtubs of overbooked hotels. Iran was suddenly a place of stupendous numbers: under the Shah, the country had doubled the length of its railway network, quadrupled the number of paved roads, tripled the number of secondary schools, and engaged some of the world’s leading architects—I. M. Pei, Moshe Safdie, and Louis Kahn—to make vivid Iran’s modernization. In little time, Tehran transformed from a sleepy third world backwater to a worldly capital with wide tree-lined boulevards, modern cinemas, and fivestar hotels. Iran Air flew daily to Paris and London and back again. In the background, the Shah spoke proudly of his country as “the Great Civilization.” “It was a period during which we were moving forward. Orphanages and hospitals were opened; there was investment in education, too. Everyone had ideas and everyone worked hard,” the Shahbanou recently told me. “In the end, we are a country of very creative people.” The boom was a boon for the arts. With the help of the National Iranian Oil Company and the Plan and Budget Organization, the Shahbanou secured the necessary funds to begin the construction of the new museum and by 1974 was making a steady stream of acquisitions. Purchases went through her office, which was headed by Karim Pasha Bahadori, and decisions were very often made by the Shahbanou herself—especially when she personally visited artists, as she did with Henry Moore, Marc Chagall, and Salvador Dalí. Kamran Diba, who was to serve as the museum’s first director, cultivated relationships with gallerists around the world. At the time, Kamran Diba’s tastes gravitated toward postwar American art—Ab Ex, Pop, and Minimalism—and before long he encountered Tony Shafrazi, a thirty-something conceptual artist of Armenian-Iranian origin. Born in the oil-rich Persian Gulf city of Abadan, Shafrazi went on to study at London’s Royal College of Art in the 1960s. He had captured the attention of the art world on February 28, 1974, when he walked into The Museum of Modern Art in New York and spray-painted the words kill lies all on Picasso’s Guernica. In Iran, he was known by some artists for an enigmatic talk on conceptual art that he had given at the Iran-America Society in 1972 with the title “That’s It.”

104

Recognizing the historic opportunity before him, Shafrazi approached fifteen leading New York gallerists—among them Paula Cooper, Ileana Sonnabend, John Weber, and Leo Castelli (whom he considered his “American father”)—and asked them to sign a letter of recommendation that would introduce him to the Iranians as a liaison. Before long he was moving back and forth between Tehran and New York with suitcases full of slides. The fruits of his efforts were a great number of pivotal acquisitions, including Roy Lichtenstein’s Bratatat! (1962), a riff on the hyperbolic masculinity of wartime. “I very strongly felt that if there was going to be an acknowledgment and collection of modern and contemporary art, what I had devoted my life to and studied since the age of thirteen, . . . that this would be the greatest opportunity for the gates to open,” Shafrazi recently told me. “Young Iranian men and women, already talented in cinema and armed with a remarkable propensity to respond to the best of Western culture, would have an opportunity to participate and be recognized in a new global future.” Barbara Jakobson, a prominent New

York collector who had been close to Leo Castelli, has said that the sales to the Iranians kept the storied gallery afloat during the economic slump of that decade. “Naturally, the gallerists loved us,” remembers Kamran Diba. During these years, dozens of Western artists traveled to Iran, including Andy Warhol in 1976. At the time, Warhol’s primary link to Iran was the sumptuous Fifth Avenue townhouse that was home to the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. Its rakish, cosmopolitan ambassador, Fereydoun Hoveyda, had been a member of the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd and counted Godard and François Truffaut as his friends. Throughout the 1970s, Hoveyda’s mission was known for its chic A-list parties, where supermodels and fashionistas mingled with diplomats and writers. Warhol and his Interview magazine colleague Bob Colacello became regulars, christening the townhouse the “caviar club” after the vast amounts of that delicacy offered within its bounds. Eventually, Hoveyda arranged for Warhol to make portraits of the Shahbanou. Colacello traveled with him to Tehran, along with the noted

Iranian modernist Monir Farmanfarmaian’s daughter Nima, who served as their guide. Warhol spent much of his trip lounging by the pool and eating caviar at the Tehran Hilton, or mooning over the Iranian crown jewels, which were housed in the central-bank building downtown. Colacello reminisces, “North Tehran reminded me of Beverly Hills, except that you had Persian carpets by the pool and that wonderful rice.” Meanwhile, as the museum approached completion, a staff of curators conceived a series of exhibitions. Among them was Donna Stein, an American who had worked in MoMA’s print department and joined the museum upon urging by her friend Feri Daftari, who also briefly served as an art consultant in the Shahbanou’s office before going off to pursue her graduate studies in the United States. Early on, Daftari had been tasked with reviewing what she referred to as “the avalanche of junk [that] European dealers were trying to sell to the ‘oil rich’ Iranians.” She commented, “None of the offers were of museum quality. Rejecting them was delightful!” Stein, for her part, built up the museum’s print and 105

Tony Shafrazi recalls the museum’s inception In 1972, on a visit to Tehran, I presented an exhibition at the Iran-America Society in the form of a reading of a radical artwork I had made titled That’s It. I made friends there and a year later heard mention of a possible building of a museum. This remarkable dream was an undertaking of the Empress Farah Diba, who was establishing a wide-ranging cultural program in cinema, dance, and the performing arts, a traditional museum of carpets, and a new museum of modern and contemporary art in Iran. The museum was to be designed by Kamran Diba and his partners, and Diba was also to act as a temporary director. To me this represented a cultural revolution. I strongly felt that an

106

acknowledgment in Tehran of modern and contemporary art, which I had devoted my life to, had studied since the age of thirteen in England, and had practiced in New York in 1968–69, would create the greatest possible opportunity for the gates of cultural exchange and friendships to open. If the great artists of the West, many of whom I knew and admired as heroes, colleagues and friends, could visit Iran, I could help to show and share with them the magnificent country and wonderful variety of people. It would also give young Iranian men and women—who had a remarkable propensity to respond to the best of Western culture, and were already showing talent in cinema—the opportunity to be recognized, participate and contribute in a new global future. Not knowing or trusting anyone in the corridors of power and influence in Iran, and given that my background was

already somewhat notorious, in 1973–74 I asked Leo Castelli (whom I considered my American father), Ileana Sonnabend, Paula Cooper, Irving Blum, John Weber, and other gallerists I admired, to write a letter of introduction on my behalf addressed “To whom it may concern.” Being an artist at the time, I had no ideas about commissions, profits, or acting as a so-called “dealer,” a word I have always hated in any capacity. My concern was to address the changes needed in the Iranian state, and in the art world as it entered the period of what some years later would come to be called postmodernism and globalization. Tony Shafrazi is an artist and acted as an adviser for 1974–78 for the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. He returned to New York in late 1978 to open his first gallery on Lexington Avenue in January 1979.

Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground (1950), Jasper Johns’s Passage II (1966), several works by Robert Rauschenberg, and works by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Duane Hanson, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, and James Rosenquist. There was also a respectable smattering of Impressionist work—by Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir—along with Cubists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and Surrealists like René Magritte and Joan Miró. Accurate figures are next to impossible to come by, but there is no question that the Iranian budget appeared boundless. If ever challenged about the prices of her purchases —and she rarely was—the Shahbanou would reply that all of it cost less than one of the Shah’s beloved Tomcat fighter planes. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art opened on October 14, 1977, which was also the Shahbanou’s thirty-third birthday. Its curators had installed eight exhibitions, including a survey of historical photography, a show on graphic art, and an exhibition devoted to the works of Iran’s Saqqakhaneh school, a group of artists whose works tended to draw upon vernacular and folk art. (Kamran Diba would later refer to Saqqakhaneh as a sort of “spiritual pop art.”) Nelson Rockefeller declared the new complex one of the most beautiful museums he had ever seen. Still, not everyone was keen about the new-fangled artistic expression in their midst. The prominent critic Cyrus Zoka likened the strange new art on display to “wearing a turban with jeans while dancing the twist.” The artist and writer Coosje van Bruggen, who was married to Claes Oldenburg, continued her call for Western artists to boycott the Iranian regime, which by the late 1970s was facing an avalanche of criticism from within and without. But that didn’t stop the museum from acquiring two Oldenburg works, Giant Blue Shirt and Ironing Board, through the secondary market. As it happens, the new museum’s timing couldn’t have been worse. By 1977, the winds of revolution were gathering; in the months that followed, antiregime demonstrations erupted in cities across the country. By October of 1978, Kamran Diba had left the country, leaving the directorship of the museum to Mehdi Kosar, a dean of the art school at the University of Tehran. Sensing the mounting religiosity in the air, Kosar dragged some works, including ones that included conspicuous sexual content, into storage spaces in the basement. “In Farsi we

have an expression: something that is ‘in the basement’ is trash, worthless. And so that’s where we put it . . . and somehow, the mullahs didn’t pick up on it,” Kosar later told me. The Shah and his family left Iran on January 16, 1979. On December 23 of that year—by then, Kosar too had left—CBS interviewed the museum’s new director, a U.S.-trained architect named Massoud Shafi Monfared. A red banner draped across the museum building read, “This belongs to the people, and we represent the culture of the people.” In the background were murals and calligraphic works with revolutionary themes. Nearly four decades after the revolution that swept away the Shah and Shahbanou’s kingdom, the collection, which is today estimated to be worth close to $3 billion, remains, by luck and the hard work of the Iranian staff and curators who stayed through the revolution, intact. Or mostly, anyway. In 1994, Willem de Kooning’s Woman III (1953) was exchanged for a few pages of a rare sixteenth-century copy of the Shahnameh, the Persian book of kings, in an elaborate James Bond–style handoff, facilitated by the Zurich dealer Doris Ammann, in the international zone of the Vienna airport. The de Kooning, which boasted frontal nudity, had been declared “un-Islamic.” The entertainment magnate David Geffen later acquired the work and reportedly went on to sell it for $137.5 million. When the Shahbanou, by now living quietly in exile, heard of the exchange, she rang up the museum, posing as a concerned art student. “Please don’t sell off any more,” she told whoever was on the other end of the line. “This museum represents the cultural and material heritage of our people.”

Artworks from the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art are on view at the Nationalgalerie–Staatliche Museen zu Berlin from December 4, 2016 to March 5, 2017. p. 103: Artwork © 2017 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY p. 104: Artwork © 2017 Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, NY pp. 104–05: Artwork © The Henry Moore Foundation

photography collection in particular and assembled a library of 20,000 books. David Galloway, an American who had worked for the United States Information Agency and had curated shows at the Iran-America Society, was hired as chief curator a few months before the new museum opened. Boeing 707s and 747s were placed at his disposal for buying basic supplies. When he left the country, only eight months into his tenure, Robert Hobbs, a professor of art history at Cornell, was hired to replace him. Other museum staff included Nahid Mahdavi, Nasrin Faghih, Mina Etemad, and Roxane Zand. By the tail end of the 1970s, the Iranians had become the world’s biggest collectors of contemporary art. The overt goal of investing in the works of major American artists since 1950 meant that the American collection dwarfed the Iranian one. Still, the museum made important acquisitions of Iranian artists such as Farmanfarmaian, Bahman Mohasses, Behjat Sadr, Parviz Tanavoli, Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, and many others. Among the pivotal American works were Jackson 107

Taryn Simon at the Albertinum Museum, Dresden, 2016. Photo by David Pinzer

OBSCURING THE INDEX Taryn Simon’s 2016 exhibitions spanned the globe. Angela Brown brings us highlights from six museums. 108

The image alone is not the work. Its true form—a combination of text and image—is only understood when seen at scale installed on the museum wall. I do feel compelled to speak when it is presented outside that context, in print or online, because it’s got its legs chopped off. Taryn Simon

Museums collect. They gather the objects of the world and put them into categories. In the Renaissance Wunderkammer, shelves were packed with curiosities from near and far; in the early-modern French salon, the walls overflowed with paintings organized according to subject-based hierarchies. Today, knowledge is created and spread within an uninterrupted flow of images and text. In this digital, globalizing present, Taryn Simon’s work enters the museum and proposes new strategies of research and visualization, creating indices of the information to which we have—or can gain—access. Like the museum, Simon catalogues objects and information under specific organizing principles: symmetry, crispness of detail, and refined, minimal installation. Through this highly careful mode of tracing, depicting, and presenting, she both mirrors the systems she sets out to examine and surpasses them in her rigorous application of their logic.

Her presentation of images and texts reflects the control and authority that are the very subject of Simon’s work. In this way her indices deal with the obscuring of information, bringing the viewer to question the stability of the very facts they present. In 2016, Simon had gallery exhibitions in New York, Rome, and Brussels; her first performance work, An Occupation of Loss, co-commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory and Artangel, premiered in New York in September; and she had major museum exhibitions in Moscow, Prague, Tel Aviv, Dresden, and Copenhagen.

109

GARAGE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MOSCOW Renovated in 2015 by the architectural firm OMA, the Garage puts the open floor plan and exposed concrete of a Soviet-era restaurant to a twenty-firstcentury purpose. Its design offers glimpses of the building’s original mosaic and mural work, allowing contemporary art to live alongside views into the past. The two series of Simon’s in the exhibition, Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) and Black Square (2006– ), entered into this dialogue between past and present. In Paperwork and the Will of Capital, Simon re-creates the floral centerpieces that witnessed thirty-six signings of official documents, all involved with aspects of governance and economics. Photographs of Simon’s reconstructions are accompanied by specimens of dried flowers, re-

vealing how time transforms the artifacts of history. (For a more detailed description of this series see Kate Fowle’s essay on it in Gagosian Quarterly, February–April 2016). Black Square, a homage to Kasimir Malevich’s game-changing Suprematist masterpiece of 1915, is an ongoing project in which Simon formats objects, documents, and individuals within black squares of the same measurements as Malevich’s painting. Black Square XVII is an 80-by-80-by-80-cm cube containing a mass of vitrified nuclear waste derived from pharmaceutical and chemical plants in the greater Moscow region. This toxic cube is technically the first work in the Garage’s permanent collection, but it must remain in Russia’s State Atomic

Energy Corporation (rosatom) until the year 3015, when it will finally be safe for human observation and will be placed in a custom-made niche currently cut into the Garage’s wall. For Simon, Black Square XVII was “an exercise in being a step removed, as a condition of experience.” The work had to be made by proxy since Simon, as an American, was not allowed to enter the rosatom facility. She met with workers, wrote instructions (that then had to be translated into Russian), and handed off a letter to the future that was placed in a two-ply cylindrical steel capsule within the cube. The project gave rise to a film—a documentary about the atomic industry and the process of constructing an object indirectly within it.

Top: Taryn Simon, Black Square, 2006–, void for artwork, 31 ½ × 31 ½ inches (80 × 80 cm), permanent installation at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow Bottom: Installation view, Taryn Simon: Action Research/ The Stagecraft of Power, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, March 17–May 22, 2016. Photo by Naroditskiy Alexey

110

GALERIE RUDOLFINUM, PRAGUE Half of the film was shot in the facility and the other half in a customized film studio at the Garage during the exhibition. The Black Square series continues to capture disembodied objects with lasting implications. The black backgrounds are not neutral; the allusion to Malevich imbues each object with a political charge. On June 24, 2016, at 2:30 a.m. GMT, Simon went to Alexandra Palace in North London to photograph Black Square XX, a clear plastic box containing the final ballot count for the Borough of Haringey—pink and yellow slips of paper affirming that the United Kingdom would leave the European Union.

Simon’s work appeared at the Galerie Rudolfinum in neoclassical rooms with a complex past. In this ornate architectural context, projects including An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), Contraband (2010), Image Atlas (2012), Cutaways (2012), The Picture Collection (2013), and Birds of the West Indies (2013–14) felt like rare artifacts on display, blurring the line between art and science. The decor of the Rudolfinum, however, contains its own poignant historical details. Inaugurated in 1885, the building became the chamber of the Czechoslovak parliament after World War I; it was under Nazi occupation during World War II and was occupied by Soviet forces in 1968. Within this charged context, Simon’s works depicted inaccessible objects,

sites, and spaces of American mythology; archived 1,075 images of items seized from airline passengers and postal mail; and pointed to the invisible hands behind seemingly neutral image-gathering systems at the New York Public Library and on Google. Her projects offer alternate readings of the world, highlighting habits of interference and judgment while also revealing the fictional dimensions of what we call facts.

Installation views, Taryn Simon, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, April 27– July 10, 2016. Photos by Martin Polák

111

TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART Paperwork and the Will of Capital gained additional layers of political complexity at the Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art. Here it hung in the museum’s Herta and Paul Amir Building, a hyperboloid structure, faced in bright white Israeli stone, that was built in 2011 and has become a major international landmark at the center of the city. The building is not unlike Simon’s bouquets: serene, hermetic forms placed within contexts of complicated political tumult. This tumult is one of the reasons why the series was chosen for this exhibition. Paperwork and the Will of Capital began in Simon’s mind with a nineteenth-century book of botanical specimens; an image of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Neville Chamberlain at the 1938

Installation views, Taryn Simon: Paperwork and the Will of Capital, Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art, September 23, 2016– January 28, 2017. Photos by Elad Sarig

112

conference that saw the signing of the Munich Pact; and the Flemish Enlightenment idea of the “impossible bouquet,” the bouquet that was unrealizable in actuality, since its flowers blossomed at different times of the year, but that could be realized in painting. Piecing these seemingly disparate lines of inquiry together, Simon found that each revealed something about the others. Now, together, the botanical, the diplomatic, and the impossible enter Israel and reflect the current chapter in a long debate about Palestinian statehood. Whose land is it? Where are the borders? Who are the people? These questions are often answered through treaties, contracts, and attempts at consensus, but Paperwork and the Will of Capital addresses the instability of

executive decision-making and the precarious nature of survival. Despite their innocuous appearances, the photographed bouquets and pressed flowers subtly suggest the impotence of diplomat ic negotiations. Sometimes, major decisions made by religious and political leaders remain merely words on pages, waiting for signatures and resolution. Like the centerpieces, the paperwork becomes a prop, and humanitarian issues await concrete resolution.

LOUISIANA MUSEUM, COPENHAGEN In founding the Louisiana, in 1958, Knud W. Jensen wanted to create a museum in which Danes could see Danish art alongside a less familiar international collection. He followed what is known in the Louisiana as the “sauna principle,” which divided exhibitions into “hot” and “cold”: hot exhibitions included works that were well-known in the community—the favorites of Danish modernism, for example—while cold exhibitions introduced less accessible contemporary artists. In this way the museum hoped to attract guests with what they knew and liked, then challenge them by setting the familiar alongside the new or surprising. The photographs in An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, the work Simon showed in

the museum’s “Louisiana One Work” series, gracefully emulate the sauna principle. Their strong focus and formal compositions make them as engaging as a modernist Dutch painting, seducing viewers into contemplating them on a purely visual level. Yet this clean aesthetic is shaken by the content of the photographs: an inbred white tiger in a cage; a test explosion of an MK-84 IM warhead; a woman about to undergo hymenoplasty. Simon compiles an inventory of the covert, often troubling elements that underlie America’s foundation, mythology, and daily functioning.

Installation views, Taryn Simon: Louisiana One Work, Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen, October 29, 2016–January 15, 2017. Photos by Poul Buchard/ Broendum & Co

113

ALBERTINUM, DRESDEN This show marked Simon’s first solo exhibition in an encyclopedic museum. In the Albertinum’s grand Renaissance Revival building, a selection from the artist’s oeuvre spanning 2007 to 2015 entered a historical arc, a collection ranging from the Romantic era to the present. To expose Simon’s archival work in Dresden was symbolic on several levels. First, Dresden is a museum city. The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections), of which the Albertinum is a part, comprises fourteen state-sponsored museums. It originated in the sixteenth century, in the royal collections of kings, and boasts a systematic approach to collecting. This taxonomic drive to preserve national tradition continues to the present day.

Simon’s work both imitates and challenges this disciplined cataloguing, experimenting with the political and psychological impact of images and their dissemination. The exhibition title is a quote from the 1942 annual report of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, which explains that the majority of image requests that year were for pictures of “the enemy.” The reason, the report explains, is that a soldier “must go into battle armed with visual knowledge of the face of the enemy and the contour of his lands.” During the Cold War, Dresden was located in the extreme east of what was then the German Democratic Republic. This region came to be known as the “valley of the ignorant” because its residents

had no access to Western television and to images of the West. Simon’s photographs thus grant special access to what once was vehemently hidden. The work also centers on boundaries and access, both of critical importance at this moment in Dresden’s history. As tens of thousands of refugees, mainly from Syria, seek safety in the city, they have been met with opposition and violence. Crowds gather to protest migration, some fearing that Germany’s traditions will be eroded by the increased presence of Muslims. It is at this juncture that Simon’s work enters a cultural institution that symbolizes and in some ways harbors these national traditions.

Installation views, Taryn Simon: A Soldier is Taught to Bayonet the Enemy and not Some Undefined Abstraction, Albertinum, Dresden, October 26, 2016–January 15, 2017. Photos by David Pinzer

114

UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS, NEW YORK On the occasion of the 2016 General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, three photographs from Paperwork and the Will of Capital were installed in the treaty-signing area at the UN Headquarters. The works—Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty). Maastricht, the Netherlands, February 7, 1992 (2015), Convention on Cluster Munitions. Oslo, Norway, December 3, 2008 (2015), and Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Marrakesh, Morocco, April 15, 1994 (2015)—thus returned to the kind of site and sources that had inspired them. The photographed bouquets, alongside miscellaneous diplomatic gifts, bore witness yet again, but this time they served as windows into the past rather than customary

ornamentation. During the treaty signings, Simon was granted permission to document the events as a press photographer, taking on the very role of the makers of the archived photographs that had fueled her own images. Simon’s expanding indices extract clear visual points from the blurry timelines of recent history. To display her conceptual works in international museums is to slow the pace at which we receive visual and textual information. Simon utilizes the museum’s atmosphere of leisurely contemplation in order at once to present and to obscure. Her work reveals the imperceptible space between language and the visual world—a space in which multiple truths and fantasies are constructed, and in which translation

and disorientation continually occur. Clarity draws attention to the unclear. Meanings shift and engagement oscillates. And, despite growing networks of shared visual data, Simon shows the human act of looking to be inevitably solitary.

Installation view, Taryn Simon: Paperwork and the Will of Capital, United Nations Headquarters, New York, September 19–23, 2016. Photo by Taryn Simon Artwork © Taryn Simon

115

MICHAEL AN Richard Calvocoressi sheds light on one series of paintings from his

116

DREWS: AIR latest curatorial endeavor, the Earth Air Water exhibition in London.

117

ndrews began by making himself extraordinarily good at the outwardlooking painterly skills,” wrote Lawrence Gowing in a preview of the artist’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1980. “Following the whole story through the galleries one gathers the resourcefulness and compulsion with which he turned to look inward as well. The visual quality and mastery remain, rendered mysteriously airborne or liquid by turns.”1 Andrews’s “party” pictures were followed by an ambitious narrative cycle of seven paintings that occupied him for five years. It was both inward-looking and airborne, and to a certain extent liquid too. Having exhausted the subject of social interaction, Andrews turned his attention from group dynamics to individual behavior. Some of the heads Andrews painted in 1967–69 were conceived as studies for a final party picture in which the players, or “luminaries,” would attain a state of unself-consciousness. The painting never materialized but the Lights series, as it came to be titled, was already forming in the artist’s mind. It depicts a gas balloon floating over a sequence of landscapes, from the country to the sea, via the big city with its broad river. In Andrews’s mind the balloon was a metaphor for the self as it dispenses with the ego, gradually attaining spiritual enlightenment in the process. The balloon is thus present in the first three paintings in the cycle but absent from the next three. In the seventh and last painting only its shadow is represented, emptying itself of air and coming to rest on the seashore: “I found a photograph of an aerostat, a manned balloon floating over Gloucestershire, and that together with the phrase ‘the skin-encapsulated ego’ seemed to me to make a perfect image. So out of that came a series called Lights. They were to do with sloughing off the ego.”2 Andrews came across the concept of the ego encased in a layer of skin in his reading of Alan W. Watts, the interpreter of Zen Buddhist thought. For each stage of the progress from burdensome self-consciousness to illumination and ego loss— what Andrews called “flight and the evolving experience”—he had to invent convincing pictorial equivalents. From a folder of found images in his archive, marked “Landings & Landing Places & The Full Inner Experience, i.e. good or bad enlightenment, illusion or disillusion,”3 it appears that he attached particular importance to the spot where the balloon would drop to earth: I imagined my series ending in an idyllic place. The Pier Pavilion [Lights V] was one of the pictures that represented an idyllic place. The Pier and the Road [Lights IV], which preceded it, was a search for such a place . . . . In the event I never painted these enlightened souls coming to land anywhere, but The Pier Pavilion was a … sort of stately pleasure dome in a kind of idyllic Xanadu that the balloon, the ego, passes over. 4 Lights I: Out of Doors, which Andrews began in 1969, was the first painting in which he used a spray gun and acrylic paint. His initial reasons were, he said, romantic: “I wanted the balloon to be floating through an airy space and I thought, I’ll use a spray gun, I’ll blow the paint on, that’s airy.”5 Sprayed onto unprimed canvas, the water-based acrylic stained the surface of the canvas and was then absorbed by it, causing the flock to push up and creating “a kind of atmospheric veil between you and the object.”6 118

Previous: Michael Andrews, Lights I: Out of Doors, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 56 × 122 7⁄8 inches (142.3 × 312 cm), private collection. Photo by Antonia Reeve Photography

It had other advantages, Andrews found, such as speed of application and drying, especially useful when covering very large areas, though it was not without its own dangers. While working on the final painting in the cycle, Lights VII: A Shadow (1974), Andrews attended an international balloon meeting at Cirencester Park in Gloucestershire. There he would have observed gas and hot-air balloons taking off, free-fall parachute and skydiver demonstrations, as well as balloon-inflation demonstrations.7 Whether any of this influenced the development of A Shadow is difficult to say. Provisionally entitling the work The Artificial Horizon, Andrews described it as “an almost empty canvas with balloon coming in against an empty shore,”8 and considered it one of his best paintings: “It embodied the extent of my success and failure to come to terms with myself, by which I meant I was less egotistical than when I started the Lights series but not unegotistical or without ego as I would like to be.”9 Whatever its merits as personal therapy, it is a sublime, almost abstract image. Remove the hazy imprint of the descending balloon and the straggle of seaweed on the beach and you are left with almost nothing: three horizontal bands of color corresponding to sky, sea, and sand—a vision of infinity worthy of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations, the prose poem that inspired the whole series. In contrast, Liner (1971–72) and Cabin (1975) can be read as vehicles-cum-containers, either for the crowd, the masses—the opposite of Andrews’s “enlightened souls”—or for the “luminaries” themselves. Cabin was originally to have included faces at the windows, based on photographs of miners underground. 1. Lawrence Gowing, “Painter of Fact and Feeling,” Sunday Times Magazine (London), October 26, 1980, p. 112. 2. Michael Andrews, in an interview with Anna Benson Gyles, April 1990, unedited transcript of BBC TV Omnibus film, As It Seems: A Profile of Michael Andrews, broadcast January 1991, 1/LMA S643K, S.R. 2/5. 3. Tate Archive, TGA 2000/25, MA 23. 4. Andrews, in the interview with Gyles, S.R. 3/3. 5. Ibid., S.R. 4/8. 6. Ibid., S.R. 4/9. 7. Daily Express International Balloon Meeting, Cirencester Park, June 15–16, 1974. There is an annotated program in the Tate Archive, TGA 2000/25, MA 22. 8. Tate Archive, TGA 2000/25, MA 25. 9. Andrews notes, July 1980, in author’s possession.

Left: Michael Andrews, Lights V: The Pier Pavilion, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 84 inches (152.4 × 213.3 cm), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. A press cutting in the Andrews archive shows this to be based on a 1904 photograph of the old Britannia Pier, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, published in the Eastern Evening News, July 20, 1967. Photo by Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza/ Scala/Art Resource, NY

Below, top: Nineteenth-century engraving of grounded hot-air balloon, possibly from Charles Dollfus’s book Balloons (1961); from Andrews archive, Photo © Tate, London 2017 Below, bottom left and right: Two images from Anthony Smith’s book The Dangerous Sort: The Story of a Balloon (1970); from Andrews archive. Photo © Tate, London 2017 Opposite: Michael Andrews, Lights III: The Black Balloon, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 63 × 51 inches (160 × 129.5 cm), private collection. Photo by Suzanne Nagy

119

Images of space travel and weightlessness, of sights never before observed by human beings, apparently stimulated Andrews’s interest in flight generally and in seeing the world from the air. Richard Calvocoressi

Right: Michael Andrews, Study for Lights V: The Pier Pavilion, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 72 inches (152.4 × 182.9 cm), private collection. Photo by Lucy Dawkins

120

121

122

In Andrews’s mind the balloon was a metaphor for the self as it dispenses with the ego, gradually attaining spiritual enlightenment in the process. Richard Calvocoressi

Michael Andrews, Lights VII: A Shadow, 1974, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 72 inches (182.9 × 182.9 cm), private collection

123

ndrews’s fascination with the world’s wonders cannot be explained by simple wanderlust. Deeper preoccupations prevailed. One of the largest groups of material in his archive concerns scientific discovery. In the 1960s Andrews subscribed to the weekly magazine New Scientist and owned a copy of the Larousse Encyclopedia of Astronomy, both of which he plundered for images and ideas. From the latter he cut out illustrations of stars, shooting stars, constellations, Saturn and other planets, extragalactic nebulae, galactic magnetic fields and globules, eclipses, comets: in short, a wide range of celestial objects— understandable interests, perhaps, in an abstract

artist but esoteric for a representational painter like Andrews. New Scientist provided him with information on the latest technological inventions as well as discussion of ethical issues such as advances in biological medicine, radiation, pollution, and political control. Featured subjects that caught his eye, especially if they were illustrated with striking colored diagrams, include (in no particular order) electrical fields, the behavior of particles, fluidized reactors, earthquakes, the control of plant growth, artificial plasma clouds, rotation and powder photographs, X-ray analysis, electron micrographs, ultraviolet radiation, computerized heat exchangers, electronic systems in the defense industry, holography, planetary radar astronomy, light projection, the science of illusion, molecular biology, cancer cells, sound, noise pollution, boomerangs in flight, crystals, telescopes, and light boxes. He also showed an interest in new materials—molded plastics, Perspex, new types of glass, strengthened steel. Here, clearly, was an inquiring mind, someone eager to understand what the universe and the physical world—energy, matter, the cosmos—looked like and how they worked. He once admitted to an “obsessive compulsion to know (vividly realize) the inner structure of any phenomenon that happens to puzzle me,” calling it a “neurosis.”1 Hardly surprising, then, to find Andrews captivated by the sublime images resulting from the exploration of outer space that accelerated in the second half of the 1960s with the various Apollo missions from the United States. These culminated in the first manned space flight to orbit the moon, in 1968, and the first moon landing, in the summer of 1969, producing a wealth of film stills and photographs that Andrews duly collected. In July and August 1969 the Sunday Times Magazine, Britain’s first weekly color supplement (launched in 1962), devoted three successive issues to the recent moon landing, documenting the historic journey “from blastoff to splashdown” and publish-

Left: Newspaper cuttings of the Lunar Orbiter 2 spacecraft [1966; lower left] and manned Apollo 8 mission [1968; top left]. Photo © Tate, London 2017 Right (top): Collage for Lights I: Out of Doors, 1970, from Andrews Archive © Tate, London 2017 Right (bottom): Cover of pamphlet The World from the Air showing an aerial view of oil country in California; all from Andrews archive. Photo © Tate, London 2017

124

ing “the first color pictures ever taken by men on the surface of the Moon.” Andrews’s copies of the magazine survive in the Tate Archive, along with illustrations torn from other publications showing the predominantly blue earth floating in an inky black void 240,000 miles (385,000 kilometers) away from the astronauts and shots of the capsule parachuting into the sea. Images of space travel and weightlessness, of sights never before observed by human beings, apparently stimulated Andrews’s interest in flight generally and in seeing the world from the air. He accumulated dramatic photographs of jets and fighter planes, skydivers, parachutists viewed from above and below, clouds seen from 30,000 ft (9,000 meters), as well as aerial views of landscapes and cities—especially high-rise buildings at night—which he gathered together in a folder marked “Places flown over.” He began to prefer panoramic or high viewpoints for his own paintings and twice took photographs of his motifs from the air: the first time

in Australia, from a light aircraft flying over Ayers Rock and the Olgas at sunset, the second from a helicopter hovering over England’s Vale of Pewsey while researching his landscape Oare, the Vale of Pewsey (1989–91). On a scrap of paper on which Andrews was trying out possible titles for the Lights series he wrote, “Up is a nice place to be”—the title of a 1967 American folk song—and added the words “the best.”2 There is no evidence that he was familiar with the theories of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, but the latter’s concept of “ascensional psychology,” with its analysis of aerial imagery, dreams of flight, the association of air with mobility and freedom, and the wish to escape the earth’s atmosphere, seems remarkably relevant to his preoccupations.3 1 Andrews notes, January 1974. 2 Tate Archive, TGA 2000/25, MA 22. 3 See Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, 1943, Eng. trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 1988).

125

Michael Andrews, Cabin, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 83 7⁄8 inches (152.4 × 213 cm), private collection

126

127

128

Liner and Cabin can be read as vehicles for Andrews’s “enlightened souls.” Cabin was originally to have included faces at the windows, based on photographs of miners underground. Richard Calvocoressi

Michael Andrews, Liner, 1971–72, acrylic on canvas, 60 1 ⁄8 × 72 1 ⁄8 inches (152.5 × 183 cm), private collection. Photo courtesy private collection Artwork © The Estate of Michael Andrews Photos courtesy James Hyman Gallery, London, unless otherwise noted

129

130

MAN RAY In the early 1980s, Ira Nowinski visited a studio frozen in time.

When the Nazis occupied France in 1940, Man Ray fled Paris. Instead of heading for New York, as many of the Surrealists did, he settled in Los Angeles, where he hoped for a career in films. There he met Juliet Browner and they were married in a double ceremony alongside Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. In 1951, drawn back to Paris by Man Ray’s Dada roots, they set sail for France. Soon Man Ray and Juliet found a studio at 2 bis rue Férou, a narrow winding street between the Saint Sulpice Church and the Luxembourg Garden, deep in the heart of the Left Bank. It was a large whitewashed room that had originally been a garage and had then been used by a sculptor for many years. This was to be Man Ray’s final studio; he lived here for the rest of his life, right up until his death, in 1976. Rue Férou was the most improvised and personal studio of the artist’s life. He made everything in it—tables, benches, chairs, lamps, and bookcases—and built a darkroom, a bedroom, and a kitchen. He also arranged a parachute to float over the entire universe of Man Ray, to protect his artworks from the rain that came in through the leaky roof. Over the years the studio became crowded with new concoctions—photographs, readymades, paintings—and boxes full of things that were, in effect, Man Ray’s life. These were productive years, during which many of his most famous objects were recast in limited editions. The studio became a backdrop

for many of his friends, including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Francis Picabia. They were always playing chess, smoking, and drinking in true bohemian fashion. The studio was in a constant state of flux, from people stopping by to the objects that were arranged and then rearranged. Man Ray died on November 18, 1976, and was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. Juliet grieved for her husband for many years, and would go to the old studio to smoke Gauloises, sip Scotch out of tea cups, and await his return. My first visit to the studio, in 1983, set the stage for subsequent visits. Upon entering I picked up an ashtray containing two cigarette butts. Juliet politely told me to put it down exactly where I had found it. I was then informed that these cigarette butts were from the last visit to the studio by Marcel Duchamp. Then I knew where I was, or where I could be. Man Ray’s presence was everywhere—looking over my shoulder, behind a mirror—and every time I returned I found that some of the objects had mysteriously rearranged themselves, creating new possibilities and new layers to be discovered. On my final visit to the studio, Juliet closed the door, locked the three massive locks with her set of keys, and blew a kiss to the person known to his friends as Man. Juliet died in 1991. It was a great adventure to see Man Ray’s life through the filter of his studio: a unique experience.

131

Previous: Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres with assemblages. Also pictured from left to right: It’s Springtime, Person to Person, and Featherweight

Below: To the door’s left, Father of Mona Lisa and Trompel’oeuf; to its right: Permanent Attraction, Les grands-transParents, and Jeux nocturnes Opposite: Permanent Attraction, Target, Le Torse tournant, Chess Painting, Lampshade, and Domesticated Egg

132

133

Left: Untitled assemblage Right: Henri Cartier-Bresson’s candid portrait of the artist with Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray’s Le Manche dans la manche

134

This text and the images from Man Ray’s studio first appeared in Ira Nowinksi’s The Studio of Man Ray, published in 2006 by Nazareli Press. Artwork © 2017 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris. Photos by Ira Nowinski

135

WESSELMANN GROUNDED CONSUMER CULTURE AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION IN ART HISTORY. WARHOL AND LICHTENSTEIN TOOK ON HISTORICAL QUOTATIONS AS WELL, BUT WESSELMANN STARTED WITH THEM. HE REINVENTED EUROPEAN HISTORY PAINTING IN A VIBRANT NEW IDIOM. HE IS A QUINTESSENTIAL POP ARTIST WHOSE IMAGERY IS EMBEDDED IN AMERICAN CULTURE. Larry Gagosian

TOM W

ESSELMANN

A catalogue raisonné of the Great American Nudes is scheduled for completion in 2018. Wesselmann began this celebrated series in 1961, imbuing his depictions of the female nude with symbols of American culture alongside arthistorical allusions to modern masters such as Picasso and Matisse. The series of 101 paintings ended in 1973 with Great American Nude #100. Collectors, museums, and galleries with any information pertaining to a work by the artist are invited to contact the Estate of Tom Wesselmann: cr@tomwesselmann estate.org

Previous: Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #35, 1963, oil and collage on canvas, 120 × 192 inches (304.8 × 487.7 cm) Right: Tom Wesselmann with the unfinished Great American Nude #21 (1961) in his studio, New York, 1961. Photo by Jerry Goodman Artwork © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York

138

139

PAUL NOBLE

140

141

142

DESIRE One of the earliest and most fundamental artistic themes, eroticism has served to reflect theÂ social mores and cultural values of different civilizations. Diana Widmaier-Picasso, curator of the exhibition Desire, reflects on the history of eroticism in art.

Previous: Jeff Koons, Dirty—Jeff On Top, 1991, plastic, 55 × 71 × 109 inches (139.7 × 180.3 × 276.9 cm), edition of 1 + 1 AP. © Jeff Koons, Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio Left: pascALEjandro Jodorowsky, Le poids de la chair—El peso de la carne, 2009, Ink, watercolors, and colored pencil on paper, 16 5 ⁄8 × 22 1 ⁄8 inches (42 × 56 cm). © pascALEjandro Jodorowsky Right: Ed Ruscha, Desire, 2013. Acrylic on canvas, 50 × 80 inches (127 × 203.2 cm). © Ed Ruscha

esire marks the culmination of my long-standing interest in art and eroticism. In my book Picasso: Art Can Only Be Erotic (Prestel, 2005) I argued for my grandfather’s utmost capacity to love and to expand his thrill for lust all around his work. He once said, “It is age that forces us to stop, but we still want to smoke. The same goes for making love: you can’t do it anymore but you still want to.” This exhibition sheds light on contemporary artists who celebrate and question, through a wide range of media and artistic expressions, the theme of desire, revealing their overabundant sensuality and power of imagination. Their approach to eroticism oscillates between fascination, sensuality, pleasure, and fantasy but also spirituality, symbolism, and abstraction.

144

Abstraction In the vein of Marcel Duchamp’s aesthetic of sexual desire, both Ed Ruscha and Alex Israel produce visual and linguistic systems. In Desire (2013) Ruscha mixes clear white lettering with an image of an atmospheric landscape, while Israel and American author Bret Easton Ellis’s collaboration Trent Looked at Tara (2016) combines texts by Ellis (Less Than Zero, 1985) with photography. Tara and Trent, two sexually destructive characters, encounter each other here in a doomed love story. Beyond desire Jordan Wolfson emphasizes the idea of desire as an absurdity. With Animation, Masks (2011) Wolfson presents a single, intensely engaging video, focused on a grotesque, animated caricature of a Hasidic Jew, who recites, among others, Richard Brautigan’s Love Poem and, more affectingly, the

intimate words of two young lovers, while flipping through a recent edition of Vogue. Other artists release their emotions and inhibitions through art. They express their deepest fantasies with explicit sexual depictions mainly focused on carnal pleasure. Gaspar Noé, best known for directing the film Love (2015), created a series of warm, red-lit photographs especially for the exhibition, which show a couple engaging in intercourse. The red color and the tight framing emphasize and focus on the sexual act, flirting with pornography. In a different manner, pornographic scenes inspire John Currin’s paintings of women. He depicts eroticized subjects, exploring libertine fantasies through the prism of art history. While Francis Picabia’s Madonna and Child with Nude (c. 1935–36) mixes classical style with the artist’s own vision of the female body, Joe Coleman’s The Three Graces (2016) reinterprets a major theme of art history using images

Left: Marilyn Minter, Haze, enamel on metal, 48 × 42 inches (121.9 × 106.7 cm) © Marilyn Minter. Courtesy of Salon 94, New York Right: Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, Trent Looked at Tara, 2016, acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 72 × 144 inches (182.9 × 365.8 cm) © Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis. Photo by Joshua White/ JWPictures.com Following: Installation view, Desire, The Moore Building, Miami, November 30–December 4, 2016

SOMETIMES, THE ART THAT EXPLORES EROTICISM IN THE LEAST EXPECTED WAY POSSESSES THE STRONGEST EROTIC CHARGE.

and symbols that refer to erotic spirituality. Like the fantastical and mystic collaborative drawings of pascALEjandro Jodorowsky (the director Alejandro Jodorowsky and his wife, Pascale, combined their first names to form the portmanteau), Necrophonia (2011) is a joint project made by Urs Fischer and Georg Herold. The artists have created sculptures based on nude models, which will be activated by live models in the installation. Voyeurism Voyeuristic art explores the thrill and controversial behavior of watching others engage in private, intimate acts. Artists invite the audience into their lives, raising questions about participation, distance, observation, and the sanctity of one’s public image. Francesca Woodman depicts herself or female models. In her timeless work, she looks at the representation of the body in relation to its 145

146

147

148

149

Previous: Urs Fischer and Georg Herold, Necrophonia, 2011, cast zinc, cast aluminum, acrylic, paint, fabric, nude model, fresh flowers, 57 parts, dimensions variable. © Urs Fischer and Georg Herold. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio Left: Jenny Saville, Odalisque, 2012–14, oil and charcoal on canvas, 85 ½ × 93 1 ⁄8 inches (217 × 236.5 cm). © Jenny Saville. Photo by Mike Bruce Right: Man Ray, Marjorie, 1940, silver print mounted on original card, 9 ½ × 7 ½ inches (24.1 × 19.1 cm). © 2017 Man Ray Trust/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris

surroundings in an unconventional and ethereal manner. Jeff Koons’s Made in Heaven series (1989– 91) depicts Koons’s sexual escapades with his then wife, the onetime Italian porn star Ilona Staller, known as Cicciolina. Blurring the boundaries between fine art and pornography, Koons challenged the conventions of artistic taste, encouraging his audience to make their own decisions about what is acceptable. On the contrary, Carlo Mollino’s series of erotic Polaroid portraits of naked female bodies (c. 1962–73) were kept private until his death. Balthus also used a Polaroid camera in the last decade of his life in order to make numerous instant photographic “sketches” (c. 1999–2000) for his paintings, depicting his last model, Anna. Combining photographs and painting, Richard Prince’s Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, Renee Vivian and Roman Brooks Take Over the Guahnahani (2008) shows his infatuation with the female form. He magnifies the erotic in 150

EROTICISM REINVENTS ITSELF WITH EVERY SUBSEQUENT GENERATION.

Below: Pablo Picasso, Femme dans un rocking-chair, 1956, oil on canvas, 76 ¾ × 51 ¼ inches (195 × 130 cm). © 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Top right: Roy Lichtenstein, Profile Head, 1988, painted and patinated bronze, 36 5 ⁄8 × 22 ½ × 9 ½ inches (93 × 57.2 × 24.1cm), edition 1 of 6. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photo by Rob McKeever

Bottom right: Francis Picabia, Untitled, c.1941, oil on canvas, 39 3⁄8 × 29 ½ inches (100 × 75 cm). © 2017 Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris Following (from left to right): Diego Rivera, Retrato de Lolita Casanelles, 1948, oil on canvas, 49 × 39 5⁄8 inches (124.5 × 100.5 cm). © 2017 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Allen Jones, Chair, Hatstand, and Table, 1969,

the models’ photographs, redefining concepts of authenticity, whereas his Untitled (portrait) (2014) was taken directly from Instagram. Known for their erotic imagery, the photographers Nobuyoshi Araki and Noritoshi Hirakawa depict female nudes in a provocative way. Araki’s painted photographs of nude portraits are inspired by ancient and modern Japanese traditions, and clearly influenced by the Japanese art of shunga. In Araki’s images, women reveal their genitals; in Hirakawa’s Dreams of Tokyo series (1991), the photographer shares his fascination with secret displays of nudity in public places. With Jennifer (2011) and Amber (2016), John DeAndrea produces realistically cast nude figures and blends latex acrylic paint into realistic flesh tones, making his sculptures look more and more like real people. Pablo Picasso’s vision of his final lover, Jacqueline Roque, seated in his favorite rocking chair in Femme dans un rocking-chair (1956) focuses in a

hatstand: painted fiberglass, resin, mixed media, and tailor made accessories, 73 ¼ × 42 1⁄8 × 13 inches (186.1 × 107 × 33 cm); table: painted fiberglass, resin, mixed media, glass, and tailor made accessories, 24 × 51 × 30 inches (61 × 129.5 × 76.2 cm; chair: painted fiberglass, resin, Plexiglas, mixed media, and tailor made accessories, 30 ¾ × 37 ¾ × 22 ½ inches (78.1 × 95.9 × 57.2 cm). © Allen Jones. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio

suggestive way on the intimate and sensual atmosphere inspired by the oriental ambiance of Matisse’s odalisques. Cartoons and expansion of desire Several artists, originators of the “adults only” comic book scene, use their talent to draw sexually explicit scenes. On the one hand, Tom of Finland lived out his most personal fantasies through an ongoing eponymous character, Kake, in his panel stories (1968). This hypermasculine, dark-haired, mustached leatherman travels the world on his motorcycle to spread the seeds of liberated, mutually satisfying, ecstatically explicit gay sex. On the other hand is R. Crumb’s 1985 Psychopathia Sexualis, an illustrated version of the 1886 classic by the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a pioneer in cataloguing sexual aberrations and popularizing such terms as sadism and masochism. By embrac-

ing and disclaiming their sociocultural environs, artists seem to strike a balance between their art and the moral values in today’s society. In Positive Grid (1993–2000) Nan Goldin portrays friends infected with HIV in order to give a more human face to statistics. These photographs are a positive study of moments of lovemaking, happiness, and loneliness among people facing the disease. Lust will always have an important role to play in the political consciousness. Looking at erotic art may be a challenge for some of us, for others it may speak to a silent and deeper layer of consciousness. Either way, the art will resonate within us. Eros holds back Thanatos. Short of death, only desire can move us beyond the plane of our existence.

151

152

153

154

Debora h McLeod ta kes Derek Blasberg to her favorite spots in Los Angeles What neighborhood do you

the UCLA Sculpture Garden

live in?

is a refuge for me. LACMA

Beverly Hills. One-mile

has become my home museum,

commute.

I would say; under Michael Govan it’s been transformed

Where do you find inspiration in Los Angeles? In the car, of course! I have lived here for thirty years, but driving down palmlined streets is still a mood elevator. The Pacific Ocean is pretty good too. Los Angeles is a formative

Then there is our legacy

town for Larry Gagosian,

of modernist architecture,

who was born and raised

one of the massive assets

there. He opened his first

of our city. I’ll take you

gallery on North Almont Drive

on a driving tour! Richard

in the early 1980s. Ten years

Neutra dotted the town with

later he opened the current

modernist masterpieces, as

Beverly Hills outpost,

did John Lautner, Rudolph

Schindler, Pierre Koenig,

Richard Meier. Gagosian was

and A. Quincy Jones.

one of the first galleries to

Jim Goldstein has made a

cover American art from coast

promised gift of his Lautner

to coast—literally—and one of

masterpiece the Sheats-

the first to devote important

Goldstein Residence to LACMA.

West Coast exhibitions to

Another Lautner house, the

artists like Jean-Michel

Chemosphere, the home of the

Basquiat (whom the gallery

publisher Benedikt Taschen,

first showed in 1982), Chris

is an amazement. You can see

Burden, and Richard Avedon.

early-century Frank Lloyd

Deborah McLeod, director of

Wright masterpieces in

Gagosian Beverly Hills and a

Pasadena, and Welton Becket’s

California native, has an art

futuristic Theme Building

history degree from UCLA and

greets you on arrival at

has worked at the gallery for

LAX! Have you noticed that it

more than a decade. She takes

still looks futuristic fifty

Derek Blasberg on a tour of

years later?

into the cultural hub of

Richard Neutra dotted the town with modernist masterpieces, as did John Lautner, Rudolph Schindler, Pierre Koenig, and A. Quincy Jones. Jim Goldstein has made a promised gift of his Lautner masterpiece the Sheats-Goldstein Residence to LACMA.

LA, with Chris Burden’s “Urban Light” welcoming you on Wilshire Boulevard and Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass” rocking the 6th Street side. Downtown is humming. The Broad Museum has opened, and what a love affair the city is having with it. It is directly across the street from our beloved MOCA on Grand Avenue, so that’s a two-for-one special. Do not miss The Getty Center—allow a half-day there, and be sure to walk Robert Irwin’s Central Garden. A nice place to meet up with pals? The Soho House in West Hollywood is pretty perfect. It’s really a place to play or to work, which is unique. It has breathtaking views of the city on all sides and

Sheats-Goldstein Residence. Photo by Jeffrey Green

her city. What’s the best place to Where were you born?

check out the art scene?

In the beautiful San

Gagosian Gallery for

Francisco Bay Area,

starters! Galleries are

in Piedmont, California.

now in every part of town, including pockets in

Deborah McLeod. Photo by

downtown, Culver City, and

Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Hollywood—you can’t see them

Opposite: View from Griffith

all in one go anymore. I

Park Observatory. Photo by

studied at UCLA and love its

Peter Carey

Hammer Museum in Westwood;

155

Do not miss The Getty Center— allow a halfday there, and be sure to walk Robert Irwin’s Central Garden.

I love the patio at the Chateau Marmont and the lush grounds and al fresco dining at the Bel-Air Hotel. E. baldi is my perennial favorite for lunch, and not just because it’s near the gallery: it has the best fish, the best wait staff, and it’s loaded with artworld friends. Grand Central Food Market will get me in my car to go downtown (Egg Slut is worth the wait in line). Nobu Malibu is a ten out of ten. It could not be more atmospheric or delicious.

Robert Irwin’s Central Garden at The Getty Center.

For old LA charm, go to the

Photo by Robert Landau

Sunset Tower Bar (maître d’ Dimitri is a legend), or slip

a really great mix of people

cuisine, with long lines of

into a red leather booth at

from Hollywood and the art

people waiting for their

Musso & Frank’s on Hollywood

world. The newest one, in

creative, soulful food. I

Boulevard, where Charlie

Malibu, is off-the-planet

should also say I’ve never

Chaplin often dined.

beautiful.

been disappointed by Mr. Chow’s in Beverly Hills. I

Best cup of coffee?

went for the first time when

Hands down, Teuscher in

I was seventeen and looking

Beverly Hills. Perfect

at colleges. The hostess

coffee to go with the perfect

seated me on the banquette

Swiss chocolate.

next to Ringo Starr. Can you imagine? Nothing has changed.

Favorite restaurant

Still star-studded.

experience? That’s a hard question—there

Any other good places to eat?

are so many divine places to

Yes—all of Jon Shook and

eat in LA. But I think Trois

Vinny Dotolo’s restaurants,

Mec is my favorite ever.

starting with Animal. This

The entire dining experience

is world-class James Beard–

feels new. You buy tickets

awarded eating! Animal offers

in advance, and dinner

tail-to-snout cuisine and has

is a single five-course

such a convivial atmosphere

meal-of-the-day. The food

that you talk to strangers

is thrilling, and completely

at the next table. Then

experiential. You feel like

Wally’s Wine & Spirits is a

you’ve been to a great play.

fabulous new spot that I love

Then there is Malibu Farms

in Beverly Hills. It has an

(go for breakfast) at the end

incredible wine selection

of the Malibu pier. On the

and a gourmet-foods section;

opposite side of town, the

a basket of wine and truffles

tiny storefront Sqirl has

from Wally’s is a perfect

the most heavenly healthy

gift! For romantic atmosphere

Chateau Marmont Hotel. Photo by Robert Landau

156

Michael Heizer, “Levitated Mass,” 2012, Photo by Tom Vinetz

What about after dinner? What’s a good late-night LA experience? Ok, I have a great one for you. The Standard Hotel on Sunset has a pop-up disco on Saturday nights only. It’s called Giorgio’s (after Giorgio Moroder) and it runs from 10 pm on. It’s a great find for anyone who loved to dance in the 1980s—a disco ball and a D.J. in the booth playing classics. Honestly, so much fun. Now, let’s go shopping.

Watts Tower. Photo by mauritius images GmbH

In Beverly Hills, the first person who comes to mind

that the area has changed

exhibition catalogues at

is Effie at Prada. She knows

over the years—but I love

LACMA from Dagny Corcoran, my

how to navigate the brand

the changes!

friend and catalogue queen.

and knows what looks good on

And for nonart books check

me before I do. Then there’s

Part of the California allure

out Skylight Books in Los

Gratus on Canon Drive. It’s

is the weather, right? What

Feliz and the legendary Book

a small shop full of chic,

sorts of outdoors activities

Soup on Sunset.

handpicked designer clothes;

would you suggest?

ask for Kristin. LA’s own

I love Malibu beach for

What are the most

Johnson Hartig just opened

walking and Santa Monica

quintessential

a by-appointment space in

beach for biking. I start

LA experiences?

Hollywood for his artful

at my beach club and ride

Well, we talked about the

the bike path to Marina

beaches and the architecture.

del Rey. Riding past Muscle

We are the entertainment

Beach in Venice is a trip.

capital of the world after

Hiking is a favorite in LA,

all, so I’d say the Hollywood

too: Solstice Canyon in

Bowl. It’s a big part of our

Malibu is gorgeous. Temescal

history and it’s never lost

Canyon in Santa Monica has

its luster. Dine under the

a waterfall at the end.

stars before a concert. I’ve

Runyon Canyon in Hollywood

had a box there for twenty-

is great if you feel social

five years. I’m thrilled

and don’t mind sharing the

every time I arrive at Frank

path with people and dogs.

Gehry’s masterpiece Walt

If you like gardens, The

Disney Concert Hall to hear

Huntington in Pasadena

the LA Phil. My boys are off

has over 200 acres of some

to college now but we sure

of the most extraordinary

love to go to the Staples

landscaping in the world.

Center together for an LA

It’s our Versailles. Another

Kings, Clippers, or Lakers

extraordinary botanical

game. There’s a great sushi

garden is Lotusland in Santa

spot called Outtakes located

Barbara, but you need to make

next to Section 104 inside

a reservation.

the stadium. Much less

Libertine. South Willard Gallery on 3rd Street is a quirky little storefront with amazing ceramics, jewelry, and decorative arts. Just One Eye, located in Howard Hughes’s historic Art Deco office building in Hollywood, offers haute couture and one-of-a-kind finds from all over the world. Abbot Kinney is a pedestrian road full of stores I love on the Westside; Hoorsenbuhs, my very favorite jewelry designer, is nearby on Main Street. Some people complain

I love Malibu beach for walking and Santa Monica beach for biking. I start at my beach club and ride the bike path to Marina del Rey. Riding past Muscle Beach in Venice is a trip.

Cyclists on Venice Beach, Photo by AHowden - USA

visited but essential to Workouts?

LA history are the surreal

I go to Pure Barre in Beverly

and majestic Watts Towers.

Hills and for yoga to

They are so much more

Yogaworks in Westwood.

elaborate and impossibly beautiful in person than you

Book stores?

could imagine. Visiting the

Glad you asked. Taschen

Griffith Observatory at night

Books in Beverly Hills is

is transporting. The view

really special. Sumo books

cannot be explained, only

to thrill you! I agree with

experienced. And do wait in

John Waters that books are

line for the big telescope

the best gifts, and Taschen

on a summer night!

has fantastic books on art, architecture, travel,

What is a place that I might

design, music, and subjects

not expect to find you at?

more risqué. Arcana Books

You will not find me at a

is wonderful for art and

theme park. You will not find

architecture books. Whatever

me in a bad restaurant (for

you’re looking for, they’ll

long, anyway). And I hope you

have it or owner Lee Kaplan

will not find me at 5 o’clock

will find it. I get all my

on the 405.

157

A short story in four parts by Christopher Bollen

Part One It would be an ordinary day, Kit decided, a sticky, late-spring New York day so unextraordinary and similar to all the others that it might as well be dragged into the spam folder of time. She’d make a few calls, check in with her gallery to see which of her paintings had sold, meet up with Bruce for a late breakfast at Black Run to hear how his sobriety was affecting his sex life, return the ridiculous neoprene dress that didn’t fit and she’d already been photographed in, and get to her studio by mid-afternoon. If she managed not to be pushed in front of an oncoming subway—an achievement, given the recent rash of public-transportation homicides—today would pass into oblivion and she would rise again, single and productive and hungrier, tomorrow. Kit yanked up the aluminum blinds on her bedroom window and watched the yellow light agitate the tip of the Chrysler Building. Across the street, the pretty hooligans of the Catholic high school congregated like rival gangs in a prison yard. For once, instead of wishing them dead for their loud morning hip-hop serenades, Kit tried to appreciate the way they modified their school uniforms with so many chains and rips and cinched folds to their skirts and pumpkin-sized sneakers that they utterly negated the whole purpose of a uniform. Maybe she’d paint their portraits and do a series called Youth at Risk that she could use for her show in Zurich next December. “Kit Carrodine traces the mutability of cultural consumerism by focusing on the appropriations of its youngest demogra—.” She had to resist the urge to pen her own press releases before she even began a project; it strangled the creative act from the start. Still, this was good, she told herself, bury your head in the future. Forget today. She walked into the kitchen to brew coffee. Technically, the coffeemaker belonged to Kai, and she was thankful that he had overlooked it when he moved his belongings out of the apartment yesterday. They had been together for eighteen months. Kit treated her personal life the way others treated seasonal homes in the country. She disappeared so thoroughly into her paintings, months and months in her studio, that finishing a show was a chance to reconnect with her life and make the necessary improvements that had fallen into disrepair while she was away. Kai had been the first problem in need of fixing. While Kit had cast their breakup as an opportunity for them both to grow, she knew, and Kai knew, that she was dumping deadweight. She was successful, and Kai—all those awful, unsellable junk piles that he persisted in connecting to his Appalachian upbringing—was not. If she were to dwell on it, she would admit it was the cloying, singsong alliteration of their names, “Kit and Kai,” always uttered by a friend in a single breath, that proved the first blow to their happiness. Kit had not worked for years in this city to establish herself as an important painter to be referred to as a twosome that sounded like a demented Japanese toy. Still, the memory of naïve, vulpine Kai holding his box of clothes and books at the front door last night momentarily stung her. “You’re not even crying,” he had wailed with enough tears in his eyes for both of them. He was right. She hadn’t cried. And she wouldn’t today. She would get through this first day without regret. Plus, she missed dating women. Kai had always been a bit of a heterosexual experiment for her, like a home chemistry set that failed to turn salt into snowflakes. Kit opened the front door and snatched up the Friday Times—surely there would be a review of her latest show. She let the advertisement inserts scatter in the hallway as she flipped to the art section. There was no review, and she felt small flares of jealousy over the triumphs of rivals. Why hadn’t Haskell, her gallerist, pushed harder for a review? He knew this was the show, the big one, the culmination of two years of work, and it had already been open for two weeks. Kit had painted a series of mug shots of New York death-

159

St. Kit of New York

row inmates among veils of fluorescent digital glitches and random free-floating emojis and consumer products. Perhaps Haskell was angling for a meatier story in the Times. In a small act of compassion for Kai, she considered it only fair that the first day of his misery wasn’t compounded by another validation of her accomplishments. Kit raked in about $2 million a year after expenses. She wondered what Kai would do now for money. He had better not sell the drawings she had given him. Forty minutes later, Kit was on the street, dressed in too-dense tweed for the soft April air pouring through the avenues. She carried the rumpled neoprene dress in its original shopping bag (in lieu of the receipt). The trees were breaking into pink, and the last-remaining magazine shops proclaimed the local headlines: woman pushed in front of D train, assailant not apprehended. Horrible. Horrible that these tiny, doomed magazine shops would morph into nail salons by summer. Even the banks were shuttering their storefronts, but somehow nail salons magically proliferated. The future was manicures. Kit tried to reach Haskell on her phone but got a busy signal. She wasn’t aware that the busy signal still existed. She tried again. Busy. Some idiot assistant had probably left the front-desk phone off the hook. The Haskell Vex Gallery might be too small an operation for her. She had stayed out of loyalty and expected devotion in return. Dammit, Haskell, pick up! She called his cell, but it went straight to voicemail. Kit hurried down 10th Street, late as usual to meet Bruce. She wished she could text him calm down, a block away. But Bruce, a paranoid unemployed writer who lived off the chrome, manganese, and iron mines of his wrathful South African family, was religious about not using technology. It was noble only in theory. Though approaching fifty, Bruce had the healthy lust of a twenty-five-year-old just off the bus from Omaha, he had a fabulous wit and could always make Kit laugh before noon (not an easy feat, her sense of humor tended to kick in around sundown), and he had a house in San Sebastián where she was hoping to spend most of August. He would be thrilled to hear of her split with Kai (“He’s perfectly adorable, doll, in the one-night-stand, please-no-talking sense”). Kit scurried around the morning’s post–rush hour foot traffic. Everyone on the sidewalk seemed to have a disfigurement—a limp or a misshapen back or some invisible spinal condition that rendered them half-immobile. These were her people, New Yorkers on the street, drifting around the overtended brownstones like dirty pollen particles. She loved living here, though maybe not as emphatically as she had in her twenties; New York, you saved me was no longer a dissident shout but a quiet, grateful whisper like the kind exchanged between an older couple who had long stopped having sex and found their celibacy only confirmed their closeness. When Kit first moved to Manhattan, she had been a bar-back and a waitress. No matter how successful she became, a part of her always expected to end up back in the poverty of her youth. Artists understood starving even when they ordered endless lunch trays of sashimi for their studio staff. Kit’s phone vibrated with an incoming call marked unidentified. It could be Bruce hounding her from a pay phone. Or Haskell calling from some provisional line if the phones were down at the gallery. She clicked “accept.” “Hello?” she said. A muffled silence. “Bruce? Calm down. I’m a block away.” She heard thundery pulses of static like panting breath. “Hello? Who is this? Haskell? Hello?” A more depressing possibility occurred to her: Kai might have simply wanted to hear her voice. She had never been safe from his old-fashioned conception of romance. “Kai? Jesus, I said no communication. Why are you making this harder on yourself? This is for your benef—” “Fucking bitch,” came the sexless, leathery voice. “You will die.” At first she still thought it was Kai. But the primary-school, prank-call pathology didn’t fit the eighteen months she knew of him. “You will die for what you did.”

160

Part One

“Thanks for the warning. I’ll have my assistant look into it.” She hung up. Unfortunately this was not Kit’s first death threat. Seven months ago, a leading fashion magazine had run a profile on the daughter of a maniacal, bloodthirsty dictator of a former Soviet state. In every photograph the handsome young woman had posed in her home in front of a prominent Kit Carrodine canvas. Kit had no clue how the painting wound up in the hands of the evil dictator’s daughter, and she went on a warpath straight to Haskell about it. “Secondary market!” Haskell had pleaded, arms raised in mystification, as if the secondary market were a divine force beyond control. “We’ll never again sell to the collector who flipped it.” The magazine suffered weeks of social-media persecution about their glorification of the offspring of a major human-rights violator, and it was Kit’s painting that appeared over and over alongside this blonde posed holding her infant baby while attempting to slip on a high heel. (It was the pose that infuriated Kit as much as the inclusion of her painting: why did a woman putting on an expensive shoe suggest the possession of a complex inner life?) The demons of social media briefly turned on Kit, as if she too were guilty of torture and kleptocracy by mere association. She had received dozens of frightening emails, a Twitter campaign to boycott her show at a Los Angeles museum, and thirteen hate-spewing anonymous phone calls. Her regular morning joke upon entering her studio had been, “Any calls for my execution today?” If there’s one thing in this world you can count on, it’s a short attention span. The bluster didn’t slowly fade; within a week it vanished altogether and no one could recall the fashion story or the country of the dictator’s daughter or the beautiful painting hanging behind her. But Kit was sure there must be one holdout who had finally tracked down her number to burden her with a reminder. She circled through the revolving door of Black Run, theatrically swept the shopping bag over her shoulder, and located Bruce, clearly having failed in sobriety, slumped in a corner booth behind two glasses of white wine. “You didn’t,” she roared from the doorway, ignoring the petite hostess’s attempts to corral her. Bruce’s face lit up. “Of course I did. And I’m bringing you down with me.” He flicked the brim of the fuller glass. On her way to Bruce, Kit passed a table where a couple she recognized sat. The woman was a prominent attorney and the man was on the board of MoMA when he wasn’t off on one of his spiritual quests in the desert. She idled at their table for a minute, swapping supple, meaningless banter. Kit wouldn’t exactly call them friends, although they were more than mere acquaintances. There should be a word for the people you genuinely care for, and enjoy talking to in snatches at a party, but who would not be expected to attend your funeral. Kit said goodbye, glided toward Bruce, and bent down to kiss him on each cheek. When she squeezed his shoulders, he winced. “What’s wrong? Did you get beaten up by a new boyfriend?” “No, by my trainer. Every muscle is sore. And you’re late. Again.” “I’m sorry,” she said, sliding into the seat across from him. “That’s all right. I ordered company.” He grabbed his wine and took a sip. She gave him a disapproving glance, but she wouldn’t guilt-trip him about it. She loved Bruce enough to tolerate his vices. She might not even recognize him without them. “I got another death threat.” She enjoyed saying that. It made her feel strangely important. Bruce’s eyes widened with fascination. “You might be the only artist in the world worth killing. At least your work means something to strangers. You should take it as a compliment.” “I’ll try to see it that way.” “I had such a marvelous time at your opening. What a crowd. I could barely see the paintings.” He leaned into the table to signal intimacy. “Doll, I promise I’ll go back to the gallery when I have a free hour to really take them in.” Bruce had all the free hours of

161

St. Kit of New York

every day to do just that. It was as if he, too, were waiting for a positive review to make sure a second trip was worth his while. “The show’s up for two more weeks. No word from the Times yet.” She huffed and reached for his hand. “Honestly, I need that review. I want the work to get some notice. Otherwise it will just be sold to private collections and no one will ever see it again. What’s the point?” He rubbed her knuckle tenderly. “Everything eventually moves through the intestines of private ownership and ends up in public institutions one day. Meanwhile, think of the collectors as guardians. Or as benevolent digesters.” “You make museums sound like toilets. Anyway, that’ll be in, like, forty years. I want them seen now. They’re supposed to be about the Internet. In forty years they’ll be as relevant as the statues at Luxor.” Bruce retracted his hand. “That’s a sensitive subject. I had a friend—now who was it?—a distant uncle, I believe, who survived the shooting massacre at Luxor. He hid behind a rock for hours, and—” “Bruce,” she howled. “That was my story. It was my friend’s sister, or was it—oh, I can’t remember. But I told you that story.” Bruce stared down at his lap in genuine hurt. He loved to tell stories and hated when he was called out on pilfering them from others. Kit sighed and feigned confusion. “Maybe I’m wrong. Tell me again. What was it?” She was absolutely sure she had told him that very story a few years ago over dinner. Bruce immediately snapped to attention, describing the scene of the massacre at the archaeological site with a wealth of gruesome adjectives. Kit pretended to be astonished and actually found herself shocked the moment he mentioned the bullets piercing the tourists as his distant uncle—who was really Kit’s friend’s sister—crouched behind a stone pillar. “Awful,” she whimpered as if hearing of their deaths for the first time. He nodded solemnly. “The worst,” he agreed. Although now she recalled that Bruce’s reaction was an apathetic shrug when she had described the same piercing bullets to him. It only mattered to him when he told it. “Well, you’ll love my news,” she said. “Kai and I . . . . ” But her phone began to vibrate on the table. When she flipped it over she saw it was her studio manager, Grace. She lifted the device to her ear. “What?” “I’m sorry to bother you,” Grace said too meekly. Grace was past the point of doing anything right—everything the girl did was too. She was another problem on Kit’s list of life repairs. “It’s just that I’m getting all these weird calls from journalists. They want to talk to you. I didn’t know what to say.” “Say yes,” Kit shouted. “That’s good news, Grace, not bad news. We want that.” “But the questions were really weird. I mean, I didn’t understand them.” Grace would never understand. So much for the practical application of an art-history degree. “It was the Post, the Daily News, Jezebel, and Huffington—” “I’ll talk to them.” Grace hesitated. “But. . . I think there’s something wrong, something odd. You should call Haskell.” “Why?” But Kit decided that, for once, Grace was correct. She hung up and dialed Haskell on his cell. I’m sorry, she mouthed to Bruce and placed her wine glass in front of him to keep him occupied. Haskell answered after four rings. “What’s going on?” Kit barked. “I’ve been trying you all morning.” “Oh, um,” Haskell mumbled. “Oh, Kit. It’s been so crazy here at the gallery.” He sounded nervous and tense, a middle-aged man who had lost his cool. Haskell never lost his cool. She had never seen him so much as sweat. That was one of the reasons

162

Part One

she had stayed with him. “I was going to call. You see, it started two days ago. I honestly thought it had something to do with the humidity in the gallery. Or condensation from the air conditioning. So I wasn’t going to bother you. But it’s. . . . it’s not that.” He shouted something indecipherable at an assistant and then whispered into the receiver. “I think we should close for a few days, until an expert can come in.” “What are you talking about?” Now she sounded nervous and tense. “Close the gallery? No way. You’re not doing that. What the hell is the matter?” “I. . . I can’t explain it. Something’s wrong with one of your paintings. I think you should come down and see for yourself.” Kit double-kissed Bruce goodbye and collected her shopping bag, apologizing to him while frantically ordering an Uber. Black Prius. Driver’s name Mamoun. The one problem with Uber was that you couldn’t bribe the driver to speed faster to Chelsea. Kit climbed out of the car on 21st Street and ran down the bleached sidewalk. As she approached Haskell Vex she was struck by a bewildering sight: a line of some thirty people waiting outside the frosted-glass doors to see her show. A rush of ecstasy flooded through her, but these loiterers weren’t the usual, well-heeled, semijaded gallery-goers of strictly Northern European ancestry. They were of all ethnicities and mostly very old or very young, with patchy clothing, and some held rosaries and others white roses. As she sprinted past them she heard one of them whisper, “She’s the one.” Kit wrenched open the heavy door. Inside the cold white space was a crowd of more unlikely visitors. Some clutched hats reverently over their hearts. One older Hispanic woman was on her knees in the midst of some sort of Bellevue-worthy emotional breakdown. A tall black man was passing out leaflets printed with a calligraphic verse. Two gallery assistants stood at the front desk looking horror-struck. She spotted Haskell stampeding toward her. He grabbed her by the arm before she could ask what was happening. His face was ashen and, yes, sweaty. “Kit, let me show you. It started two days ago and it hasn’t stopped. I have to say, I do not want this.” As they entered the main exhibition room the swarm of visitors fell into a hush. Kit gazed at her nine paintings lining the walls. All of them were perfectly normal except for the one on the far wall. There were clumps of white roses underneath it and three more women swaying on their knees. The painting was Untitled, #7 in her Killers series. Kit had covered the canvas in a golden wash. Amid the floating emojis of a bag of cash, a priapic eggplant, and a beach umbrella loomed the mug shot she had lifted from public record of a young black prisoner convicted of murder, whose name she never knew because his particular identity had been of no interest to her. But as she stepped closer, she saw exactly what had brought all of these visitors to Haskell Vex in droves. Her lips went numb, and the shopping bag fell from her grip. No, fuck no, it’s not possible. A seepage of water clung to the young man’s eye, and a tiny amount trickled down the canvas, bleeding the gold. The man in the painting was definitely—unmistakably—crying. Haskell turned and looked at her angrily as if expecting her to offer an explanation. But Kit Carrodine was not in the business of explaining her artwork, let alone miracles. She stood in the cold room full of people she didn’t recognize, a little Lourdes right here in Chelsea, and all she could think was how happy she’d been this morning, before God came to the art world.

[To be continued]

163

IN CONVERSATION Craig Robins, co-founder of Design Miami and developer of the Miami Design District, talks to Derek Blasberg

Craig Robins has been called

one of the key contributors

DB: Let’s start at the

school in Spain, where I

many things: real estate

to the revitalization of

very beginning. The first

became really fascinated

entrepreneur, art collector,

Miami Beach’s Art Deco

question I often ask in this

with art, especially Goya.

philanthropist, cultural

District. Later, in the mid-

series is, What was your

I landed in Barcelona and

director, Miami guru. But

1990s, when the neighborhood

first or foremost art- or

that’s where I decided I

the way he’d prefer to be

was in disrepair, he began

design-world memory?

wanted to do something with

labeled is, “I see my work

collecting buildings in

CR: When I was a child, we

art and artists.

as producing creativity.”

the area with the plan to

had a family friend who was

Robins, who grew up in

reestablish it as a hub of

an artist and who lived with

DB: What was the first piece

Miami’s South Beach, is

contemporary art, design,

us for a time. He taught me

of art that you collected?

largely responsible for

and fashion. Derek Blasberg

to draw and sort of planted

CR: A little sketch by

revitalizing the city’s

sits down with Robins to

this seed of affection for

Salvador Dalí. I was living

Design District. Beginning in

discover how he revamped his

the creative arts. It went

in Barcelona and was

the late 1980s, Robins became

hometown.

dormant until I went to

fascinated by him. I didn’t

164

have many resources, but I

DB: Was there something

DB: How would you describe

young, hip, less-expensive

got this tiny little sketch

special about the Design

the culture and vibe of the

brands. We are constantly

and I loved it.

District or was it just a

district to someone who has

approached by big brands and

great venue and a great

never been?

we’ll sometimes reach out to

DB: What role did your

value?

CR: First of all, it’s just

a younger, less-established

personal connection to Miami

CR: Once you get to Lincoln

an amazing place to walk

brand if we think they have

play in your development? Do

Road, which is the end of

around. You can see public

something important to say.

you think you’d be doing what

the commercial part of South

works by John Baldessari,

The key is to have a mix and

you’re doing if you’d been

Beach, the next neighborhood

Zaha Hadid, and Marc Newson

to not make it just about

born somewhere else?

is the Design District, even

in addition to many other

buying and purchasing. We

CR: My parents always

though it’s over the bridge

examples of public art and

want it to be a destination

liked art, so I think that

and a little north. So one

design. There’s really

where you can see art,

inspiration was more in the

was location, yes. But it was

interesting architecture:

experience the luxury world,

home environment than in the

also a historic neighborhood

it has Sou Fujimoto’s first

but still walk away with

city. When I graduated law

that was originally built

building in the United

something.

school and started to work

around design, and I found

States, Jun Aoki did an

in South Beach, in the Art

that intriguing. It was in

amazing building for Louis

Deco district, it was a place

total disrepair and a lot of

Vuitton. . . . The brands

that was very much about

people were skeptical.

themselves have done a lot

DB: As a collector, do you

of really wonderful things

look for art in Miami? Do you

style and creativity. It

Also: wonderful restaurants.

wasn’t just a normal business

DB: Was it cheap?

and it’s got a great offering

make an effort to go local?

neighborhood. I think my

CR: The property values were

of art, design, fashion,

CR: I try to find the highest

childhood experience of being

so low, but I knew there was

and food. It’s building and

level of talent where I can

around an artist, then living

something there that only

expanding very quickly—the

get really good work, and

in Spain and getting exposed

needed to be enhanced. The

Institute of Contemporary

where the pricing seems

to some great art, and then

buildings were primarily

Art is under construction,

reasonable relative to the

working in a neighborhood

unoccupied and I started

there’s the de la Cruz

talent and the contribution.

that had these beautiful

doing what I had done in

Collection, so there’s a

The first person who comes

historical buildings where

South Beach: looking for

lot that you can see in art,

to mind is Njideka Akunyili

the challenge was to figure

interesting spaces and for

obviously in fashion, and

Crosby, who’s young but

out how to do something

interesting people to take

the furniture showrooms are

great. I look for young

contemporary with them—that

them. I gave studios to a

still there as well, so it’s

artists but also I try to buy

basically got me going.

bunch of artists. As the area

a creative laboratory.

works that will help anchor the collection. A few years

started becoming financially DB: So let’s talk about the

successful, it felt like

DB: What do you think its

ago I acquired Duchamp’s

Design District: How did that

it was missing something

contribution has been to the

“Three Standard Stoppages”—

opportunity present itself?

else, so when Sam Keller

art world at large?

he’s the foundation of

CR: When I started working in

wanted to bring Art Basel

CR: Between Art Basel Miami

conceptual art. Other artists

South Beach, I was primarily

to Miami I thought it was a

and the Design District, what

I like at the moment are John

motivated to own an art

great idea and I said let’s

we invented was the idea of

Currin, John Baldessari, and

studio so that I could bring

do nonprofit exhibitions

a global cultural happening.

Richard Tuttle.

artists to come and make

and events to make it into

Before Miami, if you went to

art. While I was looking

a cultural happening. The

Art Basel in Switzerland,

DB: One of my favorite things

for a studio, I met this guy

Design District started to

it’s the best art fair in

to do in Miami is take those

who became a mentor and a

become a place where just

the world but it didn’t have

Art Deco walking tours. They

partner, Tony Goldman. He

amazing things would happen.

the fun and excitement and

made me so nostalgic for the

had the perfect studio but he

We were doing things with

sexiness of this place. Other

golden days of Miami.

told me that if I wanted it

the Guggenheim and Jeffrey

fairs have popped up around

CR: In its day, in the 1950s

I had to become his partner.

Deitch, restaurants started

the world since Miami that

and ’60s, the Art Deco

It was sort of on a lark,

to open. . . . We did Design

have tried to capitalize on

District was really the

but I said ok, as long as

Miami, which at the time

the idea of the place to be.

platform for a new Miami. By

I can have the studio I’ll

was in the Design District—

make the investment. Then it

that was the first real

DB: The idea of a buzz, you

become more of a retirement

began this career where I was

contribution Miami made to

mean.

place and didn’t have much

making both cultural spaces

the global dialogue about

CR: It’s an exciting place,

energy. By the end of the

and also had stores to rent.

furniture design. It was

a time when a city takes a

century the energy changed

really the first furniture

moment to celebrate culture

dramatically, and people

DB: Who was your first tenant?

show that had contemporary

in different ways. There are

started coming back and

CR: Keith Haring. It was

collectible design as well

other fairs, like Salone del

falling in love with Miami

1987. He’d done the Pop Shop

as modern design and was

Mobile in Milan, but that’s

again. It was the beginning

in New York and I wanted to

featured during a major art

much more of an industry

of a city that is in part

have one of those in Miami.

fair.

show. This was the first

trading on culture and

place to show off a city, an

creativity. In a modest way,

Then there wasn’t much

the late ’70s, ’80s, it had

happening in South Beach. In

DB: Give it to me in a

art world, a design world,

it’s what Florence did in the

the mid-’90s, once it started

timeline.

and everything else that has

Renaissance. Miami has this

to become a highly regarded

CR: In the mid-’90s I

come to be associated with

interesting combination of

destination, especially

started acquiring spaces,

the Design District.

being a tropical paradise

by the creative world, I

but quietly. By 2000 it was

thought I needed to go over

a very successful place for

DB: Tell me what you look for

the bridge, away from Miami

furniture, and then in 2002

in a Design District tenant.

Beach and into the city of

is when Art Basel came to

CR: We continue to work with

Miami. I started to buy some

Miami. In 2005 I founded

amazing fashion brands and

properties in the Design

Design Miami, which is now

luxury brands, but I think

District.

back in South Beach.

it’s also important to have

but also emerging as a global city of cultural substance.

165

BOOK CORNER

1C LIFE

Douglas Flamm, a rare book specialist at Gagosian, highlights 1¢ Life, a 1964 publication created by the Chinese-American artist and poet Walasse Ting and the Abstract Expressionist painter Sam Francis. Text by Anna Heyward

Images by Roy Lichtenstein (opposite top) and Tom Wesselmann (opposite bottom) that appear in Walasse Ting’s 1¢ Life (1964) Respectively © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York Photos by Rob McKeever

166

one life too short one day too long — Walasse Ting Walasse Ting, who mixed works on paper with artist’s books throughout his career, was an itinerant Chinese-American artist and poet whose color-saturated paintings refer to calligraphy and Abstract Expressionism. His most ambitious work by far was the loving anthology 1¢ Life, which brought together a community of artists traversing the moments of Abstract Expressionism and Pop: Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and Ting himself. It also includes Ting’s poems, which have roots in the asceticism of Chinese poetry but principally express the fitful and vital dynamism of New York. Disjointed, erratic, yet wide-eyed spiritual recitations, the poems are sometimes epic, heartfelt affirmations, screamed out in all-capital letters, sometimes restrained and reflective, almost choked-up abstractions.

The landmark artist’s book of 1964, 1¢ Life is now celebrated, canonical, and rare. Produced with the painter Sam Francis, it was published in 1964 by E. W. Kornfeld of Bern, Switzerland. The 170 lithograph pages were printed in Paris by Maurice Beaudet; the typography is handset letterpress by George Girard. Revolutionary in its assemblage of artifacts of Pop, 1¢ Life is a compact visual manifesto of the 1960s—bright, psychedelic, and pulsating, a collaboration of artists who came together under Ting’s poetic street magic. Setting large areas of white space next to areas of maximum color saturation and layered density, the book exemplifies the searching and schizophrenic design spirit of the time. Ting’s poetry sits on the page in giant colored letters, like fallen rain: “i am fall in love/i sit himalaya/mountain/eat candy/mouth/taste sweet.” The title 1¢ Life is an impressionistic riff. With a hint of irony, it captures the fragmented but hopeful mood of the moment—but also a timelessness, a reflection of the philosophic eternity in which Ting believed art and poetry lay.

167

CHARMED,

I’M SURE Seven female artists were invited by art collector Liz Swig to create special charms for this one-of-a-kind bracelet. Text by Anna Heyward

Clockwise from top of center bracelet: Laurie Simmons Wangechi Mutu Mickalene Thomas Rachel Feinstein Cindy Sherman Barbara Kruger Shirin Neshat

168

The wearing of charms on the wrist goes back to antiquity, when people carried talismans to repel evil and bring luck. The modern charm bracelet extends this impulse into autobiography, with the ornament serving as decoration but also as a way to mark the milestones of intimate and emotional life. Particularly among girls and young women, it acts as a kind of diary: a chain, usually a silver or gold link, becomes the vehicle for symbolic trinkets—charms— each for a special purpose. Given or acquired to mark a significant moment in life, new charms are added and removed, so that wearers can alter their charm bracelets to express mood and circumstance. Liz Swig, founder of LizWorks studios, has worked with the New York jewelry-maker Ippolita to produce Charmed, a combination charm bracelet and work of contemporary art. To make it—in an edition of fifty, plus artists’ proofs—Swig called on seven prominent women artists to create a charm, a small talisman reflecting both their personal history and their aesthetic vision. Each of the seven artists—Rachel Feinstein, Barbara Kruger, Wangechi Mutu, Shirin Neshat, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Mickalene Thomas—designed a charm to hang with the others on an oversized Ippolita goldlink chain, the trinkets collectively telling a story of contemporary art. For Swig, the bracelet creates “a dialogue between the personal and professional.” Charms, she says, “are a form of communication,” a way for the wearer to communicate with the world: “The charm has been used by women to connect, share, and save memories from generation to generation. It is a form of love among women. This bracelet elevates a piece of jewelry to a piece of art.” The Pictures Generation artist Laurie Simmons is celebrated for photographs, often made by posing dolls and figurines, that explore the social roles of women. Her charm is an old-fashioned camera box standing on a pair of female legs. Simmons remembers, My mother wore a charm bracelet that told the story of her life. My father bought her a charm for every occasion—anniversaries, birthdays, and holidays—until the bracelet was filled. A bride and groom, a house, a car, a piano and three little ballet dancers representing me and my sisters . . . each had tiny little jewels or doors that opened to reveal little surprises. Twenty years ago I photographed my mother’s charm bracelet with a macro lens so I could remember every detail. When I was asked to make a charm it wasn’t a question of “What will I make?,” it was “Which charm shall I make?,” because I’ve thought about creating a charm bracelet for a very long time. Shirin Neshat’s charm, a hand, recalls the Middle Eastern hamsa or “hand of Fatima” amulet and refers to Neshat’s artwork Stories of Martyrdom, from her Woman of Allah series (1993–97). “I’ve always related to jewelry as an art form that gives women a unique sense of style and identity,” says Neshat. “It’s particularly meaningful to create a small charm that, in its modesty of scale, can be a fusion in between my artistic vision and my passion for jewelry.” Barbara Kruger’s works combine images from the mass media with sloganlike texts to invoke familiar constructions of power and identity, consumerism and sexuality. Her charm riffs symbolically on notions of value and desire: on the front of a disk engraved with the words “liberty” and “e pluribus unum,” like a U.S. penny, and embossed with a presidential pair of heads, the phrase “Money can

buy you Love” is emblazoned in Kruger’s signature font; the back of the disk reads “charisma is the perfume of your gods.” “My charm plays with the ideas of desire, charisma, and value,” Kruger says. “It’s ‘on the money’ and attached to you.” Wangechi Mutu’s art incorporates performance, collage, painting, video, and sculpture to plumb layers of identity. She has created an ornament shaped like a traditional cameo, in pastel hues. The work externalizes a feeling of doubleness, with an illustrated collage of a feminine-looking bust, eyes, mouth, and facial features exploding to both the left and the right. Mutu explains, “I am aware of the complexity of being an immigrant—albeit one with visibility and voice. ‘Pretty double headed’ were the words I used to describe that feeling of being from two places, two mindsets, and two worlds all in one. It’s a privilege with a price to pay.” Cindy Sherman’s photographs of herself, costumed and made up in various roles, subvert the stereotypes of women found in films, magazines, television, and the culture at large. Her charm refers to another traditionally feminine form of jewelry, the portrait locket: a solid golden egg, it opens to reveal two contrasting self-portraits. For Sherman there’s something so comforting about collecting freshly laid eggs, each one slightly different yet sublime, to feel the weight and warmth of it in your hand. I’m amazed how anything lays an egg once in a while, much less daily. What a relief it must be when it’s popped out! And then we get to eat it! Unless it’s a golden egg. Then you can crack it open to look inside. And wear it around your wrist on a bracelet, a symbol of fertility and femininity—and now art. The pop-cultural references in Mickalene Thomas’s work touch on complex notions of gender and race and challenge common definitions of beauty. The charm she created, a pair of larger-than-life, jewel-encrusted blue lips, signifies sensual femininity, which she says she wanted to “gift . . . to the world.” Whimsical and fantastical, Rachel Feinstein’s charm, like her sculpture, draws on the iconography of the Baroque and Rococo periods of European culture, intentionally overplaying its search for sophistication. Feinstein remarks, I’ve always loved the sentimentality and femininity of wearing a charm bracelet. My own mother and grandmothers did not wear jewelry and I don’t wear jewelry every day but somehow I became aware of charm bracelets as a young girl just like my own young daughter recently has. Flora wanted to go shopping for her seventh birthday in April and chose a plastic rainbowcolored charm bracelet where one can choose different cute and girly charms like an ice cream cone, Dorothy’s red shiny shoe, et cetera. It instantly brought me back to my own childhood. And strangely within the month Liz approached me about her Charmed project. The charm bracelet honors the intimacy and narrative qualities of the work of these seven artists. A story as much as an ornament, Charmed is personal history become symbol. “To charm” is also to attract, and one of the characteristics of the charm bracelet, Swig says, is “the sound it makes,” a subtle but unapologetic jingling and tintinnabulation as the charms jostle and knock, intermingling on the wrist with the wearer’s motion as she moves through life.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Georg Baselitz: Jumping Over My Shadow Georg Baselitz in conversation with Okwui Enwezor John Currin Text by James Lawrence Line into Color, Color into Line: Helen Frankenthaler, Paintings 1962â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1987 Texts by John Elderfield, Francine Prose, and Carol Armstrong Josephine Meckseper Text by James Frey Ed Ruscha: Extremes and In-betweens Texts by Yve-Alain Bois and Ben Eastham Nude: From Modigliani to Currin Text by Michael Cary Zeng Fanzhi Text by Yuko Hasegawa Photo by David Harrison

170

171

FOOD

LUNCH IN CAPRI Serena Cattaneo Adorno prepares a simple lunch for Mark Grotjahn and his family at a remarkable private house in Capri during the planning of a one-night-only exhibition. Produce is locally sourced and delivered by boat as the house is set at the top of a cliff. Casa Malaparte is difficult to reach. For the courageous guest, it is a dizzy climb of more than 100 steps up from the sea; others must approach on foot, a steady forty-five-minute walk from the Piazzetta in the village of Capri, overlooking the dangerous, passionate ridge and the cliffs. The air is crisp in the early morning, before the sun has warmed up the carnelian-red walls around this secret and precious house. Curzio Malaparte, born Kurt Erich Suckert, was an Italian writer, playwright, editor, photographer, novelist, diplomat, and architect, among other things, and the house he designed for himself may be one of the most striking architectural marvels of the world in private ownership. Malaparte liked Piedmontese Barbera wine, simple trattoria food, and loved red and

172

white checkered table linen. He designed a regal kitchen with a window that frames the view so as not to overwhelm. Through the window the sea glistens against the rocks and the breeze brings news and gossip from the village. When we stay at the house, we order produce by phone from Aldo’s small fruit-andvegetable stand at the port. Long, very serious conversations take place over the order—on the quality of the capers, their proper saltiness, the succulence of the cherries, and the sweetness of the tomatoes in contrast with the unusual fresh herbs that have finally arrived on the island. We must have full confidence in Aldo as he is the only source of ingredients we can trust, though he always and invariably forgets at least one item, forcing us to be resourceful.

173

Photos of Capri by Eric Piasecki

Once lunch is finished, silence reigns once again in the house, while the seagulls shuffle high in the cerulean sky above the cliffs. Serena Cattaneo Adorno

The rosemary and mint that grow in the ardent soil on the house’s narrow terrace have strong bitter roots to fight the difficult winter climate. A local fisherman may grace us with something from the daily catch, if the tourist restaurant in the bay hasn’t been too greedy. Meals are often about luck, but everything tastes sacred in this house on its dangerous cliff top, caught in the magnificence of the Mediterranean and the traditions of the island. Mark Grotjahn is preparing a one-night exhibition in the house’s main room. The installation process is arduous, demanding careful fine-tuning; the works have been created in response to the house, and the house responds to them in perfect synergy. I don’t want to disturb Mark, whose gift is to be able to simultaneously work on instinct while carefully considering the proportions and notions of space dictated by Malaparte. His twin daughters are joining us for lunch, and more specifically to play with the litter of gray and brown kittens that are frisking around the house with liberty and excitement. As I finish cutting up the potatoes for the caper, anchovy, and tuna salad and carefully positioning them in a rustic terra-cotta dish, people start peeking into the kitchen with rumbling stomachs. We run down the myriad of steps to dive fearlessly into the shimmering blue bay, the grottino azzurro, as the mischievous Southern Italian boatmen call it for the benefit of the tourists on the island. With our bare feet and wet hair, we eat in the shade on the great and famous steps of the house. We hold our plates on our knees and the kittens run around our legs. Mark tells us a little about the progress of the installation and we discuss the various changes and possibilities of the layout before he escapes, with a plate of oozing cherries and fresh rosemary, to work on completing our marvelous fleeting presence in this sanctified house. As Malaparte explained, “Nowhere else in Italy has such a broad horizon, such depth of feeling. It is of course a place fit only for strong men and free spirits.” Once lunch is finished, silence reigns once again in the house, while the seagulls shuffle high in the cerulean sky above the cliffs. 174

Photos of finished recipes by Serena Cattaneo Adorno

Penne alla sora checca

White peaches, cherries and Malaparte rosemary

All recipes serve 6

Potato salad with tuna, capers, anchovies, olives, and herbs

½ kg (c. 1 lb) ripe cherry tomatoes ½ kg (c. 1 lb) beefsteak tomatoes 500 g (c. 1 lb) mozzarella di bufala ½ cup fresh walnuts and pine nuts 750 g (c. 1 ½ lb) dry penne pasta ½ liter (c. 2 cups) extra-virgin olive oil Handful of fresh washed basil leaves 1 lemon Sea salt and pepper

1 kg (c. 2 lbs) small-to-medium-size potatoes 3 cans wild tuna fillets in olive oil 100 g (c. 3.5 oz) large green olives 150 g (c. 5 oz) small grape tomatoes 100 g (c. 3.5 oz) salted capers 150 g (c.5 oz) anchovies Handful of mint, dill, and tarragon altogether Half a lemon Extra-virgin olive oil to taste

5 medium-size white peaches 200 g (c. 7 oz) fresh cherries Handful of fresh rosemary Small section of ginger root Juice of 1 lemon 3 spoons agave nectar 50 g (c. 2 oz) peeled and flaked almonds

Nothing need be cooked except the pasta. First, chop both kinds of tomatoes in halfcentimeter dice and put them in a large bowl. It’s important to use different kinds of tomatoes to produce a balance of acidity and sweetness. Roughly chop the mozzarella di bufala and mix it with the olive oil and the tomatoes in the bowl. Use your hands to squeeze the ingredients into a kind of paste. Add a large pinch of sea salt, which will marinate the tomatoes and draw out their marvelous juice. Leave to rest for about thirty minutes at room temperature.

Put the potatoes to boil in salted water.

Blanch the peaches—bring a small pot of water to the boil and plunge each peach into it, one by one, for forty-five seconds; on removing each peach from the pot, immerse it immediately in a large bowl of ice water. Carefully remove the skin, cut in half, and slice into half-moons.

Cook the penne al dente. Following the brand’s instructions for timing, but taste regularly and carefully to monitor the pasta’s degree of doneness, since cooking times will vary (depending, for example, on whether you’re at sea level or high in the mountains). Reserving some of the cooking water, drain the pasta and add it to the tomatoes and mozzarella. The cooking water will retain starch from the pasta; adding a little to the sauce will make it blend better. Roughly chop the walnuts and pine nuts, cut the skin of the lemon into very thin slices, and tear the basil into pieces by hand (never cut basil, as contact with the metal of the knife makes it turn black). Add to the sauce, and season. The dish can be served warm or cold.

Wash the capers under running water to remove excess salt. Strain the tuna fillets and air them with a fork to give them a very light consistency. Cut the grape tomatoes in half. Pit the olives and cut them in sections, or slices if very large. Prepare the herbs, picking the smallest leaves, and set all aside for plating. Pierce the potatoes with a fork to check their firmness before removing them from the heat. They must maintain a crunch and the skin should remain firm. Once ready, leave to rest at room temperature.

Cut the cherries in half and pit them. Mix the peaches and the cherries in a bowl with the lemon juice and agave nectar and grate some ginger root over them. Leave to rest in the refrigerator for twenty minutes. To serve, add the fresh rosemary and sprinkle with the almonds to add crunch.

For the presentation: place the tuna fillets at the center of a very large flat serving plate. Slice the potatoes in half, at an angle of 45 degrees, and set them carefully around the tuna, with the thinner side toward the edges of the plate, like an open flower. Then add the tomatoes from this center outward and gently lay the olives, capers, mint, dill, and tarragon over them. Drizzle the oil and sprinkle the sea salt, which should remain crunchy and visible, over everything. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon directly onto the dish, leaving some pulp randomly scattered.

175

Lunch Monday–Saturday 12–3pm Dinner Monday–Saturday 6–11pm 976 Madison Avenue, New York T. 212 906 7141 reservation@kappomasanyc.com

176

177

Photo by Patrick Crawford/Blackletter

178

179

LA CRÃ&#x2030;ATION EST UN VOYAGE

FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON 8, AVENUE DU MAHATMA GANDHI BOIS DE BOULOGNE, PARIS

#FONDATIONLOUISVUITTON

LOCATIONS New York Madison Avenue 980 Madison Avenue, New York, ny 10075 T. 212 744 2313 newyork@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6

London Davies Street 17–19 Davies Street, London w1k 3de T. +44 207 493 3020 london@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6

New York Madison Avenue 976 Madison Avenue, New York, ny 10075 T. 212 744 2313 newyork@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–7

Paris Rue de Ponthieu 4, rue de Ponthieu, 75008 Paris T. +33 1 75 00 05 92 paris@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11–7

New York Park & 75 821 Park Avenue, New York, ny 10021 T. 212 796 1228 parkand75@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6 New York West 24th Street 555 West 24th Street, New York, ny 10011 T. 212 741 1111 newyork@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6 New York West 21st Street 522 West 21st Street, New York, ny 10011 T. 212 741 1717 newyork@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6 Beverly Hills 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, ca 90210 T. 310 271 9400 losangeles@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6 San Francisco 657 Howard Street, San Francisco, ca 94105 T. 415 546 3990 sanfrancisco@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6 London Grosvenor Hill 20 Grosvenor Hill, London w1k 3qd T. +44 20 7495 1500 london@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6 London Britannia Street 6–24 Britannia Street, London wc1x 9jd T. +44 207 841 9960 london@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6 182

Paris Le Bourget 26, avenue de l’Europe, 93350 Le Bourget T. +33 1 48 16 16 47 paris@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11–6 Rome Via Francesco Crispi 16, 00187 Rome T. +39 06 4208 6498 roma@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10:30–7 Geneva 19 place de Longemalle, 1204 Geneva T. +41 22 319 36 19 geneva@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6 Athens 3 Merlin Street, Athens 10671 T. +30 210 36 40 215 athens@gagosian.com Hours: Monday–Friday 11–6 Saturday 11–3 Hong Kong 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong T. +852 2151 0555 hongkong@gagosian.com Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11–7 Gagosian Shop 976 Madison Avenue, New York, ny 10075 T. 212 796 1224 shop@gagosian.com Hours: Monday–Saturday 10–7

JOIN US! GAGOSIANQUARTERLY.COM/SUBSCRIBE

GAME CHANGER Each issue we look at a particular painting that has influenced the course of contemporary art. Here is Ed Ruscha’s Burning Gas Station (1965–66). Text by Larry Gagosian 184

Ed Ruscha was born in a flyover state (Nebraska) at a time when cross-country travel was done in automobiles and the Southwest was not yet interconnected by superhighways. When he moved to LA, in 1956, he’d often drive the 1,000 miles between there and Oklahoma City in a 1950 Ford on the old Route 66. Along the way, he was mesmerized by the repetition of Standard Oil filling stations, so much so that they would become his Pop symbol of America, as Coca-Cola bottles did for Warhol. Burning Gas Station (1965–66) is one of my favorites from this series by Ruscha because it glorifies the

homecoming of that journey and introduces many of the artist’s hallmarks, like the strong use of perspectival diagonals, expressed in the gas station’s canopy, and the flames that engulf it all. (Another of Ruscha’s iconic works, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, was created at the same time.) The definite touch of irony in a gas station in flames in the desert has always reminded me of Warhol’s Disaster paintings from the same period. Ruscha doubles down on calamity: the terror of a raging fire being fueled by a gas station. It’s deadpan humor with a dose of menace.