Ye llow gold, wh ite gold, diamonds, ch rysopr ase, emeralds, tsavor ite ga rnet s, ye llow sapphires and wh ite cult ured pearls.
GAGOSIAN & SOCIAL ABSTRACTION
FEATURING:
KYLE ABRAHAM
KEVIN BEASLEY
ALLANA CLARKE
THEASTER GATES
CY GAVIN
ALTERONCE GUMBY
LAUREN HALSEY
KAHLIL ROBERT IRVING
DEVIN B. JOHNSON
RICK LOWE
ERIC
N. MACK
CAMERON WELCH
AMANDA WILLIAMS
Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2024
Editor-in-chief
Alison McDonald
Managing Editor
Wyatt Allgeier
Editor, Online and Print
Gillian Jakab
Text Editor
David Frankel
Executive Editor
Derek C. Blasberg
Digital and Video
Production Assistant
Alanis Santiago-Rodriguez
Design Director
Paul Neale
Design Alexander Ecob
Graphic Thought Facility
Website
Wolfram Wiedner Studio
Cover
Andy Warhol
Founder Larry Gagosian
Publisher Jorge Garcia
Published by Gagosian Media
For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries
Advertising@gagosian.com
Distribution David Renard
Distributed by Magazine Heaven
Distribution Manager Alexandra Samaras
Prepress DL Imaging
Printed by Pureprint Group
Contributors
Kyle Abraham
Jayden Ali
Olivia Anani
Kevin Beasley
Jessica Beck
Derek C. Blasberg
Yve-Alain Bois
Lizzi Bougatsos
Katherine Bucknell
Jordan Carter
Joshua Chuang
Grace Coddington
Sébastien Delot
Raymond Foye
Peter Galassi
Fernando Garcia
Theaster Gates
Cy Gavin
Salomé Gómez-Upegui
Alteronce Gumby
Holly Herndon
Christian House
Arinze Ifeakandu
Kahlil Robert Irving
Devin B. Johnson
Ryuan Johnson
April Ledbetter
Lance Ledbetter
Rick Lowe
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Péjú Oshin
Francine Prose
John B. Ravenal
Julian Rose
Antwaun Sargent
Diallo Simon-Ponte
Robert Stilin
Sydney Stutterheim
Spencer Sweeney
Cameron Thompkins
Cameron Welch
Amanda Williams
Josh Zajdman
Thanks
Richard Alwyn Fisher
Harold Ancart
Julia Arena
Lisa Ballard
Remi Barbier
Priya Bhatnagar
Michael Cary
Serena Cattaneo Adorno
Vittoria Ciaraldi
Allana Clarke
John Delk
Maggie Dubinski
Elsa Favreau
Paatela Fraga
Mark Francis
Hallie Freer
Julien Garcia-Toudic
Brett Garde
Eleanor Gibson
Julian Gilbert-Davis
Lauren Gioia
Darlina Goldak
Lauren Halsey
Peter Huestis
Delphine Huisinga
Sarah Jones
Susan Julin
Shiori Kawasaki
Léa Khayata
Tom Lee
Nicole LePage
Katie Levine
Des Magness
Lauren Mahony
Kelly McDaniel Quinn
Trina McKeever
Olivia Mull
Kathy Paciello
Helen Redmond
Erin Rice Patterson
Caitlin Sweeney
Philip Tan
Putri Tan
Harry Thorne
Natasha Turk
Kelsey Tyler
Timothée Viale
Lindsey Westbrook
HIGH JEWE LRY
LA
NOUVELLE COLLECTION DE COULEURS MATE S
FALL 2024 FROM THE EDITOR
Andy Warhol’s 1972 portrait of Mao Zedong gracing our cover is a masterful distillation of political tensions, propaganda, diplomacy, and power. This portrait is not a celebration— Mao targeted artists and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution and led a government responsible for the deaths of many—but his notoriety and power were subjects irresistible to the artist. In this issue, Jessica Beck discusses Warhol’s iconic Mao series, examining the cult of personality around Mao, the circulation of his image, the diplomatic background that generated Warhol’s paintings, and the artist’s long-standing fascination with power and celebrity.
Our third edition of “Gagosian &” is dedicated to the topic of social abstraction. Guest-edited by Antwaun Sargent—who curated an exhibition around the same theme, with iterations in Los Angeles and Hong Kong—the zine brings together artists who use abstraction to explore community building and other forms of social engagement, and who work in and across media such as painting, ceramics, textiles, dance, and more. Abstraction was long considered a strictly formal question, a space stripped of meaning beyond its own field, but today a new generation of artists is employing nonrepresentational form to confront some of the most challenging issues of our time and as a tool
with which communities can work toward common goals.
On the literary front, we asked Katherine Bucknell to tell us about her latest book on Christopher Isherwood, this one a biography. Christian House looks at novelists who are also active photographers and considers the influence that the camera might have on the pen. And the novelist Francine Prose visits the Brooklyn studio of the artist Harold Ancart and discusses his new work and its ability to carry us to new interior landscapes.
On the musical front, Spencer Sweeney and Lizzi Bougatsos address the power of improvisation in music, life, and painting, and Raymond Foye interviews the founders of the legendary Dust-toDigital label.
In this issue we honor the late Richard Serra, whose first show with Larry Gagosian was in 1983, in Los Angeles, and whose work the gallery presented in over forty exhibitions around the world in the years that followed. Working with Serra was always a challenge and a thrill—it often felt as though we were testing the limits of the possible together. His exhibitions usually started with questions like “How can we do that?” and in the end always revealed something that astounded us.
Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief
56
Richard Serra: Sculpture
In May 1983, the exhibition Richard Serra: Sculpture opened at Larry Gagosian’s gallery space on North Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles. Over the next forty years, the gallery was honored with over twenty additional opportunities to exhibit the sculpture of the late, unparalleled artist, in New York, London, and Paris, and we also presented many exhibitions of his singular drawings. We pay homage to the man and his powerful, challenging, and inimitable work by looking back at these exhibitions.
70
Fashion & Art, Part 19: Grace Coddington
Grace Coddington, fashion editor and former creative-director-at-large for American Vogue , reminisces with the Quarterly ’s Derek C. Blasberg about some of her most iconic collaborations with photographers.
76
Mao in the Land of Warhol
Jessica Beck examines Andy Warhol’s return to painting in the 1970s, focusing on the artist’s Mao series.
80
Jayden Ali: Beyond the Building
Architect and designer Jayden Ali joins Gagosian associate director Péjú Oshin for a conversation about false notions of failure, four-day workweeks, and the connective power of building together.
84
Harold Ancart: The Garden
Novelist Francine Prose visited Harold Ancart’s Brooklyn studio this past spring. Here, she reports on the paintings she encountered there—works debuting this October at Gagosian, Paris—and ponders the power of the medium to take us outside of ourselves.
92
The Camera and the Pen
Christian House tracks the history of novelists’ engagements with photography and speaks with three contemporary writers—William Boyd, Teju Cole, and Orhan Pamuk—about their own approaches to the medium.
96
Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire
For the third installment of 2024, we are honored to present the artist and composer Holly Herndon.
98 The Impassioned Critic
Yve-Alain Bois explores what made the late critic David Sylvester unique. Originally published in French as the introduction to David Sylvester. L’Art à bras-le-corps (Strasbourg: L’Atelier contemporain, 2021), Bois’s text is published here for the first time in English, in a translation by Nicholas Huckle.
102
Gagosian & Social Abstraction
This installment of the Quarterly ’s themed supplement complements Social Abstraction , a two-part exhibition in Beverly Hills and Hong Kong curated by Antwaun Sargent.
104
Building Culture
Historian and critic Julian Rose’s new book Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 2024) tracks developments in the field of architecture through a series of in-depth interviews with the architects behind some of the most celebrated and innovative museums of the last fifty years. In celebration of this achievement, we share an excerpt from the author’s introduction to the book.
110
The Bold Stroke: Spencer Sweeney and Lizzi Bougatsos
Two old friends chat about their love of music, nightclub paintings, life lessons from aikido, and Sweeney’s upcoming exhibition at Gagosian, New York.
114 Dust-to-Digital
Since 2003, the Dust-to-Digital label has set the gold standard of music box sets, reissuing gospel, blues, folk, and world music. Here Raymond Foye speaks with the founders, Lance and April Ledbetter.
118
Artists Confronting the Climate Crisis
Salomé Gómez-Upegui surveys environmentally engaged art from the mid-twentieth century to the urgent present.
122 Transferring the Energy: Theaster Gates
Writer and curator Olivia Anani met with Theaster Gates in his exhibition Black Mystic at Gagosian, Le Bourget. They discussed the importance of translation and relocation, the ever-expanding horizons of Gates’s practice, and his use of tar.
128
Hidden in Plain Sight: New Discoveries in the Art of Jasper Johns
In the first part of a two-part essay, art historian John B. Ravenal considers Jasper Johns’s continued engagement with the motif of woodgrain.
136
Prosperity’s Long Song Part III: Angels, Altars, Atlas
We present the third installment of a four-part short story by Arinze Ifeakandu.
142
The Art of Biography: Christopher Isherwood
Katherine Bucknell, previously the editor of a four-volume edition of Christopher Isherwood’s diaries, has now published Christopher Isherwood Inside Out , an intimate and rigorous biography of the celebrated writer and gay cultural icon. Here she meets with Josh Zajdman to discuss the challenges and revelations of the book.
In Conversation: Fernando Garcia and Robert Stilin
The celebrated interior designer Robert Stilin invited Fernando Garcia, the co-creative director of Oscar de la Renta and monse , to his home in New York to discuss their approaches to design, art, and their clientele.
Jordan Carter joined the Dia Art Foundation as curator and co-department head in 2021. His forthcoming projects include presentations of the work of Lucas Samaras and Keith Sonnier, a multipart commission by Cameron Rowland, and an exhibition of new and historical works by Renée Green, all opening at Dia Beacon in 2024–25.
Photo: Gabriela Herman
Peter Galassi
Peter Galassi is a scholar and curator whose principal fields are photography and nineteenth-century French art. From 1991 to 2011 he was chief curator of photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, having earlier worked there as a curatorial intern (1974–75), associate curator (1981–86), and curator (1986–91).
FALL 2024 CONTRIBUTORS
Arinze Ifeakandu
Arinze Ifeakandu is the author of God’s Children Are Little Broken Things , which received the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize, the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize and was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, the Kirkus Prize, and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction. Photo: Bec Stupak Diop
Salomé Gómez-Upegui
Salomé Gómez-Upegui is a Colombian-American writer and creative consultant based in Miami. She writes about art, gender, social justice, and climate change for a wide range of publications and is the author of the book Feminista Por Accidente (2021).
Francine Prose
Francine Prose’s most recent novel is The Vixen (2022). Her other books include Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles , Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern , Reading Like a Writer, and Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 . The recipient of numerous grants and awards, she often writes about art. She is a distinguished-writer-in-residence at Bard College.
Yve-Alain Bois
Yve-Alain Bois is a professor of art history in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has curated many exhibitions and is an editor of the journal October
Katherine Bucknell
Katherine Bucknell is the editor of the four-volume edition of the diaries of Christopher Isherwood; of The Animals , a volume of letters between Christopher Isherwood and his partner, Don Bachardy; and of W. H. Auden’s Juvenilia: Poems 1922–1928 She is director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, a founder of the W. H. Auden Society, and coeditor of Auden Studies
Holly Herndon
Holly Herndon is an artist renowned for her pioneering work in machine learning, software, and music. With her partner, Mat Dryhurst, she runs an art studio in Berlin, and she cofounded Spawning, an organization building an open consent-andcompliance protocol for AI data.
Julian Rose
Julian Rose is a historian and critic of art and architecture. From 2012 to 2018 he was a senior editor at Artforum , and he regularly contributes to a wide range of publications. His book Building Culture explores the architecture of contemporary art museums and was released this month by Princeton Architectural Press.
Diallo Simon-Ponte
Diallo Simon-Ponte is a writer and curator who works at Gagosian. Since starting there in 2021, he has supported exhibitions for artists including Derrick Adams, Cy Gavin, Lauren Halsey, Deana Lawson, Rick Lowe, Tyler Mitchell, Amanda Williams, and others.
Photo: Nzinga Nwa
Josh Zajdman
When not writing about books or art, Josh Zajdman is doom-scrolling Instagram or working on his novel.
Theaster Gates
Theaster Gates’s practice traverses an extraordinary range, from collecting to social gathering, architecture, object-making, experimental music and sound, and the ethical and physical reconstruction of civic life. His interdisciplinary fusion of archiving, performance, institution building, painting, and sculpting is deeply rooted in African-American histories and cultures and revolves around the transformation of objects, edifices, and communities through art and cultural activity.
Photo: Chris Strong
Olivia Anani
Olivia Anani is a writer, curator, and art-market expert based in Paris and Cotonou, Benin. After a decade working in auction houses on the sale of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alberto Giacometti, Iba N’Diaye, Mark Rothko, and Cy Twombly while supporting fundraising initiatives and acquisitions for institutions such as the Musée du Louvre and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, she is currently overseeing the creation of an important institution in the Republic of Benin, in the wake of the country’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2024. A member of the board of directors of the Amis du Palais de Tokyo, Anani was named one of the most influential women in French culture in 2021, as part of the distinction 100 Femmes de Culture.
Jayden Ali is an architect, artist, and filmmaker whose interdisciplinary practice JA Projects works internationally on public-facing cultural projects that strengthen communities and actively reflect on society. A trustee of Open City and a design advocate for the Mayor of London, he has been recognized by numerous publications as a key voice shaping the life of cities and is on the prestigious 40 Under 40 list of the Architects’ Journal . He is part of the Hackney Regeneration Design Advisory Group and sits on the London Legacy Development Corporation Quality Review Panel. In 2023, Ali cocurated Dancing before the Moon , the exhibition in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Architettura, which was awarded a prestigious special mention. Photo: Taran Wilkhu
John B. Ravenal
John B. Ravenal is an independent curator and art historian based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was formerly executive director of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and served before that as curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Jessica Beck
Jessica Beck is a director at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. Formerly the Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, she has curated many projects, notably Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body, the first exhibition to explore the complexities of the body, through beauty, pain, and perfection, in Warhol’s practice.
Photo: Abby Warhola
Cameron Thompkins
Cameron Thompkins is an event and creative producer based in New York, where he has developed multiplatform and interdisciplinary arts and cultural programs for a wide array of prominent institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, Gagosian, Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York Public Radio, and others.
Amanda Williams
Amanda Williams is an artist who uses ideas around color and architecture to explore the intersection of race and the built environment. Through an interdisciplinary practice that brings spatial and aesthetic theory to bear on real social problems, Williams is clarifying the role of the artist in reimagining public space. Whether thinking about the latent value of vacant houses, the expansive palette of Blackness, the speculative beauty of tulip bulbs, or the social currency of childhood candies, Williams has an ongoing practice of elevating seemingly mundane objects and spaces to a renewed and often reformulated status of importance. She lives and works in Chicago.
Cameron Welch
Cameron Welch was born in 1990 in Indianapolis, Indiana, and lives and works in New York.
Alteronce Gumby
Alteronce Gumby is an artist and local of New York City. His practice includes painting, ceramics, installation, performance, and film. Gumby earned his BFA from Hunter College, and his MFA from Yale School of Art. His inspirations include the cosmos, and he is an active member of the Amateur Astronomers Association and the Planetary Society. He is currently preparing for his next solo exhibition at the Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York, in November 2024.
Cy Gavin
Cy Gavin’s paintings are metaphorical interpretations of sites that have been shaped over time by human intervention and geological or cosmic phenomena. Composed with fluid, gestural brushstrokes in striking colors, they are sometimes monumental in scale. Born in Pittsburgh in 1985, Gavin grew up in Donora, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and earned his MFA in 2016 from Columbia University. In 2016 he relocated to New York’s Hudson Valley, where he currently lives and works. Photo: Tyler Mitchell
Raymond Foye
Raymond Foye is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn Rail . His most recent publication is Harry Smith: The Naropa Lectures 1989–1991. Photo: Amy Grantham
Spencer Sweeney
Spencer Sweeney is known for his psychologically rich paintings, as well as for two decades of collaborations with musicians, performers, and artists in the downtown New York art scene. His creative work oscillates between performance, music, visual art, and experimental theater, most recently in his studio salon headz , a communal art and improvisational jazz performance space. Sweeney’s paintings often show reclining nudes, portraits, and self-portraits, spanning various degrees of figuration and abstraction. Photo: Rob McKeever
April Ledbetter
April Ledbetter is the cofounder of the record label and nonprofit foundation Dust-to-Digital.
Kahlil Robert Irving
Born in San Diego in 1992, Kahlil Robert Irving has an MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Washington University, St. Louis, and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. In 2019, Callicoon Fine Arts mounted his second solo exhibition in New York, Black ICE . He was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2019 and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2020.
Lance Ledbetter
Lance Ledbetter is the cofounder of the record label and nonprofit foundation Dust-to-Digital.
Robert Stilin
Robert Stilin is a New York–based interior designer. He is listed on the AD100, published annually by Architectural Digest , and is known for creating art-filled spaces that are chic, comfortably elegant, and expertly tailored to the needs and tastes of his clients. Stilin sits on the Artists Council at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Leadership Council at the Dia Art Foundation.
Sydney Stutterheim
Sydney Stutterheim, PhD, is an art historian and writer whose research focuses on postwar and contemporary art. She joined Gagosian in 2018.
Photo: Graham Tolbert
Kevin Beasley
Kevin Beasley lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, in 2007 and his MFA from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, in 2012. Beasley’s practice spans sculpture, photography, sound, and performance while centering on materials of cultural and personal significance, from raw cotton harvested from his family’s property in Virginia to sounds gathered using contact microphones. Beasley alters, casts, and molds these diverse materials to make works that acknowledge the complex shared histories of the broader American experience, steeped in generational memories. Photo: David Schulze
Lizzi Bougatsos
Lizzi Bougatsos is an experimental musician and visual artist. Her most recent solo exhibition, Idolize the Burn, an Ode to Performance , at tramps , New York, was featured in the New York Times , the Marfa Journal , Artforum , Frieze , Vogue , Purple Magazine , and other publications. Her notorious band Gang Gang Dance has performed worldwide for two decades, at venues including the Sydney Opera House, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Lizzi is one-half of the hypnotic duo I.U.D. She lives and works in New York and is represented by James Fuentes and Galerie Molitor. Photo: K.O. Nnamdie
Fernando Garcia
Fernando Garcia was born and raised in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and studied architecture at Chicago University, Notre Dame. Garcia began his career at Oscar de la Renta and worked at the company until 2015, when he and fellow creative director, Laura Kim, left to found Monse. Laura and Fernando later returned to the house as co-creative directors in February 2017.
Rick Lowe
Rick Lowe pairs an extensive body of work in painting, drawing, and installation with numerous collaborative projects undertaken in the spirit and tradition of “social sculpture.” Working closely with individuals and communities, Lowe has identified myriad ways to exercise creativity in the context of everyday activities, harnessing it to explore concerns around equity and justice. Through such undertakings as Black Wall Street Journey (2018– ), a multifaceted citywide project for which he installed an information ticker in a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, and Greenwood Art Project (2018–21), where he worked with local artists and others in Alabama to raise awareness of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Lowe has developed a highly flexible practice centered on nurturing relationships and catalyzing change. Photo: Brent Reaney
Kyle Abraham
Kyle Abraham is the founder and artistic director of A.I.M by Kyle Abraham. He has shown his work to international audiences and acclaim since 2006. Abraham is the recipient of a National Dance Critics Award for Choreography (2024), a Dance Magazine Award (2022), a Princess Grace Statue Award (2018), a Doris Duke Award (2016), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2013). Two new eveninglength works of Abraham’s premiere in 2024, Cassette Vol. 1, in Hamburg, Germany, in late August, and Dear Lord Make Me Beautiful at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, in December. Photo: Tatiana Wills
Péjú Oshin
Péjú Oshin is a British-Nigerian curator, writer, and lecturer. As associate director at Gagosian she curated the exhibition Rites of Passage . She has held previous posts as a curator at Tate, London, an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins–University of the Arts, London, and other positions. She is the author of Between Words & Space (2021). Photo: Jake Green
Ryuan Johnson
Ryuan Johnson is a Chicago-based sculptor and creative director who primarily works with hair. Introduced to braiding as a form of self-care in her youth, Johnson views hair as both a means of selfexpression and a reflection of her emotional and mental states. Her grandmother’s work in a hair salon influenced her understanding of the cultural significance of hair. Johnson’s sculptural pieces, which resemble glimmering chandeliers and sprawling canopies, represent pride, confidence, and culture, using hair to communicate an affective universe in her creative direction and art.
Christian House
Christian House worked as a proposals writer at Sotheby’s for a decade before a period as an obituarist for the Telegraph . He now writes on visual arts, literature, and history for publications such as the Financial Times , Canvas , and CNN Style.
Devin B. Johnson
Devin B. Johnson obtained his BA in fine arts from the California State University Channel Islands in 2015 and his MFA at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, in 2019. In addition to being named an artist-in-residence for Fountainhead, Miami, in 2023, he was selected as an Artsy Vanguard in 2022, named to Forbes’s 30 Under 30 Art and Design list that same year, was included in Cultured ’s “Young Artists” list in 2021, and was one of sixteen artists from around the world selected for the inaugural year of the Black Rock Senegal residency in 2020. Photo: Xavier Scott Marshall
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist is the artistic director of the Serpentine, 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 350 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell
Vibrant Textiles
Helen Marden: Lines and Summer carpets
Helen Marden’s Lines and Summer carpets (both 2024) interpret the vibrant colors and sinuous forms of her resin-based paintings and watercolors in woven form. These works are part of The Warp of Time , an exhibition at the Old Carpet Factory, an art space on the Greek island of Hydra that was originally an eighteenth-century mansion and later a factory for the carpet-maker Soutzoglou Carpets, coorganizer of the exhibition. The exhibition, which aims to explore memory, heritage, and artistic expression, places an antique carpet from the Soutzoglou collection in dialogue with work by Marden— here experimenting with carpets for the first time—and the artist Dimitrios Antonitsis.
IN SEASON
Gagosian Quarterly presents a selection of new releases coming this fall.
Exhibiting Forgiveness (2023), a feature film written, directed, and produced by Titus Kaphar, is accompanied by a book presenting a draft of the script, with marked-up lines, notes, and deleted scenes, and over 250 film stills and photographs of the paintings included in the film. As such, it provides a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Exhibiting Forgiveness from script to screen and offers insights into Kaphar’s practice as a filmmaker and painter.
Below: Frankenthaler
On the Table Toile de Jouy plates by Dior Maison
The toile de Jouy motif, a fabric pattern dating from the eighteenth century, finds itself reimagined on a set of ceramic creations. The pattern is a symbol of Dior’s heritage—it adorned Monsieur Dior’s first boutique—and is now sketched on sets of dinner and dessert plates created by Dior Maison in collaboration with the Manufacture des Emaux de Longwy.
The Full Story Frankenthaler
by John Elderfield
This revised and expanded edition of John Elderfield’s definitive monograph on Helen Frankenthaler now covers the artist’s career in its entirety. The original book, published in 1989 by Harry N. Abrams, drew on Elderfield’s extensive conversations with the artist and quickly became recognized as authoritative. Developing the new edition gave Elderfield the opportunity to reimagine the book entirely, exploring new insights gained through curating numerous exhibitions of Frankenthaler’s work over the last decade. Published in a smaller, easier-to-use format than its predecessor, this near-500page volume features more than 300 full-color reproductions of Frankenthaler’s paintings, works on paper, prints, and sculptures.
Left: Exhibiting Forgiveness (Gagosian, 2024)
Right: Photo: courtesy Dior Maison
(Gagosian, 2024)
Print
Takashi Murakami: Field of Flowers
Field of Flowers is a limited-edition print featuring Takashi Murakami’s distinctive multicolored smiling flowers. The motif, which first appeared in his work in 1995, is inspired by his training in nihonga , a traditional Japanese painting style that often addresses subjects in nature such as the moon, the wind, snow, and flowers. Drawing from nihonga as well as from sci-fi, anime, and the global art market, Murakami creates paintings, sculptures, and films populated by iconic motifs and mutating characters of his own creation. His wide-ranging oeuvre embodies the intersection of pop culture, history, and fine art.
Bottom right: How Directors Dress: On Set, in the Edit, and Down the Red Carpet (A24 Films, 2024)
Tracking Time
Marc Newson: Hourglass (20 Minutes)
Marc Newson has collaborated with the Swiss company HG Timepiece to create his iconic Hourglass timepiece in a twenty-minute version, complementing other precision timers he has designed. “This hourglass is all about time, but in a more esoteric and fundamental way. I was thinking of having fun with time,” Newson says. Handblown from a single piece of nonreflective five-millimeter-thick Cavalier borosilicate glass, the instrument relies for its manufacture on expert craftsmanship, so that a limited number of pieces can be made available each year.
Fashion & Art Loewe × Richard Hawkins
For their Fall/Winter 2024 Menswear show, Loewe collaborated with artist Richard Hawkins to bring his signature engagement with popular culture, art history, paparazzi shots, and provocation to the brand’s newest offerings. From jewelry to clothing to the oversized Squeeze bag and Puzzle Fold tote, Hawkins’s collages have taken on new forms and materiality.
Behind the Scenes
How Directors
Dress:
On
Set, in the Edit, and Down the Red Carpet
How Directors Dress is a richly illustrated ode to the fashion choices of the most-lauded auteurs of the cinema, past and present. With a foreword by director Joanna Hogg and published by A24 Films, the book is born of a dedicated passion for the film industry.
Kashima. Michel Ducaroy Made in France
Francis Bacon by Francis Giacobetti
During the last year of Francis Bacon’s life, the renowned French photographer Francis Giacobetti was given rare access to the painter’s life and studio. The resulting images, many never published before, are the powerful and raw core of this new book from Assouline. The book also includes excerpts from conversations between Bacon and Giacobetti, providing a rare glimpse into their process.
Right: Concerning the Future of Souls (Tin House Books, 2024)
Below: Nathaniel Mary Quinn (Gagosian, 2024)
Illuminations
Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams
Crystalline, blunt, sublime: Joy Williams returns with a collection of ninety-nine meditations on philosophy, transubstantiation, metaphysics, literature, and ecology.
Monograph Nathaniel Mary Quinn
This monograph is the first comprehensive survey of the work of Nathaniel Mary Quinn. The book includes over 125 color plates illustrating the paintings Quinn has made since 2013, along with studio photographs offering insights into his process. Following an introduction by Larry Gagosian, an essay by Andrew Winer discusses Quinn’s work in terms of representation, abstraction, and memory. The volume also features a conversation between the artist and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis that offers firsthand insights into his practice, as well as an essay by Dawn Adès contextualizing Quinn’s work in relation to modern and contemporary collage, painting, and portraiture.
An Artist at Work
Left: Francis Bacon by Francis Giacobetti (Assouline, 2024)
ONLINE ARTIST, AUDIENCE, ACCOMPLICE
Sydney Stutterheim has published Artist, Audience, Accomplice: Ethics and Authorship in Art of the 1970s and 1980s (Duke University Press, 2024), a survey of performance art and related practices that involve, in various manners, the figure of the accomplice. To celebrate the publication, the Quarterly is publishing an excerpt that examines Chris Burden’s Deadman (1972). To read a longer excerpt, visit gagosian.com/quarterly.
On February 21, 1973, Chris Burden entered the Beverly Hills Municipal Courthouse—accompanied by his attorney—to face charges of causing a false emergency to be reported during the performative intervention known as Deadman . The prosecution, led by Deputy District Attorney Savitt, called for testimony by the two officers who had arrived at the scene of Burden’s piece three months prior. Based on the officers’ accounts, Savitt sought a guilty verdict due to what he saw as a conscious manipulation of events to cause alarm— which constituted an unlawful action in the court of law.
Despite the ongoing flirtation with illegality that runs throughout much of Burden’s performance work, Deadman was the only piece where an actual crime was charged and, as such, the one situation in which auxiliary agents could be indicted as legal accomplices to Burden.
Considering the expanded circumstances of the trial as constitutive to the work, Deadman foregrounds the agency and accountability of Burden’s abettors, opening a relay of ethical and legal involvement moving beyond the conventional responsibility assumed by an audience. Suddenly, a variety of individuals who played an integral role in the work’s construction—such as friends, professional colleagues, and legal representatives—became discernible operatives whose participation resulted in potential complicity in its consequences.
In a 1973 interview with Liza Béar for Avalanche , Burden had expressed an interest in transforming the role of participation in his work, noting:
Everyone’s getting very conscious of what … some of the
issues in performance are, right? And it seems to me that it’s gone way beyond being a display in front of an audience. And increasingly the audience is more prepared and is somehow implicated in the work. … No one can avoid being used somehow and used in a most intimate way, even though it’s imaginary. I’m just trying to get at some of the different ways in which audiences are part of the performance now. 1
By staging a situation in which auxiliary agents were coerced to act quickly in the face of potential legal incrimination because of their logistical support, aid, counsel, or defense of the artist, Burden presented a distinct scenario in which these individuals, previously unrecognized as participants in the artist’s work, became his abettors.
There are conflicting narratives regarding the initial interaction between members of the art world audience and the police during the evening of Deadman ’s performance. For instance, according to Peter Plagens, who observed the piece firsthand while he was on assignment for the New York Times , both an unidentified critic and a curator had to jump to Burden’s defense as he was being arrested and led to the squad car. Plagens (in reportagestyle shorthand) explained how they had to “step forward, tell deputy who they are, who artist is, what this is. Deputy says, everything considered, [he] cannot lie down in the middle of La Cienega Boulevard creating traffic hazard.”2
The limited art historical discussions of Deadman have largely situated the parameters of this project around the body of the artist as he lay in the street until the authori-
1. Burden quoted in interview with Liza Béar, Avalanche magazine archives, I.A.343, 31, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
2. Peter Plagens, “He Got Shot—for His Art,” New York Times , September 2, 1973, 87.
3. For instance, Frazer Ward primarily focuses on the events during the night of Burden’s performance and arrest.
4. Burden’s official description of Deadman reads: “At 8 p.m. I lay down on La Cienega Boulevard and was covered completely with a canvas tarpaulin. Two fifteen-minute flares were placed near me to alert cars. Just before the flares extinguished, a police car arrived. I was arrested and booked for causing a false emergency to be reported. Trial took place in Beverly Hills. After three days of deliberation, the jury failed to reach a decision, and the judge dismissed the case.” This is further supported by Burden’s lecture at the Rhode Island School of Design on November 12, 1974, in which he discussed his performances.
ties arrived.3 These examinations overlook the events that occurred before and after the approximately fifteen-minute action , as well as the unacknowledged participation of various figures whose role and responsibility was crucial to the events that would unfold. As with Shoot [1971], Burden included documentation for Deadman that exceeded the events that occurred on the night of November 12, 1972; his description of the piece in the Deluxe Photo Book also notably includes mention of his arrest and subsequent trial. 4 Moreover, to accompany his narrative, Burden incorporated four images—only one of which corresponds to the typical description of Deadman as ending with the arrival of the police in front of the Mizuno Gallery—which therefore serve as evidence of the expanded scope of the performance itself beyond its conventional parameters. . . .
Chris
(ARS), New York. Photo: Gary Beydler
‘‘ For the highest quality in the 18th centur y, the Kraemer galler y is my favorite ’’ Karl
ONLINE ON ANSELM KIEFER’S PHOTOGRAPHY
Sébastien Delot and Joshua Chuang discuss Kiefer’s exploration of photography’s materials, processes, and expressive potentials. To read the full interview, visit gagosian.com/quarterly.
JOSHUA CHUANG Last fall I had the chance to see Anselm Kiefer: Photography at the Beginning , the exhibition you initiated at Musée LaM. I was both overwhelmed and enthralled by the muscularity and complexity of Kiefer’s longstanding engagement with photography. Many of the works in the current Gagosian exhibition, which Kiefer has entitled Punctum , come from your show at LaM. We all know Kiefer as a towering figure of contemporary art whose practice has utilized a variety of mediums, incorporating them in some of the most encompassing installations imaginable—no less a critic than Harold Bloom called him the most ambitious figure in Western culture of his generation—so I wanted to ask: How did your project on Kiefer’s photography come about? And why now?
SÉBASTIEN DELOT Well, it was a longterm project that came to completion in ’23. In 2015, he had this wonderful show at Bibliothèque nationale de France, and it left on me a very big impression. I was impressed by all of the photography in his books, and I thought, maybe we have to approach Kiefer through a different path that would give the public an opportunity to revisit his work in a new way.
I remember when we had the press conference, journalists were dubious, not about the quality of Kiefer, obviously, but about what kinds of new ideas you could bring to the conversation. So when we said it’s going to be about photography and revisiting all this work from his early, student days through the most well-known series, Occupations , the public and the journalists were excited to discover another face of Anselm Kiefer.
JC You mentioned Occupations , which he carried out in 1969, making it his earliest body of work. Could you describe it?
SD To set the stage, you have to think about the late 1960s and how much it was a time of change, a time of rebellion. There was the war between the United States and Vietnam, and in France there were the student protests of May 1968. So this sense of turmoil was in the atmosphere. For Kiefer, as for many artists of his generation, there was the idea that what came before was dead, that in a way painting was dead. As a student, Kiefer’s relationship to painting was ambiguous and complex. When he started doing his Occupations , his relation to Joseph Beuys and the concept of social sculpture really expanded his notion of art and politics. In Occupations , Kiefer uses provocative imagery, like subverting
the Nazi salute by wearing a dress; it becomes fragile ridicule, and there is a lot of irony. Kiefer has always had a very sharp and edgy sense of humor. It’s disquieting, because it makes you think differently.
JC When pictures from Occupations were published in 1975, it made him one of the most notorious German artists of his generation.
SD Right. When you think of “occupation,” there are several meanings, including the idea of a military maneuver. I think this series is important in understanding how he is playing on the threshold of what’s acceptable and not acceptable—sort of a breaking point. On the verge of something that is disturbing. That’s the strength of art....
This puzzle, written by Myles Mellor, brings together clues from the worlds of art, dance, music, poetry, film, and beyond.
1 Artist who created The Waiting Room in London’s Peckham Rye Station (two words)
5 American Minimalist artist who wrote “Specific Objects” (1964)
10 First name of the artist who created Greene Street Mural (1983)
11 Pussy Riot member Tolokonnikova
12 Hamlet composer
13 Galas
14 Artist who shared with Picasso a fascination with the link between Eros and Thanatos. Goes with 20 down
18 American multimedia artist who created the web series AS IT LAYS, Israel
19 Roman 3
21 Descriptive of the works of Beijing artist Jia Aili
23 Radio type
25 Intimations of Immortality, for one
27 Evanesces
29 Cofounder of the Valentino fashion house Giammetti
31 Modern prefix
32 Founder of A.I.M dance company, Kyle
35 Darling
38 Former Beatles record label
39 Photographer well-known for her black and white photographs of herself and female models, Francesca
41 Nightclub routine
42 Distress
43 Appropriate
45 French city that is the location of Thomas Houseago’s bronze sculpture L’homme Pressé
46 Colombian artist whose major works include the News series, the Manifestation series, and the Surge works, Oscar
Down
1 Post-Minimalist who created abstract sculptures for sitespecific landscape, urban, and architectural settings
2 Artist who worked in Paris and contributed to the Dada and Surrealist movements
3 American painter who made pioneering contributions to Black portraiture and conceptualism, Barkley
4 Men in Black protagonist Agent
6 Hieronymus Bosch’s The Nest
7 German artist and sculptor who was the first artist to be commissioned to install a permanent work at the Louvre
8 Dry out, informally
9 European art movement founded by Hugo Ball and his companion Emmy Hennings
15 Homo sapiens, e.g.
16 Maria (liqueur)
17 Painting medium
20 See 14 across
21 1969 Nabokov novel
22 Architect’s overall design
24 Description of an area of a photograph that has no detail due to overexposure (two words)
25 Not quite right
26 Long-lasting type of paper
28 Corn serving
29 Wood characteristics
30 Compass point
33 Painter of The river’s tent is broken, Cecily
34 Anouk of La Dolce Vita
36 Jeff Koons sculpture Balloon
37 Neo-soul singer Erykah
40 Polka
44 Italian river
RICHARD SERRA: SCULPTURE
In May 1983, the exhibition Richard Serra: Sculpture opened at Larry Gagosian’s gallery space on North Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles. Over the next 40 years, the gallery was honored with more than twenty additional opportunities to exhibit the sculpture of this unparalleled artist, in New York, London, and Paris, and also presented numerous exhibitions of his singular drawings. We pay homage to the man and his powerful, challenging, and inimitable work by looking back to these exhibitions.
Richard Serra with Plunge (1983) in the exhibition Richard Serra: Sculpture (May 14–June 25, 1983), Larry Gagosian Gallery, North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, June 12, 1983
Left:
Richard Serra’s Two Forged Rounds (For Buster Keaton) (1991) in the exhibition Richard Serra: New Sculpture , Gagosian, Wooster Street, New York, November 2, 1991–January 11, 1992. Photo: Huger Foote
Opposite: Richard Serra’s Intersection II (1992) in the exhibition Richard Serra: Intersection II , Gagosian, Wooster Street, New York, February 13–April 17, 1993
Opposite: Richard Serra’s 58 × 64 × 70 (1996) in the exhibition
Richard Serra: New Sculpture , Gagosian, Wooster Street, New York, October 26–December 14, 1996
Richard Serra: Switch , Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, November 13, 1999–February 26, 2000
Richard Serra’s Bellamy (2001) in the exhibition Richard Serra: Torqued Spirals, Toruses, and Spheres , 555 West 24th Street, New York, October 18–December 15, 2001
Left: Richard Serra’s Switch (1999) in the exhibition
Left:
Below:
Richard Serra’s Wake (2003), later exhibited in Richard Serra: Wake, Blindspot, Catwalk, Vice-Versa , Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, September 20–October 25, 2003.
Left: Richard Serra’s Elevations, Repetitions (2006) in the exhibition Richard Serra: Rolled and Forged , Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, May 6–September 23, 2006. Photo: Peppe Avallone
Photo: Rob McKeever
Below: Richard Serra’s TTI London (2007) in the exhibition
Richard Serra: Sculpture , Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, October 4–December 20, 2008.
Photo: Josh White
Left: Richard Serra’s Fernando Pessoa (2007–08) in the exhibition Richard Serra: Sculpture , Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, October 4–December 20, 2008. Photo: Josh White
Opposite: Richard Serra’s Open Ended (2007–08), later exhibited in Richard Serra: Blind Spot / Open Ended , Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York, October 27–December 23, 2009. Photo: Lorenz Kienzle
Below: Richard Serra’s 7 Plates 6 Angles (2013) in the exhibition Richard Serra: New Sculpture , Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, October 26, 2013–March 15, 2014. Photo: Cristiano Mascaro
Right: Richard Serra’s Junction (2011), later exhibited in Richard Serra: Junction / Cycle , Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, September 14–November 26, 2011. Photo: Lorenz
Kienzle
Richard Serra’s Inside Out (2013), later exhibited in Richard Serra: New Sculpture , Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York, October 26, 2013–February 8, 2014.
Photo: Lorenz Kienzle
Opposite: Richard Serra’s London Cross (2014) in the exhibition Richard Serra: Backdoor Pipeline, Ramble, Dead Load, London Cross , Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, October 11, 2014–March 4, 2015. Photo: Rob McKeever
New York, May 7–July 29, 2016.
Street, New York, May 7–October 22, 2016.
Left: Richard Serra’s NJ-1 (2015) in the exhibition Richard Serra: NJ-1, Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street,
Photo: Cristiano Mascaro
Left: Richard Serra’s Silence (for John Cage) (2015) in the exhibition Richard Serra: Above Below Betwixt Between, Every Which Way, Silence (for John Cage), Through , Gagosian, 555 West 24th
Photo: Cristiano Mascaro
Below: Richard Serra’s Rotate (2016) in the exhibition
Richard Serra: NJ-2, Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure, Rotate , Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, October 1, 2016–April 13, 2017.
Photo: Mike Bruce
Below: Richard Serra’s Nine (2019) in the exhibition Richard Serra: Forged Rounds , Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, September 17, 2019–January 11, 2020.
Rob McKeever
Photo:
Below: Richard Serra’s Reverse Curve (2005/2019) in the exhibition Richard Serra: Reverse Curve , Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York, September 17, 2019–February 1, 2020
Below: Richard Serra’s Transmitter (2020) in the exhibition Richard Serra: Transmitter, Gagosian, Le Bourget, September 18, 2021–December 22, 2022.
Grace Coddington, fashion editor and former creative-director-at-large for American Vogue, meets with the Quarterly ’s Derek C. Blasberg to reminisce on some of her most iconic collaborations with photographers and artists.
DEREK C. BLASBERG You became well-known outside the fashion world after the documentary The September Issue came out, in 2009. Did you think when you were making that movie that it would be so impactful?
GRACE CODDINGTON I did not! I was brought up to be behind the scenes and stay there. When I worked at British Vogue , you weren’t even given credit. Nothing.
DB: There wasn’t even a sitting editor credit?
GC: No, and I adored my editor, Beatrix Miller, by the way. She was a marvelous woman, funny and incredibly creative. She let talent go forward. I made a path through working there because she just gave you free rein to do what you wanted to do. But she never encouraged any kind of interview or anything. It wasn’t until Anna [Wintour] came along—she had a brief period at British Vogue before she came to American Vogue, and the first thing she did was put a byline on every story. At first we were all really against it, we felt, we just love to do this and we don’t want to be celebrities. I’ve always fought being a celebrity.
DB: How did the director of The September Issue, R. J. Cutler, get you to do it, then?
GC: When they were filming, he kept coming to my office, and I’d say, “Go away. I’m not interested. You can do anything else at Vogue , just don‘t include me.” But every time I came out of my office and went to see Anna to discuss something, I’d turn around and they were following me. I knew perfectly well I couldn’t have the kind of conversation I needed with Anna with a camera crew there. She was miked the whole time [they were filming], even at fashion shows! She was being recorded and I always sat next to her. So it was truly annoying. I hated them. But after nine months or so, a cameraman started coming to talk to me; he just popped in to talk about photography, which I love to talk about. I became quite friendly with him and slowly, very slowly, they broke it down, and ultimately Anna said, “I know you have a couple of shoots coming up in the September issue, and you’ve got to have them come to the studio.” I said [to the cameramen], “Listen guys, let’s all go out for lunch and talk about boundaries.” We went out for lunch and had a really drunken time and it was very nice. Eventually they said, “We want to come to your house and interview you,” and I said yes, but that was at the very end, and it wasn’t that long of a chat.
A year goes by while they’re editing and all that, and then finally there’s this screening. I didn’t see it with the executives, I watched it with the other folks from the magazines. So I’m watching and I keep seeing myself in the thing. I’m wondering, How come there’s so much of me? Afterwards, Anna said, “What did you think?” And I said, “Well, I think it’s pretty funny, but they
should edit a lot of my pieces out.” I think she knew better.
DB: I’m glad they didn’t; and I can assure you I’m not the only one!
GC: I was very keen that it didn’t come out looking like The Devil Wears Prada .
DB: Why is that?
GC: To me that movie was a farce. It was damaging to the industry. [Fashion people] are always thought to be a silly bunch of people loving stupid things; there’s a lot of that in The September Issue too. But fashion can be a serious thing. It’s a fun thing and it makes you happy, but I don’t know that it should be laughed at. That’s what I was concerned about.
DB: When did you stop worrying?
GC: When my first book came out, I did a Q+A at the New York Public Library with Jay Fielden and he said to me, “When the film comes out, you’re going to be a celebrity.” I said, “Jay, don’t be stupid. It’s about Vogue.” I didn’t believe him. Then the day after the movie came out, I walked out of my door—I live in Chelsea—and people were like, “Grace! Grace!” I could not believe it. I could not!
DB: Honestly, I think that sounds fabulous!
GC: I remember having dinner with [Louis Vuitton designer] Nicolas Ghesquière around this time, at Sant Ambroeus in the West Village, and he asked me if people were recognizing me. I said, “Come with me,” and after dinner we walked back to my house along Eighth Avenue, and they were coming out of the bars. It was overwhelming! They’d look at me and say, “It’s Grace!” And ask for a picture. And then they’d turn to give my friend the camera and say, “Oh, it’s Nicolas Ghesquière too!”
DB: Even more fabulous!
GC: Did I enjoy the moment? Yes. But I didn’t want to become a celebrity. I never have. I still don’t. That said, I will admit it worked in my favor because it opened so many doors that might not have opened for me otherwise. For example, it meant I could do my memoir. I began to give talks. I guess it’s lucky it happened when it happened, so that when I was kind of too old to be on the staff of Vogue , I had other opportunities.
DB: I understood that your duties were scaled back at Vogue as a reflection of budgets, not age.
GC: Maybe a bit of both. And I’m the first to understand that you need new blood. But the right new blood, of course. I still work with Vogue, but it’s important to have the right mix.
DB: One thing I respected about your performance— if we shall call it that—in the documentary is that it made clear that fashion was a real job, you were working with real artists, and it wasn’t all superficial.
GC: Superficial is the right word. I hate that.
DB: Of course, you first started in this industry as a model—Jean Shrimpton was the Shrimp and you were the
Below: Grace Coddington, British Vogue, 1962. Photo: Frances McLaughlin-Gill Opposite: Grace Coddington, first model card, 1959
Cod—and then you became a stylist. Your whole life has been in the medium of fashion publishing. So, do you think fashion can be art? How do you respond to people who question the seriousness of this industry?
GC: It is serious. Certainly, fashion is something that brings in a ton of money and that everyone cares about. It’s undeniable.
DB: Billions of dollars come through New York alone every year.
GC: It’s not to be dismissed! And then the idea of photography: I don’t know if you’d consider all of it art, but there’s a difference between fashion photography and just photography. I do think that fashion can be art. There are certainly moments when I want it to be.
DB: What’s on the walls of your house?
GC: A hell of a lot of photographs. A hell of a lot of drawings too!
DB: Do you think of art as you’re creating pictures?
GC: I think what Annie [Leibovitz] does can be extraordinary. I want to call it art. And some of the things I’ve done with her have been creating art with actual artists. In last year’s September issue we did a story inspired by the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney Museum [of American Art, New York]. We had [the actress] Maya Hawke and the painter Harold Ancart, and they were fabulous.
DB: I thought that was an incredible way to put a Vogue fashion spin on a show about an incredible painter.
GC: Yes, we loved that show.
DB: I went to see that show a few times and one of my favorite aspects was the letters. Did you see the letters he wrote to Robert Moses in one of the vitrines?
He was furious with Moses for adding all these highways to the city and threatening to mow down Washington Square Park, which is, of course, where he lived and worked.
GC: Yes, they were assertive letters. Very aggressive.
DB: I sort of liked that we knew this artist as someone who did calm, idyllic, picturesque, beautifully still paintings. And then he’d write these vicious letters.
GC: I think it follows—the anger over trying to ruin something he finds so beautiful. I like the idea that it takes hard work to have beauty.
DB: My mom used to say, “Nothing good is easy and nothing easy is good.”
GC: That’s the truest thing ever said! It really is. And that’s why when I’m going through the challenges of working with Annie, she knows I feel like that.
DB: Speaking of Annie and artists, one of your biggest collaborations with Annie was when you used some of the biggest artists in the world—Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, John Currin, Brice Marden—to tell the story of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz for Vogue GC: We had fun casting that one. John Currin we painted silver for the tin man. Jeff Koons loved being one of the flying monkeys who were carrying Dorothy off. We hoisted him on a crane and we painted him all the way over, too, stuck wings on him, he loved it. But he’s a crazy person so obviously he would. Brice Marden as a scarecrow was fabulous—the straw in his pockets and the straw in his boots. It’s really funny to look at now.
DB: What’s the vibe on set?
GC: All the talent is happy to be there because it’s Annie. That’s why it’s also so easy to cast these things: Who says no to Annie? For me it’s fun and interesting, but it can be very demanding too. I had a huge row with Annie in the middle of that story and at one point she said, “I don’t want to see you on set again!” And I said, “Fine, you won’t!” But of course I turned up. What am I going to do? Not finish something I’m in love with? The pictures are incredible, so they’re worth the pain.
GC: Annie is an artist. She goes further than someone who just takes pictures. That’s why it’s such a painful pleasure to work with her.
DB: “A painful pleasure” is a great way to describe parts of this business.
GC: Annie respects me because I argue, and Anna certainly does too. I argued with her all the time in the beginning. She really liked that.
DB: The other famous editorial you and Annie did was Alice in Wonderland, which starred Natalia Vodianova as the famous Lewis Carroll heroine and then all of the biggest fashion designers in the world, like Tom Ford and John Galliano and Donatella Versace and Karl Lagerfeld, as the other characters.
GC: Wow, the budget on that one.
DB: Do I even want to know?
GC: It was unreal. I can’t even say it.
DB: It was worth it.
GC: It was a battle. Annie was in Paris for a week. She came to all the fashion shows with me. A lot of the dresses I’d had made especially for the shoot. Or I’d say, “Can you make one in blue in your collection?” And we’d see the whole collection and suddenly a blue dress would come out and we’d know it was for us. Annie was there for a week looking for locations, plus her team, which is not small, staying in hotels and eating and so on and so on.
DB: Tell me about the time you shot at Georgia O’Keeffe’s house in New Mexico.
GC: That was with Bruce [Weber], who I did a lot of stories with, especially when I was at British Vogue. We worked with a model called Sloane, who isn’t around anymore but she was beautiful, and the pictures were beautiful and sort of echoed O’Keeffe. He was shooting there a lot because Calvin Klein was very into Georgia O’Keeffe and did a campaign there in her house. And we went to her house.
DB: Did you get in there?
GC: For a while we could not get in to photograph Georgia. But it was integral to our story because we were there, the girl was basically pretending to be Georgia, we even had a Chow Chow dog, which Georgia had too. There
was a guy called Juan, an artist who sort of had control of her estate, and we couldn’t get through to him to get in at all. And then suddenly out of the blue, the old art director from British Vogue, Barney Wan, who was a wonderful guy, appeared and said, “I’m just going to go knock on her door.” I said, “Barney, you can’t do that. There’s a whole protocol to it.” And he said, “No, no, no, it’s fine. I’m just going to do it. She’s not going to be upset.” Off he goes, knocks on the door, and she opens it, and he goes in and sits down and has a long talk with her. Apparently he said, “I’m going to come tonight and I’m going to cook dinner for you. I’ll bring the food, everything, don’t worry. And we’ll have dinner and it’ll be kind of fabulous.” So he did that. During dinner, he said he really wanted a friend of mine, Bruce, to take a picture of you, so would you do it? She agreed. I dunno what happened to Juan. I don’t know if he was there at the time saying no. But Bruce got the most beautiful pictures.
DB: Have any other artists inspired your pictures?
GC: Andrew Wyeth. We went to his place too. And we photographed him and his son.
DB: In Maine?
GC: Yes, he was on Monhegan Island so we went there. Those were the days when you could go for two weeks and do a job, which was amazing. And we didn’t stay in the most expensive places or anything; we stayed in little inns, we were a whole troop, and it was fabulous eating lobsters every day. We spent a long time with Wyeth and his wife, Betsy. They had a lighthouse, which was really pretty, at the end of his garden, and we shot all around there. He was an amazing man. We did a closeup of blueberries in a box on a chair because he painted those kinds of things around there, and then blowing white curtains in a door frame. It was such a pleasure to do a job that was beyond just fashion. At the end of the shoot, he said, “I’d really like to paint you”—meaning me—“Can you stay on?” And I said, “Oh no, I have to go to work on Monday.” Bruce was like, “Are you fucking crazy?”
DB: Grace, that’s crazy!
GC: I know, I’m nuts. I would have loved it.
DB: Did you really have to be at work? I think even Anna Wintour would have understood if you called in sick to be painted by Wyeth.
GC: Well, I didn’t know how long it was going to take. Ha!
Jessica Beck examines Andy Warhol’s return to painting in the 1970s, focusing on the artist’s Mao series.
Paul Taylor: What do you ever see that makes you stop in your tracks?
Andy Warhol: A good display in a window. . . . I don’t know . . . a good-looking face.
Taylor: What’s the feeling when you see a good window display or a good face?
Warhol: You just take longer to look at it. I went to China. I didn’t want to go, and I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually it was great. It was really really really great.1
Glenn O’Brien: Who has the best gossip?
Warhol: Actually, I think the newspapers have the best gossip. 2
Out of the slew of texts, reviews, and essays on Warhol’s work, the 1970s remain one of the most eclipsed decades of his career. Since his passing, in 1987, his 1950s commercial and BoyBook drawings have seen success, and the work of the 1960s, without a doubt, remains his most lauded and admired. His Silver Factory has become cultural lore and the underground wonderland that he built with his Superstars still attracts screenwriters, product placement, and imitation from popular culture. The 1980s collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and his last chapter of the Last Supper paintings, have seen expanded research, but his output of the 1970s seems to achieve only a tepid response in the archive—it’s the period that many like to skip over or hesitate to unpack. Yet this was the moment when he daringly returned to painting, approaching the canvas with great enthusiasm and sophistication. During this lost decade, he challenged himself to paint differently and reenlivened his career. The Mao series is the heroine of his fresh start.
After Warhol was shot and nearly killed, in 1968, his production model changed. Fred Hughes’s role as his business manager became fixed, and Hughes introduced an emphasis on contracts and deals that promised a steady income to maintain the studio production and payroll. During this era, Warhol worked closely with such dealers as Ileana Sonnabend, Leo Castelli, and Bruno Bischofberger. And while he remained successful in Europe, mostly from these commercial relationships, 3 his friendship with the fashion designer Halston and growing alignment with the fashion world, his proximity to celebrities, and his frequent appearances on the VIP balcony of Studio 54 seemed to sully his name with art critics. 4 In 1972, four years after his shooting, Warhol expanded his endeavors beyond the canvas with Interview magazine, film production, opportunities in Hollywood, the Andy Warhol Diaries and Popism books—but Hughes was pushing him to return to painting full-time.
The Mao paintings started with Bischofberger, Warhol’s Swiss dealer, who along with Hughes was encouraging him to paint again. In an often cited exchange from Bob Colacello’s book Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (1990), Bischofberger suggested that Warhol paint the most important figure in the twentieth century, who in his mind was Albert Einstein.5 To this suggestion Warhol quipped, “That’s a good idea. But I was just read-
ing in Life magazine that the most famous person in the world today is Chairman Mao. Shouldn’t it be the most famous person, Bruno?” Fame was already a trademark of Warhol’s practice, but for Warhol fame wasn’t linked solely to Hollywood or to expertise: it came from the currency of a star’s image across a broad range of media channels, and from the hold of that image over the national consciousness.
At the moment when Warhol expressed interest in Mao Zedong, the chairman’s face was all over the media. Not only had Warhol seen him on the March 3, 1972, cover of Life , he would have also seen the chairman during the widely televised trip that Richard Nixon had taken to China a month earlier. The first ever visit to China by an American president, Nixon’s trip marked a historical turning point in global politics, with the Americans and the Chinese opening to one another after a quarter-century of bitter hostility. Nixon famously called the journey “the week that changed the world.” On the cover of Life that Warhol remembered was a photograph of the chairman, slouched in an armchair and looking aged and overweight, during his first televised meeting with Nixon and
This page: Andy Warhol, Mao, 1972, acrylic, silkscreen ink, and pencil on canvas, 82 × 60 inches (208.3 × 152.5 cm)
Previous spread: Andy Warhol, Mao, 1972, acrylic, silkscreen ink, and pencil on linen, 176 × 135 7⁄8 inches (447 × 345 cm)
Opposite, above: Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong, 1972. Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images
Opposite, below: Installation view, featuring Andy Warhol’s Mao (1972), 34th Biennial of American Painting, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, February 22–April 6, 1975.
National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. The headline below read “Nixon in the Land of Mao.” Warhol’s interest in Mao landed at the moment of a great media swell and reveals his keen interest in press coverage and headlines. This same impulse was the driving force behind his iconic paintings of Marilyn, Liz, and Jackie from the early 1960s, works made from photographs sourced during periods of frenzied media coverage and public crisis. As with these women that he had immortalized then, Warhol chose an image of Mao with emblematic weight and power: not the photo on the cover of Life , but a portrait in an American edition of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung , commonly known as the “Little Red Book”—the very image that hung over Tiananmen Square and in the consciousness of the geopolitical world.6 With his signature silk-screen and vibrant palette, Warhol transformed this controversial leader into a Pop icon.
Between 1972 and 1973, Warhol painted five series on the chairman, in graduated sizes. His palette became more vibrant and varied during this period, and his brushstrokes more animated; as the series progressed, the paintings morph into studies of color and abstraction. Warhol started the first group of eleven paintings in March of 1972, within a month after the publication of that issue of Life magazine. At eighty-two by sixty-two inches, these works are modest in scale, and Mao is fashioned in a consistent palette, against a complementary blue background, and with a vibrant pop of red on his lips. This early series exudes elegance, reverence, and stateliness. In several canvases from this group, Warhol darkens the right side of Mao’s face, hinting at a self-portrait of his own, from 1966, that obscures one side of his face in shadow.
Eight months later, in November and December, Warhol doubled the scale and created four giant Mao works at a commanding 177 by 137 inches. Here he softened his palette, implementing a paler blue, a lighter gray, and turning the chairman’s face from pink to yellow. The background received only touches of feathered brushstrokes to the top and bottom of the canvas. As Warhol continued to paint in three more sizes into 1973, Mao’s facial highlights were lost to heavy, swirling brushstrokes around his head, background, and shirt, brushstrokes that dominate the canvases. With the giant Mao paintings, the scale does more of the work, and the restrained brush brings attention to the chairman’s face.
The size of the four giant Mao ’s pays homage to the towering portrait of the chairman that still stands in Tiananmen Square, an image that Warhol at this point would have seen only on television or in photographs but that was, of course, top of
mind following Nixon’s meeting with the leader. Nixon had also toured the Great Wall and visited the zoo, marking the beginning of over fifty years of “panda diplomacy”—China’s good-will practice of lending giant pandas to American zoos. But the painterly, gestural abstraction of the works, and their significant scale, gives them life and highlights their physicality, which is noteworthy given that Warhol had spent the first part of this decade recovering from his post-shooting surgeries. The result is a luminous portrait of a complicated figure, whom Warhol’s brush softens. Mao’s face is a yellow peach, his communist uniform is a feather gray, and his eyes are highlit with blue and his lips with petal pink, giving his expression and features a gentle feel, one might even argue a feminine one. The subtle touches of color in the lips, which are also crossed by a touch of red, suggest the hint of a smile and recall the slight animation of the lips of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503–6), an expression that has captivated the public’s attention for centuries. Just as Warhol chose Mao at a time of great media attention, he painted his first Mona Lisa in 1963, during the painting’s historic tour from the Louvre to the National Gallery in Washington. As if plucking Mona Lisa and Mao from the public spotlight, Warhol added each figure to his roster of Superstars. Mao, here, was recast as one of his beauties.
The curator and collector David Whitney brought three of the four giant Mao paintings together for the first time in his 1979 exhibition Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 70s , at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Critics were unimpressed by Warhol’s society portraits; writing in the New York Times , Hilton Kramer called the works in the show “embellished photographic blowups—mainly silk-screened images sporting gaudy color and smeary brushwork,” with “shallow and boring” results.7 Warhol’s work, he continued, “belongs less to the history of painting than to the history of publicity.” 8 Yet the giant Mao works made an impact. Kramer described the installation as a chapel-like pavilion, which aligns with Robert Rosenblum’s religiously toned description in his essay in the Whitney’s catalogue, where he writes, “Warhol has located the chairman in some otherworldly blue heaven, a secular deity of staggering dimensions who calmly and omnipotently watches over us earthlings.”9 The success of these stunning paintings is this mix of high and low, this blurring of the lines between reverence and fashion. Just as he described newspapers as his favorite gossip columns, his paintings of Mao are a fashion fantasy in which an authoritarian leader becomes a political deity.
Nixon’s trip to China was not the first time television played a defining role in his career: in 1960, a decade earlier, it was his four televised debates with John F. Kennedy that ruined his first attempt to win the presidency. Nixon was no match for the well-groomed, camera-friendly Kennedy, who understood the power of wide appeal. Years before his time in the White House, Kennedy projected himself as a man of letters and of the arts, and as he rose in national attention he became a powerful symbol of family ideals as well as a charismatic sex symbol. 10 The advent of the televised debate marked a significant union between entertainment and politics, between Hollywood and the White House, and the first time in history that camera presence could sway an election.
Warhol had keen insight into the construction of an image and the power and importance of the
process. His entire career rested on this principle, and his own self-image was proof of his mastery at concealing, shadowing, and duplicating. The debates between Kennedy and Nixon resurfaced in contemporary culture following President Joseph Biden’s disastrous performance during his first televised debate with former President Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign: Biden lost his train of thought, stumbled and flubbed words, and the impact of his advancing age was laid bare for the entire world to see. Warhol’s Mao series are reminders of why we keep returning to his work, because he mirrors back to us our obsession with fame and our fetish for images. He undresses the world of illusions we’ve created with social media, where appearances reign superior to ideas. The charisma of the Mao series endures and marks Warhol’s recovery in the 1970s, his comeback, and the way he found his way back to great painting. In fact he overshadows the political titan: one might rewrite the Life magazine headline as “Mao in the Land of Warhol.”
1. Paul Taylor, “Andy Warhol: The Last Interview,” 1987, in Mark Francis, Andy Warhol: The Late Work , exh. cat. (Munich and New York: Prestel, for the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, 2004), 121.
2. Glenn O’Brien, “Interview with Andy Warhol,” High Times , August 1977, repr. in Francis, The Late Work , 62.
3. See Neil Printz and Sally King-Nero, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures 1970–1974 (London and New York: Phaidon, 2010), 3:182.
4. The critic Robert Hughes, for example, wrote of Warhol’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1979, “Warhol’s admirers, who include David Whitney, the show’s organizer, are given to claiming that Warhol has ‘revived’ the social portrait as a form. It would be nearer the truth to say that he has zipped its corpse into a Halston, painted its eyelids and propped it in the back of a limo, where it moves but cannot speak.” Hughes, “Art: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall,” Time , December 3, 1979. Available online at https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/ article/0,33009,948645-1,00.html (accessed July 27, 2024).
5. See Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, 1990 (repr. ed. New York: Vintage, 2014), 149.
6. See Printz and King-Nero, eds., Paintings and Sculptures 1970–1974, 3:166.
7. Hilton Kramer, “Art: Whitney Shows Warhol Works,” New York Times , November 23, 1979.
8. Ibid.
9. Robert Rosenblum, “Andy Warhol: Court Painter to the 70s,” in Whitney, Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 70s , exh. cat. (New York: Random House and Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979), 20. 10. See Mark White, “Apparent Perfection: The Image of John F. Kennedy,” History 98, no. 2 (330) (April 2013): 226–46.
JAYDEN ALI: BEYOND THE BUILDING
Architect and designer Jayden Ali joins Gagosian associate director Péjú Oshin for a conversation about false notions of failure, four-day workweeks, and the connective power of building together.
PÉJÚ OSHIN We met in Venice in 2022. We were in a tight alleyway with the artist Sonia Boyce, who had the Biennale’s British pavilion that year, trying to get into a party [laughs ]. And we started a conversation. I found out you were an architect and that you were going to be cocurator of the architecture biennale the following year. I remember thinking it was lovely that you had a teaching practice as well, because I feel that’s what I could have used when I was studying architecture: young, fresh, vibrant tutors with a breadth of cultural references. Over the past couple of years, it’s been interesting to see the way your practice has expanded. You’re a curator and an artist also.
JAYDEN ALI It’s a beautiful moment to be recording a conversation with you, because I saw Sonia and I stopped her and asked her, What would be your advice for an upcoming artist or any artist? She said, To record conversations with your friends. I’m also reminded of the magic of events: when you’re pushed into proximity to others through navigating a city, you’re required to form new connections. It was raining and we had to huddle under umbrellas and the entrance to the party was about as wide as a person. The city gifted us that. And maybe if I can be romantic about that, the pursuit of architecture can also feel like a gift of coming together to produce a collective lived experience—making or shaping or framing your environment—especially when you’re dealing with cities. I think that’s the joy of it.
PO I always playfully refer to myself as a failed architect when I meet new people in the field
[laughter ]. Increasingly, as I’ve been doing that, I’ve been meeting more architects who, like myself, are venturing into art spaces. There are many people like you and me who have backgrounds in architecture, but are dancing between these two different worlds of art and architecture; there’s a critical mass of people establishing a new way of seeing, or maybe rediscovering a way of seeing. So I wanted to know what you think it is about the practice of architecture that inspires this freedom of movement.
JA I’d like to debunk the myth that it’s a new thing for architects to step out beyond the field of building. If you think of OMA and AMO, the architecture practice and design studio, respectively, of Rem Koolhaas, and of his incredible book Delirious New York [: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan , 1978] alongside his continuing scenography for Prada’s fashion shows, you see this interdisciplinary interest. Even if you think of Charles and Ray Eames, for example, they dedicated their studio to making tiny little minicircuses at times. They’re artists in that respect—they’re plugged in and attuned to the world in which we live. It’s a designed output and it exists at the multiple scales of the city.
PO You’re right, there’s always been this multidisciplinary approach. That’s what attracted me to the idea of architecture. I remember a university brochure calling architecture the most public and pervasive of all the arts—that felt exciting, that idea of contributing to the built environment and considering buildings as art. What I may have been noticing is, I think there used to be this idea of architects as being very studious and serious and kind of one-track–minded, and now I think the expanded work of architects is more visible to the public.
JA You think that the everyday person in the street is open to architecture being more than buildings?
PO Okay, maybe it might be too much to say everyone [laughter ]. But at least for colleagues and enthusiasts in other creative fields, I think there’s an understanding that architecture can go beyond this, and an appreciation of that possibility. Much in the same way that people have expanded the word “curator” to describe organizing playlists, experiences, food menus, and so on, the increased
visibility of key figures has created a shift in language where people are now referred to as star curators and starchitects. That opens up the conversation for people with regard to what the discipline looks like and what it can achieve.
JA I would say the most recent starchitect of our time is Virgil Abloh, and once you consider that, it blows the door wide open as to what architecture is. How can the most famous architect, the one most people in the world would be able to name, be someone who isn’t recognized for building buildings but for taking that as a methodology and applying it to other fields, like art and fashion? Even so, in the more public realm, I think it’s still a battle for us to be defined as more than building buildings. But I’m using the term “battle” quite lightly; I don’t necessarily care about convincing people as to where the term lies, or what’s garnered by the term. It doesn’t really matter to me.
I often look at the description of the studio I founded [JA Projects, London] and what we produce, which includes urban strategy, art, and performance in addition to architecture. It really is a bit undefinable. It’s about the spirit of the thing that we’re producing; the spirit is held together by a commitment to purpose, like having some form of outward-facing social engagement. Even in a fragmentary way; it doesn’t need to be total. You can see it in our Venice project [Dancing Before the Moon , 2023], when we took the budget and distributed it to collaborators so that others could have space. You see it in our project in the National Portrait Gallery [The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure , 2024], where we worked with Issi Nanabeyin, a contemporary British artist of mixed heritage, to create a scenographic intervention that celebrated the presence of Black people. You’ll see it in our work in Queens Market[, London] this year, where we’ve designed a whole new public realm; it’s about working collaboratively with traders, local businesses, and communities. It’s a commitment to caring about how things are constructed, what they’re made from, who has the power to make, and how that results in some form of output. There’s something poetic in the output, both in the social meaning and of course from a visual perspective.
PO In the past you’ve described your approach as “architecture plus.” Is that a concept you still use?
JA I would commit wholeheartedly to the idea of “architecture plus” in the studio, which is the idea we’ve been discussing of architecture being expansive, interdisciplinary, socially engaged. It’s best illustrated by the fact that everybody in the studio does something else. Architecture is not their sole pursuit; they’re concerned with a range of other creative practices. Today I had an incredible conversation with a member of the team, Brian Yue, who studies East Asian art histories at SOAS [School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London] and is obsessed with ceramics. Isn’t that incredible to have in the studio? How nerdy is it to be obsessed with certain ceramics from a certain dynasty, but how fucking cool? And I’ll tell you what that results in. We designed this exhibition for the Royal Academy [of Arts, London], where the plinths are finished in a timber burr, which is something that forms as a growth on trees as a result of trauma and invasion. There’s a romantic idea behind a burr: it speaks to ideas around resilience and renewal, growth even in the face of trauma. That finish is developed in the studio with my leadership, but it’s developed in tandem with Brian, who is similarly obsessing about the poetics of ceramics—how they’re produced, and the meaning and messaging held in a specific glaze. It’s a transferable lens.
That’s just one example; everybody has some interest outside of the studio. Almost everyone works a four-day week to have time to devote to other pursuits. And I wouldn’t have it any other way, because the input is phenomenal and it’s the thing that keeps me sane. It’s much like the reason I’m interested in teaching again, which is that there’s a whole new generation and a whole new set of concerns they bring to architecture.
PO I’ve been thinking a lot about architects like Zaha Hadid and Frank Lloyd Wright, but then also, on the flipside, about artists such as Richard Serra and Do Ho Suh, who employ architectural principles and practices in their work to create these moments of immersion. How do you see or position yourself within this lineage of space-makers?
Previous spread: Jayden Ali, Thunder and S¸ims¸ek , 2023, steel, 78 ¾ × 315 inches (200 cm × 800 cm); installation view, Dancing Before the Moon , British Pavilion by Jayden Ali, Joseph Henry, Meneesha Kellay, and Sumitra Upham at the Biennale Architettura 2023, Venice, May 20–November 26, 2023. Photo:
JA I don’t, which is why it’s so nice to hear you make that comparison. I mean, Serra’s passing really affected me. I grew up in East London and would see his sculpture [ Fulcrum , 1987] at the entrance of the Liverpool Street station. It was mind-blowing. Then later, seeing his work at the Guggenheim Bilbao was so arresting for me—that someone could make a practice out of this, creating a whole world of opportunity. It’s an interesting counterexample to the Frank Lloyd Wrights and the Zaha Hadids of the world, which is maybe sculpture masquerading as a building. Or is it a building masquerading as a sculpture? I don’t know the answer.
PO That is a question.
JA But with Serra, I don’t think you could say his work is masquerading as a building in any way. It exists as a form of shelter and it exists on an architectural scale in terms of defining space. It doesn’t exist as a building. There’s a distinction. I don’t think you can see Thunder and ¸Sims¸ek , my contribution to Venice, disconnected from the influence of Serra. You’re just never going to get two four-meterlong giant steel sculptures with rounded edges that you can stand under and among without Serra as an influence. The criticism of that show is that it’s not “architecture.” But I see it as architectural because it’s deeply concerned with the building [the British Pavilion, Venice Biennale]. It’s deeply concerned with this edifice that sits at the end of a
colonial promenade, a neoclassical building with all those columns and all those steps, et cetera. The building required a response, and the response was to exist outside the building. The response was to present a different face and a different first impression to visitors. The response was to soften the power dynamics that were embodied in the building’s colonial aesthetic. So that required something that existed at a scale and a material quality comparable to the building, as much as our means allowed. So you end up with these two large sculptural works, but they’re attached in this elegant way—through architectural detailing—to one of the principal structures of the building, namely the columns. This blurring of the lines begs the same question: Is it architecture masquerading as sculpture or is it sculpture masquerading as architecture? In that context, it’s probably aligned more with Zaha’s work than with Richard’s.
PO I loved Thunder and ¸Sims¸ek , but also the pavilion as a whole; I was there for the opening. To me it was a celebration of various diasporas—really, really beautiful. There was an invitation to be present. The slope for people to sit and watch the film, so you felt like you were outside or on a hill, made it communal. I’m aware that that work references both of your cultural heritages, Trinidadian and Turkish-Cypriot, and your experiences steel pan drumming. I play steel pan too.
JA We should play together.
PO We should! Are you tenor?
JA I do melody.
PO Yeah, you do the small pan?
JA Yes.
PO I play bass. We could do something. The things that keep coming up for me are gathering, collaboration, community, so I wanted to discuss some of your recent projects that you’ve mentioned briefly in our chat so far. I’m particularly interested in the exhibition design for projects like Entangled Pasts[, 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change , 2024], at the Royal Academy [RA], for example. In these instances you’re in dialogue with the curators, designers, artists. It seems in some way there’s a flattening of hierarchies because you’re almost all those things; you’re in a position of decision-making but also in a position to support and facilitate. I’m interested in how you’ve managed such fluid roles and how you switch those different hats?
JA I’ve certainly been lucky to do these projects. They’re all commissions and generally we’re pitching to the organizations. Once we’ve determined that our visions fit together, we work best when we’re in dialogue. I’m not very good at designing
in a vacuum, I have to be responding to something. In Venice it was responding to the building. And that’s the joy of dealing with exhibitions, because there are so many different stories embedded in the objects and there are so many different people to interpret them. I’m thankful for you asking the question because I’m really mindful not to step on people’s toes. The dynamic at the RA was that they had a set of in-house curators and a set of external curators who were far more in tune with the lexicon of the Black diaspora and the Black agenda. The in-house curators come from a space of allyship. They want to do well but it’s not their experience. So in that space I didn’t feel so shy about stepping in and giving them confidence about good ideas. In The Time Is Always Now, I didn’t need to do any of that stuff because Ekow [Eshun, curator, writer, and broadcaster] was around [laughter ]. And it’s a smaller show. I knew we were singing from the same hymn sheet. So I’m trying to turn it up and dial it down depending on the situation. It’s about active listening. You have to be present.
I love the moment of pitching; often I’ll write what we want to do. Some people get it, some people don’t. I was having a conversation the other day about how people don’t trust the future, they want to see what it is. The beautiful thing about writing is, you can convey what it is without pinning it down; it’s like a sketch.
PO I love that idea of writing as a sketch. I think people don’t trust the future in part because they don’t trust the present, right?
JA You’ve hit the nail on the head. But I trust the present.
PO You do?
JA Yeah. I think so. I trust people who believe in other people, because they weave magic every single day. They make magical stuff that blows my mind every single day.
PO Maybe people don’t trust the future for the same reason they’re suspicious of magic. There’s this promise of change, right? And change is scary for a lot of people, especially as they’re going through it.
JA While you were talking about that, I was thinking, Wow, what’s my relationship to change? And I’ve always been comfortable in spaces of relative discomfort. Mainly that’s because I’m historically a poor Black man or boy in a white, increasingly middle-class industry. But that space of discomfort can also be described as a space of instability. If you get comfortable with instability, you get comfortable with change. I want to be in a place that’s dynamic. I don’t want it to feel stagnant.
PO In difficult periods you often find the spaces for innovation; you find a lot of change. Although you love and embrace change, the rest of the world right now is in a relatively stagnant place, it’s slow to change. How can we encourage a sense of comfort in the change, a sense of continually moving forward without forgetting what’s come before us?
JA I can only say how I address it, which is actively seeking out multiple inputs. When you’re growing up, your life is peppered with change— primary school, secondary school, moving house, divorced parents. Stuff’s coming your way all of the time. And you’re learning so much. It’s not all positive but I think that’s really rewarding. My ambition is to stay in the space that’s still giving me that type of stimulus. And the ambition is to provide other people the infrastructure to also receive that stimulus in a very simple way. I think that’s really about generating new ways of being collectively. It’s a practice that’s born from people collectivizing in this megametropolis that we’re in.
Novelist Francine Prose visited Harold Ancart’s Brooklyn studio this past spring. Here, she reports on the paintings she encountered there—works debuting this October at Gagosian, Paris—and ponders the medium’s power to take us outside of ourselves.
It’s easy to lose yourself in one of Harold Ancart’s paintings. They’re disorienting, in all the ways in which you want art to alter your perceptions and orientation. An Ancart landscape draws you in, though it’s not like any landscape you know, or have imagined, or have seen on a wall. And is it even
a landscape? It’s an invitation to travel to a world made entirely of paint marks on a canvas.
The mood of these works is dreamlike, spanning the wide range of moods and information that a dream can provide. But it’s not a dream you’ve ever had, nor, we suspect, is it the artist’s dream. Signposts help us get our bearings—water, earth, sky, horizon, plants—but these elements can appear in unexpected locations or combinations, and sometimes all alone. And what exactly are we looking at when we see that tree growing up in the middle of a canvas? Is it a cypress, or a mountain peak cloaked in vegetation, or a stationary ghost of the trees that caught Van Gogh’s eye in Arles? We more or less recognize a flower or plant, but we never imagined that it existed in such a wild range of crazy colors! The bright orange furry lollipop tree takes us back to the first time we experienced the marvel of the leaves turning in autumn.
Blossoms scattered across a network of branches evoke the giddiness of spring and at the same time the austere simplicity of Japanese art. Ancart, who is Belgian, has traveled to (and written a book about) Japan, and has clearly looked at a lot of ukiyo-e prints. The range of his sources, inspirations, and influences is subtle and broad. There’s a shimmer of Monet, a nod to Cézanne. When the landscape (rocky cliffs, shore, orange sun) is compressed to fit within the confines of a perfect circle, it’s a tip of the hat to the Tintin comics, of which Ancart is a lifelong fan. What we see in that circle is (Ancart laughs when he says this) what a pirate captain in Tintin sees when he scans the horizon through his spyglass.
The word “destiny” doesn’t appear often in Ancart’s vocabulary, but you sense that he believes in it. He understands that the art he wanted to make—the art that wanted him to make it —took him
out of Brussels, where he grew up, and where his father was a dealer in antiquities. It steered him to art school (a pursuit that his family considered impractical) and helped him resist the trends of the era—a time when young artists were being encouraged to make work that was minimal, cerebral, and conceptual. Art brought him to New York, where, after lean years and rough patches, he has continued to thrive.
In conversation, Ancart—a tall, friendly, voluble, energetic man in his mid-forties—keeps tracking back to the thing that artists understand, the open secret that keeps them grabbing the pen, or the camera, or, in Ancart’s case, the oil-paint stick. For all I know, some artists may look at a blank canvas or page and see little videos of themselves getting the Nobel Prize. But Ancart is talking about something else, something different, something that seems very familiar to me: the moment when
you become so involved in your work that it’s as if you are no longer there. The ego ceases to exist. The work is no longer about you —the person who has disappeared into your work.
“Time vanishes,” Ancart says. “Time collapses. Things start flowing, You’re in the zone.”
It’s an exalted and precious state. “The work is telling you what to do. You make a mark and somehow you know what the next one needs to be.”
There’s a great Philip Guston quote that I am always quoting and probably misquoting, about how, when you—the artist—go into the studio to work, there are all these people and voices in your head: your wife, kids, dealer, critics, audience, et cetera. As you work, those presences leave the room, one by one, until finally, if you’re really working, you leave the room.
I’ve always thought of that state as taking dictation from a character who starts to speak in my
mind, but for Ancart to reach that zone of guidedness and self-obliteration, the marching orders seem to come at least partly from color. Concerning that moment when the will disappears and something more mystical occurs, I think Ancart would say that it’s color, telling him what to do. His work reminds us of how many moods color can convey—mystery, solemnity, joy, fear. Color makes things new. You might think red flowers had been claimed—by Van Gogh, Matisse, more recently Andy Warhol—but Ancart’s red creates a new species of flower: unreal, surreal, essential. More jungly than the poppy, more like coral, or roses gone rogue. And there, under a Venetian sky, is a verdant patch of landscape not unlike the slivers of bluegreen countryside we glimpse beyond the window in a Netherlandish Annunciation.
In another large painting the mood is at once apocalyptic and festive. Pillars reflected in water
Previous spread, left: Harold Ancart, Deux Arbres , 2024, oil stick and pencil on canvas, in artist’s frame, 101 × 139 × 3 inches (256.5 × 353.1 × 7.6 cm)
Previous spread, right: Harold Ancart in his studio, Brooklyn, New York, 2024. Photo: Dianna Agron
Left: Harold Ancart, Le Grand Parc, 2024, oil stick and pencil on canvas, in artist’s frame, 101 × 139 × 3 inches (256.5 × 353.1 × 7.6 cm)
Above: Harold Ancart’s studio, Brooklyn, New York, 2024. Photo: Dianna Agron
multiply the divisions between light and darkness. The way everything hovers on the border of celebration and doom, stasis and storm, suggests an improbable but interesting conversation between John Singer Sargent and Lars von Trier. The painting shares with the rest of Ancart’s work the virtue of making you keep looking, as if something could be figured out, even though you know that what you want is the strangeness, the ambiguity, the casual but steady resistance to the rational and explicable.
Working in a large industrial loft, a former metal-storage warehouse smack in the middle of Bushwick’s exuberantly tagged metal doors and honking double-parked trucks, Ancart has created his own natural world, though he would need to walk quite a ways to see an actual living tree. It doesn’t seem to matter. It doesn’t matter. When Ancart is painting he might be anywhere. He’s in the painting. The zone. On one canvas, a small
spray of poppies blooms—insisting on its right to exist—beside a bare whitewashed wall with darkened windows. Nature coexists with an unfamiliar space, as it does in the studio.
His show, which will be up in Paris from October 14 to December 20, is titled Maison Ancart . On the day I visited, many of the paintings for it were hanging in the studio. Underneath these works is a love for French landscape. Ancart talks eloquently about the moment when he fully got the true genius of Cézanne. His take on the natural world can bring to mind the hyperactive foliage of the Douanier Rousseau, or something more sun drenched, like Richard Diebenkorn, or Ellsworth Kelly’s gorgeous drawings of plants.
You can see art history in these paintings, but they aren’t like any others. Who knows how Cézanne would have painted if he’d watched a lot of films? Some of Ancart’s landscapes can look like
sets for movies that will never be made. Maybe it’s his references to “the zone” that make me think of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the moody, slightly smudged, semi-hallucinatory way in which one image flows into another, the settings that combine memory and fantasy, desolation and overgrowth.
Ancart likes the idea that his oil-paint sticks— with which he works exclusively—have a mind of their own. It’s as if the medium had the power to turn the hand of the artist into something like a planchette moving over the Ouija board. He talks about paint sticks almost like collaborators, steering him from point to point. He lists the medium’s advantages: directness, immediacy, physical force, a pressure toward the abstract, rather than toward the microdetail that the tiny brush lives for.
Paint sticks encourage the accidents that aren’t accidental but suggestions, directions, provocations to do something unplanned and unexpected. Every
Above: Harold Ancart in his studio, Brooklyn, New York, 2024.
Photo: Dianna Agron
Right: Harold Ancart, La Montagne, 2024, oil stick and pencil on canvas, in artist’s frame, 101 × 139 × 3 inches (256.5 × 353.1 × 7.6 cm)
mark (and the process of marking) is consequential. Possibly paint sticks provide the most immediate shortcut to a memory Ancart describes: his first childhood experience of drawing, of grabbing a pencil or crayon and seeing something or someone materialize on paper. The paint stick is the closest of any medium (except for pencil and finger paint, I guess) that connects the artist to that first burst of joy in color and form—the magic of the primal crayon. I’ve heard several artists say, as Ancart does, that they can remember how it felt the first time they drew something and knew: This is it. They were hooked.
Twice during our relatively brief visit, Ancart brings up what seems to have been a formative moment, the end of a prelapsarian innocence in which he hadn’t heard that there was a right and a wrong way to draw, a correct and incorrect way to represent the figure. Someone pedantic and
annoyed—a parent? a teacher?—reprimanded him:
A hand has five fingers! Each time Ancart tells the story, you can watch him reliving the surprise of being told that you had to get things right. You couldn’t just make up the number of digits. A hand has five fingers! (Presumably, the adult had never looked too closely at Mickey and Minnie Mouse.) You can’t help thinking about how much of Ancart’s work has been a response. Let’s pick up the paint stick and make that first mark—and then let’s see how many fingers the hand is going to have. You can imagine Ancart following his oil sticks back to an Eden so sublime that the imaginary garden takes over everything else.
I began by talking about disappearance, and I want to end with it. One of the things that’s so remarkable about painting—that is, about the paintings we love—is that they let us leave our minds and bodies and enter the world of the painting. I
once mysteriously lost two entire hours in front of Bosch’s Temptation of Saint Anthony in a museum in Lisbon. I remember, when I was a child, believing that the border between the two- and the threedimensional was narrower and more porous than I think it is now. I remember a book on Sienese painting I found in our attic; I believed that concentrated contemplation—staring—could teleport me inside those towns and castles, those crenellated pink and lime-green walls.
Being in Ancart’s studio made me think how remarkable it is that the experience of the artist— the sense of vanishing, of disappearing into the work—can, in a very different form, be reproduced in the viewer. You’re in a contemporary art space in Brooklyn—and then you’re somewhere else, submerged in a boggy landscape, staring up at craggy mountains, moving closer for a better look at those improbably dark trees.
It all began when I picked up a woman at a bus stop in South London. She was lying on the sidewalk, immortalized in a scuffed-up early-twentieth-century photograph. Glamorous, in a down-at-heel kind of way.
I swept up the tiny print, no more than three inches by two, one corner torn off, and looked more closely. She was in her twenties, wearing a knitted swimsuit, striking a classical pose up to her shins in water in the middle of a lake. Here she was forever fixed—looking deliriously happy—in the ripples of a moment from the 1930s. I slipped her into my pocket.
A while later I showed the print to the British novelist William Boyd, who I knew collects found photographs. In 2015, Boyd featured the image in his novel Sweet Caress. The book, which charts the audacious life of a fictional photographer named Amory Clay, includes seventy-seven anonymous photographs that Boyd used for narrative purposes. On the frontispiece, and on the jacket of the Spanish edition, the unknown lady in the lake has become Amory.
And so my interest in the curious tangle of photography and literary fiction was tripped. Of course, the prurient tendencies of the camera have been a constant theme in storytelling. (Alfred Hitchcock adapted Rear Window [1954] from a short story by Cornell Woolrich, who had himself lifted the premise from H. G. Wells.) But some writers have picked up their Leica—or less-esteemed model—and focused in a more practical fashion. Which conjures up a paradox: writers sit in rooms imagining, photographers are out and about beholding.
In fact, writers have been drawn to the dark(room) arts since the nineteenth century. Those with a scientific bent approached it in the same spirit that authors now ponder the thrills—and perils—of AI. During the cold winter nights of 1893, the Danish playwright, novelist, poet, and painter August Strindberg spread out a series of photosensitive plates on the ground in the Austrian village of Dornach, near Basel. The
Christian House tracks the history of novelists’ engagements with photography and speaks with three contemporary writers—William Boyd, Teju Cole, and Orhan Pamuk—about their own approaches to the medium.
results—which he called “celestographs”—were a series of works created without a camera, images dappled and stained like pieces of rusty metal or mildewed newspaper. The abstracted compositions might illustrate constellations of stars; more likely they capture the marks of dust and grime. Today they lie in drawers in the Royal Library in Stockholm. They would continue developing if exposed to sunlight. They are unfinished stories.
Not long after Strindberg scanned the night sky, Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and an ardent amateur photographer, was duped by spirit photography, the notion that ghosts of loved ones could be caught by the camera shutter like a moth under a glass. Even authors can be hoodwinked by the lens.
With the arrival of the portable pocket camera and 35mm film in the twentieth century, novelists began using negatives like a notepad.
In the early 1930s, Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret, recorded the seedier corners of Mittel Europa and Africa while on reporting assignments. And the British travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin was a constant shutterbug, photographing Javanese caves, Peruvian geoglyphics, and assorted frescoes and prayer flags. Chatwin, who began his career as one of Sotheby’s first experts on Impressionism, filled his fiction with arcane details the way a collector fills a cabinet of curiosities. Similarly, his photographs were exhibits for personal contemplation. While Chatwin was using the camera as a journal, the postwar German novelist W. G. Sebald treated his contact sheets like a mood board, inserting his blackand-white captionless compositions—guileless snapshots of objects and locations—into his autofiction
in a manner that is suggestive rather than illustrative. And considering the fact that Sebald famously included a nine-page sentence in his masterful swansong Austerlitz (2001), they also provided a breather for the reader.
The abutting of jotting and snapping continues today. Boyd, the author of bestsellers such as A Good Man in Africa (1981) and Any Human Heart (2002), is now planning a volume of his own shots. He is not unique. In Harvard, the Nigerian-American author Teju Cole oscillates between creating photobooks—meditative series on Swiss vistas and his kitchen counter— and novels that explore the experiences of the Nigerian diaspora. Meanwhile, in Istanbul, the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has already produced two volumes of photographs, each focusing on a different aspect of his beloved city. His pictures can be seen this summer and fall at the Lenbachhaus Munich alongside objects from his fabled Museum of Innocence.
Discussing their double lives with me, this trio talk about how photographs provide verisimilitude, a sense of place, the comfort of nostalgia, and, conversely, a discomforting sense of loss. For Boyd, Cole, and Pamuk, photography has become a separate creative channel, providing gambits that are often, but not always, complementary to their fiction.
Photographers make perfect protagonists: they’re on the scene, they bear witness to the action. In turn, a photograph can be a convenient plot device. These flexible items—flexible physically and contextually—provide evidence, accurate or misleading, and can become coveted or reviled objects. “My last produced TV series, Spy City, hinges around a photograph that was taken in Beirut in 1961. It’s the MacGuffin, if you like,” Boyd tells me in the study of his London home. “There’s a search for this photograph which is revelatory and shows a conspiracy between Russians and other spies.”
Photography began to creep into Boyd’s work with Nat Tate, a 1998 novella in the guise of a monograph on a forgotten, in fact fictional, Abstract Expressionist painter. Boyd inserted anonymous photographs of people and places that were in fact of entirely different people and places, prints he sourced from flea markets and eBay. In Sweet Caress, which expanded on the found-photograph strategy, Amory Clay acts as a kind of guide through the various subsections of the professional
practice—portraiture, reportage, art photography— as she snaps and struggles her way through some of the more piquant periods of the twentieth century (in Berlin she dabbles in some Weimar-era pornography).
Are there parallels between a story and a photograph? “It depends on the photograph,” Boyd says. “The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm said that if you scratch a photograph, you’ll find a painting. But there are also types of photographs, such as those by Cindy Sherman, in which there is a short story lurking behind them.” But, he continues, the viewer is complicit in the storytelling. “You think, how did this decisive moment come to be?”
For two centuries, the viewer has seen a photograph and assumed it to be true. “It has the imprimatur of something that’s real and snatched,” agrees Boyd, adding that this, of course, is catnip for a novelist: “I try to make fiction seem so real that you forget it’s fiction.” Yet, of course, a photograph is a construct, edited by choices of time, place, angle, and the all-important crop. And recently photographs have become shifty. David Hockney, who created vast collages of Polaroids in the 1980s—what he called “joiners”—said that the medium lost its claim to authenticity once it became digitized.
what you’re doing with such a small camera. I wonder what you would be able to do with a real camera.’ It’s flattery, it’s praise, it’s a bug at the back of your head. You feel, Maybe I have a talent. Maybe I have an eye. You know what they used to say about Bruce Chatwin, that he just had an eye. You could see from the man’s prose that he had a kind of extreme alertness and attention to the fine surfaces of things.”
For his debut novel, Every Day Is for the Thief, published in English in 2014, Cole slotted in his own studies of surfaces. Woozy black and white compositions taken in Lagos—cracked windows, hazy highways, dusty yards, smeared windshields—marry up, but not didactically, to his tale of a young émigré discombobulated on a short trip home. “There’s a blur in them. There’s a kind of unsettledness,” he says. “For me these are photos taken by that character, that narrator.”
Marmara. “One of the biggest old buildings in the world was decaying and falling apart two miles away from my summer house. It took a lot of effort to sneak inside, because it was dangerous and no one was allowed,” he confesses. “I entered it three times in 2020 and 2021.” Pamuk’s illicit photographs of the dilapidated site tell an architectural ghost story. In the half-light of the empty rooms and corridors, wooden panels and slats dangle from the ceiling. A pile of girls’ sneakers and ballet shoes is shrouded in dust. “In the last three years, the orphanage collapsed more. Now no one can enter. In Istanbul, there are many old buildings in terrible shape. I have a self-imposed project of making a photobook of ‘modern ruins’ around Istanbul.”
Central to both Pamuk’s writing and his photography is the concept of “ hüzün”—what he describes as “Turkish melancholy.” His memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003) illustrates this “almost philosophical and partly mystical feeling of going inward” through the mid-century photographs of Ara Güler—Turkey’s equivalent to Henri Cartier-Bresson—and his own pictures taken as a teenager in the 1970s.
Boyd has been taking photographs for years, shooting with a digital Leica. His snaps pick up on inscrutable aspects caught on the fly: broken tarmac, graffiti, the tiles of a swimming pool. “Even the most banal things can make an arresting image if you frame them correctly. It’s that sense of ‘What am I looking at?’ Oh, it’s just a bench with oblique sunlight.”
The allure of the floating detail, unfreighted by context, has its literary echo in the way a novelist creates drama or comedy from an event observed by someone missing the bigger picture. Boyd, who might take ten pictures in a week or just one in an entire season, is selecting 100 of his mercurial photographs for a new book, Abstractions (slated for 2025).
In his introduction to Robert Flynn Johnson’s book Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers (2004), Boyd pinned down thirteen ways of looking at a photograph, from aide-mémoire to advertisement—categories, he notes, that can overlap in a single frame. Pursuing his thesis further, he suggests that all great shots correspond to fine-art laws of composition. “The photographs that haunt you are all beautifully composed in a way that someone in the eighteenth century would understand,” he says, adding with a smile: “I wait to be disproved.”
Cole’s photography ticks several of Boyd’s boxes: street pictures, still life, conceptual. The polymath has placed his photographs in his novels and his stories in his photobooks. In his practice, the mediums act like two hands on a piano.
Cole explains that his signature blend took shape when he was in his early thirties. “I had one of the first generation of small digital cameras; they weren’t on the phone at that time. But they were small. It had three megapixels. Sometimes our life is quite affected by offhand comments. Somebody said, ‘That’s interesting
Cole believes that the days of mysterious unidentified photographs, like my sidewalk discovery, are numbered. “Not only will we be able to figure out who’s in the photo because of the power of the algorithms—so anonymity’s gone—but also the likelihood of finding a photo in the street has plummeted precipitously.” How many people still carry a physical photograph in their wallet?
Yet Cole’s books revel in unknowability. In Pharmakon (2024) he presents fleetingly short stories interspersed with photographs of cracked masonry, flaking paint, boulders, and the fuzzy edges of buildings and woodland. “It’s about borders, it’s about stone. It’s about the detritus of modern life that claims to be one thing but is actually something else,” he says. “I think photos refuse to have a conclusion.”
In Cole’s 2023 novel Tremor, we are introduced to a photography professor from Nigeria living on the east coast of America. In the opening passage he is upbraided by a homeowner for taking pictures in his neighborhood. “He has pressed the shutter twice when an aggressive voice calls out from the house on the right,” Cole writes. “You can’t do that here, the voice says.” Photography, we are reminded, can chafe, can provoke.
Pamuk once declared, “I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it.” Are his photobooks, on the distinctive orange lighting of Istanbul’s alleyways and the panoramic views of the Bosporus seen from his balcony, spurred by the same instinct? “It’s not the same. In photography, I’m a voyeur, a gazer, a passive eye whose mind is busy with his camera rather than representing a group, a problem,” Pamuk explains. “As a novelist I am not a simple voyeur, rather I’m self-consciously political. In art and photography my motivation is rarely political.”
For two decades, Pamuk has used his camera as a means of immersion. “My novel A Strangeness in My Mind [2014] is about lower-class life in the shanty towns of today’s Istanbul and their development into high-rises. In the six years that I wrote the book, I took tens of thousands of photos of Istanbul. I used them to write the novel,” he says. “I don’t have artistic pretensions when I photograph, though it is impossible to
resist the temptation of making series, groups, and by them books that will look beautiful.”
Pamuk happily admits that his camera led him astray—to rewarding ends. In his new series of pictures, the author of My Name Is Red (1998) and, most recently, Nights of Plague (2021) captures the forlorn state of the abandoned Prinkipo Greek Orthodox Orphanage on the island of Büyükada in the Sea of
Boyd, Cole, and Pamuk all speak of the fluidity of photographs. Which brings me back to my image of the woman in the water, that curbside debris turned cover girl. Before its reframing, that photograph was something else entirely—possibly a forgotten fragment of a forgotten romance? Were the shutter and the pose flip sides of a wonderful affair? What did the subject and the snapper do after that decisive moment? Was there lunch? Was there lovemaking? But that, of course, is another story.
Photograph by Teju Cole, from Pharmakon (MACK, 2024), courtesy the artist and MACK
Questionnaire
Holly Herndon Hans Ulrich Obrist’s
Hans Ulrich Obrist
In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the third installment of 2024, we are honored to present the artist and composer Holly Herndon.
Holly Herndon
4. What is harmony?
A: Sophisticated communication technology.
The future is….?
A: For us to actively shape.
17. Has the computer changed the way you work?
A: Profoundly.
28. Whom are you working with/ thinking with?
A: My forever partner in all things, Mat Dryhurst
34. What is your advice to a young artist?
A: Find your own voice, but as part of a community you can learn from and support.
8. What was your first museum visit as a child?
A: The Mesa Verde Museum in Colorado.
26. Who or what would you have liked to have been?
A: My great grandchild; I would like to see the world then.
31. What music are you listening to?
A: Literally everything. I’m showing my one-year-old music, and falling in love with it again through his dancing.
A: Extremophiles, mothers of the next species.
13.
42. After Earth Dies, who will Moon Orbit? (added by Kim Hyesoon)
THE IMPASSIONED CRITIC
Yve-Alain Bois explores what made the late critic David Sylvester unique. Originally issued as the preface to an anthology of essays by Sylvester, published in French under the title L’Art à bras-le-corps (Strasbourg: L’Atelier contemporain, 2021), Bois’s text appears here for the first time in English, in a translation by Nicholas Huckle.
There exists no more accurate portrait of David Sylvester than the profile of the ideal critic in Barnett Newman’s homage to Baudelaire. Citing the French poet, whose opinion was that criticism should be “partial, passionate, and political,” Newman wrote:
I believe it is Baudelaire’s notion that good art criticism has to have all three qualities, and all at the same time. We know it is possible to be partial without being passionate; or political, in the best sense of the term, without being either partial or passionate. But if one is truly passionate, one is all three. One cannot be passionate without being specific about the object of one’s passion, so that one is automatically partial. And true passion, by its very nature, by its sheer existence, is a political threat against the philistine and the bourgeois. Let’s face it: “scientific,” didactic criticism, in itself, and practiced for itself, is fundamentally a bourgeois activity. 1
In this vehement polemic, Newman’s bête noire is what he calls “scientific” criticism, with its “descriptive methodology,” and his real target is the formalism practiced by Clement Greenberg and his disciples, an approach to art that was enjoying its highest point of fame and influence at the time. 2 Newman makes a caricature of it: he objects to its analytical coldness, its “objective” and “impartial” desire to see an artwork as the answer to a formal problem and to give it a grade, good or otherwise, as if it were a grammar exercise. He sees
formalism’s descriptive technique as the inescapable root cause of its coldness. But things are not as clear-cut as they might appear, on the one hand because, as evidenced by the entire work of Leo Steinberg, there is no reason why a description cannot be “partial, passionate, and political,” and on the other because Baudelaire himself took a decidedly formalist approach when it suited him.3 The same is true of Sylvester, we might add, and no doubt Newman would not have appreciated Sylvester’s long discussion, written in 1994, of one of the artist’s first lithographs, a commentary more Catholic than the pope in answering the exam question “Find the formal problem that the artist is trying to solve, and say whether or not he succeeds.”4
Still, this piece of Sylvester’s is an exception— long, formal analyses are rare in his prolific writings. He preferred trenchant condensations and lapidary utterances, often using comparisons incomprehensible to anyone but himself (he was liberal with praise in his review of the 1994–96 Mondrian retrospective, but he quite baffled the organizers, one of them myself, when he likened Mondrian’s Cubist tree of 1913 in the Tate Gallery to Michelangelo’s late drawings for the Crucifixion).5 And yet, when you look more closely, this exception that I have just mentioned, along with all those of the same type, obey a cardinal rule in Sylvester, namely, to express in the most convincing way possible (and therefore necessarily with passion) the effect on him of the works he wrote about. In the essay in question, Sylvester wonders why—having received Newman’s lithograph as a gift in 1970
David Sylvester, 2000. Photo: Eamonn McCabe/ Popperfoto via Getty Images
and having it on a wall in his apartment for twenty years, during which it had not moved him—it suddenly started to speak to him.
The resulting obsession—what is it in me that responds to this work, and why?—brings us back to Baudelaire as Newman saw him, that is, as a critic who understands that “each work of art produces its own unique sensation and requires a unique response.”6 Further on, Newman adds, “Baudelaire didn’t care about being right. He cared only about being himself. The ‘scientific’ critic lives in constant fear that he will make a mistake.” 7 Baudelaire’s ideas about art were often run-of-the-mill, lifted from Stendhal or the Abbé Du Bos; indeed, a great many of his sweeping judgments and enthusiasms no longer had many supporters at the time of Newman’s writing. But, Newman asks, “After all, what are we celebrating?” and he replies to his own rhetorical question: Baudelaire’s “enormous courage to be passionate about everything that interested him, the things he saw, the things he thought about, the things he felt.”8
The right to make mistakes is something that Sylvester stands up for implicitly—it’s the price of passion. He was remarkably explicit, on the other hand, about his numerous errors of judgment. His autobiographical text “Curriculum vitae” is also intended as an ironic self-criticism in which he lists many of his blunders and sudden changes of perspective. One of these about-turns, as a matter of fact, concerns Newman. Sylvester had come to Jackson Pollock late—even though, as early as 1950, he had invented the concept of “Afocalism” in relation to Paul Klee, an idea that as he saw it should have allowed him immediate entry to the American painter’s allover interlacing. Still, although he does not say so explicitly, the concept did in fact bring him to take that step in 1958 (see in particular the last page of his first essay on Pollock).9 Once the move was made, however, he had no trouble appreciating the other Abstract Expressionists, whom he was delighted to interview for the BBC at the time of his first trip to New York, in 1960. Or almost all of them—no Pollock, of course (already deceased), or Rothko (who refused to be recorded), or Newman, because, as Sylvester notes, “I was too dense at first to appreciate his importance.” 10 A footnote in his first long piece on Newman, “The Ugly Duckling,” makes clear that his conversion would have taken still longer but for the injunctions of Alex Lieberman. 11 Once the conversion happened though, it was radical and irrevocable. Of the period following 1970, Sylvester told Nick Serota that it was then that he “decided
1. Barnett Newman, “For Impassioned Criticism,” in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews , ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 130–36. The essay is a revised version of a talk that Newman gave at the conference “Baudelaire critique d’art” that took place in Paris in January 1968.
2. Newman does not mention Clement Greenberg by name, but in the context of the time, anyone remotely familiar with his subject would have seen that Albert Barnes and “the Bloomsbury set” (long-standing enemies of Newman’s whom he provides here as examples of what he calls “hypocriticism”) were convenient stand-ins for Greenberg, allowing him to attack the critic indirectly. Newman writes, for example, “They don’t even care whether you like their favorites. You must like them for the ‘right’ reasons—that is, their reasons,” and this directly echoes Greenberg’s extremely arrogant words: “Modernism . . . has not lowered . . . the standing of Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, or Watteau. What Modernism has shown is that, though the past did appreciate these masters justly, it often gave wrong or
that Newman was the greatest artist of the postwar period.” 12 The passionate critic is someone who decides and states clearly. But that critic will also condemn if necessary, not sparing even his friends. Sylvester’s exhibition reviews were incendiary when negative. Serota mentions that his relations with the critic were tense during the whole year preceding the exhibition they planned together at Tate Modern, Looking at Modern Art , Sylvester’s last curatorial act. 13 Serota points out that this was because Sylvester had written a thoroughly damning review of his novel display of the collection of Tate Britain. 14 Another particularly cruel example is Sylvester’s swift dismissal of Margit Rowell’s installation of the Brancusi retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 1995. Rowell too was a long-standing friend of his, and to make matters worse, Sylvester went on to heap high praise on Ann Temkin, the curator of the American version of the exhibition, which took place soon after in Philadelphia. 15 As for his enemies, it would be futile to list them! 16 That said, whether laudatory or condemnatory, his impassioned and partial judgments were always reasoned and always in accord with his own fundamental principle: “to understand and to make understood why I love or detest something.” He was authoritative—many of the
irrelevant reasons for doing so.” Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 1960, in The Collected Essays and Criticism , vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance , ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 92. Toward the end of the 1950s, Greenberg had been one of the few critics to support Newman, although they fell out badly soon after. Perhaps Newman avoids mentioning Greenberg in his essay because he would have been obliged to say that Greenberg had liked his own work for the “wrong reasons,” and would thus have been making himself guilty of the same error of which he was accusing the “hypocritical” formalists. 3. In his 1863 essay on Delacroix, Baudelaire wrote, “A well-drawn figure fills you with a pleasure that is quite alien to the theme. Voluptuous or terrible, this figure owes its charm solely to the arabesque it describes in space. The limbs of a flayed martyr, the body of a swooning nymph, if they are skillfully drawn, connote a type of pleasure in which the theme plays no part, and if you believe otherwise, I shall be forced to think that you are an executioner or a rake.” Leo Steinberg quotes this passage as
part of his acerbic attack on Greenberg (but also on Barnes and the Bloomsbury group, as represented by Roger Fry), the first version of which was a talk he gave at the Museum of Modern Art in March 1968, and thus three months after Newman’s lecture, with which it had numerous points in common. See Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 64.
4. David Sylvester writes, “It was one of [Newman’s] great strengths that his works asked fundamental questions about whatever medium he worked in, asked what were its first principles and requirements. So it was as if, making prints for the first time, working for the first time on a surface that was not going to be the surface of the actual work, he started thinking about the first principles of filling a surface, and proceeded to do exercises exemplifying them upon this unfamiliar surface, the lithographic stone.¶ Perhaps he started with the thought that it would be a good idea to separate the dimensions of the image from the dimensions of the surface. Why not do the obvious and draw a rectangle within
that of the sheet? Next, why not articulate this inner rectangle by simply dividing it into two with a line, which might as well be a vertical line? Ought the line to bisect the rectangle? It would be more interesting if it didn’t, but the asymmetry should be close enough to symmetry to suggest that that had been a possibility. Next, how to distinguish between the two halves? Since the sheet was going to be white, why not begin with its opposite, black? And then why not use the other half to mediate between white and black— not just to mediate but to show the transition between them by having them intermingle, in such a way as to leave no doubt that the white had been the ground, the black the additive? And so as to convey the sense of a process? ¶ Perhaps the attribution to the work of such a programme helps to explain its air of improvised inevitability. Perhaps, too, the thought of that programme gives a meaning to its minimalism, implying that it is not only an exemplar but a sort of allegory of the principle of less is more. That is speculation. What I know is that when I stand and look at it the whole of art is there.” Sylvester, About Modern Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), 398. All
exhibitions he organized are legendary, for both their content and their installation. (I will never forget Dada and Surrealism Reviewed , which he produced with Dawn Adès at the Hayward Gallery in 1978, and whose chronological divisions were based entirely on the small journals circulated by those movements, with a room for each one; the points of convergence and divergence between Dada and Surrealism had never been better articulated.) He spoke with authority, but always without a safety net, and there was something very generous about the way he laid himself bare.
One of his major peeves was the nefarious effect of electric lighting on painting, always crushing it. It would be hard to find a review of his, certainly from the last twenty years of his life, that did not include a plea for natural light. (This is also a topic that he and I discussed at length.) A particularly touching example comes to mind. He was rather on the fence in his review of the big Pollock retrospective of 1998–99, as much for the installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as for the staging in London at Tate, but he much preferred the latter because of its natural light. 17 (He also liked to award grades and pick prizewinners, an annoying practice, he thought, when it involved individual works—which according to him have no “programme,” to use Newman’s word— but justified when it came to exhibitions, which do have one, namely that of properly showcasing the works). 18 He had been particularly vocal in his writing on Number 1, 1950, protesting the idiotic title, Lavender Mist , that Greenberg had inflicted upon it. But returning to see the exhibition late one afternoon, and marveling at how much richer the painting (and also Mural and others) appeared to him than on his first visit, he realized his error: it was because the light was now totally natural (on the first occasion, a small amount of electric light had been added). He immediately decided to write a postscript, explaining the particular advantages of the weakening light at the end of the day, and describing in great detail the effect it had on certain paintings. This was not to correct an error and be ultimately right, but rather to share this surplus of pleasure and to enjoin his readers to go and see the exhibition on the days when the museum stayed open late (the museum had promised not to switch on the electric spotlights before 7 pm), and to do so at the very time when the daylight was expiring. Like Steinberg, Sylvester was allergic to theory, insisting on the entirely empirical nature of his work. And yet, also like Steinberg, he did engage with a certain philosophy in his writing. The difference
the same, we should note that this text is atypical in that it claims to assign a “programme” to the work in question, and in doing so opposes Sylvester’s own firmly antiprogrammatic principle. His use of the word “speculation” here may well be ironic.
5. Sylvester, “Mondrian—II, 1996,” in About Modern Art , 432–36. The exhibition was coorganized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
6. Newman, “For Impassioned Criticism,” 133.
7. Ibid., 135.
8. Ibid.
9. Sylvester, “Pollock, 1958,” in About Modern Art , 61–63.
10. David Sylvester, “Curriculum Vitae,” 26. 11. Sylvester, “Newman—I, 1986,” in About Modern Art , 331.
12. Sylvester, quoted in Nicholas Serota, “The Making of an Exhibition,” in Looking at Modern Art: In Memory of David Sylvester, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2002), 9.
13. Sylvester, who was dying of cancer and
between the two critics is that Sylvester was quite open about having consciously absorbed that philosophy, i.e., phenomenology. In “Curriculum Vitae,” for example, he reveals how much his piece on Klee and “Afocalism” had benefited from his discussions with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the quotations he includes from his own 1951 lecture “Towards a New Realism” seem to come straight from the pen of the eminent philosopher. Indeed, I think it was his “phenomenologism” more than his empiricism (or his resistance to theory) that allowed him to talk with artists so often on equal footing, obtaining interviews that almost always stand among the best they gave. Surreptitiously, and with extreme kindness and reserve, he pushed them to their limits, bringing them to understand, through his questions, things about their art that they had never articulated before. Again, the most telling case is Newman. Reading over the transcript of his interview with Sylvester for the BBC in 1965, Newman found that the way he had responded on Mondrian had been too general. Since it would have been too complicated to redo the whole interview, he asked the show’s presenter, the painter Harold Cohen, to add a few lines (he sent him an outline) to Cohen’s introduction to the broadcast. I don’t think the revision was included—at least it wasn’t when the interview was first published 19 —and it wasn’t until the publication of Newman’s Selected Writings and Interviews [1990] that the two paragraphs that Newman had wanted Cohen to insert were to see the light of day. 20 They represent perhaps the best explanation of how Newman’s artistic endeavor
no longer mobile, did not participate in the exhibition’s installation. Right from the beginning, in fact, Serota had thought of the show as a memorial, a posthumous homage to Sylvester’s eye and curatorial acumen; the critic knew he would not get to see it. During the last two months of Sylvester’s life, by fax, long telephone calls, and in-person meetings, the two friends discussed which works to include, in which of the show’s three rooms each should go, and next to which other works. They were still making small changes only five days before Sylvester’s passing, on June 19, 2001. Based on Serota’s moving testimony of the critic’s exacting installation practice (ibid., 7), one can safely surmise that many others would have occurred in situ had Sylvester lived long enough to hang the show himself. The exhibition ran at Tate Modern from January 17 to March 24, 2002.
14. Sylvester, “Mayhem at Millbank,” London Review of Books , May 18, 2000, 19–20.
15. The original text that appeared in The New York Review of Books on April 4, 1996, was slightly modified for its inclusion in About Modern Art , but the barbed comments are still there.
differed completely from that of the Dutch painter. It was, no doubt, only after speaking with Sylvester that Newman had come to really fathom the difference (up to that point, indeed even in the same interview, he had offered nothing but old clichés). 21 At the same time, these hindsight-enhanced additions allow us to see why Newman was to become a hero for the adherents of Minimalism, a movement that Sylvester, speaking of himself in “Curriculum Vitae,” described as “made for him.”22
Passionate, partial—but where is the political? I have never read the famous exchanges between Sylvester and his early adversary, the insufferable John Berger, and I probably never shall, having no interest in their debate. The one time that Sylvester uses the term “political” in his autobiographical essay, he gives it a very Baudelairean slant. Speaking about how he acquired the skill of “writing against the clock” during the ’50s by having to dash off short reviews of ball games and movies, he notes: “In contrast with sports writing, film criticism was more than just an opportunity to write about a domain that obsessed me; it was political. It is the one branch of writing I have embarked on with a sense of mission.” He goes on to argue that films intentionally produced as works of art were exceptions, and that apart from them, movies should be judged only in terms of “entertainment,” explaining further, “I believed that the cult of the director among film critics was a distortion of the culture of the movies. Films were about stars: people went to the cinema to see stars. . . . In short, I believed that films were artefacts made in Hollywood and that other films, while they might be more intelligent and more moving, were not the real thing.”23
A populist position, therefore, and thus political, but diametrically opposed to the famous “cult of the director.” Sylvester defended it gamely, even though he knew it to be “to some degree absurd.”24 Let us say that this too echoes the Baudelairean ideal as conceived of by Newman. The latter was not so convinced by the poet’s fascination with the watercolors of Constantin Guys, but he admired him for his resolutely antiestablishment stance, and for his preoccupation with “fashion and with fashion plates, with the identification of modern life with the street, with an interest in the dandy, the courtesan, the crowd, the bizarre, and the herd,” adding (although he himself thought Pop art trivial), “Were Baudelaire alive today, I suppose he would be today’s greatest critic of Pop art.” 25 Sylvester was perhaps not the greatest critic of Pop art, but he was surely one its most attentive commentators.
16. For those who like invective, see Sylvester’s insulting review of the scandalously inept (but highly successful) exhibition American Art in the 20th Century, organized in 1993 by Norman Rosenthal and Christos Joachimides at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The review’s laconic title was exquisitely eloquent: “Hanging Offense,” London Review of Books , October 21, 1993, 10–11.
17. See Sylvester, “Pollock—II, 1999,” in About Modern Art , 477–91.
18. My first meeting with Sylvester goes back to the winter of 1994 and a lecture on Piet Mondrian that I gave at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, a few days before the opening of the Dutch staging of the retrospective of his work. At the cocktail party (or was it a tea?) that followed my lecture, Sylvester surprised me, after saying a few kind words about my talk, by asking me point blank what in my opinion were the ten best works of art of the twentieth century. I would have sent him packing had it not been for the fact that I had shortly before been alerted to his identity. My curiosity got the better of my annoyance and I went along with his game, discovering some time
later that I had passed the test.
19. In The Listener, August 10, 1972.
20. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews , 254. Strangely, when Sylvester reprinted his interview with Newman for his collection Interviews with American Artists published in 2001, he did not try to incorporate the artist’s suggested additions (although he did add some passages from the original transcript that had been left out of the 1972 publication of the interview, and that were also missing from the version included in Selected Writings and Interviews). In contrast, deferring to the low opinion that Newman had expressed about his (Newman’s) remarks on Mondrian as they had appeared on the radio and then in print, Sylvester removed all reference to the Dutch painter.
21. For more on this point, see my review of Selected Writings and Interviews , “Artist as Critic,” Art in America , April 1991, 37–41.
22. Sylvester, “Curriculum Vitae,” 28.
23. Ibid., 24–25.
24. Ibid., 25.
25. Newman, “For Impassioned Criticism,” 135.
KYLE ABRAHAM/KEVIN BEASLEY/ALLANA CLARKE/THEASTER GATES/CY GAVIN/ALTERONCE GUMBY/LAUREN HALSEY/ KAHLIL ROBERT IRVING/DEVIN B. JOHNSON/RICK LOWE/ ERIC N. MACK/CAMERON WELCH/AMANDA WILLIAMS
SOCIAL ABSTRACTION
Gagosian & Social Abstraction is a special publication made in tandem with the exhibition Social Abstraction, a project I curated with iterations at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, and Gagosian, Hong Kong. The exhibition and zine delve into the rich and multifaceted world of Black social realities through the lens of abstraction in art. Both bring together a diverse array of artists whose work transcends traditional boundaries, offering new ways of seeing and understanding formal abstraction and the world around us. The intergenerational artists featured in this project explore abstraction not merely as an aesthetic choice but as a vital means of expression, rooted in personal and collective experiences. They employ abstraction to articulate and navigate the complexities of identity, history, culture, and everyday life. In these works abstraction operates beyond a pure fidelity to color, shape, form, pattern, movement, and texture to locate broader contemporary and historical experiences that range from the individual to the collective. In these pages you will find a conversation between artists Alteronce Gumby and Amanda Williams, moderated by Jordan Carter, in which they discuss the profound significance of color in their work, as well as the intersections between art and architecture. We also delve into the realm of dance with choreographer Kyle Abraham, who put on a special performance inside the exhibition in Theaster Gates, Line Study for alternative columnar projects , 2023, high-fire stoneware with glaze,
Eric N. Mack, T here is No Other Way , 2022, silk and wool scarves, cotton apron, Irish linen, rope, ribbon, polyester, felt, cotton shirt, and wool, 128 × 88 × 1 ½ inches (325.1 × 223.5 × 3.8 cm)
Beverly Hills this past July. Ahead of that event, Cam Thompkins met with Abraham at New York’s Park Avenue Armory to discuss the relationships between dance, visual art, and abstraction.
Artists
Kahlil Robert Irving and Cameron Welch engage in a personal dialogue, discussing their unique approaches to materiality and longevity. In another feature, Devin B. Johnson meets with Diallo Simon-Ponte to reflect on the evolution of his practice, the impact of place
on the temporal dimensions of his work, and the reemergence of ceramics in his exploration of abstraction and figuration.
Cy Gavin’s portfolio of paintings offers a mesmerizing journey into the night sky, using abstraction to evoke the mystery and beauty of the cosmos. And Ryuan Johnson focuses on the works of Allana Clarke and Lauren Halsey to examine the key place of hair in Black culture. Through image and poetry, Johnson reveals the cultural and historical significance of hair as a medium to discuss identity, community, and the politics of representation. Finally we present a conversation between Rick Lowe and Kevin Beasley, who discuss their engagement with material and place, as well as the social potentials of abstraction.
GAGOSIAN& SOCIAL ABSTRACTION Fall 2024
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Alison McDonald
GUEST EDITOR
Antwaun Sargent
MANAGING EDITOR
Wyatt Allgeier
EDITOR, ONLINE AND PRINT
Gillian Jakab
TEXT EDITOR
David Frankel
DESIGN DIRECTOR
Paul Neale
DESIGN
Alexander Ecob
Graphic Thought Facility
CONTRIBUTORS
Kyle Abraham
Kevin Beasley
Jordan Carter
Cy Gavin
Alteronce Gumby
Kahlil Robert Irving
Devin B. Johnson
Ryuan Johnson
Rick Lowe
Diallo Simon-Ponte
Cameron Thompkins
Cameron Welch
Amanda Williams
04
JORDAN CARTER, ALTERONCE GUMBY, & AMANDA WILLIAMS
COVER
Kevin Beasley, Harvest Slab (Pane II), 2024, raw Virginia cotton, polyurethane resin, gold dust powder, 24 × 16 inches (61 × 40.6 cm)
THE BUILDING BLOCKS AMANDA WILLIAMS & ALTERONCE GUMBY
JORDAN CARTER: I’m curious to hear how and when you both came to color. In your practices, color functions as more than a medium or form; it’s the subject matter as well.
AMANDA WILLIAMS: Age four. No [laughter]. I think for as long as I can remember, color was always the central component of my work—I just associated color with art. So when I was making the transition from my full-time architectural practice to an artistic practice, I jokingly asked myself, What is my motivation? I realized it was this deep search for color, and in the last five years, this kind of interrogation of individual colors or palettes has really been driving that interest forward.
ALTERONCE GUMBY: I think for me, in art, it came later, but in life, it happened at a very young age. In kindergarten, when the teacher asked everyone to say what their favorite color was, and why, I stood up and said my favorite color was black. Before I could say why, this student behind me said, “Oh, your favorite color is black because you’re Black.” And I was like, “No, it’s because my favorite superhero is Batman, the Dark Knight” [laughter]. So I was a little confused by that as a five-yearold, because I was like, My pants are black but I’m a nice honey umber. It messed me up a bit.
It wasn’t until I went to my first Venice Biennale, in 2015, and saw some beautiful monochromatic works by Korean artists from the ’70s that my eyes were really opened to the history of monochromatic abstract painting. Here I was in grad school, just then hearing about this group of artists. I began to research how other artists had approached this aesthetic of the monochrome and worked to find my way, my voice, within it. I found myself in Paris looking at the work of Ad Reinhardt, Kazimir Malevich, and all these European male painters who had their own perspective on, say, the color black, addressing it maybe as a void or a vacuum. And I was thinking about it as a cultural influence, my heritage, the way I’ve identified here in America. Then I really tried in my own work to move beyond that, beyond these definitions and terms in which I perceive color.
JC: Amanda, you mentioned
your transition, if you will, from architecture into visual art. You’ve used color as a way of transforming architectural space, as in your Color(ed) Theory [2014–16] series on the South Side of Chicago, using various culturally charged colors that you found to paint houses that were about to be demolished.
AW: Yeah, in the Color(ed)Theory houses and my other projects I oscillate between media, with architecture being a material medium in that instance. I was asking, What are architecture’s limits? What are its unexpected opportunities? When you have the scale of a house, you have to deal with not just light but the sun itself, and other elements, and color takes on a different meaning. In school we studied Josef Albers, we studied modernism, we studied Western conceptions of color theory, and then I’m trying to sync that with 79th Street on Chicago’s South Side. How do you leverage both of those? I feel super fortunate that I can be making projects in real time with both sorts of references. The What Black Is This, You Say? project for the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, in 2021 was also like that. It started with thinking about color in a two-dimensional conceptual framework. Then the Storefront for Art and Architecture, a nonprofit that has tried to generate public-art provocations around issues of space and equity and power,
approached me during the pandemic to make the façade of their storefront black. What does it mean for architecture to be black and Black?
JC: As you were working on that project, I imagine you were thinking a lot about that specific place and that particular architecture. And I have a question for both of you, which is, Do you have site-specific relationships to color? Do particular geographic coordinates or memories of built environments inform the ways you think about color?
AW: Lately, I’ll think about experiences or memories with some kind of location attached to them and think about the palettes associated with it. My CandyLadyBlack series [2020– ], for example, comes from my memories of “the candy lady,” which is a particular experience of going into a stranger’s house and buying candy from their table. That memory will conjure images of the kitchen, or of the extended mothers in your community, or of ’70s bungalow-style houses. So my mind associates different colors with these memories and they go into the series. The number of people who are like, “Oh, green apple, I remember”—those colors can be very literal but they can also evoke something much bigger. That’s starting to be a conscious way of working for me: thinking of a place and its palette versus starting with a color and then
working backward. It takes longer because you get into memory rabbit holes. AG: I agree; I think memory adds to the palette. I was making this white painting the other day. It wasn’t really white; it was really light pinks and oranges and greens and stuff like that. I grew up in a church—my mother’s a pastor—and sometimes in a Pentecostal church, the church mothers will sit in the front wearing all white. The painting started to remind me of hearing and watching my mother speak in tongues and shout in church, so I added this extra texture or sensibility to the paintings that I don’t think would have been there if I hadn’t had that experience.
It goes both ways as well. For my show Dark Matter at the Allentown Art Museum in 2023, I made a series of paint-
We as human beings have radicalized color. In nature, color is just what it is, an absorption and reflection of light. Being the intellectual beings that we are, we’ve taken color and given it these signifiers, these definitions, these themes, these moods, these emotions.
—Alteronce Gumby
ings that you saw in two different kinds of light: you would see them in regular incandescent light and then you also saw them under UV light. The colors shifted, the experience shifted from one palette to the next, but it was still the same painting. I was trying to expand my awareness of the different phases and sources in which color could exist out in the world. Our relationship to the way we see color is completely celestial. It’s based on one star, the sun. We’re all born on this planet Earth and all of our eyes, our cones, are adjusted to see color and light as it relates to the sun. If I go into my mind’s eye and I try to imagine myself on a distant planet in another solar system with another star, what colors would I see? The rainbow would be completely different. Would the sky be blue or orange or purple? I don’t know. I’m trying to bring that kind of imaginary space into my work.
AW: That’s beautiful.
JC: What you brought up is really powerful in terms of the limited range of our chromatic perception, which for me raises a larger sense of the politics of color, the
politics of perception, the connotations we bring to color. And in that regard I’m curious whether you could talk about your work in terms of a “politics of color,” whatever that means to you.
AW: I mean, I think being Black is political. We don’t have any choice. Everything we do, there’s a politics. But there’s a difference between my provocation within a neighborhood and conversations that Faith Ringgold, say, and other artists of an older generation were trying to have: to overtly establish political positions in their art, and sometimes just trying to stay alive. I think there’s a relative privilege that our generation is enjoying. We’re still making work about Blackness, but there’s a full range of ways to engage these politics, whether directly through the work or through other types of advocacy. The Storefront project is an example of a certain kind of confrontation. A good friend of mine, Andreas Hernandez, challenged the organization and said, “Once you go black you never go back.” Now the project is over but my black façade is still there and there’s very little graffiti on it, which I’m shocked by. There’s a kind of reverence for it that you have to assume is because of what it’s “saying.” The storefront was designed in 1993 by the starchitect Steven Holl and the artist Vito Acconci. By applying blackness to it, there are now all these layers of complexity. I wasn’t necessarily sitting down saying, “I’m going to challenge Western conventions of space,” you know? But this is what it’s doing.
AG: We as human beings have radicalized color. In nature, color is just what it is, an absorption and reflection of light. Being the intellectual beings that we are, we’ve taken color and given it these signifiers, these definitions, these themes, these moods, these emotions. As a Black man in America, as a millennial making art, I feel like in some ways I’m carrying all of these things, especially when I’m making these colored or monochromatic paintings. I’m just trying to exist as a human being in this world and not necessarily have to make a political statement within each painting I’m making.
AW: We can go between working through issues around the complexity of Blackness and transcending them.
JC: How do you begin to think about your titles?
AG: I grew up listening to hip-hop; as a teenager I wrote poetry and songs. I’ve always enjoyed wordplay in my work. In the titling of my paintings I just want to
add another layer of context to the work. I want to name my kids, in a way. So certain titles have been a little provocative, I’d say, especially early on; there was one series that was titled My President’s Black but My Painting’s Still Blue [2015–18]. That was a series, a running title for a while. I think the last one was My President’s Orange but My Painting’s Still Blue. It was a color play [laughter]. AW: I was going to blame and/or credit hip-hop too. I’m Gen X, not millennial. I listened to hip-hop 1.0, as we call it in my house. Titles can be a necessity for a kind of communication, but I think they also sometimes become a crutch—maybe that’s too strong a word, but it’s like sometimes the titles outdo the pieces in my mind. There’s a discomfort for me that the work’s not doing enough for the title. They have to do each other justice.
JC: In one of your titles, Alteronce, there’s a homage to the artist Sam Gilliam, which has me wondering who some of the artistic forebears are that you both think about when you’re in the studio?
AW: Although you would never look at any of my works and make the correlation, I think if I were thinking strictly color, Jacob Lawrence was probably my first huge influence. I was able to spend a lot of time with Raymond Saunders when I lived out in the Bay Area. Coming from Chicago, obviously, I think about Africobra and the work that they did and still do—the balance of heavy politics and levity and just having the gumption to do it at a time when that wasn’t popular. Then in the present day, obviously someone like a Kerry James Marshall has been hugely influential for me. But there’s no one, I don’t think, where you could make a one-to-one correlation between their work and mine. It’s more an understanding of their process, or trying to deconstruct how they come to color.
AG: Who am I looking at in terms of
color? Monet is definitely someone I go to a lot for a palette. Stanley Whitney, yes, Sam Gilliam, but I’ve been looking a lot outside of art for color inspiration as well. I’ve been looking at nasa’s images from the James Webb telescope, the Hubble telescope, of these nebulae and celestial spaces that are out there in the universe. Over the past year I’ve been working on a documentary, Color, that looks at color from cultural and natural standpoints. This has taken me to New Orleans, to Mardi Gras, looking at the floats; to a Holi celebration in India; to looking at color underwater, scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef, going to Alaska to look at the northern lights. Being a city boy and living in New York for almost eighteen years now, I feel like I’ve had a detachment from nature; I’ve been living in a concrete jungle. Traveling to these places and getting in touch with nature have brought back a different sensibility of color for me. Color comes from nature; chemists and scientists and paint-makers and people in ancient civilizations started going out and finding different plants and minerals, grinding them up and turning them into pigments. That’s where our golden palette comes from today.
about color in terms of ingenuity. In this instance it’s an example of the history of Black innovation and invention.
AW: Well, you have this person, George Washington Carver, in the early 1900s who was just great at everything. In addition to being an agriculturalist, he’s
JC: Let’s talk about this intersection of color and material history more broadly. Amanda, you showed us this blue vial, and if I understand correctly, this is an Egyptian blue pigment patented by none other than George Washington Carver that you’ve been researching. It’s interesting to think about color as something that could be patented, to think
crocheting, dancing, making art, doing tons of stuff. And like fifteenth on the list of great things was, “I guess we can patent this blue color I created.” He actually worked on two different blues. There’s the Egyptian blue, which Terry Adkins did quite a bit of work with, almost electric, and then the one Carver actually patented, the one I showed you, a Prussian blue. It had to do with the high iron content in the red clay that’s ubiquitous in Carver’s part of Alabama, around Tuskegee and Montgomery. I actually just went two weeks ago to the archive, and it’s mind-blowing: first of all it feels like you’re walking back in time, it’s like 1952. You think about the number of things that people at the Tuskegee Institute were pioneering and creating from nothing. It’s mind-boggling that no one questions Yves Klein’s connection with a color. He was just sitting around and was like, “I’m going to be known for blue. I’m going to go down in history and when you say blue, somebody will say, ‘Yves Klein.’” And that’s what happens, right? I tell someone I’m working on blue, they’re like, “Yves Klein.” I’m like, “George Washington Carver!” Through this research I’m interested in how we can disrupt the narratives in that way. But I’m also interested in how can we just geek out on pigment. This is pigment; it’s not yet paint. It’s the raw material, the building blocks.
KAHLIL ROBERT IRVING & CAMERON WELCH
CAMERON WELCH: One thing I really value about your work is that you’re always searching within new material sets. I find new things every time I encounter your work. It seems fair to say that we’re both curious about materials: lately I’ve been using a lot of marble and stone, harking back to an earlier era of craft and representation, such as the mosaics of ancient Greece, Rome, and Africa. By using these materials I’m able to hold a certain space without having to illustrate something overt. And next to those elements you might find a gilded leaf behind glass, or a glazed ceramic that speaks to different locales and weaves them together to create a new affect.
(26.7 × 36.2 × 26.7 cm)
KAHLIL ROBERT IRVING: What got you to start making large mosaics in the first place?
½ × 14 ¼ × 10 ½
CW: Well, I used to make them with my grandmother when I was a kid. My mom would bartend so my sister and I would go over to my grandmother’s house to spend the night a lot, and she used to take us to a craft-supply store where we’d buy kits to make mosaics. Also, my stepfather’s family is from Italy, so I’d go there when I was a kid. I’m from Indiana, so I hadn’t experienced objects that held so much history until that point.
That’s the origin, but as an adult I’ve been trying to tap into ways to speak to history and my thology while posing ideas around new mythologies. I have day dreams about the work being buried and then excavated a thousand years from now— what would people think was happening in our time?
KRI: I think my work approaches something similar, but from the opposite perspec tive. Even though they’re very opulent, the sculptures resemble a fragment of something that’s been destroyed. Once viewers learn that a work is made by hand, rather than some kind of found object, it often prompts a reframing, and this slip of cognition is something I’ve been trying
to balance. There’s the opulence of using overglaze enamels, which connect to the history of European ceramics and represent a certain kind of hierarchy, or access to capital, over another community—European decorative porcelain and ceramics were designed to corner a market and replace Asian ceramic production. And I try to balance that association with the ability to hold a bit of room for contention.
CW: I was curious about control and authorship in your work. Is that something
meaning, and a relationship to either visceral or mundane acts, such as the passing of time on something like a street? I don’t know if I necessarily have the answer to that question because it has to be negotiated through the experience of the work. My sculptures in the Social Works II exhibition in London reference fragments of Antioch mosaics, they use that as a model, but they’re not Antioch mosaics; they’re not mosaics at all, they’re hand-pressed ceramic tiles that sit on the floor, untethered to a specific site. So in terms of authorship, I made them, but the metaphor they speak to is
I think a lot about how an object feels, as opposed to what it’s illustrating, and about the fine line of trying to create something that feels as
though it’s been affected by time passing.
KRI: What we’re doing relates to a certain kind of engagement with intuition as well. Some artists get settled into the idea of what it means to be making art versus it actually being a part of them. There’s a gap between the moment of intuitive engagement and its presentation
Aside from a handful of sculptures, I’m making work for the wall, and I’ve been thinking about how the stone will outlive most paintings—the weave of linen or canvas could deteriorate far sooner than stone will deteriorate. Do you think about the permanence of the objects you
I’m trying to collapse multiple histories in one space, and also an array of materials and aggregates that are speaking to a lot of different spaces and histories, so it’s impossible to absorb everything in one sitting.
–CAMERON
WELCH
as visual art. When someone is performing on stage, by contrast, they just have to go for it—the audience might be in a trance in relation to the passion they’re feeling.
CW: Totally. In that respect I relate so much more to music. It’s often easier to find that connection when making music, maybe because it’s happening in real time.
create?
KRI: I think about that. In my new work I’m including apples and oranges, but if I were to start embedding explicit references to Monsanto and genetically modified agriculture, that would bring a contemporary reference. But how do you make that reference without being didactic or cliché?
How do you cite the moment you’re in while allowing something to hold meaning into the future? The work we make is often analogous to life outside the studio, and eventually it makes its way into the work. We mentioned the lag between inspiration and whatever you’re trying to get into the work; sometimes that can happen immediately and other times it can be a years-long conversation. I’ve been thinking recently about how a lot of motifs from earlier bodies of work are coming in and colliding with newer materials and motifs and ways of working that I’m finding surprising.
CW: In your work there are often points where I can identify something immediately, and then a breaking apart happens. There’s a moment of recognition and then it sort of falls away again. You’re rewarded for looking longer.
KRI: Thanks, I appreciate that. I started collaging on the sculptures in part because of what I had to do as a student to complete other assignments. For me a lot relates to photography. The sculptures are covered in images that are either taken by me or found on the Internet, and that might relate to current issues, such as the climate crisis, but
also recall an ancient or historical position. And I’m interested in how a pixel exists as a fragment of a greater image.
CW: That’s a fascinating relationship, the connection between the process of making collage, or mosaics, and halftone printing—thinking about that on a granular level, the solidity of objects is inherently not solid. It makes you contemplate what material can hold in terms of recordkeeping.
There’s metadata stored in digital images. I’ve been thinking a lot about a fear of negative space recently, but also what’s filled in each space is taken from very disparate locations, sites, cultural spaces, and histories. And collapsing these on top of one another where time becomes elastic is interesting.
KRI: The elasticity in the work is renegotiated over and over just through the act of making. I’ve painted the same picture of [the rapper] Kodak Black four times; there’s a material concern but also an issue of legibility that then makes me have to keep painting it. But then I’m going to obscure it even more, and do I even want you to know that it’s Kodak at all?
CW: Totally.
KRI: Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the paintings as luscious and full as the sculptures.
CW: I’ve been more and more interested in painting as well. I’ve been working with marble and stone, and then colliding that with painting. And I’ve been painting behind glass and putting that in the work. It has a slightly vacuous luminosity to it, and then these two are sort of working with and against each other in a way where the surface quality becomes poignant.
KRI: How do you approach the presentation of your work? That’s a point of contention
for me. Like presenting a room of sculptures or presenting a room of paintings versus presenting a room of experience.
CW: I think about it a lot. In the past I’ve had ideas about displaying works on the ground. But I really think that in my heart I’m a painter’s painter. I’m really interested in this idea that wall-mounted mosaics both get to participate in an archaeological and cultural dialogue and also are in a dialogue with painting and painting’s history. And having the two wrestle with each other on the surface of the work, and how they’re displayed, is something I’m really interested in.
KRI: Yeah, because negotiating what materials can do, where materials come from, how something’s seen, where something’s extractive, how does that really become physical even if it’s passed over, how does that still become a thing that one has to fight with—
CW: I’m interested in the idea of inundating the viewer, of people not being able to take all of the work in at once—partly depending on the scale, of course, but also you won’t get to see it all unless you sit there for a long time. It’s like going to a museum and you can’t see everything in a day. I’m trying to collapse multiple histories in one space, and also an array of materials and aggregates that are speaking to a lot of different spaces and histories, so it’s impossible to absorb everything in one sitting.
RICK LOWE & KEVIN BEASLEY
RICK LOWE: Let’s start by talking about locations, specifically places related to our source materials. You’re coming out of Lynchburg, Virginia; my painting practice emerges from my experience in Houston’s Third Ward. But my sensibilities come out of my experiences in rural Alabama,
things are the glue of this notion of the social. The thing about rural spaces is that people are dispersed and working, you don’t see them much. When we’d go to church, we’d be there all day. Sunday school at 9 am, services at 11 am and 1 pm, and everybody brought food and shared
We all look at material and then let it go, but artists will hone in on something and transform it in a way that lends itself symbolically and materially beyond the experience of the everyday.
–Rick Lowe
which has very intimate connections with raw cotton, one of your materials. Tell me about your experience in Lynchburg, but first, I’m curious if you were actually in Lynchburg? Because for me, growing up in rural Alabama, I wasn’t actually in a town, there was nothing there. So I adopted a nearby town, which only had 10,000 people, and I didn’t have much of a connection to that town, it was just a way to point at a map and say, “Oh, it’s there” [laughs].
KEVIN BEASLEY: I grew up in Lynchburg, within the city limits. But my mother grew up in Harlem and my father grew up in New Brunswick County, Virginia, in Valentines, a very rural Black farming community. He moved to New York when he was a teenager. Both of my brothers were born in New York City, then my family moved to Lynchburg and had me. When I was growing up, we’d go to New York a lot, because most of my family lived there, but I was in Lynchburg and we’d go to Valentines, where we’d all see each other for family reunions or just to visit the grandparents. That’s where everyone would gather, whether they were living in Florida, Texas, California, it didn’t matter—everyone would always come back to Valentines. Those memories really helped shape me. We’d visit New York and we’d see family all the time, and it was great, but there was something different about seeing everyone in the South—barbecuing, hanging out, relaxing, playing games, and taking care of the property. There was just a different dynamic.
RL: Well, what you’re talking about, those
it. And the games we played became ways of socializing. But how do you bring those experiences into artmaking? How did you end up working with cotton?
KB: Actually, I was surprised that the
material resonated with me. Originally my family had a lot of pine trees on their farm; they’d grow pine trees and then every once in a while they’d cut them down, and they’d get paid for it. They stopped running the farm before I was born, but there was always some residual stuff—chickens here and there, a few fruit trees, potatoes. It was about nine acres, but the first time I saw it planted I was in graduate school, and it was planted with cotton.
RL: Who planted the cotton? Was it your family?
KB: We had sharecroppers.
RL: They leased the land out to someone else?
KB: Exactly. And cotton was the cash crop for that year. I’d never experienced cotton in the growing season, like in August, when it’s just blossoming. You see the shape, but the cotton hasn’t revealed itself yet.
RL: In the beginning it starts as pretty flowers.
KB: Yes, it’s really beautiful. It has a distinct shape and look—I recognized it. I went to the house and talked to my mom about it. She was funny because we were there for a family reunion and she’s just like, “Well, that’s why we’re here, right? We’re going to be picking cotton. This is a family gathering.” But I wasn’t ready for it. It was too emotional; I felt like I didn’t understand it. Of course I understood it on an intellectual level and a historical level, but I never associated that level of history with my family. That was when I knew that I had to work with this material. I needed to know more about my relationship to it. I’m wearing cotton T-shirts and garments all the time, so I started thinking about who’s planting it and who’s picking it now. Where is it coming from? How has the industry evolved? It took about seven years for me to actual-
ly work with the material.
RL: That’s probably around the same amount of time that it took for me to work with dominoes as a material.
In the late ’90s, Project Row Houses was just getting started and a lot of people from the neighborhood were volunteering. There was a group of older men who would sit across the street every single day, under a little shade tree, playing dominoes for hours. They never came to participate with us. This went on for probably about two years. Then one day it started raining and I said, “Hey why don’t you come over and sit in
the A/C and play.” They were hesitant but they came inside. And I said, “You know, you could come over here and play all the time.” They played outside a few more times, then they went back and forth for a while, but eventually they started coming in regularly. At that point I decided that I should play a little bit, and that’s when I realized that playing dominoes was a great tool for getting to know the community. The more I played, the more I got into it. It still took seven or eight years before I started connecting to the aesthetic outside of the experience—the physicality, the way the dominoes spread across the table. Then I start taking photographs of the games, which evolved into using dominoes as a material with meaning on multiple levels—the social aspects of it, the aesthetic aspects of it, and all of that.
KB: I did the same thing. I took tons of photos of the cotton fields. And I sat with those images for years, just looking at them over and over. How do you think the photograph, the immediacy of it, functions in the development of your material language?
RL: The photograph allowed me to hone my interests. We all look at material and then let it go, but artists will hone in on something and transform it in a way that lends itself symbolically and materially beyond the experience of the everyday. If I hadn’t started photographing, it would
never have become more than an experience. Capturing objects in the photograph allowed me to remove myself from playing the game and instead just see the material as it is.
KB: You’re rapt in that moment, you need to find a way to remove yourself from it, there needs to be an agent. Taking photos
a way that abstracts it from that initial understanding until it becomes something else that opens up a possibility of thinking beyond the mundane uses of the material itself.
KB: Totally. I mean, I feel like I don’t have to describe it because you just did [laughter].
When I’m working with this material, it just happens to be in abstraction, and I can’t think about it in any other way without it being too didactic or too on the nose. There’s mystery there, you’re not giving too much away, but there are still codes and conversations that you’re having with people subliminally.
–Kevin Beasley
allowed me to engage with the landscape when I wasn’t in it. Which led me to start thinking differently about it—turning the images upside-down and just doing funky stuff with them.
RL: Which then leads to the question of how that material becomes a source for artmaking and particularly how it becomes meaningful in an abstract way. Even your use of cotton-based clothing, starting from a point where we have a certain sense of what that is traditionally, but then you’re taking it and using it in
RL: I saw your show at the Whitney [Museum of American Art, New York]. That was my first time seeing your work physically, and it was around the time I was digging in with painting. It was very influential for me because I saw that once you decide on your material, you can use it how you wish. And after you use it how you wish, particularly as more abstract forms, it opens up many more conversations.
KB: There’s so much weight there. I think about it in terms of your relation-
ship to John Biggers and the weight of all of that—those paintings, along with what you were studying architecturally and what you were thinking about, how those spaces are socially used and how deeply connected we are when we don’t even realize it. You’ve been painting for a long time, thinking about these constructions and the ways they evolve, not just on an architectural level but also about mapping and the connective tissue in all of that. A lot of this comes through abstraction because you’re trying to speak to something that may not necessarily have a full-on representation. It may not have a clear, discernible image. And how do you do that? In some ways it’s about recognizing the weight of the material and its history, recognizing how connected we are to it and how important it is to acknowledge that and move with it, to accumulate those experiences. But in terms of the generative quality, how do you make something that gets to those recesses?
RL: Those recesses go deep. For me it’s about trying to make the work as a way to explain the elements of my social practice. We can say that we know why Black communities are in the condition that they are—there’s a lot related to the law and politics, but there’s a lot beyond that. I was speaking with a political scientist at the University of Michigan, Christian Davenport, about Black wealth and the issues around it, and he said, “Have you ever considered the cost of Black wealth?” And I was like, “The cost of Black wealth? What are you talking about?” He was talking about what people lose in the process of trying to get there. For instance, in the ’90s, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development changed their approach to public housing, allowing the private sector to do it. They took down housing projects and dispersed the residents as a way of deconcentrating poverty. Later, after evaluating the success of that program, they realized that it came
at a heavy cost for Black families who moved—they lost connections to family, culture, and all that.
KB: The losses.
RL: And abstraction allows room for that stuff that we don’t know.
Recently I had a conversation with [former Whitney director] Adam Weinberg about the kind of abstraction that we’re talking about now and how
different it is from the initial art-historical movement toward abstraction. Earlier abstraction was devoid of references to life, it was just about the surface, the
material, the form. This new abstraction that people like us are dealing with is also about color and shape and form, but we’re not pushing things out, we’re bringing everything in.
KB: That’s something I think about a lot. My studio is full of things that people have given me, objects that hold meaning but are not trying to tell a specific story. And it can be multigenerational: there are objects my niece gave me that also have my grandmother’s experiences ingrained in them. When I’m working with this material, it just happens to be in abstraction, and I can’t think about it in any other way without it being too didactic or too on the nose. There’s mystery there, you’re not giving too much away, but there are still codes and conversations that you’re having with people subliminally. And abstraction feels like the most generous way to engage in that process.
RL: Yeah, in this new abstraction we’re
Earlier abstraction was devoid of references to life, it was just about the surface, the material, the form. This new abstraction that people like us are dealing with is also about color and shape and form, but we’re not pushing things out, we’re bringing everything in.
–Rick Lowe
putting ourselves out there in very real ways, with things that we care about deeply. We have to be good stewards because it connects to other people as well.
I’d be interested to hear more about your piece for Prospect New Orleans
KB: When I was entering Prospect, I had this moment where I was observing a city that I didn’t have much connection to. I didn’t want to bring an outside object in and leave it for three months and then disappear; I wanted to create something conceptually challenging and pertinent that had longevity in terms of its impact on folks there, its audience. So I used the commission money to buy a piece of property in the Lower Ninth, with the process of buying the property as the concept: the work, all of the steps involved, like the certified mail that goes out to identify who owns it, the title, all the conversations with real estate agents, talking to people about retaining their land when they came back after Katrina. All of that would be the work itself, and then I thought whatever happened to the land would just be a byproduct of this much more interesting, deeper thing. But once you do that, conceptually it’s wide open because you’re leaving yourself available for whatever happens next. And that’s when the communal part came in, people were like, “You have this land now, what are you going to do with it? How can we help?” I knew I needed to get the utilities going so there was water and electricity. We planted some things because it’s land. And there needed to be free Wi-Fi for connectivity purposes, on a conceptual level, thinking about this as being something that people can have access to from anywhere in the world.
RL: Young folks often ask, “How do you get to do these things?” and it was always just, “I take the next step.” You take a leap of faith and see what happens next. And along the way, incredible things can happen. You took that leap of faith and said, “I’m going to buy a plot of land.” Then you have all of these things to respond to: you’ve got to research the land, and once you have the land, what are you going to do with it? And that allows social relationships to come into being that you would never have anticipated.
KB: 1,000 percent. And those relationships are predicated on something different—everyone knows it’s a conceptual idea, but some neighbors, trying to wrap their head around it, say, “So you
just bought this land and the buying of it was to disseminate information?” And it’s like, Yeah, that’s kind of it. But the way it evolves truly feels organic. It just leaves all of these other possibilities open, and the relationships you have with the community are based on those kinds of possibilities. Versus a corporate entity that comes in, makes a bunch of big promises about what they’re going to do and how they’re going to change the world, and then none of that gets accomplished because it doesn’t actually address the needs. It doesn’t come from a point of rigor or criticality.
RL: And it also doesn’t come from a perspective of belief in the possibility of people to rise up when an opportunity is
in front of them. You didn’t give them this thing; you created a context they could respond to. I started the Watts House Project in LA in the ’90s, and one of the things that was fascinating about that neighborhood at the time was that there had been three master plans for the community over twenty years or so—they’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and nothing had happened. People wanted to plan things out, as opposed to planting seeds. And you just planted a seed. You’ve planted a seed and it will find its way to grow. And in the best-case scenario, you’ll be able to help water it in some way.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO BEAUTY SUPPLY
BY RYUAN JOHNSON
Looking at the work of Allana Clarke and Lauren Halsey, I feel a deep connection to the beauty supply store, a pivotal institution in Black hair culture. This space serves as a mecca nurturing transformation, enhancement, and self-esteem. The beauty supply store is almost synonymous with the experience of being a Black woman.
Both Halsey and Clark represent Black hair culture in unique and compelling ways. Halsey’s work glorifies and preserves the vibrance of braiding hair and the creativity of traditional Black hairstyles. Her art showcases Black hair culture in a fantastical, empowering, and culturally rich light. It represents the avant-garde, free, and expressive nature of Black hair, beautifully capturing these styles as a time capsule, offering a glimpse into the evolving era of Black hair.
I feel a deep connection to the beauty supply store, a pivotal institution in Black hair culture. This space serves as a mecca nurturing transformation, enhancement, and self-esteem. —Ryuan Johnson
Clark on the other hand focuses on track glue, a product used in Black hair-styling. Her sculptures made from this glue critique its use, because, despite allowing for expressive hairstyles, it can cause traction alopecia. Clark uses track glue as a metaphor for the pressures Black women face in society. She speaks to the way we sometimes conform to beauty standards even if they harm us, pointing out the struggle between beauty and survival in a world where hair can influence our opportunities and relationships. Track glue represents this tension.
Clark’s work is about the lengths we go to fit in and be seen as special, often by aligning with unnatural standards. It critiques how society dictates our worth through beauty standards. Halsey’s art celebrates the creativity and heritage of Black hair, while Clark examines its complex effects. Both artists are connected by the beauty supply store, the only place to find both braiding hair and track glue.
“The Gospel according to the Beauty Supply” is my response to the impact of the beauty supply store on both artists’ work and on Black hair culture. I compare the beauty supply store to a church because it’s a place where we go to transform, feel better about ourselves, and feel safe. Finding the right pack of hair, the right earrings, or the right do-rag can be as uplifting as a spiritual experience, making the beauty supply store a place of worship in its own right. But like religion, the beauty supply store has its darker side: sometimes we go there to conform out of insecurity, and some of its products, like track glue or perms, can have long-term health effects. Despite this, the beauty supply store is a crucial part of Black life, offering comfort and connection even when it demands conformity.
The church bells ring I go in because I feel this place knows me
Bonnets sacred as halos
Rush to receive Communion
We looking to find god or Blue Magic grease
No difference
Where we from
$20s, $50s, hunnids pass in offering trays
We tithe for salvation Or Knotless braids
as if there’s a difference
Where we from Everyone in the aisles
Jumping, exalting, beaming
We all feel the Holy Spirit
Or a fresh bundle
Or a new outlook on life
Or a Dr. Miracle’s hair-growth oil
We don’t know there to be a difference
DEVIN B. JOHNSON
DIALLO SIMON-PONTE: So Devin, first and foremost I want to say it’s a pleasure to be in conversation with you, given we’ve known each other for some time. How are you feeling?
DEVIN B. JOHNSON: I’m feeling really good. I feel blessed to be in this space and to be able to open up our relationship in this way.
DSP: You live and work in Brooklyn now, but you’re from California.
DBJ: Yes, I was born in Los Angeles, and shortly after that my family and I moved to San Diego. We lived there until I was ten years old, and I was lucky to have had some early art experiences there; my grandfather would take me after school to drawing classes. He’d pick me up in his old Pontiac and drop me off at the studio in this plaza, and he would just sit outside for two hours while I played around with pastels, oil, acrylic, and all that stuff for the very first time. It was really a space where a lot of my needs and interests were nurtured by my parents and grandparents.
DSP: It’s beautiful that they supported your curiosities in that way. Then you moved back to LA, right? I remember you telling me about encountering the Underground Museum, and how that operated as a lighthouse for you at a formative time.
world could look like?
DBJ: Absolutely. It was around that time when I learned a lot about Pope.L, Kerry James Marshall, and Theaster Gates, to name a few. It was there that I first saw their work in person. I was learning more about contemporary art everywhere I could. I was doing a lot of investigation on YouTube, the University of
ration from the Underground Museum and the online media I was able to engage with, I decided to make work that would then be my portfolio to submit to an MFA program. I was so emboldened; I felt that whatever MFA I chose—I chose just one—if I got in, it was God given. If I didn’t, then it was also God-given. I just did one Hail Mary application to Pratt,
DBJ: Right after I graduated college I wanted to learn more about contemporary art. I was going out of my comfort zone, and outside my neighborhood, Woodland Hills, to downtown to find out more about the museum circuit there. I started meeting people, and this space in Crenshaw called the Underground Museum kept coming up. This was shortly after Noah Davis, the artist who founded the museum with his wife, Karon Davis, passed away; his
YouTube [laughter]—I was able to simply type “Theaster Gates” or “Henry Taylor” and learn more about who these people are and what their practices are. More generally, I was interested in learning more about conceptual artists and how to think more broadly across the spectrum of ideas, outside the realm of paint.
DSP: Is this what led you to Pratt for your graduate degree, and to New York?
DBJ: I received my undergraduate degree in 2015, and for two years after that I had a job working as an Uber driver and
and I had no doubt in my mind that I was going to get accepted. I got the acceptance letter in February and moved to New York.
DSP: And so now in New York, how did your practice begin to evolve and develop?
I was interested in the weathering of the surfaces and how I could extend paint to look like the weathering, decaying, metal erosion or corrosion that’s indicative of time passing.
dying wish was to have the Underground Museum be a place that serves the community, and it really succeeded in that. In my life, it became a place to have discourse, to see films, and to really connect with others with an interest in contemporary art. I appreciate what the space did for me.
DSP: Would you say it shaped your ideas of what the Black contemporary art
I did Instacart shopping. I did that to pay my bills and pay my gas money and pay for materials. Driving around LA, being stuck in traffic, I had such a long time to think for myself, and at twenty-four I was like, This cannot be the end. I have to figure out how to challenge myself. And so when I was driving around, I was listening to lectures with Thelma Golden and other people. With all that inspi-
DBJ: At the time, I was rendering a lot more in my painting, working toward something more figurative. During my first semester of MFA, this was one of the things that I felt I had to quickly dismantle, thinking more in depth about the ideas and concepts of my practice, the whys and the scaffolding of what my practice was based on. And I was around influential professors: Greg Drasler, Torkwase Dyson, and Cullen Washington Jr. All of them challenged their students to think and talk about their work in a more philosophical manner. Dyson, for instance, has this structure around Black compositional thought that follows the ethos of why the paintings are what they are. That was inspirational as a way to identify what the scaffolding of a painting could be.
DSP: At this moment in your painting practice, how would you describe the
relationship between figuration and abstraction? What does that investigation look like?
DBJ: For a couple of years I was trying to figure out, What is the voice that I’m pushing? What are the ideas that I’m challenging? Can I go beyond what the conventional ideas of figuration are? To work through these questions I needed to give myself room to switch between the figurative and the abstract. In my figurative works there had to be a balance between chance and technicality, but in the process of reaching that balance, I’d encounter frustrations, and I’d need to create in a more abstract mode. Doing this, I’d often be startled by what abstraction allowed: it was real and it was raw. DSP: I want to touch on the passage of time in your work. The surfaces of your paintings feel like they’ve undergone a chemical treatment, like you’ve worked to weather them— the canvases have undergone some sort of temporal change. How would you say you’re wielding temporality as you paint?
DBJ: One of the main takeaways that I first identified when I moved into the city was, How does one interact with the city and the landscape? In LA you’re confined by the seatbelt of your car and your vision is stipulated by your car window—there’s a distance to integrat-
ing with your space; in New York, moving around on foot, a new vantage point is opened up regarding space and time. I was so interested in the textures, the entropy, energy, and electricity, involved in the arteries and capillaries of a bustling tightknit city. And what technique can really show how time and how entropy work? Graffiti, the degradation of buildings, and the tear-aways of ads in the subway station—those textures are indicative of a moving city. That’s a landscape’s memory. And how do the filters of the individual also dictate how they move and see things in a city or in a place? More specifically, after I came back from Senegal, the city was barred up in a particular way where you couldn’t go into buildings. You couldn’t go into your favorite places.
DSP: Because you came back from Senegal in 2020, at the height of the pandemic?
DBJ: Right, I was in Senegal for four months, and I witnessed the social up-
Devin B. Johnson,
Devin B. Johnson, Head Adornment
heaval that resulted from the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery from afar. It was an eye-opening experience, and for me as an artist, I thought about that sound bite that floats around the Internet with Nina Simone saying something like, “If you’re an artist, how are you talking to the changing times?” So when I came back to New York, things were in this liminal space. The boarded-up riot signs and the graffiti of all those things that had been taking place in months prior pushed me to think about the cathartic and ambiguous nature of reality at that moment. So the paintings became a mirror of that, riddled with grief and anxiety. But through that, I started to figure out how to stretch the plasticity of my paint to mirror the type of synesthesia of emotions that I was feeling, stretching out the painting to be viscous and watery, to think about crying or think about dread or think about a long, dissonant chord. I started experimenting with different concoctions, watering down pigments and pouring it all down and using spray paint and pouring other pigments down and covering things up. I was interested in the weathering of the surfaces and how I could extend paint to look like the weathering, decaying, metal erosion or corrosion that’s indicative of time passing.
DSP: I know that J. M. W. Turner is a big influence on you, the way he pushes the crescendos and brushstrokes of light and shadow.
DBJ: Turner is so interesting because his works are figurative but ultimately they’re very abstract: the whooshes of color and the inferences of space. He creates these dreamy spaces. There’s this void, but there is also shape to
weigh down the void. And this quality he achieved has provided a key in my own work in abstraction: I think about space and void, but there has to be shape and structure.
DSP: It’s clear—this is the scaffolding you mentioned previously.
DBJ: This is my scaffolding, yes, of course. DSP: Two of your paintings in Social Abstraction, Rough Rub and Diesel Clad Ensemble [both 2024], are directly related to each other and play off each other through color and form.
DBJ: Rough Rub was the first painting that came out of the conjuring of this series. It was made in between other paintings as just like a bup-bup-bup. And it was weird because the colors are ones that I
don’t typically work with in abstraction. DSP: You’re also showing a ceramic work. How did you begin exploring this medium?
DBJ: In undergrad, even, I was always straddling painting with ceramic courses. The hard part about ceramics, ultimately, is access to a studio. So when I was able to do my MFA, I enrolled in a few ceramic classes. My entry point wasn’t necessarily throwing anything on the wheel; I’ve always been more drawn to the hand-built. Beyond that, my interest lies in figuring out how I can make something sculptural with enough surface to think in a painterly way. I came up with these slab-built forms that I shaped into cylinders, composited with other clay remnants, and collaged together. I kept making more of those cylinder vases, or freestanding vessels, that I then personified with the likeness of my lips. But there’s also this connection to other parts of the world where ceramics are made in the context of goods and design. They’re used to decorate or even uplift or add color to a space. The Surma people in the Omo Valley in Ethiopia live along the river, and they decorate their bodies with the mud from the banks of the river; it’s a way for them to signify beautification for themselves to attract a mate. I find it interesting to have a connection where the personification of these lips and these painted vessels become these beautiful things that connect us to the earth.
Kyle, we’re at a rehearsal for your upcoming debut at the Park Avenue Armory, and you have another performance coming up for Social Abstraction in LA.
I was thinking about how to bring dance into this primarily visual-art conversation—I wanted to add a new, embodied layer, and to view abstraction in a Black queered context.
—KYLE ABRAHAM
KYLE ABRAHAM: [Laughter]
Yes, I’m often working on many projects at once. The Armory commission is called Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful and will premiere in December. Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful is an evening-length dance work created collaboratively with the visual artist Cao Yuxi (james), the lighting and scenic designer Dan Scully, the costume designer Karen Young, a cast of sixteen dancers, and all set to a commissioned score composed and performed by yMusic. I’m processing what it means to age and what it means to change . . . or to pray for a change . . . personal change . . . and explore, in the most present way, what those transitions feel like and physically look like.
CT: I’m looking forward to it! How about the performance you’re planning for Social Abstraction? How has your approach there developed?
KA: I was thinking about, a) the term “social abstraction” and what that means for me being a Black, queer choreographer, and b) the relationship between dance and the art that will be behind, next to, and in front of it. The first work from the exhibition that I saw was Devin B. Johnson’s Congealed & Stuck [2024]. I started thinking about its color palette and that sparked some new ideas— as random as this sounds, I thought about a baritone saxophone, about deep but experimental sax sounds like those of the composer Shelley Washington. I dove through her catalog to find a world in which I wanted to create movement.
Another motivation was to demonstrate choreographic range as a way to introduce a new audience to my work. I was thinking about how to bring dance into this primarily visual-art conversation—I wanted to add a new, embodied layer, and to view abstraction in a Black queered context. So I’m presenting an excerpt of this new duet that we’re currently calling 2x4, with music by Shelley Washington in a draft form. And then we’re also presenting
a work of mine called Show Pony [2018]. As I engaged with more of the art in the exhibition, I thought about what colors, what textures, come alive, and how can I represent that through dance? Donovan Reed, one of the senior company members, will perform that work. The costume is a metallic unitard that I thought would be striking, but in a way very different from the Nina Simone solo that I’m going to be dancing myself, which is “Ne Me Quitte Pas” [1965]. It’s a solo that I made for a Carrie Mae Weems exhibition, a retrospective, in Nashville, Tennessee, back in 2012. That was choreographed in response to the beautiful sense of poetry
and isolation you get in her work—a solo study in figure. When I decided in 2020 to make a suite of works to Nina Simone’s music, I was interested in “Little Girl Blue” [1957] which is a piece of music that I’d made a solo to in graduate school, many, many years before that—nobody needs to know how long [laughter]—but many years before that. I wanted to revisit that idea with Gianna Theodore, who dances in my company, because Gianna is immersed in B-girl and hip-hop culture and all things social dance. This allowed me to think about what story I could tell not only through her hip-hop vocabulary but also through contemporary, postmod-
ern, release technique, ballet, just the kitchen sink of dance. Put all that in there to connect with a sense of longing and love and innocence. And then for the new duet, I’m not sure what the costume is going to be just yet, but I’m leaning toward a 1940s kind of vibe.
CT: Could you say more about how the color and tone of not just visual work but also music translate for you? Is there a specific process that comes alive in your body that you then translate to others?
kind of guttural. And that’s also what I’m hearing in that baritone sax—that guttural sound. Now it’s become a consideration for the costuming. I want it to really connect.
CT: To match the textures of what’s on the body as well?
KA: Well, usually I like to play with the relation to the artwork’s tone and textures rather than to translate directly. You see
and pink. I was taking a lot of art classes growing up and my sister and I were going to Carnegie Mellon as kids, doing special Saturday classes and things. I’ve always loved visual art and I think there was probably a period in my life when I thought that was where I was going. My IB [International Baccalaureate] project in high school was all visual art and poetry; that was what I was working on at
As a movement practitioner and maker, anything I experience—whether I’m looking at my friends at church camp moving around the floor, looking crazy, doing whatever they considered to be social dancing—I might put in a dance. —KYLE ABRAHAM
KA: Tone is really at the heart of all things. If you’re a real music person, and you love Brandy like I love Brandy, it’s the tone that really sets her voice apart. In the case of the new duet, that’s been a big part of the story for me; I needed to figure out what the tone is. And responding to Johnson’s work, as I was mentioning, I see this textured brown tone that makes me feel
that with Donovan’s costume for Show Pony; it’s this metallic unitard that’s ridiculous in the best way. And I think it’s going to complement Rick Lowe’s paintings, with their intersecting lines of color. CT: Do you have any early experiences or memories with color or visual art that stand out to you?
KA: Oh, jeez. Well, I knew as a very young person that my favorite two colors were gray and pink, and they still are gray
the time. So I think it’s all part of my journey of becoming a choreographer. Color in particular—I guess there’s some irony because people will say gray’s not a color, but it’s my favorite. That also could tell you about the contrarian that I am [laughs].
CT: It’s interesting you say gray’s your favorite color. Queerness as I understand it embraces ambiguity or “gray areas.” There’s this settling into ambiguity instead
need to trust each other both physically and emotionally. How do you help build this trust and bring the audience along on the journey?
KA: I’ll begin with different types of workshop ideas with the dancers. Maybe we do some trust exercises. We’ll do some internalized storytelling where there are no words; you’re just communicating with your eyes, or maybe just holding someone’s hand without actually saying anything, and seeing what happens. We’re going to do some of those exercises the second half of the day; they don’t know that.
With this new duet, one of the things is playing with tension and support between these two dancers, and the gen-
CT: Yeah, she comes right out the gate every time.
KA: And that solo comes out the gate, so [laughs] it’s in contrast to Nina Simone and what we’re working with there, the subtlety and vulnerability—they’re very, very different. I mean, there’s some subtlety that we’re playing with in Jlin, for sure, but it’s at a different temperature.
CT: Are there any key elements in an A.I.M performance? You’ve spoken about love being a consistent theme before. Are there others that come to mind?
of reaching for something predetermined or black and white.
KA: Definitely. Yesterday I was doing some writing about all my self-identifiers, such as Black and queer, and realizing that in this free-write exercise there were many contradictions and I had to be aware of them. For example, using the word “coarse” as a descriptive term and thinking about the positives and the negatives of how people over time would use that word in relationship to Blackness. I will say that as a queer person in art and life, I just like people. I don’t feel like I’m confined by a type of dancer to work with or a type of person to be romantically intimate with. There are so many things that make an experience rich. So I don’t want to ever be confined by any one thing.
CT: When you’re working with dancers I imagine they really
der dynamics are variable. Four dancers have learned the duet, and for this particular engagement I put two of them together. But I have a feeling when we actually premiere the full-length work, it won’t be the same pairing and the genders will be different. I usually cast based on the qualitative way people move, not anything else.
CT: I’m curious, as you’re thinking about how these performances will appear in the gallery, what kinds of dialogues are developing between the artwork, the space, and the performers?
KA: I’m thinking about several things. One is space and proximity. How close will people be to the dancers? How close will we be to the artwork? Knowing that is a delicate and dangerous thing. I’m thinking about order: How do I want to introduce your audience to whatever I’m sharing? What journey can we take them on in a way that’s surprising but not jarring? The music in Show Pony is Jlin, but if you know Jlin, that’s a really strong sound.
KA: I do think there’s a bit of a sense of isolation in my work, however one might choose to take it. That always makes its way through. I also like to include multifaceted ways of representing Black queer culture. I don’t think it’s monolithic, so whatever it is you’re seeing, even if you’re seeing one of my ballets, it’s still very that. My choreography will have moves like face snatches or the nae-nae for New City Ballet. We can mix all these genres. We can put it in [Alvin] Ailey and in these A.I.M pieces. When Donovan is doing Show Pony there will probably be a little vogue moment in there too. I like to look at movement and culture in a way that doesn’t have to be so literally black and white, it can—oh, look at the gray here [laughter]. I’m saying that this is my experience. I was joking with one of my friends earlier in the day about the raunchy rap groups I used to listen to back in the day, BWP, HWA—I probably forgot what those acronyms are for—Jacki-O, just like raunchy, raunchy, but at the same time I was also listening to Morrissey and the Smiths. None of these things makes me any less Black or any less queer or any other thing. As a movement practitioner and maker, anything I experience—whether I’m looking at my friends at church camp moving around the floor, looking crazy, doing whatever they considered to be social dancing—I might put in a dance. I’m not going to say it’s my culture but I’ll say it’s part of my cultural experience, because it’s something that I grew up witnessing over the years, at social events. When I began learning dance formally, I had the space to explore and make outside of a set vocabulary of steps. If there’s something that I don’t feel wellversed in, I’ll probably ask someone to try and make sense of it; if there’s a calling, I’ll go there.
Kyle Abraham performance: Photos: Pushpin Films
Kevin Beasley artworks: Photos: Maris Hutchinson
Allana Clarke artwork: Photo: Jeff McLane
Theaster Gates artwork: Photo: Josh White
Cy Gavin artworks: Photos: Owen Conway and Maris Hutchinson
Cy Gavin installation view: Photo: Jeff McLane
Alteronce Gumby artworks: Photos: Owen Conway
Lauren Halsey artworks: Photos: Allen Chen
Kahlil Robert Irving artworks: Photos: Christopher Bauer
Devin B. Johnson artworks: Photos: Owen Conway
Rick Lowe artworks: Photos: Thomas Dubrock
Eric N. Mack artwork: Photo: Jeff McLane
Cameron Welch artworks: Photos: Maris Hutchinson
Amanda Williams artwork: Photos: Jeff McLane
GAGOSIAN & SOCIAL ABSTRACTION, THE THIRD IN A SERIES OF STAND-ALONE THEMED SUPPLEMENTS.
Historian and critic Julian Rose’s new book Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 2024) tracks evolutions and developments within the field of architecture through a series of in-depth interviews with the architects behind some of the most celebrated and innovative museums of the last fifty years. In celebration of this achievement, we share an excerpt from the author’s introduction to the book.
CULTURE
What is it, exactly, that architects do? The intuitively obvious answer—that they make buildings—doesn’t withstand more than a few moments of reflection. The real business of putting buildings together, after all, falls to contractors, laborers, and practitioners of the various construction trades; an entire economic sector, the construction industry, has arisen to provide this service. Architects, meanwhile, work at a remove, their efforts mediated by the various forms of representation—models, drawings, renderings—that are the actual products of their occupation. So is their contribution a higher-order one, requiring us to take a step back for it to come into focus? Architects make plans, architects design things. Perhaps, then, it is their thinking that shapes the built environment; perhaps they are the ones responsible for the tex-
ture of our cities and the character of our interventions in the landscape.
But this idea, too, collapses under scrutiny. Today, most cities and landscapes are shaped by forces much larger than the vision of an architect— by politics, by the real estate market, above all, by the imperatives of industrial and economic development. In this broader domain, architects vie with clients, investors, regulators, bureaucrats, project managers, technical consultants, and a host of other interested parties, while countless construction projects around the globe proceed without any input from architects at all. When architects are involved, their ineffable contributions tend to be concentrated at the top end of the market, where they can add a signature flourish to a building whose underlying parameters have already been mostly dictated by more concrete constraints or more heavily vested interests. The real answer, then, seems to be that today’s architects are creators of exceptional spaces in an all-too-literal sense:
narrow specialists engaged primarily in highprofile projects, routinely enlisted for place making and brand building but largely alienated from the physical fabric of everyday life.
Their arrival at this point has not been sudden; it is rooted in architecture’s tangled relationship to modernity as it has unfolded across more than a century. Modern architecture promised to draw out the best from the revolutionary forces of modernity—the radical technological innovations, the rapid growth of new cities, the reshuffling of entrenched social orders—to build a better world from the ground up. In doing so, it simultaneously promised to ameliorate many of modernity’s worst aspects—the urban poverty, the environmental devastation, the social alienation—claiming the power to engender social progress through spatial means. But this brave new world failed to materialize, while the forces of modernization only accelerated, continually reshaping physical reality—along with its underlying social, economic, and political
Previous spread, clockwise from top left:
Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2006.
Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015. Photo: courtesy Renzo Piano Building Workshop Architects/photo by Nic Lehoux
Gehry Partners, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2014.
Selldorf Architects, rendering of Frick Collection renovation and expansion, New York, anticipated completion 2024. Image: courtesy Selldorf Architects
systems—in ways that rendered architecture’s inefficacy ever more apparent.
Prescient observers have long understood this trajectory. Manfredo Tafuri was among the twentieth century’s most precise elucidators of the relationship between buildings and the societies that produce them. Over fifty years ago, in his book Architecture and Utopia , Tafuri set out to write a comprehensive study of the relationship between modern architecture and modern economic systems, undertaking what he called “the precise identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture.” He concluded that by the final decades of the twentieth century, architecture had been reduced “to form without utopia; in the best cases, to sublime uselessness.”
At first glance, the art museum would seem to be the apotheosis of this progression. Of all the new buildings constructed around the world in recent decades, museums have tended to be the most iconic, designed by the most celebrated architects. One of the primary functions of a new museum building is, in a sense, to simply look new and exciting, generating interest and gaining attention through expressive architecture and aesthetic innovation. And so the museum has earned a reputation as the most sculptural of buildings, a place for architects—unhindered by the practical constraints that might bog down more pedestrian building types—to give their creativity full reign. Tafuri was no optimist, but it seems unlikely that even he could have predicted the extent to which this particular brand of sublime uselessness would be smoothly instrumentalized by the ascendant and globalized capitalism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with museums regularly conscripted to drive urban regeneration, attract tourism, and stimulate economic growth.
And yet the core premise of this book is that art museums are significant for an entirely different reason: rather than being symptomatic of the plight of architects today, these buildings offer one of the few remaining opportunities for architects to realize the full potential of their calling.
Over more than half a century, the sixteen architects interviewed here have designed dozens of museums across five continents. These include any number of undeniably paradigm-shifting projects: among them Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Centre in Paris, completed in 1977, which radically reinvented the social function of the museum in the
wake of the upheavals of May 1968; Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, completed in 1997, which catalyzed such a dramatic regeneration of its urban context that the eponymous “Bilbao effect” was coined to describe the transformative economic potential of high-profile architecture for new cultural institutions; Kazuyo Sejima’s 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, completed in 2004, which deployed pioneering techniques of glass construction to explore new immersive effects, rethinking how museum architecture might shape the experience of art in the new century; and David Adjaye’s Museum of West African Art, currently under construction in Benin City, which not only breaks with the historical legacy of the European museum but also seeks to actively undo it, reimagining the art museum as a vital piece of cultural infrastructure in a postcolonial society.
Several of the sixteen architects included in this book were already working when Tafuri delivered his bleak diagnosis; a few had their first museum projects underway. All have wrestled, in one way or another, with the conditions he identified. Many were taught or mentored by the generation of pioneering modernists who had dreamed first of using architecture to catalyze social change in the cataclysmic decades leading up to the Second World War, then of rebuilding a better world through architecture in the era after. They came of age acutely aware of the vacuum left by the failure of those aspirations—the loss of purpose that followed from modern architecture’s inability to deliver on its promises. Even those who began their practices later, at the turn of the twenty-first century, were deeply affected by the subsequent failure of any definitive version of a postmodern architecture to take root, by the field’s ongoing inability to produce a cohesive movement that offered a body of thought about not just how architecture should look but also the role it should play in society. And all acknowledge grappling with the increasing commercial pressures on their work, their struggles to create meaningful architecture in the face of the economic forces that are more and more brazenly dictating the patterns of growth and development. Yet all, too, describe museums as a vital exception to these conditions. Each of them has made museum design a cornerstone of their practice, and each describes crucial ways in which the museum occupies an anomalous status in the field of contemporary architecture, offering
Shohei Shigematsu/OMA, rendering of the New Museum of Contemporary Art expansion, New York, anticipated completion 2025. Image: courtesy OMA/bloomimages.de
Hood Design Studio, de Young Museum, San Francisco, 2005. Photo: courtesy Hood Design Studio
Right:
David Chipperfield Architects, Neue
Nationalgalerie refurbishment, Berlin, 2021. Photo: courtesy David Chipperfield Architects and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021/ photo by Simon Menges
opportunities for reflection and experimentation not viable in other areas of their work. What makes these buildings so different from others today? Collectively, the conversations in Building Culture present one fundamental answer, profound in its simplicity: the museum cannot be optimized. At its most banal, this means merely that there is no one “best” way to design an art museum. But, more specifically, it means that the art museum does not present a problem that can be “solved” in terms of the parameters that developers are so fond of. Both the real estate market and the construction industry prioritize efficiency, seeking to eliminate risk, minimize costs, and maximize returns. This, in turn, overwhelmingly incentivizes predetermined, standardized solutions that benefit from economies of scale. Particularly on large projects, architects—and, for that matter, contractors, engineers, and the host of other consultants involved in today’s complex construction projects— speak less of “design” or even “construction” than of the “building procurement process,” a neologism encompassing the multinational supply chains, worldwide networks of labor and material, and dozens of specialized subfields that must be properly administered to produce a building in the current global economy. An architect planning, say, a new office tower or apartment complex might, in consultation with a developer and a contractor, weigh labor costs in the local market against availability and shipping costs of primary structural materials. The architect checks these against basic programmatic requirements such as the maximum buildable area or the minimum allowable floor-to-floor height. Then they factor in a few client preferences that might be tailored to a specific market—perhaps luxury finishes in the lobby or an iconic silhouette on the skyline. Finally, the results of this calculus are crystallized into a physical configuration that is not so much designed —in the sense that it is the result of creative deliberation on the nature of the project, the opportunities it presents, or the needs it might serve—as optimized , in the sense that it provides the greatest quantity of the most profitable space possible in a given context. No wonder, then, that, as several architects lament in these interviews, buildings and cities tend to look the same around the world today. Contemporary architecture, like most products of globalization, is shaped
The more voices that seek to shape the future of museums, the more complex the conversations about their design and purpose, the more centrally important the role of the architect becomes.
–Julian Rose
far more by the process of its origin than by the place of its destination, reflecting the general conditions under which it is produced rather than the specific context in which it will be experienced.
Museums certainly enjoy a privileged status within this ecology of development; usually bigbudget, high-status buildings, they are not subject to the same ruthless value engineering as typical architectural projects. But the crucial distinction between museums and other buildings is not one of degree but of kind. It is not simply that more money tends to be available for museum architecture, but that museum architecture creates value in a fundamentally different way. A museum succeeds according to a nebulous convergence of prestige, cultural capital, and soft power; its purpose is not easily reducible to the blunt dollars-per-square-foot commodification of space that drives most architectural production. This irreducibility, in turn, leaves the door open to an almost infinite variety of architectural propositions. The essential program of a museum is, after all, deceptively simple: it is a place for visitors to encounter works of art. But what is the best way to encounter a work of art?
Each of the architects interviewed in Building Culture has a different answer. In fact, not only does each have a different vision of what an art museum should be, each has also invented a different method to create it. One works primarily in plan because they insist on the primary importance of circulation, arguing that it is the visitor’s
trajectory through the museum that sets the tone of their experience. A second prefers to work in section, arguing that the varied proportions of the gallery spaces in relation to the works they contain are all-important. Another eschews drawings altogether for physical models, believing that the ethereal interactions between sunlight and natural materials are what produce a superlative exhibition space. Yet another contends that encounters with works of art are meaningful only when framed by other forms of activation and engagement, emphasizing the role played in their design process by conversations with members of the various communities a museum will serve.
Inevitably, no matter which approach is chosen, finite resources must be allocated and tough decisions must be made. These decisions are inherently subjective, based on the architect’s consideration of a shifting cloud of variables that ranges from the building’s context to its collection, its intended audience to its mission and identity. These are not decisions that can be guided by objective metrics like floor area ratio, and one architect’s solution for a museum in a given context cannot be easily compared to another’s somewhere else. This form of decision making prioritizes the expertise of the architect because it demands solutions that are resolutely architectural.
Museums are by no means the most complex buildings confronting architects today—airports, hospitals, and any number of urban infrastructure projects come to mind—but their complexity is surely the most deeply architectural, in the sense that it plays out at human scale, in terms of space and material, light and movement, in the densely intricate choreography of physical encounters between bodies and works of art. Here, the success of a design might hinge on the way sunlight glances off a vaulted ceiling; how a well-placed corner first obscures, then reveals, an adjacent room; the subtle resonance that emerges between a gallery’s stone floor and the materiality of the artifacts within; or in a delicate interweaving of circulation and exhibition space, subtly reminding viewers that their visit to the museum is both an aesthetic and a social experience.
It bears emphasis that none of this has much to do with the Tafurian caricature of the architectas-sculptor, the monumental form maker whose main role is to serve as a kind of urban decorator, even if that version of architectural authorship has long been associated with museum design. The working processes described in this book are intensely collaborative and profoundly synthetic. They are rooted in the architects’ broad base of technical and cultural knowledge, which allows them to engage meaningfully with the full range of participants in the long and complex process of conceiving and constructing a new museum, from artists to engineers, contractors to curators; they highlight the architects’ ability to consolidate a vast array of inputs and constraints into a singular solution. Ultimately, the conversations unfolding in these pages reveal less about the creative genius of the architect than about the stubborn agency of architecture itself, its ability to articulate material and spatial configurations that frame our perceptions, shape our interactions, and establish the horizons of our experience.
This is a mode of architectural authorship much better suited to the twenty-first century. By now it is clear that the Bilbao effect was not just an economic and cultural phenomenon, but also a historical one. It was rooted not only in the shift from
industrial to postindustrial economies in developed nations, but also in an emergent post–Cold War world order dominated by a new Europe and an apparently unchallenged United States, and it was underpinned by certain glib and boosterish assumptions about the nature of both culture and political power as well as the relationship between them. A quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, these assumptions have been challenged by both a global recession and a global pandemic, as well as a host of other political and environmental crises. These shifts have led to shrinking budgets for culture as well as soul searching within many institutions now reevaluating their roles in society. In some circles, rumblings have begun about a “post-Bilbao” era, as extravagant architecture has come to seem troubling—at best, quietly complicit, uncritically serving to reinforce existing power structures; at worst, actively exclusive, serving to intimidate and alienate broad swaths of the public.
And yet, as this volume amply demonstrates, the pace of museum construction has continued to accelerate worldwide. Part of the explanation for the
continued growth of museums is simply that these rumblings come mainly from the regions where the Bilbao effect originated and has now run its course; its transformative magic is still fervently sought by other nations in other regions in other phases of economic and political development. (Tellingly, Gehry’s next Guggenheim franchise is under construction in Abu Dhabi, set to open twentyeight years after his building in Bilbao.)
But even in areas where monumental architecture is no longer quite the thing, museums continue to renovate, expand, and rebuild at a brisk pace. The reason is twofold. On the one hand, new buildings remain the most efficient way for institutions to extract wealth from their donors. The twenty-first century has seen a massive redistribution of wealth across the globe, creating a turbocharged donor class. Museum directors and development offices know that the surest way to draw large sums from deep pockets is to offer a building or a wing or a new gallery to which a prospective patron can affix their name. Meanwhile, as museums become more closely intertwined with financial networks and so more corporate in their operations, they become more beholden to capitalist mantras like grow or die . Nor is the flow of benefits from donors to museums unidirectional. As the global art market surges in sync with the increased concentration of wealth in the hands of major collectors, there is a constant threat that booms will swell into bubbles and investment will teeter into speculation, particularly for contemporary art that does not yet have an established historical pedigree. But by hanging an artwork on its walls, a museum offers tangible proof of its worth. In return for investment from art collectors, then, museums stabilize the value of the very goods their patrons collect, serving as something like the central banks of the art market.
On the other hand, as more and more museums come under political pressure from various constituencies—artists, activists, the public, even their own staffs—to expand, reorganize, and reframe their collections in order to present new narratives about culture and history, these reconfigurations will inevitably create new spatial requirements for their galleries. Similarly, as museums increasingly seek to engage new audiences in new ways, they will inevitably require new physical spaces for this expanded social programming.
Although these various economic and cultural forces all drive growth, they do so in sometimes violently contradictory ways. Yet paradoxically, the more voices that seek to shape the future of museums, the more complex the conversations about their design and purpose, the more centrally important the role of the architect becomes. It is the architect who is responsible for mediating among the many different stakeholders in a given museum, and ultimately it is the architect who must translate their manifold and occasionally opposed ideas into a coherent physical form.
Even in a post-Bilbao era, architecture seems likely to remain central to the evolving identity of the art museum because important questions about who and what these buildings are for will always require architectural answers. The art museum, in other words, is grounded in the two alchemical translations, recursive and omnidirectional, that lie at the heart of architectural praxis: from the conceptual to the actual—the instantiation of ideas and aspirations in concrete form—and from the spatial to the social—the complex feedback between the physical configuration of a building and the modes of inhabitation and interaction that unfold within it.
Opposite: David Chipperfield Architects, Turner Contemporary, Margate, England, 2011. Photo: courtesy David Chipperfield Architects/photo by Simon Menges
LIZZI BOUGATSOS So, Spencer, you’ve been a dear friend and confidant to me since 1997. We’ve collaborated on curating exhibitions like The Living Theater [2015], on playing music with my band I.U.D., and on acting projects. Endless collaborations, from recording music to countless studio visits.
SPENCER SWEENEY Titling drawings and paintings.
LB True. I’m also honored that you’ve made drawings and paintings of me. I remember the first time I met you, you had a pencil mustache like John Waters and you were wearing your famous—
SS I was wearing the tight pants, was it?
LB Well, can I say it? You were wearing very tight pants that were duct taped.
SS At the sides, yeah. That was some kind of DIY sartorial trip I was on. They weren’t making tight pants for men in the ’90s so I used to make my own with boys’ or women’s pants and duct tape.
LB I feel like a lot of guys did this, but I participated too [laughter ]. I want to get to the heat of this interview, which is your upcoming, much-anticipated exhibition in September at Gagosian. In your exhibition at the Brant Foundation, the reclining nudes in that big room were reminiscent of [Henri] Matisse; I know you also love Bob Thompson, David Hockney, Joe Coleman. We both love [Francis] Picabia and I see Picabia in a lot of your portraits. But I’m wondering what your thoughts are on some other artists, like Philip Guston and Peter Saul?
SS Guston is definitely an influence. I’ve had a real attraction to his work since I was young. I always connected with his way of depicting forms, and later on I began to understand him as a colorist and a master of composition. I love Peter Saul as well.
LB Do you? That makes sense.
SS Yeah. I was really interested in the work he was doing in the ’60s, and at one point when I was in high school, I took a trip to New York City and I saw an ad for a Peter Saul exhibit; it was at a gallery uptown and I went. It was maybe my second trip to New York City. I don’t remember the name, but it was one of those
OLD FRIENDS CHAT ABOUT THEIR LOVE OF MUSIC, NIGHTCLUB PAINTINGS, LIFE LESSONS FROM AIKIDO, AND SWEENEY’S UPCOMING EXHIBITION AT GAGOSIAN, NEW YORK.
SPENCER SWEENEY & LIZZI BOUGATSOS THE BOLD STROKE
smaller Upper East Side galleries. I rang the bell and they let me in. I told the gallerist I really loved Saul’s work and he took me into the back room, opened up the flat files, and took out all of these works on paper— they were so beautiful—and just spent hours with me looking through them.
LB That’s cool. You sent me pictures of some of your black-charcoal drawings on linen. They’re sort of classical Greco-Roman. For me, they’re also a little [Martin] Kippenberger-esque. They’re just quite elegant. The simplicity. . . . I was wondering, are you planning to leave them like this? What’s the plan?
SS As opposed to painting them over, making them into paintings?
LB Yeah, like adding color.
SS I don’t want to add any color to them. This combination of just the charcoal on the linen, I’m finding that to be very easy on the eyes. I like the combination of those two tones and I like the materiality of it too, because the linen isn’t primed or treated with anything. It’s raw and I like the way it absorbs the light, creating no reflection.
LB How did this series come to be?
SS Well, these particular drawings are nude self-portraits, and the poses are very stilted artist’smodel-type poses. So that appealed to me, to take on these specific poses that you might see in a life-drawing class and then work my own self-portraits into those.
LB Or sex poster or calendar art. Some of the poses remind me of a Playboy calendar.
SS Yes. They’re a bit beefcakey, aren’t they? The poses have this kind of stilted sensuality, which appeals to me.
LB And the Kippenberger part for me is the humor in the portrayal of the portraits.
SS There’s a certain level of humor through selfdeprecation that Kippenberger would often use in his depictions of himself. That we have in common.
LB Another element I always wonder about is your devoted aikido practice and teaching. How does that affect your line, your gesture, your form?
SS Aikido is one of these arts that ends up being infinitely applicable to other parts of life, to your work, to your relationships, to your day-to-day. Aikido is all about movement; painting is of course also movement based, in that you move in a certain way to create a certain quality of line or mark. Sometimes it has to be fast and large, other times slow and small, whatever the moment calls for. But at the end of the day, the quality and expression of the marks have everything to do with the movement of the hand, the body, and the eye, and in that there’s an obvious relation to aikido. I’ve been told at the dojo that I make very large movements when I do aikido; I’ve been told the same thing about my painting. One similarity I’ve recognized between aikido, painting, and performing or composing music is this: in aikido the first thing you do is get out of the way of the attack so you don’t get hit; then the force,
direction, and nature of that attack reveal the appropriate technique to use. I find it’s similar with painting— you want to get out of the way of the painting and of the creative process. If you’re sitting down at an organ to play Bach, you want to disappear and get out of the way of the music. So it becomes very much about losing yourself and being in the moment, which is also a big part of improvisation.
LB When you make a bold stroke, do you imbue it with a sense of importance? Versus a gestural, whimsical, [Vasily] Kandinsky-like painting stroke— those tend to be a little bit more on the outside of your paintings. And specifically I’m wondering how you approach color when you make these strokes? Is it intuitive? Is it planned?
SS Sometimes you’ll just have these visualizations for color-scheme ideas. Somehow it’s been transmitted to you, this idea of how to create a mood, and it might say, “Make this painting with a pale pink traveling into a gray with a chartreuse figure surrounded by it.” And you don’t know where this comes from but you get to work. Often in the morning the idea will come to me in a half-dream state. Sometimes it’s an idea for a painting that will come to me in an image. Sometimes it’s a song, it’s like you hear the lyrics sung to you melodically. Then you have to grab your notebook or record it. And that becomes what allows you to live your life and make what you do.
LB I have the same experience. The notebook is always there.
SS Do you ever wake up singing a song and you have no idea where it came from? Not an existing song, but like this lyrical idea that’s been put into your head?
LB For sure.
SS It’s such a wild phenomenon.
LB A lot of my sculptural ideas come from being half-awake, and if you don’t write them down— SS —they just evaporate. I think that’s part of the practice: prioritizing recording these moments. You need little tricks, you need notepads or recorders. And you need to be diligent about catching them and containing them.
Then to answer the part of your question about the significance of the line: a mastery of line can articulate things completely in terms of volume and substance without any need for shading or any other technique. And then when it comes to making the bold stroke feeling, when you lean into that bold stroke and you get it just right, it can completely embody the intent and
THE BOLD STROKE IS ALL ABOUT OWNING IT. —LIZZI BOUGATSOS
emotional direction of the work, so that can be a really satisfying move. Sometimes I think about it in terms of Beethoven, and Beethoven’s endings in particular. He’s a master of ending a piece of music, like dun dun . . . dun dun [counts] two . . . three . . . dun dun!
LB So do you know when a painting’s done?
SS Sometimes you hit those Beethoven endings.
LB I love this. Let’s talk more about sound. How many sets of speakers do you have and can you explain your fascination with them?
SS I think I have about four or five, no, six or seven, maybe seven sets of speakers. I grew up in a musical family and I therefore have a musical mind, so I’m always thinking in musical terms, even in relation to painting and mark making. I’m always playing music, recorded music or an instrument. I don’t see much of a separation between creating visual art and creating music. I think it all calls on the same sensitivities— you know, painting, music, cooking, one or two other things [laughs ].
LB Looking at this painting [on the wall in the studio], are these grids a nightclub reference? They remind me of Denzil Forrester, who painted nightclub paintings in the ’80s, right?
SS Yeah! He’s done some of the best nightclub paintings ever, in my opinion. I think three of the great nightclub painters are Toulouse-Lautrec, Denzil Forrester, and Jörg Immendorff.
LB I don’t know the third one.
SS He was a German cat who painted a lot of nightclub-type scenarios. He was considered a neo-expressionist. Some of his paintings took place in specific nightclubs, like Exile in Cologne. Often the great painters of nightlife are dealing with rendering different
forms of artificial light, and how it hits the bodies of the people in the clubs. Toulouse-Lautrec was dealing with the gas lamps of the Moulin Rouge and places like that. Denzil was doing paintings in reggae and dancehall clubs; he’d decorate and pattern his figures with a light thrown from colored nightclub lights, which end up in spots, stripes, and different shapes on the clothing of the partygoers. It’s a wild and energetic way of capturing the scenario and depicting the figures. Then Immendorff was also dealing with how to illustrate the interaction of figures in low-light nightclub situations. He’d paint these brilliant auras depicting the silhouettes of the figures being hit by colored lights and popping forth from the dark backgrounds. They were really interesting and exciting to me. Come to think of it, nightclub painting is a favorite genre of mine. You were asking me about the grid motif—I don’t know if I directly relate the grid to nightclubs per se. I think of it as a representation of the organization of matter.
LB Like bodies in space. Do you feel like you engage with the low lighting of the nightclub genre?
SS Those artists I mentioned articulate light, they work it into their compositions and color schemes to create these sumptuous pictures. I haven’t worked specifically with depicting light in that way, but my figurative work often relates to dance and various expressions that come about from different poses of the body. The most important part of the nightclub is the humans inside it and what they do with their bodies.
LB I know you love Bob Fosse, and your figures are often gestural, with legs upside-down, for example, like performers. What’s your relationship to jazz? Is jazz aikido? Is it improvisation?
IMPROVISATION IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS TO LEARN HOW TO USE IN LIFE. . . . IF YOU START TO ANTICIPATE SOMETHING, IT’S OVER. IT’S THE SAME WITH PAINTING. IT’S A BALANCE BETWEEN CONTROL AND THE LOSS OF CONTROL. —SPENCER SWEENEY
SS I think there are many parallels. Aikido and playing music can be essentially improvisational. In both you really have to trust in the technique. Improvisation is one of the most important things to learn how to use in life, and in human relationships—when you can engage every situation with zero expectation, you reveal your actual true self. If you start to anticipate something, it’s over. It’s the same with painting. It’s a balance between control and the loss of control, one being just as important as the other. You learn how to control things to set yourself up for a fruitful experience with the loss of control, which is often where the magic happens. Our band Actress was pretty much purely improvisational. I think the first couple of performances were just “Go into a room and do something.”
LB Play chess.
SS Yeah, somebody’s got to do something different. That was the move on the chessboard for that time and place. That was my understanding of the group’s function and purpose. There was almost a sense of urgency to it. It was kinda like, somebody’s got to do something weird right now! And it seemed clear we were the right people to do it. I remember the artist Steven Parrino was at one of our first performances.
LB The one at PS1?
SS I think so. He came up to me after the performance and said, “I really liked that and I’d like to invite you over to my studio.” This was probably 1997 or ’98 or around then. So of course I went to visit him in his studio. Everything was painted silver—the floors, walls, everything. It was his garage. His motorcycles and his paintings were there. It was such an amazing environment. Anyway, he said, “You know, I really appreciate what you guys were doing because you’re starting from nothing. You’re just pulling it up from the void. There’s no plan.” And that was exactly how I was thinking about it as well. He read it right away. And he said, “So that’s totally scary and I really appreciate what you guys are doing” [laughter ]. You make an announcement that you’re going to do it and then you go in with zero plan, so it was just total improvisation.
LB Improvisation is a huge part of my practice as well. I remember Kim Gordon said to me, “You have this stage and when you step on it, you have to own it. Because if you don’t, you completely fail.” And the anxiety of that—of being a failure, of not owning that space—is a risk you take. I think you and I both share this approach to the world. You never know what moods you’re going to feel when you listen to the same song twice. You can’t own the void.
SS That’s what Kim’s saying: nobody owns the void, but there you are and you have to own it anyway.
LB Which brings us back to the bold stroke. Because the bold stroke is all about owning it.
SS The bold stroke also has very much to do with what you’ve learned and what you’ve cultivated. That’s something you’ll never lose, even in the moments of pure improvisation.
DUST TO DIGITAL
Dust-to-Digital has been known since 2003 as the gold standard of music box set labels. A record label and a nonprofit foundation, it focuses on gospel, blues, folk, and world music, and the extensive booklets that accompany its issues often run into the hundreds of pages. Dust-to-Digital has always shown a keen awareness of the social role of music and an appreciation of the responsibility that goes with preserving and presenting the music of the past. Raymond Foye met up with its principals, Lance and April Ledbetter, when they were speaking at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Harry Smith retrospective in December 2023, and continued the dialogue a few months later. In this interview Lance and April discuss college radio, music in the age of the Internet, and the evolution of the label and its current challenges.
RAYMOND FOYE April, Lance, did you always know that you would spend so much of your life dedicated to the preservation and distribution of music?
LANCE LEDBETTER I recently found a journal entry from when I was fourteen. I had to keep a journal in high school, and one of the questions was, What are you going to do when you grow up? And I wrote, I’m going to run a record label. I just knew that that was what I wanted to do.
The scope became clearer during my time as a DJ for a college radio station, where I played all 78 reissues. That, and discovering Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music [1952]. I was familiar with the various blues compilations on labels like Yazoo and Rounder, but to me the Smith anthology just set the bar so high—in terms of the music but also the liner notes, the aesthetic, all of it.
RF Harry packed so much into those liner notes: catalogue numbers, bibliographical references, illustrations, wickedly funny synopses of the songs. He was a Dadaist at heart, so at the same time as he’s creating something he’s also subverting it. There’s not one bit of sentimentality, which keeps it fresh to this day. It’s not a stretch to say that he really invented the box set in 1952.
So you got your start in college radio. What did you glean from that experience?
LL After high school I moved to Atlanta to go to Georgia State University. I knew that I wanted to work at the college’s radio station, WRAS, which was a 100,000-watt station. I also wanted to intern at a record label, and I knew there were labels in Atlanta where I could apply for an internship. The label I ended up working with was called Table of the Elements. It had an amazing aesthetic, both in the sound—the audio releases they chose—and also in the presentation and packaging. It was run by a man named Jeff Hunt and it’s still in operation. It was through Jeff that I got turned on to a lot of experimental music. With that education and my spot at WRAS, I started hosting an experimentalmusic show on Mondays at midnight.
RF I used to sit in on two radio shows my friend Nicolas Gardère had at WKCR at Columbia University, a blues program on Saturday afternoons and a gospel show on Sunday mornings. The thing that takes place between the broadcaster and the listener—I had no idea how intimate that was going to be. We had 30,000 listeners and people would call us from all over with requests, or just to chat. On Saturdays we were immediately followed by Phil Schaap’s Traditions in Swing . He would come in from Queens on the subway with an armload of 78 rpm’s. I never heard such a wonderful sound in
my life as when I finally heard a 78 rpm live. LL Absolutely. I think doing the radio show, where I played all 78 reissues, opened my mind to what my future record label could be. You don’t have to go to clubs and do A&R and figure out who the next band is, or what sound you want to document, or what’s happening in modern music; you can actually go backward. And I drew from the relationships I’d developed with my radio audience. There were listeners who were requesting gospel music, I’d go to record stores and couldn’t find anything, so I started to reach out to the record collectors who had the actual 78s. They—mainly Joe Bussard, in Maryland—started sending me music, and I’d think, Why can’t you go into a store and find this? Why can’t people hear this? That’s what led me to begin the 4 1/2-year journey that resulted in the first Dust-to-Digital release, Goodbye, Babylon [2003]. April and I were dating at the time, and I presented her with this idea. At that point I didn’t know it was going to be a box set or develop into a label; I thought it would just be a single album, but we worked on it together and the scope just kept growing and growing.
RF Do you think there are still important 78 rpm collectors out there whom we don’t know about?
LL Fewer and fewer, but you never know. About a decade ago a friend, Nathan Salsburg in Louisville, Kentucky, knew someone who worked for that company 1-800- got-junk?. They were emptying out a house and the family said, “Throw it all away.” This guy who works for the company called Nathan and said, Hey man, we just filled several dumpsters full of 78s. They called the manager and he said the dumpsters get picked up at nine in the morning—whatever he takes out of there before then, it’s his. So he went back and forth all night long with his pickup truck taking away all these records. We did some research and the guy who’d died was a member, maybe thirty years ago, of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, but no one knew of him. He was just a loner.
RF And think about all the collections in foreign countries we don’t know about.
LL Actually, we know a young collector who’s Cambodian-American, his parents immigrated to the United States from Cambodia. He went back to Cambodia on a visit and there has been a law there, when the Khmer Rouge took over, that it was illegal to keep any records pre–Khmer Rouge. If you were caught with those records in your possession you’d be sentenced to death. He was befriended by an old
Album cover, Voices of Mississippi (Dust-to-Digital, 2018), featuring a photo of James “Son Ford” Thomas by William Ferris. Graphic design: Barb Bersche
man who lived there and who ended up showing him his entire collection, which he’d hidden in his house for decades. It’s an important collection that this person kept under the risk of being killed. So we digitized that collection for our nonprofit, the Dust-to-Digital Foundation.
RF That’s been happening all throughout history: people who, upon punishment of death, or damnation of their eternal soul, have saved important things. Some monk who copied a manuscript of Catullus or Sappho, or something that was blasphemous or went against dogma. Or people who hid religious works of art during periods of iconoclasm. It’s amazing that there have always been people who have preserved these things against the risk of capital punishment.
What’s your collection like?
LL I believe I have the wiring to be a collector, but April and I made the decision together, pretty early on, that if we were collectors, Dust-to-Digital wouldn’t be able to function the way it should.
APRIL LEDBETTER We’re like a pass-through. Collecting is an occupation, and very different from what we’re trying to do, which is more about sharing and distributing.
RF What’s your position on streaming services? Ethically speaking, from the musician’s point of view, what should people be listening to? What should they avoid? How do you feel about streaming sound quality?
LL Well, I use them. I have an Apple Music and a Spotify account. I always turn any device I’m listening to to the highest audio quality possible but I think the rates these services pay are not fair for artists and not fair for labels like ours. A lot of these streaming services are co-owned by major labels, and I think the business is skewed toward their interests and their artists. It’s not set up to sustain independent artists or labels.
AL There’ll have to be some kind of government-level reckoning for it to change. We’ve been conditioned to accept things as they are. All this music for this price—what’s wrong with that? But then as the consumer your relationship is out of whack with what’s good for the whole ecosystem. We’re in this weird space right now that’s not functional, economically, for a lot of musicians and labels. How does that continue? What does that look like? I do not know. If we were to release Goodbye, Babylon today it probably wouldn’t have the same impact: the attention span isn’t there and the economics of the box set have changed. A lot of things now are off the table. I find value in the past, but if it’s not where things are going, I just don’t see
the point in spending energy fighting what is the present. So the task is to figure out how your work and message can be shared.
RF What you’ve done on Instagram, creating a compendium of world music, is absolutely extraordinary. You revolutionized what an Instagram feed could be, and for 1.1 million followers nonetheless.
AL We get the nicest comments about it, it’s a source of so much joy and inspiration, and it’s a lot of fun. It used to be all archival material but then we opened it up to our followers, crowdsourcing.
LL We started getting submissions. To use a radio analogy, people tuned in to our frequency and started sending things along those lines. It was during the pandemic that we made the decision to respond to submissions and engage—it was crazy, the next day our Instagram account got frozen because we received so many messages that they thought we’d gotten hacked.
RF During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time on YouTube looking at wedding music. I decided that wedding music is where you find real folk music these days.
LL We’ve shared several wedding videos that people have really loved. When two people of different cultural backgrounds get married, and then their music combines at the postwedding party, it can be incredible. The one that really took off
was an Indian man marrying a Scottish woman, and the party that followed featured Indian drummers performing with Scottish bagpipers. It’s hard to explain how powerful it was, it was spectacular.
RF It seems like the number of labels doing original and creative box set releases are dwindling with each passing year.
LL I think for us the pressure against time came pretty early on because when we came on the scene, post– Goodbye, Babylon , a lot of the labels that had inspired us stopped doing the type of work that we were continuing. So we became the receptor of a lot of pitches, and it was somewhat heartbreaking because you knew if you said no, there was nobody else who was going to do it. That’s when we got the idea for the foundation.
RF We’re talking about your Music Memory project, right?
LL It started out as Music Memory but last year we changed the name: it’s now the Dust-to-Digital Foundation. We’ve digitized approximately 50,000 recordings, mostly from the 78-rpm era, although some are from the 45-rpm era. We use the collectors as our guiding light. Our setup is different from the Library of Congress: they have record-digitization initiatives, but their initiatives require the records to be on their premises. And the collectors we know aren’t going to let these rare records out
Art Rosenbaum recording
Maude Thacker. Photo: Margo Rosenbaum
Images: courtesy Dust-to-
of their sight. So we set up in the collectors’ homes, employing trained people in their community to digitize the records. We’re in talks now with a university to create public access to the music we digitized. There’ll be an announcement later this year.
RF What’s the format going to be? There are some websites, like archive.org, where you can go and find 78s and play them one by one, and then there are others that are more like an Internet radio station, where it’s a curated thing.
LL The way I understand it now is, with the university we’re partnering with, it’s going to be a oneby-one type listing. I asked them about building playlists and queues, but it’s all down the road. Right now we feel like it’s a huge accomplishment just to get the music out there. We want to create accessibility, so that’s where we’re starting.
RF Do you have any particular favorites of all your projects? Or is that like children, where you just can’t pick one?
LL I think the most joy I had working on a project was Goodbye, Babylon . That’s a six-CD anthology consisting of 135 songs and 25 sermons recorded between 1902 and 1960. It’s accompanied by a 200page book featuring essays, annotations, and lyric transcriptions. It was one of those situations where everything was new and there were no expectations. The only expectations were ones we placed on it ourselves. Nobody knew who we were. When I reached out to distributors and people in the press, I was introducing myself as someone who’d interned at Table of the Elements. I mean, they had no reason to take me seriously. It was an exciting moment.
I also really enjoyed Art of Field Recording Volume 1: 50 Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum , a four-CD
anthology [2007], because we got to work with someone who’d been present during all these recordings. Rosenbaum, described as a painter and a preserver of folk music in his 2022 obituary in the New York Times , documented a variety of vernacular music for more than five decades. He and I listened to his tapes for a year and a half, and I got to talk to him about those people and the moments he’d shared with them. That was an incredible experience.
AL It’s funny, somebody asked me that a few months ago and I named a release, and then I named another, and another. Maybe Goodbye, Babylon , because it was my first experience of creating something and putting it out in the world. That experience flipped the way I’d been in the world up until that point: instead of just consuming music, I was able to actually create something. That was an amazing experience. And then the fact that Lance and I made all of those sets by hand—
RF Putting the wooden boxes together too, right?
AL Collating the CDs, receiving the pallets of empty boxes and books and all that. It’s a good thing we were so young when that came out.
RF I like the fact that all your releases are all so different, one from the next. I love Greek Rhapsody: Instrumental Music from Greece 1905–1956 [2013]. The booklet and the notes are so great. And I love Music of Morocco: Recorded by Paul Bowles, 1959 [2016]. Such a beautiful package. I listen to that constantly. Well, whichever one is on the stereo is the one I like.
AL All the vibes are so different. I love Melodii Tuvi: Throat Songs and Folk Tunes from Tuva [2007]. When we released that it was definitely like a little pebble in the lake: it didn’t make big waves. But it’s such a beautiful project. The audio is stunning, and the graphics that we were able to source for it were so rich.
RF April, do you work on the design more than Lance does? Or is it a collaborative thing?
AL It’s really collaborative. At some point it got put out there that I’m a designer, that that’s what I do at Dust-to-Digital, but I’m no more of a designer than Lance is. If anything, he’s actually much more particular about aesthetics and details than I am. I’m sort of a “Looks good to me, let’s keep going” kind of person.
RF Where does the design aesthetic come from? Dust-to-Digital is one of those labels, like ECM, where you know the label just by the cover.
LL When we were working on Goodbye, Babylon , we gave a lot of thought and consideration to what this was going to look like. The two criteria
were: one, if this was in an old-time general store in the 1920s, when a lot of these recordings were made, would it fit in with the other items behind the counter? That meant it couldn’t look plasticky, so that was why we chose the wood for the boxes. And two, if the artists included on the release came back today—because all but four were deceased when we released it—if they were able to see this, would this make them happy? Would this be a thoughtful, respectful presentation of their work?
RF It must have been amazing when Neil Young plugged Goodbye, Babylon on NPR by saying that Bob Dylan gave it to him for Christmas. I mean, obviously it must have blown your minds. Did you get sales from that?
LL We did. It was great, and we were so appreciative to Neil for doing that. The New Yorker article that came out in 2008 was a huge boost. But the biggest of all was when Brian Eno named it his album of the year in 2011. He did a top-ten albums of the year for the Guardian right before Christmas. It was so wild because we were almost going to let it go out of print. I think his mentioning it almost sold 1,000 copies.
RF What’s next for Dust-to-Digital?
LL I think the way forward is the foundation. It’s meeting people where they are. The fade-out on physical media is out of our hands. We’ve been looking at our social media as a new avenue for connection and distribution. The energy that we used to harness into a box set is now an Instagram carousel, or it’s a collection put online through our foundation. I’d say we’re not leaving releases, but I think our expectation for so long was that these physical releases were going to be the thing that sustains our mission. And I think that’s not the case anymore.
This page, left: Album cover, Goodbye, Babylon (Dust-to-Digital, 2003), featuring Gustave Doré woodcut. Graphic design: Susan Archie
This page, right: Album cover, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten (Dust-to-Digital, 2015). Graphic design: Boland Design Company
Digital
ARTISTS CONFRONTING THE CLIMATE CRISIS
SALOMÉ GÓMEZ-
UPEGUI SURVEYS ENVIRONMENTALLYENGAGED ART FROM THE MIDTWENTIETH CENTURY TO THE URGENT PRESENT.
Below: Agnes Denes, Wheatfield —A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – With Artist in the Field , 1982. Photo: John McGrail, courtesy Agnes Denes and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
2023 was the hottest year on record; 1 close to 80 percent of the extreme weather events over the past two decades were influenced by human activities and the use of fossil fuels; 2 about half of the planet’s glaciers are expected to disappear by the end of this century; 3 and somewhere between Hawaii and California there is a growing island, currently twice the size of Texas, made entirely out of plastic trash. 4 For decades, scientists have warned humanity about the perils of a rapidly accelerating climate crisis in which everyone plays a role. In the art world, however, environmental issues were until quite recently still treated as niche subjects. But artists are increasingly addressing the pressing issue of the climate crisis, and this essay, though far from a definitive survey, aims to shed light on some of those who have been bold enough to sound the alarm in unique and unexpected ways, often blazing critical trails in the process.
In the 1960s and ’70s, artists belonging to the Land art movement were some of the first to directly contend with matters of ecology and the climate. Not all Land artists engaged with these subjects, of course, but the Hungarian-American artist Agnes Denes made history in 1969 with one of the first ecological public artworks ever made: Rice/Tree/Burial, a site-specific installation in Sullivan County, New York, that declared the artist’s devotion to environmental justice. 5 Denes has continued to address environmental themes throughout her career. In Wheatfield—A Confrontation, for example, she planted two acres of wheat on the Battery Park Landfill in downtown Manhattan to raise awareness about an array of ecological matters including waste management and world hunger. In 2024, with these themes more urgent than ever, she reproduced that iconic work in HonoringWheatfield—AConfrontation (2024), an installation for Art Basel’s Messeplatz Project set to remain on-site until the crop’s harvest. Widely considered a pioneer of environmental art, Denes has long defended the importance of art in confronting our ecological crisis. “In a time when meaningful global communication and intelligent restructuring of our environment is imperative,” she writes, “art can assume an important role. It can affect intelligent collaboration and the integration of disciplines, and it can offer skillful and benign problem solving. A well-conceived
work can motivate people and influence how things are perceived.”6
The German artist Joseph Beuys was a pioneer of environmental art, and indeed was a founding member of Germany’s Green Party in 1980. His best-known ecology-related work is surely 7000 Eichen ( 7000 Oaks), a project to plant 7,000 oak trees around the city of Kassel, Germany, each tree being paired with a basalt pillar. The planting began at the documenta 7 exhibition in Kassel in 1982 and was completed, by the Dia Art Foundation, at documenta 8 in 1987, one year after Beuys’s death.7 Beuys’s goal in this Land art piece was to raise public awareness in matters of conservation and urban renewal.
Also worth highlighting are the contributions to environmental art of the American Land artist Mel Chin. In RevivalField (1991– ), an experimental work that began at the Pig Eye’s Landfill in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has seen many iterations since, Chin devised a sculptural structure containing “hyperaccumulator plants” that remove heavy-metal toxicity from the land’s soil, directly improving the environmental conditions of whatever site the installation is built on.
Other late twentieth-century artists contended with environmental matters, if sporadically. In 1970, for instance, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg designed the first Earth Day poster to raise money for the American Environment Foundation in Washington, DC. 8 Featuring a sepia-toned image of a bald eagle surrounded by pollution and endangered species, the work highlighted the United States’ prominent role in the global ecological crisis. In 1980, Greenpeace commissioned Judy Chicago to create a poster, Rainbow Warrior, named after the organization’s ship, which participated in numerous campaigns involving ecological issues such as seal hunting, whaling, and nuclear testing. Chicago’s poster featured a kaleidoscopic, warriorlike figure above a group of sea creatures alongside the following phrase: “According to a Native American legend, when the Earth’s creatures have been hunted almost to extinction, a rainbow warrior will descend from the sky to protect them.” Likewise, the activist art collective Guerrilla Girls grappled with themes of environmental justice in the all-text
Right:
poster TenTrashyIdeasabouttheEnvironment (1994), which featured sarcastic statements such as “I like to use plastic, especially for making art about the environment. After all, art is eternal, and so is plastic,” and “Dumping garbage in rivers and oceans is disgusting, but, hey, ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’”
Public awareness of the climate crisis increased with the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But artworks and exhibitions addressing the matter continued to be few and far between in the 1990s. In 1996, Superflex, a Danish art collective founded a few years earlier by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, and Rasmus Rosengren Nielsen, brought an intersectional approach to art on ecological issues with Supergas, a cutting-edge project that transformed biowaste into gas that could be used by rural communities in Africa for cooking or lighting. More recently, Superflex has continued to address ecological matters with projects such as DeepSeaMinding(2019–21), a multiyear initiative to create a series of installations related to global warming and rising sea levels.
The Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña is another prominent figure who grappled with themes of climate change well before the subject became mainstream. Her work is particularly important in applying the wisdom of Indigenous communities to understand and confront the ecological crisis. The performance and site-specific installation Cloud-Net (1998–99), made from unspun wool, addresses global warming by incorporating ancestral weaving traditions from the Andes. In an interview in 2018, Vicuña recalled the precarious way in which art critics engaged with this work back then: “No one that wrote about [Cloud-Net] addressed the issue of global warming. They just interpreted it as a work of monumental weaving. Not a single person understood what the actual subject was.”9
After the beginning of the twenty-first century, as our understanding of the magnitude of the climate crisis expanded, a growing number of interdisciplinary artists grappled with these themes in novel and unexpected ways, often in direct collaboration with scientists. For the 2007 exhibition WeatherReport:ArtandClimateChange, curated by the American art critic Lucy Lippard at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, fifty-one artists were invited to create works addressing climate change and global warming, and all were given access to scientists working on the subject
matters of their artworks. Reflecting on the importance of art in confronting the crisis, Lippard has said, “An uninformed public will make the wrong decisions or will have no voice in the decisions. That’s where art can help. Some of it will be useless and some will be co-opted [by the art business], but there will always be the visionaries who manage to communicate.”10
Among those visionaries, the Icelandic Danish artist Olafur Eliasson stands out for his masterful use of natural elements to create mesmerizing pieces that raise awareness about humanity’s relationship to climate change. One of his bestknown works is Theweatherproject, a now iconic installation that brought an artificial sun into the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, in 2003, inviting viewers to reflect on our rapidly warming planet. In 2014, Eliasson collaborated with geologist Minik Rosing to produce Ice Watch, an interactive installation, timed to correspond with a meeting of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that transported gargantuan ice blocks from Greenland to City Hall Square, Copenhagen. In 2015, the duo created a second iteration of the work at the place du Panthéon, Paris, where the talks that led to the Paris Climate Agreement were taking place. And in 2018, IceWatchwas shown in London, coinciding with the meeting of world leaders at the COP 24 climate-change conference in Katowice, Poland. “By enabling people to experience and actually touch the blocks of ice, I hope we will connect people to their surroundings in a deeper way and inspire radical change,” Eliasson has said of the project.11
Many artists who work on environmental issues seek to broaden the scope and impact of
their practice by creating nonprofits. Eliasson, for instance, cofounded the nonprofit Little Sun with entrepreneur Frederik Ottesen, creating a portable solar lamp that has brought renewable energy to hundreds of thousands of people across Africa since 2012. Similarly, the Argentinian interdisciplinary artist Tomás Saraceno, who has experimented with air-fueled sculptural works in his practice since the early aughts, is the founder of Aerocene, a project (formally a foundation since 2015) that seeks to envision an alternate reality free from fossil fuels and in harmony with earth. Its initiatives include MuseoAeroSolar (2007– ), an ongoing collection of community-built floating museums made from reused plastic bags. “While fossil fuel enterprises attempt to colonize other planets,” an Aerocene statement reads, “the very same interface between us, the Sun and the atmosphere—the air—continues to be compromised. . . . Can you imagine how would breathing feel in a post fossil fuel economy, and what is our response-ability?”12
An outstanding example of an artist whose practice expands into nonprofit work is American painter and conservationist Haley Mellin, founder of the nonprofit Art into Acres, which works with artists and art institutions to finance large-scale conservation initiatives in vital and threatened ecosystems around the world. As of 2023, the organization had contributed to the preservation of more than 30 million acres of land.13 Mellin is an established painter who focuses on ecological themes: “My paintings,” she has said, “aim to be a gentle reminder that we are not superior, that all species share land and that we are not alone.”14 Moreover, Mellin sees her conservation efforts as an extension of her artistic practice: “A painting is a certain expression of art. Land conservation is a certain expression of art. They both have specific aims.”15
The artists of a nascent art movement, sometimes dubbed “regenerative artists,” intend to foster immediate and constructive connections between communities and their surrounding ecosystems. Interdisciplinary sculptor and photographer Mary Mattingly has pushed the boundaries of regenerative art in surprising ways. In 2009, Mattingly worked with marine engineers, designers, and sculptors to create Waterpod, a sustainable floating habitat that navigated the waterways around New York City’s five boroughs, fostering conversations about environment-focused subjects such as rising tides, food insecurity, and pollution. From 2016 to 2019 she embarked on a similar endeavor with Swale, a “floating food forest,” built on a reclaimed barge, that allowed any-
one to harvest fresh food. The project arose after Mattingly found out that growing or foraging food from New York’s public land was illegal; marine common-law principles, however, allowed her to circumvent this difficulty, since the barge was considered a floating island. In 2024, Mattingly plans to reveal Shoal, an expanded and permanent food forest built on a reclaimed barge that will serve the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.
An additional example of a regenerative artwork is NewForest,AncientThrones (2024) by the American artist and activist Jordan Weber. This public sculpture is designed both to monitor air-pollution levels and to clean the air with purifying plants. Somewhat reminiscent of Chin’s Revival Field, the piece is permanently installed in the East Canfield neighborhood of Denver, Colorado, which has historically and disproportionately dealt with high levels of pollution. With this work Weber seeks to serve the local community while also raising awareness of discriminatory urban planning and environmental racism.
Undeniably, already-disadvantaged communities around the world are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. In this regard the exhibition Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, curated by Glenn Kaino and Mika Yoshitake at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from September 14, 2024, to January 5, 2025, features the work of more than twenty artists addressing the crisis while considering its connection to matters of social justice.
In 2019, a group of 11,000 scientists from around the world came together to “tell it like it is,” unequivocally stating that what our planet is now facing is far from a mere crisis but a “climate emergency.”16 Under these circumstances, we in the art world can no longer afford to make environmental justice a niche issue, and artists, galleries, and institutions are increasingly taking note. This swift review of environmental artworks that have emerged in recent decades is highly incomplete— and thankfully so. As the climate emergency escalates, so too do the number of artists attempting to confront and call attention to it, and this should provide hope for the future.
1. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Centers For Environmental Information, “2023 was the warmest year in the modern temperature record,” January 17, 2024. Available online at www.climate.gov/news-features/ featured-images/2023-was-warmest-year-modern-temperaturerecord#:~:text=Details,decade%20(2014%E2%80%932023) (accessed June 30, 2024).
2. Roz Pidcock and Robert McSweeney, “Mapped: How climate change affects extreme weather around the world,” CarbonBrief: Clear on Climate , April 8, 2022. Available online at www. carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affects-extremeweather-around-the-world/ (accessed June 30, 2024).
3. Chelsea Harvey and E&E News, “Half of All Mountain Glaciers Are Expected to Disappear by 2100,” Scientific American , January 9, 2023. Available online at www. scientificamerican.com/article/half-of-all-mountain-glaciers-areexpected-to-disappear-by-2100/ (accessed June 30, 2024).
4. “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” National Geographic: Education , n.d. Available online at education. nationalgeographic.org/resource/great-pacific-garbage-patch/ (accessed June 30, 2024).
5. For the curator and art historian Peter Selz, Rice/Tree/Burial was “probably the first large-scale site-specific piece anywhere with ecological concerns.” Quoted in “Agnes Denes: Works, Writings, Biography,” n.d. Available online at http://www. agnesdenesstudio.com/index.html (accessed June 30, 2024).
6. Denes, in Dan Mills, “The Visionary Art of Agnes Denes,” 1996. Available online at www.agnesdenesstudio.com/writings. html (accessed June 30, 2024).
7. See Dia Art Foundation, “Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks ,” Fifty Years of Dia , n.d. Available online at https://www.diaart.org/ visit/visit-our-locations-sites/joseph-beuys-7000-oaks (accessed June 30, 2024).
8. See Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, “Earth Day,” n.d. Available online at https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/ art/art-context/earth-day (accessed June 30, 2024).
9. “Cecilia Vicuña on Female Power and Climate Change,” Elephant , June 13, 2018. Available online at https://elephant. art/environmentalism-and-female-power-with-cecilia-vicuna/ (accessed June 30, 2024).
10. Lucy Lippard, in Regina Cornwell, “Lucy Lippard on Eco Art and Climate Change,” Women’s Media Center News and Features , December 6, 2007. Available online at https:// womensmediacenter.com/news-features/lucy-lippard-on-ecoart-and-climate-change (accessed June 30, 2024).
11. “Olafur Eliasson Confronts Climate Change with Icebergs in London,” Frieze Magazine , December 7, 2018. Available online at www.frieze.com/ko/article/olafur-eliasson-confronts-climatechange-icebergs-london (accessed June 30, 2024).
12. Aerocene, “Aeronauts Unite!,” n.d. Available online at aerocene.org/manifesto/ (accessed June 30, 2024).
13. “2023 Baccalaureate Ceremony Dorothy Height Awardee: Haley Mellin (PhD ’12),” NYU Steinhardt News , May 4, 2023. Available online at steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/2023baccalaureate-ceremony-dorothy-height-awardee-haley-mellinphd-12 (accessed June 30, 2024).
14. Haley Mellin, in Ananyaa Sathyanarayana, “Complex Biodiversity: An Interview with Haley Mellin,” Berlin Art Link , June 7, 2024. Available online at www.berlinartlink. com/2024/06/07/haley-mellin-interview-dittrich-schlechtriembiodiversity/ (accessed June 30, 2024).
15. Ibid.
16. William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M. Newsome, Phoebe Barnard, and William R. Moomaw, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency,” BioScience , November 5, 2019. Available online at https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/ article/70/1/8/5610806?login=false (accessed June 30, 2024).
TRANSFERRING THE ENERGY
THEASTER GATES
Writer and curator Olivia Anani met Theaster Gates in his exhibition Black Mystic at Gagosian, Le Bourget, to discuss the importance of translation and relocation, the ever-expanding horizons of his practice, and his use of tar.
OLIVIA ANANI I was fortunate to grow up with family and friendly connections across several African countries. I remember being exposed, through my mother’s love of craftsmanship, to the expertise in each of these regions: goldsmiths and jewelers from Senegal, silverwork and leatherwork from Tuareg artisans in Niger, Akan gold weights and kente textiles from Ghana, Ethiopian pleated cotton, Malian embroidery on bazin , woodworking from Benin and Togo, bronzes from Burkina Faso. . . . I bring this up because each of these places brought something new to the conversation. This is also one of the reasons why I’m so interested in your practice, because it’s really a 360-degree practice. You’re interested in and preoccupied with all aspects of life.
THEASTER GATES First, I love labor and I have a respect for labor: labor deserves to be esteemed as a cultural practice in the same way as painting. One way to frame the exhibition is through two words: transference and transgression. The transference is not only my dad transferring knowledge about how to make, but also the ability to imagine transferring the skill from a traditional labor practice to an artistic practice, and then the transference of the material from the roof to the floor to the wall. In that sense, what my work does the most is relocate, and in the act of relocation, I’m able to allocate new meaning, new significance, and different value.
I love gospel music but I stopped going to church. I had a major crisis with the institution of the church, but I wanted to try to maintain some sense of a spiritual self. So, I created a band called the Black Monks. The transference in that case is the relocation of the music from the pulpit and the choir stand to the museum, and to others who would otherwise never have a spiritual experience
in the Black church. Once during a performance, a white curator suddenly passed out.
OA You mean, as in the context of a Holy Ghost experience?
TG Yes. And when he came to, he explained that he didn’t know how it happened: he was listening to the music, and it felt overwhelming, and then he fell to the ground. In this case the transference was one-to-one. Even when I left the church, I didn’t become ironic; I didn’t become critical of the ecstatic possibility of the music. But its relocation to the museum meant that people could have a one-to-one experience of real ecstasy without ever having encountered an ecstatic thing before.
OA Which is fascinating, because it means that in this case you were not only transferring the form or the tradition or the history of the musical experience in the church, you were also transferring its energetic charge.
TG The energy, the power. People say, “Oh, your dad is a roofer.” Yeah, but that’s not the clincher. The clincher is that my mom gave me the gift of translation. And here that translation is, How do I make roofing legible to the art world? How do you translate? What’s the shift from one vocabulary to another to make people understand its value without a whole lot of explanation? Artists should not have to speak a lot. Let the work speak. Can the work speak?
And then transgression—what that word means for me is a shift that requires some kind of fault: you do something wrong. It’s a shift and there’s a cost. The shift is me accepting that I entered the art world with a very different toolkit than a conventional, academically trained artist. The trained artist learned the basics in the four years of undergraduate studies. I learned about composition on the roof, from twelve years old to eighteen years old, and then in undergrad I gained an understanding of urban planning. I had hand ability and disciplinary knowledge in a field separate from art. So while most art students were reading about other artists, in constant conversation with the Flemish painters or the eighteenth-century use of blue, I was thinking about the commodification of the planet and how every inch of this place is owned by someone . . . on paper.
I feel that one of my transgressions is that I entered the art world with other things on my
mind. And art and the market became complicit with my desires to satisfy these other disciplinary ways of knowing. I want to fix the city, so art should be the tool whereby I activate my desire to fix the city. I want to grieve, so art should be the vehicle through which I grieve. And it means that sometimes you walk into an exhibition and it feels like a funeral. You walk into an exhibition and it feels like a church. You walk into an exhibition and it feels like a symposium. And that’s because I’m trying to bend the discipline toward my love of these other practices or toward my problems at hand. To do that comes with a cost. People don’t know how to evaluate it.
With three moves, three paintings, Black Mystic attempts to weld together my history with Japan and my history with Mississippi. Maybe somewhere in those three paintings is both a philosophical understanding of Japanese aesthetics, Japanese religion, Japanese form, and the jankiness or the can-do self-determinism of the Black experience all over the world with the materials we have. At the end of the day, our roof won’t leak. It may not be perfect, but the patching will keep most of the water out of the house. At least our expensive color TV—
OA —is protected.
TG —is protected. You know what I mean? The TV might be worth more than the house. That’s okay.
I like this translocation, this kind of movement between these worlds. I’m trying to find ways to own this material as a way of creating a new regime in the canon of materials that are recognized as potentially artistic, so that at some point others would be like, “I think I want to be a potter too.” Or, “I think this roofing material holds something I could use.” That feels like movement building, like building an ideological foundation that says to other people, “Maybe the trades that you learned from your families are also important.”
OA And have you felt that you’ve achieved that for tar, clay, and other roofing materials?
TG I think the floodgates are open with ceramics. That part feels okay. With tar, I still feel like I’m wrapping my head around, my hands around, what I’m after. Now that I’m past the honorific, celebrating my dad, I’m at form. I’m now at something that’s
genuinely mine. I’d like to deepen some of the technical aspects of roofing—roofing for the wall.
OA “Roofing for the wall,” that’s a beautiful phrase. There’s such a rich layering of meaning— biographical, historical, structural—from the very intimate scale to the city-planning scale. And beyond your subject matter, there’s also the painterly research. How do we talk about painting, but painting as an act, as subject matter, as the experience of the painter exploring their medium?
TG And how do I resist the exploitation of the sublime, spiritual Africanist experience? How do I resist exploitation of our deepest selves? The way I resist is to establish new forms. I won’t just borrow one-to-one. I want to make it mine. I want the tar painting to nod at my dad, nod at history, nod at my family, nod at the market, nod at color, nod at painting, and resolve itself as my form, as an answer. There have been moments when art collectors who are not Black have asked, “Theaster, what are you trying to make in these color field paintings? Are you trying to align yourself with only the white makers? Why don’t you make things that are more charged? I know there’s anger. Why does it always deliver so coolly?”
OA They don’t sense the anger in tar?
TG Right? What they’re saying is that what their non-Black souls need is the manifestation, or the reoccurrence, of the violence. They so desperately want the ongoing acknowledgment of their great power and my complicity, of my weakness and their ability to tame the most savage. They want to see that scenario play out.
OA There’s that desire, definitely, and also a desire for a legible way of processing information, of having everything laid out in a certain way that’s clear and encyclopedic, a very intense impulse toward nonopacity.
TG And that impulse is also a declaration of what’s important. I want to develop a different set of codes that matter to us . If I can become masterful at making code, I can then develop an alternative archive of things on their own footing. We’re taking knowledge sets that we’ve gathered from all over the world, and then we’re applying those knowledge sets toward the creation of our codes. They may not matter to the art market. They may not matter to other painters. Doesn’t matter. It’s my code. And then, some might argue, “Well, how do we evaluate it?”
OA And how do we evaluate it monetarily?
TG And based on their archive.
OA I think that kind of resistance is essential in the self-determination of the artist. I find it suspicious when artists are told what to paint and very dutifully paint that.
TG Thank you for saying it. Because I’m a resistingass person.
OA You have to be. That’s why I was intrigued when you said that your father could have been an artist because he had an independence of thought. Can we talk about the subtleties of roofing as artmaking?
TG Say you had a roof and a chimney. I’d watch my dad take roofing paper and a roofing knife and go cut, cut, cut. He just knew where the cuts needed to lie to accommodate the chimney. It was like wrapping paper. He would make these cuts without measuring, but I had to measure—
OA And you’re like, How do you know where to cut?
TG Yeah, how do you know? And he would do it in the same way people think about Japanese calligraphy. You’ve practiced so much that at a point, you don’t have to think about it anymore.
OA It’s exactly like swordsmanship, too, or the martial arts.
TG Right. With a specific type of brush, one might imagine that the line can only be a thick line, but to watch an expert calligrapher control a line, that shit is beautiful.
OA The variations in pressure.
TG It requires a nonlazy hand. You must be thinking all the time. My dad had that. But there was no one to codify it the way we’ve codified calligraphy. There was no one to name this swipe that he did. He was just cutting. In the absence of the codification and the archive, it’s an unrecorded history. But what if I went back and created a language for roofing, and then I published a catalogue of the names of things?
OA A kind of treatise like [the Japanese martialarts treatise] The Book of Five Rings [c. 1645]?
TG Exactly.
OA But for roofing.
TG One more example. In the old way of roofing you’d have an underlayer material. You tar the roof, you put this underlayer on, you tar on top of that, and then you put the final layer on. And the mop— the mop was a regular mop.
TG Like a cotton mop, because synthetic hairs would burn in the roofing material. The tar would come out into a bucket and then you’d mop.
OA I’m thinking about Japanese ink painting and the range of brushes used.
TG Exactly, c’mon. You mop and then someone else rolls. Then you roll it back. Then you mop the next section. Then they kick it and roll. You would mop, mop, mop, mop. And then kick, kick, kick, kick. This is your new line. Mop, mop, mop, mop. Kick.
I think what my dad gave me, which I think is what the art academy gives you, was an understanding of and a sensitivity to process. You learn your tools. You learn the process. And the more I understand the technologies of perspective, and scroll painting and flat painting, the greater the arsenal of processes that I have in my head, the more I can render a subject, a field, or a horizon. I feel like my dad gave me that for the built environment. That’s a good gift.
OA There’s a book called Secrecy in Japanese Arts: “Secret Transmission” as a Way of Knowledge [2005], by Maki Isaka Morinaga, about secret treatises passed down the lines in swordsmanship and Noh theater. She studies two treatises, by Yagy�u Munenori and Zeami Motokiyo, respectively, that were obviously not supposed to be read by outsiders but eventually transpired out. It’s a fascinating study of: What do we transmit? What do we keep secret? What do we put outside? And it makes you think about Black families. You mentioned the gift that your mother saw in you for translation—can you tell me more about that?
TG My mom understood that when you’re in a situation that makes you angry, you manage your temper and remember what your goal is. You translate your intended goal, not your feelings. I try to translate my anger into a more effective kind of communication. My mom would always say to me, “Use your translation tools.” She might say, “Talk to God. What would Christ do?” She had spiritual and emotional filters that would help me with the translation possibilities. Before you send that email, pause and pray.
OA I’ll think about your mom next time I want to send an angry email.
TG Before you send that email, pause and pray [laughs ].
Hidden in Plain Sight
New discoveries in the art of
JasperJohns
In the first part of a two-part essay, art historian John B. Ravenal considers Jasper Johns’s continued engagement with the motif of woodgrain.
It may seem unlikely to discover a readily visible but almost entirely neglected motif spanning more than fifty years of an artist’s work, especially an artist as well studied as Jasper Johns. But this is the case with simulated woodgrain, a regular feature of Johns’s paintings, drawings, and prints from the 1960s through at least 2018. Woodgrain has effectively hidden in plain sight—an act of covert ubiquity well suited to Johns’s practice of appropriating and recasting familiar but overlooked bits of his surrounding environment.
Focusing on an underrecognized motif can fill in missing information and shed new light on familiar pieces. Tracing the arc of one visual element over half a century also offers a case study of how motifs function in Johns’s work, providing insight into his creative process, including his well-known openness to serendipity and unforeseen solutions. Describing this receptivity more precisely, Johns has said, “There are no accidents in my work. It sometimes happens that something unexpected occurs—the paint may run—but then I see that it has happened, and I have the choice to paint it again or not. And if I don’t, then the appearance of that element in the painting is no accident.” 1 Even if the initial appearance of an image, pattern, or drip were unpremeditated, then, it must afterward earn its place. This happens largely by its capacity to suggest diverse and often ambiguous, even conflicting meanings while also allowing for future elaboration—in short, by a state of interpretive abundance.
Closely related to the question of chance in Johns’s work is the question of found versus invented imagery. In an early interview he described this dynamic as an opposition between things that are “taken” rather than “mine.” 2 Emerging in the wake of Abstract Expressionism and rejecting its emphasis on personal expression, Johns preferred preexisting subjects. Using found motifs freed him from the burden of designing new imagery that might have to “carry my nature as part of its message.”3 The notions of “taken” and “mine,” however, ought not to be seen as antipodal but rather as on a continuum, with found images sliding toward personal symbols the longer they circulate in Johns’s orbit, as will be seen with woodgrain.
This progression has been well described in relation to Johns’s celebrated subjects: public motifs such as the American flag, targets, and numbers; mundane patterns that Johns encountered obliquely, such as crosshatching and flagstones; 4 and images borrowed from his predecessors, including Pablo Picasso, Hans Holbein, and Marcel Duchamp. The pattern of simulated woodgrain, for all its humbleness, follows the same trajectory. That it hasn’t been acknowledged before as belonging to Johns’s established stable of motifs, even after decades of active use, underscores how woodgrain’s very commonness heightens its contradictory status. On the one hand it is highly visible in Johns’s work, and deeply interwoven with his other subjects; on the other hand, it continues to slide beneath the radar of conscious attention, for scholars, viewers, and even the artist.5
First Appearances
The representation of woodgrain—distinct from the use of actual pieces of wood—first appeared in Johns’s art during the 1960s with images of rulers that he incorporated into works such as the fourpanel painting Harlem Light (1967) and the lithograph Pinion (1963–66). But in these and similar works, the ruler’s woodgrain is faint at best and secondary to the main event of its numbers and lines. The 1968 screenprint Target with Four Faces , which reproduces the 1955 painting of the same title, offers a more considered representation of woodgrain. 6 Here Johns mechanically reproduced the grain of the actual boxes and lids included in the painting, inking strips of wood and applying them to the printing surface.7 He would use a similar process four years later to produce the woodgrain pattern in Device (1972), a lithograph that also looks back to an earlier, iconic painting, Device of 1961–62, which like Target with Four Faces contains actual wood attachments. In neither case does the woodgrain replicate that in the earlier painting, but each makes a convincing simulacrum while substituting an alternative pattern.
Johns soon began hand-drawing woodgrain, perhaps first in the drawing Souvenir 2 (1970). Again, the image doesn’t imitate the actual wood there in the source, a 1964 painting of the same title. Instead, it presents a loose, gestural grain in white pastel on a black ground. 8 Two years later, Johns again turned to hand rendering for the fragment of floorboards that appears beneath the waxen hand, foot, and sock in the last panel of the four-part painting Untitled (1972; Museum Ludwig, Cologne). 9 Johns recalls that he painted the grain into the mold from which the floorboards were to be cast, also in wax. 10
The change from a transfer process to freehand drawing had important consequences for Johns’s work, as the remainder of this essay explores. But before moving on, it’s worth asking whether rubbing, imprinting, and related transfer methods impart any additional content to their subjects or are merely transactional means of reproduction characterized by expediency and accuracy. It’s tempting to connect Johns’s rubbings, especially of woodgrain, with the frottage technique that Max Ernst developed in 1925 by rubbing graphite on paper laid over rough floorboards. But rubbing is also one of the most elemental methods of drawing, at once childlike and ancient. 11 In addition, lithography has long involved the use of transfer paper as a means of faithfully incorporating images, marks, and textures into prints. 12 Moreover, Johns’s transferred woodgrain abstains from the transformational magic of Surrealism: no imagined plants or creatures emerge from the depths of his wood-grain pattern, whether through hand embellishment or layering of multiple textures. Johns’s transferred images focus on replicating an external object rather than forming new imagery. 13
From Image to Motif
Johns’s initial experiments in representing woodgrain—whether mechanically or freehand—seem governed by a simple logic: rulers, wood slats, and floorboards usually have visible grain, and so should their likenesses. At this early stage, the pattern can’t be called a motif; it hasn’t yet attracted enough of Johns’s notice for him to begin altering, mutating, and shifting its appearance—that is, exploring the variations that will separate an image from its source. Just a few years later , however, woodgrain began to evolve into a vehicle for more complex meaning and with greater independence from its sources—a transformation from descriptive pattern to motif.
In 1977, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art presented a midcareer survey of Johns’s work. While generally hands-off with the organization of his exhibitions, Johns did agree to design the show’s poster and the dust jacket of its catalogue. For both, he presented an image of his
sculpture Painted Bronze (1960), in which a Savarin coffee can holds a clutch of paintbrushes, as a stand-in for an image of himself—a fitting substitution given the directness of paintbrushes as symbols of creativity. 14
For the poster Johns signaled the retrospective nature of a career survey by placing an image of this early sculpture against a field of hatchmarks derived from a recent painting. 15 The sculpture sits on a dark, narrow ledge. Beneath the ledge, a wider field houses the exhibition’s title, date, and location. Barely visible behind the stenciled text, a black wood-grain pattern inflects the warm gray ground. It seems a whimsical choice, as this part of the image doesn’t clearly represent an identifiable object. But one could imagine the overall work as a traditional wooden shop sign, and the experience of having a retrospective at the nation’s foremost museum may have put Johns in mind of this folksy reference. 16
In Savarin (1977, page 133), a closely related print made at the same time as the poster, woodgrain comes out from behind the text to stand on its own. 17 Here, Johns’s hand-drawn black-and-white rendering revels in the organic nature of the pattern and its contrast to the primary-colored geometric hatchmarks above it. The plank’s strong alignment with the image’s front plane also contrasts with the way the hatchmarks sit back behind the can and brushes. For the book jacket design, Johns also placed Painted Bronze in front of hatchmarks, and again the sculpture sits atop woodgrain, but now with no distinction between a ledge or table edge and a subsection. Instead, woodgrain here describes a receding surface that appears to support the can and brushes, while its loose swirls also suggest the instability of rippling water. These subtle variations show Johns
Below: Jasper Johns, Souvenir 2 , 1970, ink, white pencil, and pastel on plastic, 25 3 ⁄8 × 19 ¼ inches (65.1 × 48.9 cm), Menil Collection, Houston; bequest of David Whitney. Photo: Thomas R. DuBrock, courtesy The Menil Collection, Houston
exploring multiple ways to visualize woodgrain: exaggerated versus naturalistic, frontal and autonomous versus perspectival and integrated. Such modifications open divergent paths in Johns’s subsequent work, where woodgrain will attain the status of a full-fledged motif.
The act of drawing woodgrain freehand carries additional significance. Following Johns’s early embrace of recognizable subjects and his rejection of painting as an expression of individuality and interiority, artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein pushed further in their use of popular imagery and their exclusion of gesture. In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein eliminated all signs of painterly process; Warhol emphasized process, but a mechanical process rather than a hand one. Johns never abandoned gesture, but he drained the Abstract Expressionists’ emotive freight from the touch and tactility of his strokes. 18 His evolution with woodgrain from mechanical representation to hand drawing may seem a reversal of the art-historical trajectory of the 1950s and ’60s. But woodgrain, in effect, offered Johns a “handmade readymade”—a familiar subject whose instant recognizability was not compromised by his many invented versions. 19 Over the course of decades, Johns has mined this flexibility to explore a wide range of formal and symbolic implications.
Johns’s receptivity in the mid-’70s to the pattern of woodgrain—a familiar element in an artist’s studio, from pencils and brush handles to stretcher bars and floorboards—may have been enhanced by his evolving interest in the art of Edvard Munch. Johns was familiar with Munch’s paintings and prints and may have had in mind his experimental uses of woodgrain in woodcuts such as The Kiss (1898), where the pattern forms a dramatic but ambiguous environment for the pair of lovers. 20 In the print version of his most famous painting, The Scream , Munch used strong black lines and lack of shading to introduce a woodcut aesthetic into the medium of lithography. This cross-pollination of mediums confused his contemporaries, who from the start sometimes misidentified this litho as a woodcut. 21 Munch’s bold foregrounding of woodgrain and his embrace of ambiguity may have encouraged Johns at a time of his own experimentation in printmaking, especially given his predilection for visual tricks and double readings.
In his next prints using the Savarin-can motif, a pair of monotypes from 1978, Johns made clear his interest in the Norwegian artist by inserting the iconic skeletal arm from Munch’s 1895 selfportrait beneath the image of Painted Bronze , separated by a dark ledge with loosely scratched woodgrain. Commenting later, Johns acknowledged his fascination with Munch’s play with woodgrain: “You don’t really know what the connection between [the pattern in The Scream ] and the woodgrain [in The Kiss ] is, you don’t know which comes first in his mind. Whether this is because he’s been working with the wood or whether he’s attracted to the wood because it has these forms.”22 Johns’s remark is especially revealing for its focus on creative process, including the subtlety and, ultimately, the unknowability of the mind’s path from one idea, image, or process to the next.
Deepening the Meaning
Over the course of the next decade, Johns would make the pattern of woodgrain ever more visible while extending its capacity for signification. His acts of representation and transformation would
bring woodgrain fully into his domain of privileged motifs, with their enigmatic union of clarity and obscurity and their penchant, as Thomas Crow writes, for “perpetual reuse, recirculation, and change over time.”23 A suite of Savarin monotypes from 1982 explores variations on the motif introduced in the Whitney poster—some with a red armprint and Munch’s initials added to the image of Painted Bronze and the hatchmarks. More than half of these seventeen monotypes include images of woodgrain, ranging from attenuated and ghostly to painterly and conspicuous. One print includes thick brown woodgrain nearly obscuring the red arm-print. In another, where colorful handprints replace the hatchmarks (page 128), fluid, brushy strokes of woodgrain surrounding dark, jutting forms recall the stylized evocation of rock and sea in raked Japanese sand gardens. 24
In the same year that Johns made the Savarin monotypes, 1982, he completed the painting Perilous Night . It introduced a mysterious new image on the left side that was later identified as the flipped and rotated contour of two startled soldiers from the Resurrection panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1512–16) by the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald. These figures, who recoil at the sight of the risen Christ, also appear, with their orientation corrected, in a small image on the right side of the canvas that is painted illusionistically to seem nailed to a wall. Above it, three blotchy, grayish cast-wax arm fragments in graduated sizes dangle over a trompe l’oeil crosshatch painting on paper25 and the score of John Cage’s Perilous Night (1944)—a composition Cage linked to danger, misery, loneliness, and terror. 26 Altogether these motifs contribute to a new, darker mood in Johns’s work, marked by themes of sex, death, and the cycle of life. Below the small image of the soldiers, wood planks fill nearly the bottom half of the right side. Cartoony in their exaggerated shorthand rendering, the planks are both distinct and confusing. One recognizes them as floorboards, but a dangling handkerchief nailed to their surface suggests an upright orientation. The illusionistic nail’s shadow offers no further clarity.
Johns painted Perilous Night at his home and studio in Stony Point, New York, a converted barn just outside the center of town with a rustic interior of hand-hewn timber posts and beams. 27 The wide, vertical barn-board walls, though, don’t match
the narrow, horizontal planking of Perilous Night. His East Houston Street studio, however, featured a large open floor with narrow planks, and Johns has confirmed that this floor was the source for the wood-grain pattern in at least one of his paintings from around this time—Fall (1986). 28
Reality and Fantasy
Over the next five years, Johns painted a number of works that did reference his Stony Point home, specifically the bathroom, in a view looking out from the tub. Each of these “bath pictures” includes the tub’s rim and fixtures at the lower right. 29 The two paintings that begin the series, both titled Racing Thoughts —a brightly colored encaustic and a grisaille in oil—include the same four images affixed to the wall and door: a puzzle with the face of Johns’s art dealer, Leo Castelli; a reproduction of the Mona Lisa ; a Barnett Newman print; and a Swiss avalanchewarning sign. A drooping tan form represents Johns’s pants hanging on the door against a jigsaw-puzzle pattern of bundled hatchmarks. This pattern hides the outline of a fractured image, again traced from Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, but this time from the Saint Anthony panel and focusing on a diseased figure with webbed feet, swollen belly, and large red boils.
The Racing Thoughts paintings have been analyzed extensively for their mysterious references to other artworks, popular imagery, and objects from Johns’s own collection. Rarely mentioned, however, is the presence of woodgrain, which features prominently in many of the bath pictures.30 This near invisibility in the literature is in inverse proportion to woodgrain’s visibility in the images. Yet if decades of scholarly attention have taught us anything about Johns’s work, it’s that nothing there is arbitrary. In relation to the bath pictures, John Yau writes, “We must recognize that the artist’s placement of each ‘thing’ conveys a feeling of urgent necessity, and that for any of these sights (meanings) to become possible everything must be exactly where it is.”31 Woodgrain does not just fill space or neutrally denote a domestic interior; it conveys meanings and associations and undergoes the manipulations and displacements of Johns’s other motifs. In addition, woodgrain often grounds these other elements,
lending them both an actual, descriptive basis and a way to measure their departure from the literal.
The horizontal strip behind the vases in the Racing Thoughts paintings represents an actual molding in the Stony Point bathroom. Horizontal and vertical boards on the left sides of the paintings reflect the real wood door and casing. Their grain would have been clearly visible at the time Johns made the paintings—as he recalls, “the bathroom door at Stony Point was not painted when I lived there. I don’t remember that anything made of wood, other than front and back doors, was painted.”32 The Racing Thoughts paintings represent the door’s boards selectively, and seem to shift the molding up from its actual location. But the fact that Johns chose to paint these strips of wood at all attests to his interest in depicting a specific place. Working in tandem with the hamper, ceramic vessels, drooping pants, and tub rim and fixtures, this specificity asserts his Stony Point bathroom as a solid grounding for the shifting phantasmagoria of images on the wall, creating a dynamic tension between real and imagined, or outer and inner, spaces.33
The presence of woodgrain also allows Johns to further the play between figuration and abstraction
Left: Jasper Johns, Perilous Night , 1982, encaustic and silkscreen on canvas with objects, 67 1 8 × 96 1 8 × 6 ¼ inches (170.5 × 244.2 × 15.9 cm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Collection of Robert and Jane Meyerhoff. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
in the door’s puzzle pattern and its hidden Isenheim figure. In this setting, woodgrain competes, clashes, and causes confusion. Its proximity to the Newman print makes that abstract image read like a close-up of woodgrain or tree bark. And in relation to the puzzle pattern, it’s hard to tell where the woodgrain ends and the pattern’s dense clusters of hatchmarks begin.
Shifting the Ground
Two large untitled bath paintings from 1984 alter the ground on which the images are affixed by moving the woodgrain from the left side to the right. Now the pattern appears in wide vertical planks, which resemble Stony Point’s barn-board walls or the inset panel of the bathroom door. In either case, Johns makes the reference to his home overt, yet also shows the ground as mutable, shifting from left to right. Moving the woodgrain to the site formerly occupied by the smooth wall reflects the way Johns plays fast and loose with all his motifs—rotating, reversing, and recombining them to suit his needs and tease out new meanings.
On further inspection, the wood-grain wall in both of these untitled bath paintings gives way at its upper left to a mottled green area that reveals itself as a field of sperm. Johns had used this motif two years earlier in one of the Savarin monotypes, again reflecting his interest in Munch, who included images of large sperm around the edges of several prints showing the Madonna.34 In Johns’s paintings, it also adds to the unstable nature of the room, as patterns, images, and allusions pile on top of and slide beneath one another, creating a shallow space that shifts back and forth, much like the illusion contained within that flips between a young woman and an old woman as one stares at it. In this context, the familiar, homey pattern of woodgrain anchors the flux, helping it read as a display of images fixed to a vertical surface. The effect recalls Johns’s interest in nineteenth-century American trompe l’oeil paintings by William Harnett and John F. Peto, whose hyperreal assemblages of ordinary household things backed by wood surfaces also create a sense of spatial confusion.
1. Jasper Johns, quoted in Paul Schimmel, “The Faked Gesture: Pop Art and the New York School,” in Donna De Salvo and Schimmel, Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955–62 , ed. Russell Ferguson, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993), 42.
2. Johns, quoted in Edmund White, “Enigmas and Double Visions,” Horizon 20, no. 2 (1977), quoted here from Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe, compiled by Christel Hollevoet (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 154.
3. Johns, in Peter Fuller, “Jasper Johns Interviewed Part II,” 1978, in Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews , 187.
4. Johns saw both patterns from a car—the flagstones on a wall in Harlem, the hatchmarks on a passing car while on the way to the Hamptons. See Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns, 1977 (rev. ed. New York: Abrams, 1994), 52–53, 57. 5. Only three authors, to my knowledge, devote more than passing mention to images of wood and woodgrain in Johns’s work: John Yau, in “Jasper Johns’ Preoccupation (Part 2),” The American Poetry Review 35, no. 5 (September/October 2006): 13–17, and A Thing among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2008), 159–61, 167; Charles W. Haxthausen, in “Translation and Transformation in Target with Four Faces: The Painting, the Drawing, and the Etching,” in Jasper Johns: Printed Symbol (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1990), 72–73; and Scott Rothkopf, “Suspended Animation,” in Jasper Johns: Catenary (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2005), passim.
6. I have not seen this mentioned in the literature but in the screenprint, Johns seems to have replaced the painting’s four casts with the face of the dancer Merce Cunningham. Observation reveals that the faces in the print are not those of the painting and match Cunningham’s features. Johns made the print as a benefit for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and a poster version was produced for the company’s use, making the insertion plausible, as Rothkopf concurred in an email to the author, February 3, 2022.
7. See Haxthausen, “Translation and Transformation,” 72. There is some question, however, whether the wood-grain pattern may result from a photographic rather than a manual transfer process. Shelley Langdale, telephone conversation with the author, April 13, 2022.
8. Johns also made a color lithograph version of Souvenir 2 in 1970, but with almost no discernible woodgrain beyond layering mottled tones of yellow and gray.
9. I previously proposed this as the first instance of simulated woodgrain in Johns’s work, but the current essay revises this history. See John B. Ravenal, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Inspiration and Transformation , exh. cat. (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and New Haven: Yale University Press, in partnership with the Munch Museum, Oslo, 2016), 18.
10. See ibid., and Johns studio, email to the author, December 16, 2014.
11. See Allegra Pesenti, Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2015), 11.
12. See Marjorie B. Cohn, “The ‘Freedom and Extravagance’ of Transfer Lithography,” in Cohn, Touchstone: 200 Years of Artists’ Lithographs , exh. cat. (Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums, for the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 1998).
13. What the French refer to as estampage or frottis in contrast to frottage, according to Pesenti; see her Apparitions , 12.
14. Johns based the image of the Savarin can and brushes on a 1977 drawing he had made of his sculpture (graphite pencil and crayon on plastic; private collection).
15. See Ravenal, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch , 12–15, for discussion of the identity of the background painting.
16. Haxthausen discusses woodgrain in the print Savarin , which closely resembles the Whitney poster but lacks the exhibition text, as a sign of temporality. “Translation and Transformation,” 72. To my mind, however, he misreads the woodgrain as a table rather than a separate plane from the narrow ledge above.
17. According to Bill Goldston of the print workshop ULAE, they worked on all three Savarin prints at the same time, although the Whitney poster was completed first. See Ravenal, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch , 110 n. 52.
18. See Schimmel, “The Faked Gesture,” esp. 40–49.
19. See David Deitcher, “Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist,” in De Salvo and Schimmel, Hand Painted Pop, 109 and passim.
20. See Ravenal, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch , 18–20.
21. See Ute Kuhlemann Falck, “Idea and Reality: Edvard Munch and the Woodcut Technique,” in Diana Dethloff, Tessa Murdoch, Kim Sloan, et al., Burning Bright: Essays in Honour of David Bindman (London: UCL Press, 2015), 243 and passim.
22. Johns, in conversation with the author, June 20, 2014. Quoted in Ravenal, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch , 23.
23. Thomas Crow, “Moving Targets: Change and Renewal in the Art of Jasper Johns,” in Jasper Johns: Drawings 1997–2007, exh. cat. (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2008), n.p.
24. Johns was stationed in Japan for the last six months of his military service, in 1951, and visited again in 1968. In the late 1970s and early ’80s he worked with Simca Press on the Japan-inspired suite of prints titled Usuyuki
25. The same drawing is seen in In the Studio (1982). See Ravenal, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch , 70, 115 n. 149.
26. See David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, A Life (New York: Arcade, 1993), 85.
27. Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective , exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 320.
28. See Barbara Rose, “Jasper Johns: The Seasons,” Vogue, January 1987, 259–60. In an email to the author on October 27, 2021, Johns confirmed, “The wood pattern in Fall imitated the floor of my Houston Street studio.”
29. Fiona Donovan counts nine paintings and twenty drawings that feature both the bathroom wall and the tub fixtures. Donovan, Jasper Johns: Pictures within Pictures 1980–2015 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), 269 n. 36.
30. See Yau for the only discussion of the wood planks in the bath pictures that I know of: “Jasper Johns’ Preoccupation,” 16, and A Thing among Things , 159–60.
31. Yau, “Jasper Johns’ Preoccupation,” 15.
32. Johns, email to the author, October 27, 2021.
33. Roberta Bernstein notes that all the images and objects in the bath pictures are things that Johns owns, even if they wouldn’t have been seen together in this location and these configurations. See Bernstein, “Seeing a Thing Can Sometimes Trigger the Mind to Make Another Thing,” in Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective , 54.
34. See Ravenal, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch , 40–50, 66–67, 77.
Excerpted from an unpublished essay. Part two will appear in the winter issue of Gagosian Quarterly
First I saw the white angel. He was resplendent, with expansive silver wings. He descended amid thunder, wings flapping loudly, whoop-whoop-whoop, smacking air and slicing rain. I’d been drifting to sleep, and when I startled awake, there he was on the football field, fanning the grasses with his descending wind. I was stunned, seeing this from an upsidedown perspective—I liked to sleep on my back—but what I saw next forced me onto my stomach, ushering in my days of sleeping that way: the devil itself sliding down our corridor. It could only be the devil, this coal-black thing with mighty curved horns gleaming in the thundering night.
They were both mighty creatures—movies did not scrape the surface of their monstrosity. When, trembling less but weeping in my soul, I peeked at them, they were tussling in our corridor, bodies gleaming wet, stooping like two bulls as they charged, protecting their heads from the high ceiling. I watched as the devil shoved the angel away from the door of our house, slicing and digging with its horns, its fangs, its long, long fingernails, leaving bloody gashes that closed back up, but slowly. The angel shot orbs of light from his golden spear, the devil faltering in its relentless charge, bleeding smoke. It made a frightening sound, like a stream in a forest full of birds and darkening trees. I blinked hard, again and again, pinching myself.
All around me, boys snored and muttered in their sleep, hearing nothing, seeing nothing. I needed desperately to wake up from this nightmare. It had been raining since night prep; Aunty Music had to cancel choir practice, allowing Ifeanyi to complete his story with us in the chapel before we all dispersed to our dorms (maybe Ifeanyi had put ideas in my head with his ghost stories). I recalled falling asleep, recalled waking up and walking to the corridor to pee, standing beside one of the cement beams and pissing into the hedges below. I recalled returning to my top bunk, located a few tight bunk beds away from Soludo’s, and I certainly recalled closing my eyes for a second as lightning flashed across the sky—as it did now—thunder cracking the pouring blackness with its guttural blast, like a bomb going off in the sky, shaking the world and blessing our hostel with a soft, fierce breeze.
This was not a dream.
Back outside, the devil grabbed and flung the angel’s spear across the football field, ripping through his skimpy white robe, digging its fangs into his neck and chest, the angel unable to defend himself without his spear, his wings billowing wildly. Suddenly they froze, and the angel’s fading
eyes glanced at me, quizzical, cold with a bone-freezing hunger, and the devil whirled round, looking pissed, tossing him onto the hedges and rushing at my window. The angel grabbed his spear, limping, scurrying across the field into Classroom Block. Again, my trembling, soundless scream, only now I wanted to weep as well, wishing I could run. A stupid fear flipped me over face up, paralyzing me there. This was real, this was happening for real—why me! Satan was at my window, poking in its horned head like a giant spider cow. I wished to faint. Its face was immeasurably gigantic up close: endless, yet it fit into the window. As it hovered over my face, I took in this strange human face, bulbous triangular eyes, fangs, and mighty curved horns. I knew immediately that this was a deity. I quaked with dread. Deities could be hostile or friendly, my mother had told me, depending on their nature and mission. A different force from fear was keeping my eyes open, saying Don’t blink, making me feel deep in my bones that this was a game of wink. We stared eyeball to eyeball. It was like looking into the eyes of the world. Shimmering there were the lives of everyone I’d known, somehow, in this and previous lifetimes, plus the lusts and terrors of a million strangers, their days and presences darting behind its fiery irises. Now, it was like a curious insect, smelling of wood, smoke, and earth, and of the forest in the morning.
It began to hum, light, like a big bird whistling out of a wooden mouth; like a strange man humming in the forest. I-yulu-yulu-o, i-yulu-yulu-o, it sang in my face, in my ears, smoke breath all over me. Petrifaction gripped me from head to toe, keeping me still, expanding, expanding, until I was awash in a cool, satisfying wonder.
It retreated gingerly, strutting down the corridor, its back rippling with the motions of its unruffled walk.
I felt a coldness between my legs and knew that I had peed myself.
The morning Soludo ran away, the ghost in the toilets of Awka House sang a long, eerie song. It was strange, how too few people in Block B heard the song, even though it came from the walls of their toilets, whereas Samson and I heard it all the way in Waddington House, wide awake in our beds, its tremulous frequencies across the school compound like tattered lamentations. I did not really hear the words, it was
maybe the wind or my deficient Igbo, which the other boys teased me often about, saying Igbo gi eyero eye , but I understood that she was full of questions for the cosmos, the ghost, and that I was this singer’s least concern.
One minute Soludo was holding me, the next he was gone, and it was raining beads, all thunder. How did I hear the song through that racket? I did not sleep, I prayed in my mind, thinking at some point Protect me within the hedges of your consuming fire/And preserve me in the cloudburst/of your gentle morning. When they struck the rising bell, I woke to the sweetest breeze and refused to leave my bed, could not, I had slept for what felt like five minutes but was probably an hour, and I would be tired and sleepy all day, and we had math first period, and Collins had died, and Soludo had run away. I wanted so much to cry, missing my mummy and thinking of home, where no one had died, where Grandma or Daddy or Mummy were ready to hold me if a strange bird wailed too loudly at night, Grandma saying Don’t fear those powerless witches, he that is in you is greater than he that is in the world, Daddy saying Don’t be afraid, it’s just a bird.
Around me, boys were shuffling out of bed, conformists heading to chapel where we ought to be after waking for Morning Prayer, the more daring ones retrieving their pails and gallons, creeping toward the water tanks and the showers before the after-prayers rush.
Samson appeared at the head of my bed. My corner was dim, seeing as it was in the middle row and was surrounded by a barracks of bunk beds. He tapped my shoulder, thinking I was asleep. “Wake up. Eche is going to ring the warning bell.”
My heart swelled inside my chest and I began to sniffle.
“Ifyy,” Samson called, leaning over me. “What’s the problem?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I just thought how Collins used to ring the bell every morning.”
Samson looked at me strangely. “So? Someone has to ring the bell no matter what, do you expect them to let us sleep forever?”
My heart squeezed itself. “You’re wicked,” I said.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re a very wicked boy.” I was crying fully now, quietly.
“You’re the wicked person.” His voice faltered as he began
rocking my shoulder. “Sorry. Sorry nah, o zugo. It’s going to be okay. Let’s go fetch water before they ring the warning bell.”
I sat up groggily, rubbing my eyes with my arm. Samson sat beside me, lifted his shirt, and, his arm around my shoulders, wiped my face with the hem. I leaned down to meet him halfway, feeling better.
“I don’t want to,” I said into his shirt. “I want to go back to sleep.”
He looked at me like I was silly. “What if Eche—God forbid, Chaplain himself—inspects around and sees you sleeping? They will use a cane to wake you up.”
“I didn’t sleep last night. There was this strange sound.”
Samson’s face erupted in fright, like he had seen a ghost, something frantic in his voice as he said: “What sound? What did you hear?”
“You heard it too? It was raining.”
“Yes? It rained this morning. Was that your strange sound?”
“No. It was raining when I heard the sound.”
A sheet of fear fell over his frozen face. It made me nervous, remembering that bloodcurdling sound. My eyes darted around the emptying hall. I wondered what evil lurked in the darkness between bunks, my mind creating images of the most fearsome-looking demons I’d seen on TV: ugly and messy haired, always in black or white wrappers, their faces painted with nzu or charcoal, lips unbelievably red.
“Let’s just go to chapel,” I said. “But first I must tell you something, but promise not to tell anybody else, you hear? Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Soludo ran away.”
In chapel, when the keyboard comes on, all woofing and shuffling stops. Everybody stands at once, red hymnbooks open, at the ready.
Mine still smelled of the printer’s that Sunday morning of Freedom Week, our first week here, when we’d been new. I’d flipped pages hither-thither, searching for the song, and finding it, stared blankly at the words, listening to everyone else
sing the first verse. “Aren’t you Anglican?” Samson asked. He spoke English with the same Igbo flavor as Soludo, but his had the sharpened edge of someone whose parents had money. We were Anglicans, of course, but I wondered if Samson was the sort of boy to tell the truth if I weren’t. It was a school for Anglican boys, but my mummy had said as she signed my forms months ago, “I hear many non-Anglicans forge baptismal certificates to get in.”
“I used to attend the children’s church back home,” I told him. “And even our main parish did more praise-and-worship songs than hymns.”
“And they’re—Anglicans?” A sneer on his face, like, Imagine that. I shrugged.
The hymn was slow. My uncle used to play songs like that all the time, going la-lu-lu on Grandma’s radio all afternoon whenever he returned home from university, filling the house with such boredom, I sometimes imagined hiding all his CDs away. In Bishop’s Memorial Chapel—the official name, though we all simply called it “chapel”—my body reacted differently, with wonder and love: the keyboard sounded like the organ in our cathedral back home, filling the chapel with its mighty sound, like a majestic beast climbing the walls. When the choir emerged from the vestry, I was ready to die—I had never heard voices so beautifully blended, like one person singing various complementing notes at once. First, the cross-bearer, in his white and red robes, and then the choir in their red robes, moving like saints, singing like angels, “Spirit of Truth and Love”; walking to their pews, turning, not quite like orderly soldiers (they moved too calmly) away from us to face the altar. The second procession: two acolytes. Soludo? I mouthed, surprised. They flanked the cross-bearer at the entrance of the chancel, their red robes having little sacks behind like hoods, the acolytes’ girdles giving theirs a shapeliness. Reverend floated to the front of the altar and everyone bowed together: priest, acolytes, choirboys, and 240-something boys moving their heads at once. What a fantastic choreography!
In the chancel, Soludo sat still, hands on his thighs. There was no restlessness in him, Soludo who so far that week had shown me that he was a rule-breaker, making us skip chapel once to go fetch water. He stood, he sat, he bowed (standsit-bow was all he did in that altar). He was focused, Soludo who spent prep time, when we were supposed to be reading,
gisting in the corridor with his friends. Boredom entered his face when Reverend began to give the sermon, saying, “The devil will tempt you with pleasurable things.” Soludo looking up at the ceiling, head thrown back, pure concentration on his face, as though counting the squares. He did not seem to care that, seated up there, he was a center of attention, that all eyes were on him. I, too, looked up to see what he was seeing, but it was the same flat white squares that began to expand and meld, like a snowy kaleidoscope.
I thought of Freedom Week whenever things got too hard. It had been, so far, my best week at our school, with no house duties and no punishments. Now I had to sweep outside with my friends and observe hours without failing, or else risk getting in trouble.
The opening hymn this morning is “New Every Morning Is Thine Love.” Kosi plays the first line on the keyboard, the tune “Melcombe” clacking round the chapel, an unsure intro. When we open our mouths, our voices are as unsure; sleep is in our mouths and our throats, and fear is in my heart, and we drag the song the way we drag and shuffle our feet in the morning, much to Chaplain’s chagrin—lazily. Could I call it the voice of an angel that had serenaded me the night before? Or was it the beguiling lure of an evil spirit? I shuddered to think. It had been a beautiful song, a strange and ethereal tune, sad and funereal. I’d learned that word the very week before while flipping through my English dictionary. Forgotten was my delight at discovering such a beautiful word, funereal , how I diddled in my little book of new words and sentences: dark and funereal was the gravesite; sad and funereal was the procession . . . the song. Was it a coincidence that I had happened upon that word in a dark corner of the library? I’d been in search of the dictionary and, finding it there, where the naughty boys liked to sit, settled in to stare at the words they‘d left behind—Jude loves Eze; Aunty English pa Manchester; stupendous Aunty Music; Ebuka was here, Set ’094 for life—names, and all sorts of funny and rude remarks scrawled into the history of our library walls, our library desks, and all over school in the toilets and dormitories. Proof we were here, with each other in this time.
Collins hangs like a sob in my throat. Thankfully, they have spared us chanting the Psalm. I love chanting but not today. I move my lips as Chapel (we call him Chapel the same way we call the labor and dining prefects “Labor” and
“Dining”) drawls each alternate verse while we respond in kind. Samson is right behind me, now he leans his head and arms on my back, resting on me. His weight on me is light. We must chant the Gloria so Kosi plays a tune. We bow at “Holy Spirit,” facing the altar with the plain brown cross; I bow low and in the brief darkness of my closed eyes I swear I hear her clear as day, the girl, singing, uwa na-eme ntughari-ntughari.
Samson was humming our morning hymn while he swept his portion beside our hostel block. There was a canopy of trees there, mango tree touching orange tree, branches outstretched. The grounds were puddled from last night’s rain, and instead of proper sweeping we poked out refuse with sticks and threw them into old Bagco bags. “Melcombe” was somber, which made it perfect for morning prayer, but it was never this dreary, the way Samson sang it like a prisoner doing hard labor, reminding me of my recurring dream in which a group of slaves gather cotton under scorching heat while singing, all the time, of the river Beulah.
A quiet breeze blew, rustling the leaves, which shook their wetness all over us, for a second it felt as though I could hear the trees sigh, saying, “Ahh, yes.” But I’d not gotten a good night’s sleep and was certainly hearing things. I looked up at the moon retreating slowly in the distance, like it was waiting for the sun to arrive for its shift before making its final descent, and imagined that they liked to say good day to each other, the sun and the moon, and then I thought of stories of witches holding covens in the night sky. I tried to remember if it had been a full, crescent, or halfmoon last night, tried to remember what meaning each was supposed to carry.
“Lee! Lee!”
Boys clustered around Marcus, making wondering noises. Soon, the circle grew, hands reaching, saying, Ka m kirie, ka m kirie
“What is it?”
“It looks like a shrapnel!”
“What’s a shrapnel?”
“It’s a type of bullet. They used it during the Biafran war.”
“How come it is still here? War that they finished fighting more than thirty years ago.”
I joined the group of scrambling boys and, after some struggle held the shrapnel in my hand. It was like a rusty periwinkle shell, but metal, with lovely spikes. I rolled it between my fingers, feeling its delicate coarseness. I wanted to keep it for myself, a toy, not to play with, but to look at and to feel between my fingers.
“Sir Obinweke used to talk about it last term, before your set came in,” Marcus said. He was repeating JSS 1, and sometime last week an argument had broken out during morning duty, JSS 2 boys insisting that his status as a repeater ended in the classroom, that he was supposed to join them in the sweeping of the hostels, which was the more arduous task (the wet floors, the obstructing bunks, and all those stubborn feet coming and going with their dirty slippers while you mopped the floor), after all he sat with them at meal times, not us. “He said they discovered some years after building the school that Biafran soldiers had laid mines and built a bunker on this very land. He even brought people from the Ministry of Memories to collect the things they found in the bunker. Luckily, none of the mines were active, if not—poof !”
“Woah.” We shivered, fascinated by the thought of things blowing up. Samson took the shrapnel from me while someone else reached impatiently for it. And so it went, from hand to hand.
“We should submit it,” Samson said.
Marcus snorted. “Nah, it doesn’t matter anymore. This is not the first time, neither is it the last.”
He took the shrapnel from Samson and, walking past the mango tree to the fence, flung it into the compound with the lonely white duplex, the rest of us watching in disbelief before erupting in protest.
Katherine Bucknell, previously the editor of a four-volume edition of Christopher Isherwood’s diaries, has now published Christopher Isherwood Inside Out , an intimate and rigorous biography of the celebrated writer and gay cultural icon. Here she meets with Josh Zajdman to discuss the challenges and revelations of the book.
THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY: CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
JOSH ZAJDMAN I love the book; it occupied my whole mind and made my Google history much more interesting.
KATHERINE BUCKNELL Thank you. I spent a really long time writing it, and probably because of the pandemic, longer than I might have. But I’m happy with the way it came out. It’s long; if I’d had my druthers, it would have been longer. I grew up on things like Leon Edel’s five-volume Henry James [1953–72].
JZ Definitely—that’s a favorite of mine, as well. How did you come to Isherwood as a subject?
KB I wrote my PhD thesis about W. H. Auden, specifically his juvenilia. Isherwood and Auden were friends from the time they met at boarding school, and when they reconnected as young adults, in 1925, Auden sent Isherwood pretty much everything he’d written up to that
date, and Isherwood saved it all. Auden went on sending him everything he wrote from then on. Isherwood was a born archivist and collector and I went to California to study his collection of Auden poems—he’d already died when I was working on the project, sadly, but Don Bachardy, his partner, welcomed me, and I sat in the dining room and worked there for a week. We connected through that, and then Don asked if I’d like to edit Isherwood’s diaries. I said yes without having any idea what I was really saying yes to. And there went the next twentyfive years of my life [laughter ]. It was over a million words of diaries and then I did a volume of letters. After that, my agent said, “Hmm, don’t you think you should do a biography?”
JZ Were you at all resistant when a biography was suggested?
KB I was daunted, but I put on my “I-can-be-aprofessional” hat and wrote up a proposal, which proved to demonstrate no inkling of how the business of biographies works. The publishers are in a commercial world, where everything is monetized, and they want a book that’s a size that will fit on the Amazon shelf and can be packaged like a box of Cheerios. But a proper, honest biography can’t really compromise itself in that way, so it’s a negotiation. From the start, I had so much material— three, four thousand documents, some of them hundreds of pages long—across so many locations—libraries and archives all over the United States, all over the UK and Europe—and I thought, partway through, that it was too big for anyone to do in a way that a publisher would be happy to sell. I mean, I gave my publishers a three-volume idea: “Let’s have three little paperbacks and they’ll come out simultaneously but we’ll have youth, middle age, old age.” I thought that would mean you could have a little paperback in your hip pocket on the subway. That was mocked [laughter ]. What you can imagine, when you’re all alone writing, would suit your subject, and what someone in a big meeting full of important people who want to spend money on it are considering—those are two different things. This is my first biography, so this was a lesson learned along the way.
JZ Well, I’m glad you won out in terms of writing with such scope—it’s a big book and I’d put it on the shelf with Henry James by Edel, and Hermione Lee’s and Robert Caro’s assorted biographies. This is a biography that suits the subject.
KB I feel honored to be named with those names. I did put everything into it that I could. I immersed myself in Isherwood’s life. I reread his diaries, his mother’s diaries, all his letters. I tried to read all the books that he read. I saw a lot of the movies he saw. Because you know, the great mystery really is, how did he make the work? This is a writer whom we should admire for his literary achievements and also for how he lived. You have the gay icon, and then you also have the mysterious, chameleonlike, elusive, will-o’-the-wisp creature who seemed to be always changing, absorbing everything that was happening around him and presenting it back for us in a work like Goodbye to Berlin [1939]. He was this very charming, engaging person who always played down any talent, any intelligence— he always said, “Oh, Auden was the intellectual one”—but he was brilliant, incredibly well read. For him there weren’t distinctions between high literature and pulp. He read it all; same with the movies. And this matches with his engagement with human beings—he was curious about absolutely everyone, regardless of social status.
JZ As I was reading, his consistent ability to see value in that wide range of literature, people, film . . . it was so inspiring and touching. His life can serve as a reminder to engage with the world; everything is worthwhile and living fully is the only way to live.
KB I agree with that. He observed already when he was very young this problem of collateral damage in the great events of the world, where the generals or the presidents or the monarchs are running the show and it’s the minor figures—the young people, the unemployed, the vulnerable— who are the collateral damage. When he was ten, World War I suddenly blew his world apart and his father was killed and the family fortune subsequently declined. That resulted in a range of identifications with so much of the world around him. And then of course when he moved to Berlin,
which was the enemy power in that same war, he met so many people there who were going to be crushed all over again when Hitler took over, people he identified with. He was on to that theme from very young. And then after he moved to America and became a Hindu and schooled himself in nonattachment and a wider love . . . you say it’s touching, which is interesting, because he didn’t permit himself much sentiment as a young man. He tried to control that, but once he became a follower of Prabhavananda, love was okay, and from there a huge amount of love flows out of him toward whoever he’s writing about and whoever he’s with.
JZ There’s a motif of haunting that pervades this book—from the two wars, whether it’s his father dying in the first or his coming of age and fleeing Germany before the second, but also actual ghosts,
which we learn he was terrified by in his childhood home.
KB Yes, in the house where he grew up, in Cheshire, and his grandparents’ house, where he spent a lot of his school holidays, Marple Hall. A huge number of ghost stories were attached to these houses, in ways romantic and frightening. He wrote a lot about those hauntings as an adult in Kathleen and Frank [1971]. He had a sense that psychic evil was real from a young age, growing up in this enormous, gloomy house where he was often left with just his nanny while his parents were traveling abroad. It didn’t help that his favorite story as a child, [Beatrix Potter’s] “Roly-Poly Pudding” [1908], about a kitten who’s kidnapped and taken behind the wainscoting where the rats are going to make him into a pudding, was so aesthetically akin to his own setting. But then there’s a shift when he leaves England and moves to Berlin. He comes to feel more comfortable identifying with the creatures behind the wainscoting. The way to neutralize what you perceive to be evil: go toward your fear. Become part of it.
That links up with his sexuality: if you were a homosexual in the ’20s and ’30s, in the United Kingdom where he lived then and in the United States where he lived later, it was against the law. You were classed as a criminal. The Oscar Wilde trial was not long ago, and he was very much aware of that history growing up. Eventually I think he did enjoy the freedom of saying, “I’ll join the other side, this menace of evil, hauntings”; he dressed up as a ghost with his cousin and frightened the maids, and then they felt a lot better. When he went to Berlin, he immersed himself in a milieu that his mother would have been horrified by—partly his sex life but partly the fact that a lot of the people he socialized with had broken one law or another and had even been to the reformatory or prison for it.
JZ You write that he worked on the boundary of fiction and nonfiction. Did you find that intentional, or was it just how his output unfolded?
KB He tried different things in each of his books. Sometimes he’d write what he called a contraption novel, with a full plot and fully fictionalized imaginary people. Other times he did something much closer to his diary. But even his purported diary pieces, like the first and last sections of Goodbye to Berlin , are very fictionalized. One of the tasks in the book was finding out what actually took place and how he reshaped it, because you can really work out what his intention was by seeing the differences. As soon as you know, here’s what actually happened and here’s how he transformed it into fiction, you are privy to his plan. He had an
artistic intention, which can be understood in a political way—to bring the homosexual into the drawing room, so to speak, as a figure who could be attractive and funny as well. He used humor a lot to make something attractive. If you have something you want the world to change its mind about, you’re going to try all different strategies. What he left out also gives a clue as to the intentions of his work. One reason he needed such a huge biography is to say, “Look at the weight of what he left out. The ballast underlying these delicate works is so much deeper and more complex than people have seen previously.” And now that we’re in a very different phase with regard to sexual diversity, it’s much easier to talk about, but we don’t want to forget what was happening in that period. So we need to talk about it.
JZ Can we talk about faith for a minute? Whether
it’s the appearance of faith, or the evaporation of it, or just the need for it, it’s a constant with Isherwood. How did he relate to faith as he moved through his life?
KB He definitely needed to believe in something. Usually he described wishing to believe in something personified in another human being. So he always liked to have a mentor, whether it was Gerald Heard or Swami Prabhavananda. He had a real need to devote himself to something outside himself—to his guru, and also to Don Bachardy, his companion. His last book, My Guru and His Disciple [1980], is about his religious life, and you can see that he had an extremely religious personality. Art and the sacred were for him places where you access the energy of the universe, which is just a huge, frightening, unknowable, exciting, thrilling thing that he wanted to get at all the time. So
This spread, from left to right: Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden in Central Park, New York, 1938. Photo: Smith Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
The exterior of Marple Hall, 1919. Image: courtesy The Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Christopher Isherwood and Walter Wolff, Rügen Island, Germany, 1931. Image: courtesy The Huntington Library, San Marino, California
I think art and religion for him are adjacent if not sometimes overlapping.
JZ With so many interesting people in his life, what was the calculus of explaining those people’s lives as you made your way through? He encountered so many brilliant characters of the twentieth century, be it through work or romantic engagement—how did you mark the parameters of how to introduce these figures in his life to the reader, while keeping the focus on Isherwood?
KB This is a technical matter which really is key. If you do it right, hopefully readers are going to feel that you’re telling them a story and that without them being aware of it, you’ve handed them a little tiny bit of paper that lets them in on who this person is who just showed up in the story. You spend so much time mastering the background of, say, Gerald Heard, who is not famous but is a
hugely learned and important figure in the history of religion and sociology, and then you’ve just got to run that in there very briefly. In editing Isherwood’s diaries I’d made these huge glossaries that are meant to help the reader who wants to know who they’re reading about, so I’d spent a lot of years with some of those people and I’d done a lot of footnotes. But to make that stuff seem weightless and gossamer and to appear naturally in the text is hugely demanding. You don’t get it on the first go-through, you work at it and work at it. You don’t want to introduce the person with cliché, you have to make this person fresh and alive. It can’t be something you got off Wikipedia. I found it helpful to imagine that I was telling a neighbor at a dinner party about the person: is it “Oh, she just won the prize for such and such,” or is it “He has a boyfriend at home who only has one leg.” What’s the thing that’s going to help the reader most? It’s incredibly interesting to do that work, but by the time you’ve got your answer, you’ve probably forgotten what the question was, as the writer. So then you have to go back to your paragraph and sew in that little stitch and try to make it look like it’s not a patch but part of the actual weave of what you’re telling.
JZ We have to talk about Don Bachardy. I found myself responding to their relationship differently as I read the book. I was touched by the love. I was dismayed by the toxicity. I was repelled by a slight codependence—
KB Good.
JZ I’m curious what your take was.
KB I think all of the above. The fluctuations in their relationship are so real, and they articulate outwardly what many of us experience inwardly in our most intimate relationships. These are two people whose interior censors were carefully and deliberately pushed aside as they grew and developed as artists. They wanted to get down in the dirty place where it all comes from. No holds barred. So all that stuff you feel, that’s what I felt. And it’s real. Don has said that he’d love to be the older guy sentimentally standing up in front of an applauding audience and talking about thirtythree years of love and loyalty and whatever, but as the years have gone by, the unfiltered truth is important: it was a relationship and it was difficult. With everything that happened, they absolutely did stay together. And that’s where I find the example that I’d like to follow. Whatever you go through in a relationship, if you can possibly handle it and not break up, the payoff is huge. In A Single Man [1964], there was a big temptation for Isherwood to portray a homosexual relationship as somehow more successful than a heterosexual relationship, because in that period you needed to do that in order to persuade the culture to shift. But I think it’s okay now to say, No, no perfection here either. It’s different, it’s real.
JZ I think one of the great strengths of the book is that you’re unflinching in depicting those moments and those warts, so to speak. It makes the portrait more truthful, but also, as a reader, your relationship to him is stronger for it.
KB If you wanted to take a life lesson from it, Isherwood really grew throughout his life by saying, “I will put my arms around something bigger and harder than I expected it to be.” And he just kept on doing that. And I too as a human being would like to be able to do that. He was really good at being friends with people and holding out through the tough times. I think we could all learn from that.
Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood, 1970. Photo: Michael Childers/Corbis via Getty Images
The celebrated interior designer Robert Stilin invited Fernando Garcia, the co-creative director of Oscar de la Renta and monse , to his home in New York to discuss their approaches to design, art, and their clientele.
FERNANDO GARCIA Was there an early moment when you realized that art was something you cared about or wanted to know more about?
ROBERT STILIN My appreciation for art didn’t come about until I was a little bit older, quite frankly. When I was a kid, my parents were aspirational, children of immigrants, and they were all about getting an education, being an entrepreneur, making money, having a career, and making a better life. So when I was a kid, I liked to design cars and houses and do all these drawings, and if I’d been in a different family, maybe I’d have been an architect, like you, Fernando. But they were just like, “That’s so cute, Robert. You’re going to be a lawyer” [laughs ]. I also grew up in a really small town in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, and art wasn’t such a big thing.
FG I had a similar upbringing. I was raised to think that art was secondary, that raising a family and building a business were first and foremost. Growing up in the Dominican Republic, if you had an affinity for the arts or liked film, like I did, you’d better have it backed up with really good grades in school or a college degree as a safety net before you tried anything “creative.” Had I not gotten into a good school and given my parents the reassurance of knowing that I earned a degree in architecture, and that I could be an architect in Chicago, I don’t know if they’d have given me the freedom of exploring my internship at Oscar [de la Renta].
RS Do you feel that education has served you in what you do?
FG Yeah, I think so. One thing it certainly did was develop the skills necessary to navigate between a client’s goals and whatever the hell else I thought was necessary for their project. But beyond that, the architectural concerns around proportion, scale, and materiality translate to the work I do with clothing. How did you get into design?
RS I met my now ex-wife when I was in college, and when we graduated we moved to Palm Beach, where she was from. I’d studied business and finance. I was meant to go into private equity, and I wanted to live in New York, but she didn’t. We bought this little house and we were renovating it, trying to find furniture, and there was no place to buy anything. Compared to what we know today, the world of design was closed. There was Bloomingdale’s and Ethan Allen. If you went to the Design Center they wouldn’t let you in the door if you weren’t an architect or a designer. So I thought, well, maybe I could create a lifestyle store that has everything somebody would want for a house and a life and make a prototype in Palm Beach, because I was living there, and then open one in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and so on, building a company, sell it for $20 million and move on to the next thing. That’s not what happened, obviously. I wish. But I did create this beautiful store, and somebody came in and bought a bunch of furniture and they met with me and said, “Hey, we just bought this house and we don’t have anything. We’re going to buy this stuff, but can you help us? Can you come over and look and help us figure this out?” I said, “Sure,” and that’s it, that’s how I got into it. And then the entrepreneur in me was like, well, if you want to be in that business, how do you create a market? How do you create a name for yourself? How do you get clients?
FG In my life, both professionally and personally, Oscar was a key mentor and advocate. Was there someone in your life who played that role?
RS I definitely had people I looked to who were inspiring. There was Michael Taylor, a famous designer from San Francisco, Rose Tarlow from Los Angeles, and Europeans like David Hicks. There was a designer named Kalef Alaton who
died young of aids . But beyond those influences, my mother-in-law had a huge impact on me. She’s the person who opened me up to art and design and jewelry and fashion. We would go to exhibitions together, and she was an art collector.
Our work is collaborative: we’re working with clients to arrive at a final vision, be it for an interior or an ensemble. What’s that process like, and what do you hope they take away from the experience, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually?
FG My first lesson in how to please a client came from Kate Young, a stylist whom I met early in my career at Oscar de la Renta. She needed help with a client for the Academy Awards and I had to figure out a way to make everybody happy. I owe a lot to her for that process, because it served as my blueprint for how I handled myself with the needs of my company and the needs of the clients and the stylists of the world. Chiefly: patience.
RS Major.
FG She taught me to be able to suppress and discern and formulate the efficient response to any problem. At the end of the day, we’re just making dresses, but I learned it can be more than just that. We’re making clothes to make people feel good about themselves, and hopefully to inspire others to pay attention to our vision. But had I not had a Kate in my life during a very impressionable year, I don’t know if I’d have been this person you’re seeing in front of you.
RS Absolutely. I’m creating homes, lifestyles for people that will be theirs. They’re not mine. And I’m not trying to impose my taste or my style.
FG When did you arrive at that conclusion?
RS I don’t really know. In the early days, when you’re trying to make a name for yourself, you have so much time and so many ideas, but you don’t have clients. Then you get the clients, you have all the work, and
you have no time to be creative, right? And then you get to a point where somehow you figured out how to get through it and make it all work and make people happy. I think it was a process that evolved over time, but I also think it was an instinctual thing.
FG I do think that everybody has that detachment at some point in their career. Mine happened a couple of years after becoming cocreative director alongside Laura [Kim], learning that we had to let go of what we thought was right for the brand and believe in a good amalgamation of two ideas—what we lived and what we were taught the genetics of the house were.
RS Also, I was exposed to art early on in my career. My first clients were major art collectors. It was 1989, 1990, and they were collecting Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Frank Stella, Sam Francis, Les Lalanne. At the time in Palm Beach, people were like, Who are these weirdos? Everyone was still collecting [Henri] Matisse and [Pablo] Picasso and [Edgar] Degas. And my first client was like, you can come and see our houses and you can see our art, but I’m not really going to show you the art because I’m going to change it all the time.
FG So when did you start to understand that you can’t think of furniture in a finite way, depending on what hangs above it?
RS I think very early. How you finish a project depends on the client. And for people who are serious collectors, who like nice things, it doesn’t really ever stop. When I meet a new client, what I say to them is, We’re going to work for the next two years on this while you’re building the house, we’re going to get everything ready, and when we install your house, we’re going to install 85 to 90 percent of the interior—all the carpets and the rugs and the curtains, lots of vintage and antique furniture, and the
Fernando Garcia and Robert Stilin, New York, 2024. Photo: Tim Lenz
art that you have—and we’re going to create a house you can live in. And then we’re going to take three months, six months, nine months, a year, five or ten years, or forever, depending on your appetite, to put all the rest of it in. What I’ve learned in the thirtythree years I’ve been doing this is, that’s what makes it yours. That’s what makes it special, because you have something tangible now. You’ve been working for two or three years on this project that’s a dream. It’s an idea. It’s not tangible. And now you’ve taken all this stuff that you’ve accumulated, you’ve put it into a space, and you can sort of tweak it and edit it and try things out.
FG In a way, I have the luxury of saying it’s done.
RS Because they have to wear the dress.
FG For VIP red carpet moments, at least. But I think that there’s something beautiful about the fact that your work could never be done. It has a therapeutic thing about it. For me, while an individual garment must be complete, there’s still an ongoing relationship with the client. Selena Gomez and Scarlett Johansson, for instance, to name a couple, have given me the ability to grow with them.
RS Right. People come back.
FG But that isn’t the same for every artist. I have the privilege of continuing a relationship and expressing myself through it. After that dress was on the red carpet, she and I probably grew into different people, and she and I probably want different things, and we will meet in the middle again in the future.
RS In your practice, what’s the intermediary step between having the idea and executing it with the final materials? You’re trained; I’m not! [laughs ] So it fascinates me to know what might be the official way to do something.
This spread: Interior of Robert Stilin’s New York apartment, 2024. Photos: Tim Lenz
FG When Laura and I work together, I’m more of the drawer, she’s more of the draper. But the drawing is just an initial thought. It doesn’t mean much in the beginning. It can inspire or take us somewhere at the end of the day.
RS I’m a very visual person, but inspiration can come from anywhere. It could be a song, it could be a rock, it could be some sand. It could be anything. You could notice the most obscure detail on a building and you’re like, Oh my God, I’m going to make a table of that.
FG Yes, I saw the color of a building and thought, I haven’t seen that in a garment in a long time. What was the last thing that tickled your imagination walking through the streets of New York?
RS I came across a handrail in this beautiful stairway, so I took a quick photo. It’s bronze and beautiful, it’s classic, it’s sexy, it’s all these things. I don’t know where that’s going to present itself. It might come up in two years, like, Oh my God, remember that picture? And maybe I’ll actually do it as a handrail for some client, I don’t know, or maybe it will turn into a console or a table or some hardware. But the movement of the form just spoke to me. That happens to me a gazillion times a day, in New York and all over the world.
And sometimes we make stuff just for fun. I’m like, I don’t know what we’re going to do with it, but I want to make this light fixture inspired by a handrail [ laughs ]. You must have some unexpected sources of inspiration in your design practices?
FG What I saw John Galliano and other designers do with fashion shows—extrapolating a story through music and clothes—resonates with me a lot more than people realize, the music part in particular. I love watching films, but my mom had no idea that I was listening a lot more to the scores
than I was focused on the narrative. The Philip Glasses of the world, the Hans Zimmers, the Trent Reznors— these people have inspired my work. Other than that, the artists Laura and I have always been inspired by are the very instinctual, clean-cut, aggressive ones— the Picassos, the Matisses.
RS I’m so inspired by what I see when I travel; you see beautiful ways of life, and interesting ways to treat a floor or a table, or a way to serve lunch or have a dinner party, that you hadn’t before. I try to absorb all that, so when I’m doing a project I can reference and incorporate all those things in a way that makes sense.
FG Where do you hope to go from here, or what does it mean to evolve? I ask because I’m learning that every day. I think I’m a different person from what I thought I was going to be five years ago, so I have no parameters. I remember when they asked us in the beginning of monse , What does your five-year plan look like? And Laura and I were like, Oh, X Y and Z. And all of that has changed.
RS I think evolution is really a personal thing. It’s about owning and respecting yourself. I want to do things I love, that’s always been paramount in my life and my career. I’m lucky enough to be at a place in my life where I can sort of pick and choose clients and jobs. So that’s a luxury, and I’m super grateful for it. And there are new things I want to do, and I don’t know exactly what they’re going to be. I’ve always had this passion for hotels and doing a hotel brand. I might do that. I mean, I’m not going to die if I don’t do it, but I also think my fantasy and dreams around it could be amazing, and could be—almost a whole other life. And I think if that’s meant to happen, it’ll be a little bit of me and a little bit of the universe, and it will gel.
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Brown, Free Games for May, 2015
Property from The Mo Ostin Collection
Sotheby's, New York, May 16, 2023
Estimate: $3,000,000–5,000,000
Price Realized: $6,711,450
Advised by Gagosian Art Advisory
Cecily
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GAGOSIAN BUILDING LIBRARIES
Douglas Flamm, Gagosian’s rare book specialist, has established an advisory service for clients aiming to curate their private libraries, whether they are building a reference collection from the ground up—for a new home, perhaps—or enhancing an archive they have already established. Douglas conducts individualized consultations, working to produce and acquire bespoke lists of titles. Anyone interested in books and libraries as still-unmatched repositories of knowledge and tools for in-depth research will appreciate this service.
About Douglas Flamm
A twenty-five-year veteran of the field—and Gagosian’s in-house rare books expert since 2016— Douglas has significant experience in developing and maintaining library collections. He boasts unparalleled know-how in sourcing scarce and important publications, from catalogues raisonnés and museum exhibition catalogues to monographs and artist’s books, including rare and out-of-print titles as well as newer releases. Focusing on a broad range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists and movements—from Picasso through Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism, to the full spectrum of contemporary practices—Douglas can also locate design and architecture books on such subjects as Art Deco, the Bauhaus, and Modernism.
Please contact Douglas Flamm for more information at dflamm@gagosian.com or +1 212 744 2313.
Curator and author Peter Galassi, coeditor of the recent collection Ulf Linde: Essays from a Lifetime in the Arts (König, 2023), reflects on the life and work of the Swedish art critic and museum director.
Pontus Hultén, the young director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, was eager to include Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23) in his first major exhibition, Rörelse i konsten (Movement in art), in 1961. 1 The work had shattered in transit years earlier and was too fragile to leave the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but Duchamp had approved the making of a full-scale replica. The task fell to a brilliant young critic who shared Hultén’s enthusiasm for Duchamp’s work: Ulf Linde.
Linde had made his name in his early twenties playing vibraphone for Sweden’s leading jazz bands, but he was just starting out as an art writer. (He quit jazz because he couldn’t tolerate touring.) If he seems an unlikely candidate to make the first replica of one of the most challenging works of modern art, consider the arrangements for the five-day visit of Marcel and his wife Teeny Duchamp to Stockholm shortly before the exhibition closed. They stayed in a room that Linde used for writing, down the hall from the two-room apartment he shared with his wife on the outskirts of central Stockholm. “One bed was fine,” Linde recalled, “but the other was a rickety cot. Duchamp looked at it and said that his own wasn’t much better.” After dropping their bags, the visitors accompanied Linde to the museum, where the artist saw Linde’s replica and was momentarily stunned: “It’s amusing,” he said, “but I never thought of the Glass as not being broken.”2
Duchamp and Linde together completed the last major element of the work, and their friendship continued by mail after Duchamp left Stockholm. For a gallery exhibition in the city in April 1963, Linde commissioned replicas of several of Duchamp’s readymades, three of which would reappear later that year in Walter Hopps’s
landmark Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum.3 The others were shown in 1964 at Arturo Schwarz’s gallery in Milan, which issued editions based on Linde’s prototypes. In short, the young Swede played a key role in the flowering of Duchamp’s career in the years before his death, in 1968. 4 Linde went on to collaborate with the curator Jean Clair on the major Duchamp exhibition that was one of the shows with which the Centre Pompidou opened its doors, in 1977. In 1991–92, again at Hultén’s request, he led the making of a second replica of the Glass , though thanks to his distaste for airplanes and boats he never crossed the Atlantic to see the original. Both replicas are in the collection of Moderna Museet.
I was a Duchamp fan in my youth, so I had heard of Ulf Linde— vaguely. Then I fell in love with a Swede (we’re married now) and I began to learn a bit about the culture. I was flabbergasted to discover the scope of Linde’s very substantial achievements and writings, quite apart from his involvement with Duchamp.
In 1963 and 1964, for example, Linde was instrumental in organizing Önskemuseet (The Museum of Our Wishes), which brought to Moderna Museet the core of its outstanding modern collection, including works by Francis Bacon, Giacomo Balla, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Vasily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, René Magritte, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. 5 Beginning in 1977, he spent two very busy decades as director of Stockholm’s Thielska Galleriet, thoroughly reinvigorating that great collection of Nordic art circa 1900. Also in 1977, Linde was elected to Svenska Akademien (the Swedish academy), becoming one of the few members in the history of
that august body whose principal field of expertise was the visual arts.
Linde published prodigiously throughout his career but the vast bulk of his considerable output was until recently available only in Swedish—effectively invisible to most readers outside Scandinavia. In 2012, my partner, Kerstin Lind Bonnier, and I set out to edit and translate an anthology spanning Linde’s writings. He enthusiastically approved the project before he died, in October 2013, and his widow, Nina Öhman, continued in the same spirit. Thanks to the publishers Walther and Franz König, Ulf Linde: Essays from a Lifetime in the Arts appeared last year, with an indispensable introduction by Olle Granath, former director of both Moderna Museet and Sweden’s Nationalmuseum. 6
Linde agreed with Osip Mandelstam that every work of art is a message in a bottle. Whoever finds the bottle is the addressee, charged only to respond. Always concrete and personal, Linde’s responses were free of any system, forever open to improvised interpretation. The anthology ranges from essays on individual artists (continental leaders such as Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, and Francis Picabia, as well as Swedes who ought to be better known abroad) to idiosyncratic speculative texts (such as “The General and Unique in Art,” which quotes Mandelstam). It concludes with “Hodgepodge,” a compact but expansive and original exploration of the magic of drawing.
Linde was an erudite autodidact, at home in German, French, and English as well as Swedish, and in mathematics and philosophy as well as art history. He was a passionate advocate of the art that he loved, and he clung with equal tenacity to his blind spots: the entire medium of photography and the broad
stream of art since the 1960s that has responded to our ubiquitous media culture, beginning with the work of Andy Warhol. Few in Sweden today remember Är allting konst? (Is everything art?), a compilation of earnest manifestos by Hultén, Linde, and twenty-seven others that appeared in 1963. But if the fierce disputes of Linde’s youth have faded, the originality, wit, and game-changing clarity of his best writings are as powerful as ever— and available now to readers of English around the world.
1. On Pontus Hultén see, e.g., Wyatt Allgeier, “Game Changer: Pontus Hultén,” Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2020.
2. In 1986 Linde published an extensive account of his work on the replica, Duchamp’s visit to Stockholm, and their subsequent involvements. See n. 6.
3. The exhibition, titled Marcel Duchamp, took place at Galerie Burén, Stockholm, April 26—June 30, 1963. Bokförlaget Faethon, Stockholm, is planning to publish a facsimile edition of the elegant catalogue, designed by Linde, with a historical introduction by Paul B. Franklin.
4. Beyond Linde’s own account of his relationship with Duchamp, the essentials are provided in Franklin’s contributions to the last number of the scholarly journal published by the Association pour l’Étude de Marcel Duchamp, Paris, especially Franklin’s extensive interview with Linde (pp. 10–43) and “Exposing Duchamp in Sweden” (pp. 94–141). See Étant donné Marcel Duchamp no. 11, Marcel Duchamp en Suède: Ulf Linde, Pontus Hultén & Friends (2016).
5. See Önskemuseet/The Museum of Our Wishes/ Notre musée tel qu’il devait être/Museum unserer Wünsche , exh. cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1963), with texts by Gerard Bonnier, K. G. [Pontus] Hultén, and Linde. Despite the multilingual title, the text is in Swedish only. Linde’s brief summaries of Fauvism, Cubism, and other “isms” soon became a popular reference in Sweden.
6. Ulf Linde, Essays from a Lifetime in the Arts , ed. and trans. Kerstin Lind Bonnier and Peter Galassi, introduction by Olle Granath (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2023); distributed in the United States by D.A.P. The book includes the two key sections of Linde’s Marcel Duchamp (Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1986): “Marcel Duchamp: Journal” (Linde’s account of his relationship with Duchamp; pp. 138–177), and “Marcel Duchamp: Un philosophe ” (pp. 178–207).
Marcel Duchamp and Ulf Linde working on the replica of the Large Glass , Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1961.
