Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2022 by Gagosian Quarterly

or over fifty years, Michael Heizer has worked in the Nevada desert on a sculptural complex of epic proportions. After facing seemingly insurmountable challenges for decades, the City will finally open to the public this fall. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we are honored to publish the last text written by the late Dave Hickey, who visited the site in 2018.

Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

Jasmine Sanders focuses on the economic, architectural, and chromatic roots of Amanda Williams’s latest paintings.

The work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette De Silva was underappreciated during her lifetime; Amie Corry traces her colorful biography and trailblazing achievements.

Katy Hessel’s new book The Story of Art without Men brings to light stories of women previously overlooked by art history. The author speaks with artist Somaya Critchlow about the genesis and formation of the book. We present the newest series of photographs by Tyler Mitchell, alongside a text by Brendan Embser that explores their aesthetic motifs and art-historical references.

For our Building a Legacy feature, we look at the Duchamp Research Portal, an online project, many years in the making, built through the collaboration of the Association Marcel Duchamp, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Ashley Overbeek examines how museums around the world are exploring the promise of crypto art in their exhibitions, collections, and community-building efforts.

Sam Lipsyte’s new novella Friend of the Pod is being released this fall through the Picture Books imprint. To accompany his story, Jordan Wolfson has contributed a self-portrait to the book; in this issue, the two discuss their project with their friend Joey Frank. We’re thrilled to feature Wolfson’s sculpture House with Face (2017) on our cover.

In 1962, Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed a sculpture of eighty-nine oil barrels forming a blockade on the rue Visconti in Paris. To mark the sixty-year anniversary of this seminal work, The Iron Curtain , William Middleton tracks the formative years of the artists’ partnership and the various ways in which this early public installation inspired their future projects.

In Los Angeles in the 1970s, curator Connie Lewallen helped to shape some of the earliest moments in Gagosian history, working alongside Larry Gagosian at his Broxton Gallery. Michael Auping honors her life in our Game Changer column, admiring her influence on the proliferation of Conceptual art.

Building74 a Legacy: The ResearchDuchampPortal

For this installment of Building a Legacy, the Quarterly ’s Alison McDonald met with Antoine Monnier, Séverine Gossart, Margaret Huang, and Aurélien Bernard to discuss the genesis and development of the online Duchamp Research Portal.

The third book published by Picture Books, an imprint organized by Emma Cline and Gagosian, is Sam Lipsyte’s novella Friend of the Pod Accompanying the text is a new artwork by Jordan Wolfson. In celebration of this forthcoming publication, Lipsyte and Wolfson speak with their mutual friend Joey Frank.

ImperfectCy108Twombly:Paradise Eleonora Di Erasmo, cocurator of Un/veiled: Cy Twombly at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome, reflects on the resonances and networks of inspiration between the artist and music.

Shooting112 the Myth: Painters on Film Carlos Valladares examines various attempts to capture the creative act of painting on film.

A presentation of excerpts from thirty-six conversations included in the installation The Conversation Machine , part of the exhibition human brains: It Begins with an Idea , at the Fondazione Prada, Venice. Giuseppe140 Penone à La Tourette

Taryn134 Simon: The MachineConversation

Screen126 Time: How Museums Are aboutThinkingNFTs Ashley Overbeek reports on the different ways in which museums across the world are harnessing the power of crypto art in their exhibitions, collections, and community building.

Penone and Frère Marc Chauveau discuss the power and peculiarity of Le Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, in Éveux, France, as well as the artworks that Penone will exhibit in this building designed by Le Corbusier.

The third installment of the series. There64 Is No Neutral Space: The Architecture of Donald Judd, Part 2 In this second installment of a two-part essay, Julian Rose continues his exploration of Donald Judd’s engagement with architecture. Here, he examines the artist’s proposals for projects in Bregenz, Austria, and Basel, arguing that Judd’s approach to shaping space provides a model for contemporary architectural production.

A short story by Anne-Laure Zevi. Mehdi154 Ghadyanloo Negar Azimi speaks with the artist about his murals in Tehran, his preoccupation with children’s slides, and his inspirations, from Giorgio de Chirico to Alfred Hitchcock.

Amanda92 Williams: candyladyblack

The artists address their shared ardor for poetry, the surfaces of painting, and nature.

Book166 Corner: On withCollectingPaulMarks

Front Jordancover:Wolfson, House with Face , 2017, urethane resin, stainless steel armature, stainless steel, hardware, polyurethane paint, chain, and wood, overall: 107 ⅛ × 89 ⅝ × 95 ⅝ inches (272 × 227.5 × 243 cm) © Jordan Wolfson. Photo: Mark Tretter, courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London

A40City in the Ocean of Time

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Jasmine Sanders addresses the economic, architectural, and chromatic roots of Amanda Williams’s new paintings.

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Memoirs100 of a Poltergeist, Part 3 The third installment of a short story by Venita Blackburn.

Tyler52 Mitchell: This Side of Paradise Brendan Embser reports on his encounter with Mitchell’s newest series of photographs, addressing their aesthetic motifs and arthistorical references.

Michael Heizer’s City, a monumental artwork over fifty years in the making, is opening to the public this fall. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we are honored to publish the late Dave Hickey’s report on his visit to the work in Nevada.

To mark the sixtieth anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s seminal installation The Iron Curtain , author William Middleton addresses the radicality of this work and its enduring relevance to the artists’ subsequent projects. Fashion88 and Art, Part 11: Diane von Furstenberg Derek Blasberg speaks with fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg about her relationship with Andy Warhol, the liberations of the 1970s, nature as the ultimate influence, and why it is essential to keep a diary.

Katy118 Hessel: The Story of Art without Men Author, curator, and podcaster Katy Hessel met with the artist Somaya Critchlow to discuss Hessel’s latest publication, The Story of Art without Men Minnette120 De Silva Amie Corry traces the trailblazing Sri Lankan architect’s biography, philosophy, and achievements.

Paul Marks speaks with rarebook specialist Douglas Flamm about books as tools of selflearning, reference materials for collecting, and a mode to share his love of art with others.

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Game186 ConstanceChanger:Lewallen Michael Auping pays tribute to the bicoastal curator, admiring her contributions to the proliferation of Conceptual art.

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In 1932, Gabrielle Chanel created BIJOUX DE DIAMANTS, t he ﬁrst high jewelr y collection in history. Inspired by t he allure of t he stars, it was designed to be worn freely in a brand-new way. Mademoiselle t hen turned her concept of jewelr y in motion — par t of her vision for women — into a manifesto .

1932 COLLECTION THE STARS ALIGNED

In 2022, C HANEL High Jewelr y celebrates t his celestial revolution wit h t he launch of t he 1932 COLLECTION , based on t he perpetual motion of t he stars and tailored to t he natural movements of t he body In t he same spirit, C HANEL asked an aut hor known for his reﬂections on movement to write a manifesto for t he new collection. After winding around from the nape of the neck, the string of diamonds suddenly bursts into a shooting star, trailed by a cascade of sparks leading to a sapphire that ts perfectly into the negative space of a crescent moon of diamonds. A fragmented nimbus then explodes around a profusion of carats pulsating at the neckline. A line of precious stones rises and falls with the rhythm of the breath, trapping the gaze in their bewitching depths. Beneath this blue eclipse, a string of cr ystals leads the eye toward the heart, where a diamond sun blazes, its early-morning rays oscillating and sparkling with the wearer’s movements. In this theater of precious stones, celestial bodies undulate on the skin’s “Milky Way,” sketching new landscapes each time the head moves or tilts. Like the necklace, the collection is a series of celestial bodies journeying across the skin and enhancing each movement of the body as the planets travel past twinkling stars. e beauty of the world lies in this radiance. e glow of the stones is tangible, sculpted into the diamond, itself becoming a jewel, liberated, as if the aura could be removed and worn as a brooch. What was a parure has become a jewel, a stone cut in stone, made even more precious by what has been removed from it. From the depths of the Earth to the Cosmos, there is little light, but it sometimes burns beneath the eyelids in insistent lines. e gems begin to dance within us: diamonds, blue diamonds, rubies, yellow diamonds, sapphires and rings running along the ngers, orbiting, spilling their brilliance over the hand. Bracelets and diamonds give way to a streaking comet on the skin, a virtuoso play of light and the ever-changing gestures of a woman who is suddenly the center of the universe.

om.cchanel ®HANELC©*WHITEGOLDWITHATHINLAYEROFRHODIUMPLATINGFORCOLOR2022,Inc. THE NEW 1932 COLLECTION CELEBRATES THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIJOUX DE DIAMANTS COLLECTION, CREATED IN 1932 BY G ABRIELLE CHANEL . TRANSFORMABLE ALLURE CÉLESTE NEC KL ACE IN 18K WHITE GOLD* AND DIAMONDS, WITH A 55.55-C ARAT OVAL-CUT SAPPHIRE.

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Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2022 Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier Editor, Online and Print Gillian Jakab Text Editor David Frankel Online Text Editor Jennifer Knox White Executive Editor Derek Blasberg Digital and Video Production Assistant Alanis Santiago-Rodriguez Design Director Paul Neale Design Inês Bianchi de Aguiar Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility Website Wolfram Wiedner Studio Cover Jordan Wolfson Founder Larry Gagosian Published by Gagosian Media Publisher Jorge Garcia Associate Publisher, Lifestyle Priya Nat 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 Michael Auping Negar Anne-LaureJordanDianeCarlosTarynSetsukoJasmineJulianGiuseppeAshleyHansAntoineJotaWilliamPaulSamY.Z.MargaretDaveKatySéverineMehdiJoeyDouglasBrendanEleonoraSomayaAmieFrèreDerekVenitaAurélienAzimiBernardBlackburnBlasbergMarcChauveauCorryCritchlowDiErasmoEmbserFlammFrankGhadyanlooGossartHesselHickeyHuangKamiLipsyteMarksMiddletonMombaçaMonnierUlrichObristOverbeekPenoneRoseSandersSimonValladaresvonFurstenbergWolfsonZevi Thanks Karrie Adamany Bechet RichardAllenAlwyn Fisher Julia Arena Jin AndishehAuh Avini Priya OliviaMatthiasIsabelleRainerFlavinSarahSarahDelphineCamilleHeatherDarlinaLorenzaLaurenBrettGarretteHallieMarkKatieKateElsaAndrewSaraDanieleNicolaMichaelMatthewDuncanEmmaVittoriaBrookeSerenaRobertoMichaelBhatnagarCaryCaterinoCattaneoAdornoChartashCiaraldiClineCockFosterCrossCullenDelRoscioDoriliDouglasFabricantFavreauFernandez-LupinoFordyceFrancisFreerFuroGardeGioiaGiovanelliGoldakHarmonHausHuisingaJackmanJonesJuddJuddKitzeKoddenbergLibbyLumpkin Sabyrzhan Madi Lauren Mahony Pepi Marchetti Franchi Hannah Marshall James McKee Rob VladimirTeresaAmandaEmmaSarahAndreaHannahTimothéeKaraAndieChandlerJessicaClaudiaMicolDialloIsabelAntwaunDavidKellyJonathanKathyCaitlinOliviaTylerAdeleLuisellaMcKeeverMeloniMinardiMitchellMullMurrayPacielloPerkinsQuinnRobsonSargentShorneySimon-PonteSpinazziStaccioliSteeleSterlingTrainerVanderWegVialeVitosWalshWatsonWhelanWilliamsWittek-SaltzbergYavachev Opposite page: Amanda Williams, CandyLadyBlack (wine candy grape nowalater sneak), 2022 (detail), oil and mixed media on wood panel, 60 × 60 inches (152.4 × 152.4 cm) © Amanda Williams. Photo: Jacob Hand

Sam Lipsyte

Sam Lipsyte is the author of five novels and two short-story collections, including The Ask , Hark , and the forthcoming No One Left to Come Looking for You . His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, n+1, Noon , Open City, The Quarterly, Best American Short Stories , and elsewhere. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Photo: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Joey Frank is an artist and author. He is deeply interested in astrology and parallax vision. Frank lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Eleonora Di Erasmo

Joey Frank

Jordan Wolfson Jordan Wolfson was born in New York in 1980 and lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2003 he received a BFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, and in 2009 he received the Frieze Foundation’s Cartier Award, which assists an artist from outside the United Kingdom in realizing a major work at the Frieze Art Fair in London. Wolfson is known for his provocative work in a range of mediums, including sculpture, installation, video, photography, digital animation, and performance. Filtering the languages of online and broadcast media through digital and mechanical technologies, and employing an array of invented characters, he crafts enigmatic narratives that explore uncomfortable social and existential topics.

Photo: Collier Schorr

William Middleton

Eleonora Di Erasmo is an art historian and curator. Since 2008 she has been working for the Cy Twombly Foundation, focusing in particular on the catalogues raisonnés of Twombly’s drawings (vols. 1–8) and sculpture (vol. 2). She runs the Foundation’s office in Rome and together with Nicola Del Roscio she recently curated the project Un/veiled: Cy Twombly, Music, Inspirations

The Paris-based writer William Middleton is the author of Double Vision , a biography of the legendary art patrons and collectors Dominique and John de Menil, published in 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf. He has contributed to such publications as W, Vogue , Harper’s Bazaar, Architectural Digest , House & Garden , Departures , Town & Country, the New York Times , and T

CONTRIBUTORS

Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. He was previously curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 1991, he has curated more than 300 exhibitions.

Photo: Lewis Ronald Jota Mombaça

Katy Hessel is an art historian, broadcaster, and curator. She runs The Great Women Artists podcast and Instagram account and her book The Story of Art without Men is published in September (Penguin, 2022). Somaya Critchlow Somaya Critchlow lives and works in London. She obtained her BA in Fine Art Painting at the University of Brighton in 2016 before entering the Royal Drawing School, London, where she completed a postgraduate diploma in 2017. In October 2022, Critchlow will present her second solo exhibition with Maximilian William, London.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Photo: Tyler Mitchell

Katy Hessel

Jota Mombaça is an interdisciplinary artist whose work unfolds in a variety of mediums. The sonic and visual matter of words plays an important role in their practice, which often relates to anti-colonial critique and gender disobedience. Their work has been presented in several institutional frameworks, such as the 32nd and 34th São Paulo Biennale (2016 and 2020/2021), the 22nd Sydney Biennale (2020), the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018) and the 46th Salon Nacional de Artistas in Colombia (2019). Currently, they have been interested in researching elemental forms of sensing, anti-colonial imagination, and the relation between opacity and self-preservation in the experience of racialized trans artists in the Global Art World. Anne-Laure Zevi Anne-Laure Zevi is French and lives in Switzerland. Her short stories have appeared in translation in The Paris Review, The Brooklyn Rail , and The Hopkins Review. An exhibition of her drawings was held earlier this year at 107 s-chanf, in S-chanf, Switzerland.

Taryn Simon Born in New York, where she lives and works, Simon received a BA in semiotics from Brown University in 1997. In 2001 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for what would become her first major photographic and textual work, The Innocents (2002), which was exhibited at MoMA PS1, New York. Incorporating mediums ranging from photography and sculpture to text, sound, and performance, each of her projects is shaped by years of rigorous research and planning, including obtaining access from institutions as varied as the US Department of Homeland Security and Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

Jasmine Sanders

Brendan Embser Brendan Embser is the managing editor of Aperture magazine and the editor of monographs by Deana Lawson, Philip Montgomery, Wendy Red Star, and Ming Smith. His writing has appeared in apartamento and n+1 Photo: Matthew Leifheit

Jasmine Sanders is a writer from the South Side of Chicago. Her work has appeared in the New York Times , New York Magazine , Vulture , Artforum , Bookforum , and elsewhere.

Michael Auping

Julian Rose

Michael Auping is an independent curator and art historian. Well-known as a curator and scholar of Abstract Expressionism, he has organized exhibitions of Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, and Clyfford Still. He has also organized major exhibitions of Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and Susan Rothenberg. His most recent book, 40 Years: Just Talking about Art, was published by Prestel in 2018.

Venita Blackburn Venita Blackburn’s writing has appeared in thenewyorker.com, Harper’s , Ploughshares , McSweeney’s , The Paris Review, and other publications. The winner of the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction for her story collection Black Jesus and Other Superheroes in 2017, she is the founder of the literary nonprofit Live, collectionofworkshopsprovides(livewriteworkshop.com),Writewhichfreecreative-writingforcommunitiescolor.Blackburn’ssecondofstories, How to Wrestle a Girl , was published in the fall of 2021. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Julian Rose is an architect and critic based in New York City. He is working on a book about museum architecture, Architects on the Art Museum , forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press in 2024.

Ashley Overbeek Ashley Overbeek is the director of Strategic Initiatives at Gagosian. Before joining the gallery, she spent several years with McKinsey & Company as a strategy consultant. She lives and works in New York City.

Negar Azimi Negar Azimi is a writer and the senior editor of the publishing and curatorial project Bidoun . With Klaus Biesenbach, Tiffany Malakooti, and Babak Radboy, she curated the first retrospective of the Iranian avantgarde theater director and filmmaker Reza Abdoh at MoMA PS1, New York.

Marcel Duchamp, Couple of Aprons , 1959, cloth potholders and fur © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris/Association Marcel Duchamp, 2022

Frère Marc Chauveau, Dominican and art historian, has lived for twenty years in the convent of La Tourette, built by Le Corbusier in the Lyon region of France. Since 2009, he has curated contemporary art exhibitions, inviting artists to establish a dialogue between their works and those of Le Corbusier.

Mehdi Ghadyanloo

Giuseppe Penone

Margaret Huang Margaret Huang is the Martha Hamilton Morris Archivist at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she is the project manager for the Duchamp Research Portal. She holds a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Pittsburgh. Séverine Gossart Séverine Gossart is an art historian and deputy director of the Association Marcel Duchamp.

Antoine Monnier is the director of the Association Marcel Duchamp, founded in 1997 by his mother, Jacqueline Matisse-Monnier (1931–2021), Duchamp’s stepdaughter.

Frère Marc Chauveau

Mehdi Ghadyanloo established a public art practice in his native Iran by completing more than 100 expansive trompe l’oeil murals on buildings throughout Tehran between 2004 and 2011. In 2016, with the completion of his Spaces of Hope mural at the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, he became the first artist since 1979 to receive official commissions in both Iran and the United States. Ghadyanloo’s works envision a fictive architecture of playground slides, tubes, and ladders situated in shallow walled spaces and lit from above by ocular skylights. Working meticulously in acrylic and oil, he defines their rounded forms with dramatic chiaroscuro to represent the reflectivity, translucency, and opacity of polished steel, plastic, and other materials.

Antoine Monnier

In a body of work spanning almost fifty years, Giuseppe Penone has explored the subtle levels of interplay between humans, nature, and art. His work represents a poetic expansion of Arte Povera’s radical break with conventional mediums, emphasizing the involuntary processes of respiration, growth, and aging that are common to both human beings and trees, with which he is deeply involved. His works can be found in many major museum collections around the world.

Aurélien Bernard

Carlos Valladares is a writer, critic, programmer, journalist, and video essayist from South Central Los Angeles, California. He studied film at Stanford and began his PhD in History of Art and Film and Media Studies at Yale University in the fall of 2019. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle , Film Comment , and the Criterion Collection.

Amie Corry is a London-based writer and editor. She was senior editor of Other Criteria Books from 2014 to 2020 and is director of publications for Do Ho Suh. Corry contributes to the Times Literary Supplement , Burlington Contemporary, and other publications, and in 2013 she coproduced a pioneering audit on gender equality within the London art sector. She is cofounder of the literary festival Primadonna and works closely with the art-andmental-health charity Hospital Rooms. She is currently producing a collection of short fiction.

Aurélien Bernard is assistant curator in the Création contemporaine et prospective department of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. He holds master’s degrees in art history and library science and was previously in charge of the artist’s-book collection at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky.

Carlos Valladares

Photo: Jerry Schatzberg

Dr. Paul Marks

Dr. Paul Marks is an associate professor of surgery at the University of Toronto, and the medical director and orthopedic surgeon for the Toronto Raptors NBA basketball team. Marks has served on the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s Acquisitions Council, Washington, DC; the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery Foundation Board, Buffalo, New York; and the acquisitions committee of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Amie Corry

Setsuko Setsuko was born in 1942 in Tokyo and lives and works in Paris and at the Grand Chalet de Rossinière, Switzerland. She has exhibited in Tokyo, Paris, London, Rome, Geneva, and New York, and her work is included in collections such as that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Since 2002, Setsuko has served as the honorary president of the Fondation Balthus, and in 2005 she was designated unesco’s Artist for Peace. Photo: Yuko Yamashita Y.Z. Kami Y.Z. Kami was born in Tehran and lives and works in New York. His work reflects a diverse range of interests, from portraiture to architecture, from photography to sacred and literary texts. Kami’s work lies in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York; the British Museum, London; and many other institutions worldwide.

A CITY IN THE

OCEAN OF TIME

I will begin here with the poet Shelley, 200 years ago, speaking for Michael Heizer in the desert. In Julian and Maddalo, Shelley writes, “I love all waste/and solitary places; where we taste/the pleasure of believing what we see/is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.” Boundless, in space and time, is the real issue here, of course, since Heizer loves big and the inference of boundless ness. He replaces artistic scale with architectural size, and, in many instances, he is ready to let big trump beautiful when big provides a better bang, although the loveliness usually survives just beyond our expectations. Even so, it is best to start with Heizer’s “waste and solitary” place, Lincoln County, on the south east edge of Nevada, where the City resides and to which Heizer’s earlier Double Negative (1969) stands nearly adjacent. Lincoln County is a harsh mistress. It is a desert expanse almost twice the size of Connecticut with a population the size of an apartment complex in New Haven—about 5,000 souls. There are schoolmarms and state employees in residence. There are juvenile offenders in the state facility in Caliente (population 888). There are ranchers who run a few cattle, and seniors who sip coffee in retirement centers. The younger folks ride motorcycles, pump diesel, and serve burg ers to the endless stream of truckers who barrel up Highway 83, a twisty two-lane route through mountains and desert that is the quickest route from Los Angeles to Idaho. Fortunately the traffic runs mostly north, since truckers find more amena ble routes back to LA.

Michael Heizer’s City, an artwork over fifty years in the making, is opening to the public this fall. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we are honored to publish the late Dave Hickey’s report on his visit to the City.

In42 geological antiquity, about 360 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into the shallow sea near what is now Alamo, Nevada, not far from what is now Michael Heizer’s City . The crash of the asteroid and the consequent tsunami flipped the seabed, destroyed marine life, and massaged the undulating sea bottom in preparation for the tec tonic ballet that would accompany the separation of the continents some two million years later. In a process that geologists call subduction, the west ern geological plate (that would soon be California) pushed eastward under the coastal plate, lifting slabs of seabed a thousand feet thick into the air, creating the Sierra Nevadas. Eighty million years later, volcanic activity would erupt near what is now the Hoover Dam, creating a terrain of ash burned into basalt rock, leaving a caldera whose new rock walls now provide a cradle for the dam. In the west, the Sierras blocked the high desert from the shoreline, creating a rain shadow that obstructs the moisture coming in from the Pacific. To the east, assorted chains of mountains rose toward the high plains. Now this is 360 million years ago, of course, but even so, that’s a lot of calamity for a relatively compact piece of real estate where nothing much else was happening, and in the progress of this geological narrative, the rocks and mud—the detritus of all this rising and falling—tumbled into the inland gap between the Sierras and the rising plains. One deposit crashed upon the next, bury ing the water tables deeper and deeper—a further guarantee of aridity. Today, at certain places and at certain times, all of these events are still visible. You look back into deep time as into a quiet abyss. What you cannot see is the die off of the large fauna, the mammoth and the dire wolves, about 10,000 years ago. In any case, the creatures are gone, and today, we call this deep box of rocks Nevada, where the greater Mojave Desert blends into the Great Basin Desert. The surface of this expanse, seen from above, resembles the mark of a tiger claw ripping the desert from top to bottom. There are small mountains and taller mountains that are smoothed off here and there, by wind and water, to resemble mesas. There are tilts, cliffs, canyons, and meadows. There are ridges wind ing among the mountains and washes running north and south. There is virtually no flora beyond desert shrubbery, and thus, from the ground, there is no visible sense of scale or distance. There is only big space—“cowboy Afghanistan,” we called it when I lived in Las Vegas—a dog whistle for crazy people with their hair on fire and their heads full of wild Michaelideas.Heizer’s City is sited due north of Las Vegas and due east of San Francisco in a piece of territory that from the air looks like a bruise because of the iron oxide in the soil—a red-tan desert shading from sienna to red ocher depend ing on the angle and intensity of the light. Heizer’s City is a crisp mile-and-a-quarter rectangular cut into the desert. It is a fourth of a mile wide and thir ty-four feet deep at its deepest. It is laid into the ris ing eastern slope of a ridge that faces a mountain. On the ridge’s west side, a wash plunges south. On its east side, the rectangle opens out into the sur rounding desert. The City has many attributes of a city, but it doesn’t really look like one. Approaching the cut on foot from the north or south, elements of a cityscape seem to be rising or falling from within the excava tion, which cuts flat into the rising ridge like a thin scrap of aluminum tape. The territory around the excavation is natural but appears to be groomed, tailored, and graded like a golf course minus the grass. As one walks up to an overlook, Heizer’s cul tural interventions open out the space. The roads and domes and pits within the excavation are ele gantly curbed into long, quiet Sumerian curves. They restore our sense of distance and scale, so that the complexity of the City reveals itself as a gracious intervention in the desert. The wholeness of the excavation subordi nates the intricacy of Heizer’s interventions. The City is a single thing, and, in this aspect, the idea of characterizing the sculpture as an earthwork seems redundant. It is made of earth and rocks, of course, but it is only an earthwork in the sense that a Raphael is an oil painting. Otherwise, the City is composed and complete, a Minimalist sculp ture that does what Minimalism does, enlivening the space above and around it. It does not, how ever, embrace the parochial concerns of urban Minimalism; it is full and sturdy rather than sleek and empty; its manufacture, once you move the machines away, is timeless, datable anywhere from the Nazca lines to yesterday morning. Whatever the implements, you would need only some friends and the time to make it—so you might say that the excavation is as old or as young as you might imagine it to be.

Photo: Ben Blackwell

One gains access to the City through a golfcart-sized road that enters on the high edge of the cut. It divides into two roads that wind around the excavation before reuniting and exiting at the low, eastern edge of the work. One drives these paths at one’s leisure, and the effect is like a stroll through a nineteenth-century romantic garden, minus the flora. (The Bellingrath Gardens near Mobile, Alabama, is the best American example of such a garden, and the drawing of its footprint—the flow erbeds, ponds, and berms—is analogous to the arrangement of the City.)

As you stand on the edge of the City and look down into its long extent, you see an easy deployment of mounds, pits, and other features that speak to half a century of accumulated labor and formal decisions, so there is no “reading” of the work. Things have changed in half a century, and the changes have changed. There is only a catalogue of ambition and a multiplicity of subsites that have grown in time and refinement with Heizer’s maturity. Heizer iden tifies about forty of these local events in his notes, but these are only guideposts in the construction and not part of the finished product. There are no words for us in situ because Heizer is serving up the mystery of things-seen, not the mystery of words-read. Each of the City ’s features is bounded and set apart by curbs so the whole expanse feels like a dictionary glyph, like an instance of the “desert annotated,” or, since most of the mounds are surfaced with rocks and gravel deployed in specific shades and sizes, they are akin to a giant image laid flat. There is no real way or available inference to determine how the City adapts to the existing ter rain. All of the work’s compartments are nuanced into nominal, abstract configurations invisible from the ground. Each enclosure is a specified object unto itself, so it is easy to imagine the excavation floating just an inch or so above the actual desert that it represents, like a city or a map of itself— like the map in Jorge Luis Borges’s story that is as big as the kingdom it represents. So, in place of a fixed reading, there is an ambient inference of narrative and incident, a history of belief in the shifting categories of meaning, like a temple site in Mesoamerica or pueblo complexes up at Chaco Canyon.

Last spread, right: Michael Heizer, Complex One, the City, 1970–Present, Garden Valley, Nevada © Michael Heizer/Triple Aught Foundation 2018. Photo: Mary Converse

Photo: Ben Blackwell

Previous spread: Michael Heizer, Horseshoe (West) and Horseshoe (East), the City, 1970–Present, Garden Valley, Nevada © Michael Heizer/Triple Aught Foundation 2018.

The county includes Pioche (population 1,354), a mining town 6,000 feet up the Pioche Hills that was once the richest and roughest town in America—the site of the Boot Hill cemetery that had seventy-two residents before anyone died of natural causes.

Following spread: Michael Heizer, Complex Two, the City, 1970–Present, Garden Valley, Nevada © Michael Heizer/Triple Aught Foundation 2018. Photo: Eric Piasecki

It includes the Extraterrestrial Highway, which runs from Alamo to Tonopah, passing through Rachel (population 54) where one can commune with American and German aliens at the Al-e-Inn— where you can talk about Area 51, which is just up the road. So, if you are looking for the cause of Heizer’s gaunt countenance and polyneuropathy, Lincoln County would be the place to start. Heizer, of course, wears these afflictions as a pirate wears his wooden leg, and this makes it hard to place him anywhere but in the desert. We are talking about a resolutely intellectual and abstract artist who finds himself performing in a paper back romance and rather loving it. So, obviously, Heizer is an American, and always a proud autodi dact, allergic to school. Like his fellow self-educator Robert Irwin, Heizer softens academic distinc tions between the genres and eras of art, between archaeology and architecture, metaphysics and kinesthetics. Where you see a distinction, Heizer may not, so you are forced to distinguish between what you see and the preconceptions you brought with you into the desert.

Last spread, left: Michael Heizer, 45º, 90º, 180º, the City, 1970–Present, Garden Valley, Nevada © Michael Heizer/Triple Aught Foundation 2018.

There is a scene that writers seize upon in their essays about Heizer. In these essays, it is late evening and the generator has been shut down at Heizer’s Sleep Late Ranch. The artist and a couple of his friends are gathered around his dining table drinking espresso and whiskey by lamplight. The scene is nothing so banal as contemporary America; it is something out of Frederic Remington—out of Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, H. Rider Haggard, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It calls up the big American dream of mortal men set against the mighty darkness of the continent. Writers use this trope to talk about how Heizer looks today and how he feels. We love it. We are smiling faintly at his ebullient megalo mania, his belief that, a world away from us, he is making the newest, biggest, strongest, and most long-lasting work of art being made anywhere.

We are bemused because we believe him, because we stand in awe at the fifty years of sweat and visual imagination that are embodied in the mounds and ditches of the City . The problem with this romantic vision, though, is that Heizer’s brazen aspiration tends to disguise the effortless grace and appropriateness of his formal accom plishments. Beautiful and big are uneasy com panions but they coexist happily in the City at the Sleep Late Ranch. Heizer, however, also belongs to the art world; he is neither more nor less crazy than the cote rie of artists who began abandoning New York in the early 1970s with the rise of public vir tue, public largesse, academia, identity poli tics, and European aspiration. I call these artists the Children of the Diaspora and regard them as Mandarin Modernists (Ellsworth Kelly) and Kinesthesiologists (Robert Smithson). So, as Heizer was gradually evacuating New York for Nevada, John Chamberlain, Jim Rosenquist, and Robert Rauschenberg were headed for Florida; Kelly was moving to Spencertown, Robert Indiana to Maine; Peter Saul and Donald Judd were making their way to Texas; Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, and Lynda Benglis were moving to New Mexico; Irwin, Ed Ruscha, and Peter Alexander were deciding to stay in Southern California. So, today, those of this dias pora who survive are scattered around the land scape of America like exotic flowers. Heizer is one of their kin, I would suggest, and maybe the last of them. All of their work is prem ised on the precritical bang that commands our attention as a prelude to our interpretation. They all presume that there is an experience that is prec edent to our little brains churning away for foot notes, that there is, initially, a bright moment—like a sudden cold rainstorm or a bear in the garbage. This idea of art having a precedent visual appeal, however, has all but disappeared among these art ists’ younger siblings, who presume that we are required to think and need no invitation.

So the footprint of the City is a glyph that we move through as through a hard garden. Things are gathered like to like—stones, gravel, shrubs, and earth, not flowers, not trees. There are vistas, disappearing lakes (with no water), disappearing roadways, and sudden reveals. There are plazas and courtyards. There are several idiosyncratic, autonomous sculptures that stand free: Complex One , Complex Two, and 45°, 90°, 180° are the land marks. There are figures in Complex Two that grow out of an interior wall or seem to be laid upon it. Here and there these ornaments rise above their enclosure, running up from the ground. There is a cone rising from ground level and an inverted cone sinking into the earth beside it. By exten sion, as a garden in the desert, the City calls up all the Islamic paradise gardens that grace deserts around the world in these latitudes; the fields of gravel in the City echo fields of tulips in Istanbul. Most locally, the City is the first garden in Garden Valley,AmidNevada.allthese mounds and reversed pits, it seems possible that the entire construction might be inverted—bottom for top, top for bottom—such that the mounds would become pits and vice versa.

Like Double Negative , the City hints at a reverse of itself, and this, I think, might be the trick of it. The great critic Kenneth Burke had an idea that touches on the hard concept. In Burke’s reading, the iden tifying mark of human animals is their invention of the negative, in building and language. Without the negative there is no tense and no time, no nar rative and no closure, no image and no imagina tion. It was from this assumption that Heizer devel oped his idea of “sculpture in reverse,” which takes us back to the original concept of the City and its genesis in the last stages of Heizer’s first major work of art, Double Negative Double Negative is

the classic demonstration of negativity empowered. It is configured as two sloping rectangular cuts fac ing one another across a blind canyon. The cuts match one to one; they infer a rectangular, invisible beam crossing from one cut to the other, so that the space between them is at once negative for the open space between the walls of the canyon and twice negative for the imaginary beam inferred from cut to cut—a doubled negative that represents a posi tive, thus the title.

The formal problem that Double Negative addresses is simple enough in the realm of out door sculpture. If the vertical height of a sculpture is less than half its circumference with the base as center, the piece is harmonious with the earth. If the vertical height of the piece is more than twice the circumference, it disassociates itself from the earth and loses reference against the sky, so there had better be some sort of figure on top. The prob lem is a version of the Goldilocks theorem, a prop osition grounded in the distance between Venus and Mars. Astronomers call this space the “hab itable zone.” Life is possible on Venus, Earth, and Mars, but Venus is too hot for earthly species and atmospherically hostile, Mars is too cold and too arid, while Earth is “just right”—thus Goldilocks.

So, when we ask what makes the City a city rather than a town or a garden, we must consider the autonomous sculptures that are integrated into the field of domes and pits and roads. They are land marks, the features of orientation that make the City a specific city, as the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum, and Times Square make New York New York. The sculpture installation 45°, 90°, 180° serves as the capstone to Heizer’s project. It sits at the higher, western end of the ter rain. It is the first thing we see and the last major object created for the City . It is a field of white reinforced-concrete objects dominated by enor mous forty-five-degree triangles twenty-seven feet high. These triangular monoliths, in various thick nesses and alignments, are deployed upon a large, white, rectangular palette. Two of them rest on the south end of a large concrete shelf facing east toward another rank of triangles resting on the pal ette. One infers from this, by kinesthetic logic, that all of these pieces derive from a prior conceptual, rectangular object, which we might reassemble in our minds, since forty-five-degree triangles assem ble into rectangles. The unity of the dispersed units, then, is held together by our instinctive effort to reimagine the pieces drawn back together into some original state. This, needless to say, is a

First, unlike Double Negative , there is no sense of intellec tual demonstration in the City —no QED. Second, there is no waste. Everything that has come out of the excavation of the City has been carted away or integrated back into it, to reappear in another form, altered by arrangement and compression. Most important, the City has a unitary armature. It is one thing. Natives like myself would call it “the place where the desert is set into the desert and seems to hover above it.”

To put it simply, artworks in Heizer’s canon may be air or object, and in the crying emptiness of the Great Basin Desert, the idea of extending the earth upward—of lifting artworks as vertical objects that retain their presence—is feckless, mainly due to the desert’s lack of scale. It is better to extend the sky into the adjacent earth because the sky wins. The sky always wins. So it is best to extend the sky, as Albert Bierstadt did at Yosemite, and make a “sculpture in reverse.” The distances and balances of the City echo these relationships but differ in two main qualities.

47 very sophisticated formal solution, and it lends the whole complex a corporate grandeur to which cor porate art could never aspire.

Complex Two is an exercise in ornament. A sec tion of interior wall, about 500 feet in length (nei ther too short nor too long), is adorned with stelae that ascend from the ground and extend above the top of the wall. Other shapes are laid in relief upon the wall, creating a decidedly Assyrian prospect, an instance of vertical lift in an otherwise horizon tal realm. Most interestingly, from certain angles the placement of these ornamental walls creates a backdrop for Complex One , the omphalos or navel of the whole project, which was built first, on level ground, at the bottom of what would become the long, flat excavation of the City. These two sculp tures combine to create the most resonant evoca tion of ancient practice in Heizer’s domain. There are echoes of the pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, Egypt, with its rounded corners, and of the Mayan buildings at Chichén Itzá on the Yucatan Peninsula. So we stand there, face to face with the abyss of geological time, and, standing there, we sense a compression of human time. The heyday of Egypt and the Yucatan don’t seem so very long ago at all.

Complex One is among the most present and simultaneously alien sculptures I have seen, and like a lot of great projects, it is based on an incred ibly rudimentary idea—the idea that things may seem irrational at close range and meaningful at a distance, which is the idea of most architecture and all of Impressionism. The sculpture is composed of five elements that seem at first glance to be whim sical and a little goofy, something in the realm of alien architecture, modern British sculpture, and other things that are very big. The main island of Complex One is twenty-four feet high, a hum bling elevation for six-foot creatures like myself, especially since the island’s length is nearly twenty times mine, at about 120 feet. I ask myself this question: how did I know that this piece, somehow, in some conception, makes sense? I’m not sure, but I attribute this crypto-certainty to the anomaly of intentionality in contemporary art—the mysterious fact that we can recognize that a work is “on purpose” long before we have any notion of what that purpose or intention might be, if we ever do. (I still worry about the “intentions” of the Ellsworth Kellys in my living room.) So we must narrow in on the work itself. The main element of Complex One —the 120-feet-long, 24-feet-high trapezium of dirt—has a long rectan gular front that tilts forty-five degrees inward, such that the the two vertical slabs of concrete that form the sides of the piece take the shape of triangles cropped flat at their tops. A white concrete bar rests on the top right side of the long tailored island. On its right edge, a concrete bar extends downward at forty-five degrees with the angle of the dirt, trim ming that side of the mound. On the near left side of the trapezium, a T-shaped concrete bar extends forward from the top of the mound, so that the cross bar of the T is parallel with the base of the island. The front of Complex One is defined by three outriders of white reinforced concrete. On the left front of the trapezium a rectangular bar at the foot of the mound extends nearly halfway down its length. About twenty feet farther out from the mound is another bar that extends from the center of the trapezium to its right end. At the left end of the trapezium an inverted L shape rises from the ground to a little higher than the top of the main element. It faces to the front. At first glance, there is a kind of teenage zaniness to the Complex One piece, although its sheer size argues against it and, to be honest, I liked the cra ziness so much that I didn’t really think about its conceptual resolution until someone explained to me that, if you step back from the sculpture about the length of two football fields, all the concrete addenda combine to frame the field of dirt in white concrete, transforming it into a sort of paint ing, like an early Robert Rauschenberg, maybe. My friends showed me a picture of the piece from the appropriate distance and voilà, there it was, very fun and very funny, especially when you con sider the amount of plotting, labor, and trigonom etry that went into this cool illusion. There is a passion to it, like those elegant hot rods we drew in high school. As I write this, I realize that many of my col leagues might think this humorous diminution is somehow disrespectful of Heizer’s practice. I don’t think so. Heizer is not respectable. He is a live spirit in the world, absolutely empowered, and any effort to tone him down, to theorize him and fit him into a lockstep art-historical and polit ical narrative, rather defeats the privilege of his hard-won freedom. Such intellectual pretension promises to banish Heizer to the airless box in which Smithson’s reputation currently resides, into which, I have to hope, Heizer would rather not go. So I prefer to remain the beneficiary of the artist’s generosity and high-hearted cleverness. How kind, I thought, of Michael Heizer to have made this city for me, to have set it afloat in the wilderness, in the deep tides of geological time. May it last forever, I thought, looking down on it, or at least until the supervolcano under Yellowstone Park conspires with the San Andreas Fault to cre ate a cataclysm compared to which that original asteroid slamming down out by Alamo is little more than a pebble cast into a stream.

PICTURE BOOKS SAM LIPSYTE & JORDAN WOLFSON

SL That’s how I work too. The worst thing is to have an idea. The whole point of making it is to find out what it is. And then you look back and say, Oh, I still don’t even know what it is. I still need other people to tell me pretty much what it is. I’ve often thought Gilbert Sorrentino, a brilliant writer whose book Lunar Follies I think both of you would get a kick out of, said it well: “No artist writes in order to objectify an ‘idea’ already formed. It is the poem or novel or story that quite precisely tells him what he didn’t know he knew: he knows, that is, only in terms of his writing. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that literary compo sition is not the placing of a held idea into a wait ing form. The writer wants to be told; the telling occurs in the act itself. And when the act is com pleted, its product is, in truth, but a by-product.”

SAM LIPSYTE I think there are lines to be drawn between them.

SL Yes, but not so much to avoid acknowledging her consciousness but because—and I don’t know if this was just this particular model or this par ticular doll—the skin was so delicate that the oils in human skin would destroy it and everyone had to handle her with gloves. She was starting to shred just sitting in a chair for two years with no one touching her. It was strange. I’d have to say that this model was still taking the hike up to the ridge before reaching the uncanny valley.

JF Your article got me thinking about the rela tionship between the artist and what’s being made, like a Franken stein or an automaton. Does intimacy or iden tification factor into that relationship? Or is it always the big-“O” Other?

JORDAN WOLFSON No, for me it was always about sculpture and the viewer. I was actually afraid of it—the artwork—because it was so uncanny in per son, so lifelike. I remember standing alone with it in a warehouse in Burbank late one weeknight and its eyes darted up at me. I ran out to my car as fast as I could.

to imagine that wild animals are conscious in the same way we are conscious. That this could occur with a robot or a machine takes this to another level.

Here’s50 a coincidence: I was dictating this brief introductory text, the text you’re reading, into my phone, a robotic intelligence that translates speech to text. The software understood Sam Lipsyte’s name as “Sam Website.” When Emma Cline first mentioned this project, of pairing Jordan Wolfson and Sam Lipsyte together for her Picture Books series, we were in a car that Jordan was driving, and at a red light, with divided attention, he turned to Emma and said, “Wait, the guy’s name is Sam Website?”Anyway, when I moved to New York, around 2005, Sam’s first collection of short stories, Venus Drive , was in the collections of all aspiring writers. Since then, a Guggenheim Fellowship and many more books later (my favorite being The Ask), Sam Lipsyte is rightly known as a prose stylist of generational talent. Sam writes stories about the state of the everyman—smart guys but not always smarter than the reader, protago nists like Jason in Friend of the Pod , a cash-strapped Gen X-er who finds him self entangled with ego maniacs. Meanwhile, I’ve known Jordan for many years. Actually, I remember, in the same friend’s apart ment where I first saw one of Lipsyte’s books, showing Jordan’s The Crisis (2004), a four-minute video of the artist talking autobiograph ically, in a cathedral, about his love of art. In retrospect, this work functions as a sort of short story in Jordan’s cat alogue. Wolfson is a master of provocation and of chan neling feelings in a way that makes them both alien and manageable. He’s particu larly potent on issues of anger and dissociation from anger. Emma first asked me to do an astrological reading of these two men, but I can just say that all three of us are air signs and we talked on Sam’s birthday, which happened also to be the summer equinox.

Joey Frank JOEY FRANK When Emma asked me to conduct this interview, my first thought was that the ego in your work, Sam, is so different from the ego in Jordan’s work. But I just read your essay “Ghosting the Machine: Humans, Robots, and the New Sex ual Frontier,” for Harper’s , which in my mind very much aligns with some of Jordan’s work, especially his animatronic work Female Figure [2014].

JF In Sam’s essay he talks about the future of sex with technology. But Jordan, I want to start by asking you something we’ve never discussed in the course of our friendship: Did you ever develop sex ual feelings for your artwork?

JW I don’t think intel lectually when I’m mak ing art. I would find that disruptive. I don’t think conceptually, either. It’s nice to look back con ceptually—or intellec tually—on these things, but for me, it’s about feeling and it’s about form. Ultimately, I’m trying to generate some kind of feeling from myself when I’m looking at an artwork. And often that feeling is a feeling of activated confusion brought about when you have a number of oppo site things colliding that aren’t supposed to be together, for example.

SL This piece I just wrote for Harper’s was about a trip to the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas, where I attended a presentation on the future of sex, pornography, and erotic technologies. One of the more interesting things I took away from this assignment was that these tech-sex creators can’t seem to imagine building a doll that doesn’t look like a very conventional idea of what’s sexu ally attractive or what’s erotic. They might imagine themselves to be transgressing certain bounda ries, but there’s something ultimately conservative about the approach. But I relate to that fear you’re mentioning, Jordan—it’s more about the fear of a machine and maintaining a comforting adjacency to the familiar.

THE THIRD BOOK PUBLISHED BY PICTURE BOOKS, AN IMPRINT ORGANIZED BY EMMA CLINE AND GAGOSIAN, IS SAM LIPSYTE’S NOVELLA “FRIEND OF THE POD.” ACCOMPANYING THE TEXT IS A NEW ARTWORK BY JORDAN WOLFSON. IN CELEBRATION OF THIS FORTHCOMING PUBLICATION, LIPSYTE AND WOLFSON SPEAK WITH THEIR MUTUAL FRIEND JOEY FRANK ABOUT THE YEAR 1993, EROTICISM AND ART, AND WHAT THE PROLIFERATION OF PODCASTS IS DOING TO THE EGO.

JF That’s a great reference, because, Sam, in your essay for Harper’s you write about meeting, if that’s the right word, this sex doll and how you had to wear gloves to touch her, right?

JW Yeah, Walter Benjamin said this interest ing thing, that human beings are terrified of hold ing wild animals—they need to hold wild animals with gloves—because if they were to hold the body of a deer in their hands, they would feel the ani mal’s heart pumping and it would remind them of their own consciousness. We have this inability

SL Yeah, he’s one of my best friends. What’s interesting is, he has a lot of stories about when he was first starting out and he sort of fell under the tutelage of Kinison, who really brought him to the edge of insanity. So there’s a nice circularity to this Kinison vision that Jordan had. I remember watch ing Kinison as a kid. That scream was extraordi nary. It cut through the malaise, the din. He’s been a preacher, I think. And a lot of podcasters are sec ular preachers of one kind or another.

JW Of course. My work really comes from post modernism, and the 1990s are quintessentially postmodern. Generally there was a certain kind of meanness in these artists’ work that I appreciated, that kind of angry, mean assault—so much was at this aggressive frequency. SL I was telling a student recently, You’ve got to be meaner.

SL Yeah, I mean, I believe that you can have an erotic experience in the vicinity of an artwork, but if you’re having sex directly with it, then it’s prob ably something else. Previous spread: Artwork © Jordan Wolfson

SamAbove:Kinison, Los Angeles, 1988. Photo: Jeff Kravitz/ FilmMagic, Inc./Getty Images

JF Sam, why did you choose 1993 for this new book? SL It takes place in the East Village in 1993, and ostensibly it’s about a band, but in a more general sense it’s a quest story. It begins with the bassist waking up and realizing that his lead singer has stolen his bass to sell it for drugs and he must go on a quest across the city to find his instrument and his front man. A variety of obstacles arise . . . a cou ple of murders and political intrigue and the implo sion of a scene. As Jordan was getting at, the year was both a pinnacle and the beginning of the end. And even Donald Trump makes an appearance. It takes place over three days in the winter, right before the huge blizzard that happened that year.

SL Yes, but all of that was happening at the same time as good music.

JW I’ve been to see that work three times. Each time, I spent about forty-five minutes with at least 100 or 250 other people looking at this sculpture. For forty-five minutes, just staring at it. And I’ve never had an experience like that—in a lot of ways, it was like a collective erotic experience. The body is so beautiful, the proportions are so uncanny and weird, that you just can’t stop looking at it. It’s a masterpiece from . . . definitely eight out of ten angles. But there are like two bad angles to look at the sculpture.

JF The funniest, most Jordan sentence in Sam’s piece for Harper’s was this part where he was talk ing about the robot, and he doesn’t know whether, as a journalist, he’s supposed to have sex with it for professional due diligence. And it’s clear that it’s a museum, so the answer is no. And Sam writes, “Well, yeah, it’s not like you can fuck Michelange lo’s David ” [laughs ]. I know, Jordan, that Michel angelo’s David is one of those pieces kind of like “Forever Young” for you, in that it drives you crazy.

JW I don’t remember that, but when I think about 1993, I think there was really good art being made. And there was also incredible music. On the other hand, 1993 is this point when awful music, which we’re still bearing the repercussions from, emerged in this big way. I’ve been listening to that track “Forever Young” by Alphaville from the ’80s over and over again. I’m somehow obsessed with it. It starts really good—it’s actually beautifully written— and then it spirals and the lyrics seem less and less potent toward the end. SL That’s a metaphor for 1993.

JW And then, 1993, I think of the Dave Matthews Band and Counting Crows’ “Mr. Jones.”

SL I agree with that. Form is essential there. We’re looking to contain the swirl of these feelings and these impulses and visions. That’s the whole point.

JW The artwork’s no longer an artwork if you have sex with it.

JW As I was reading Sam’s story, I would write things down. Again, really, I don’t know what to call it other than intuition. I had some other ideas written down too, but Sam Kinison stuck with me.

SL He thinks he knows better than everyone—

JF It’s interesting—Sam, you have a relationship with stand-up comedy, right? I know you and Marc Maron are good friends.

JF Why do you think, of all things, this was what came to you?

JF Exactly, it feels really very current. We went through the Trump era and now Biden is in the White House—it’s this stream of old men. SL The gerontocracy, yes. Absolutely no one is going to listen to this podcast, ever, but he feels he has all these important things to say and he’s got some money, so he’s going to pay someone to help him produce it. These characteristics aren’t in any way unheard of in the contemporary world. Also, with podcasting in general we’re in this age where stand-up comedy, as a form, has become an aspect of so many people’s lives—everyone’s mon ologuing. It’s not funny anymore, though—just a slew of people giving their political opinions and their hot takes on cultural events, never interacting. That’s the podcast world we’re in. And with Jason, too, I was interested in developing this character who was hapless, who’s been bouncing around in new-media worlds for years, from gig to gig, never quite landing anywhere.

JW But the great bands like the Pixies couldn’t survive, ultimately, with “Mr. Jones” taking over the radio, could they? SL No. They made some money later doing reun ion tours, but they went through some bleak times, I’d have to think. Don DeLillo wrote that the Ken nedy assassination broke the back of the American Century, but maybe it was really “Mr. Jones” that did that.

JW When I selected the image for Friend of the Pod , I didn’t even think about it, I just knew that I wanted to do this image of Sam Kinison screaming.

JW Absolutely, you’ve got to be meaner. When I’m putting things together, or working on chore ography or editing, I try to get the parts together in intuitive ways that fit and then abruptly don’t fit. I don’t actually think about it so much, it’s more of a feeling and “feeling out,” but the result often is that the attitude is hard, kind of mean, then at a certain point it becomes something else and the total form itself tells something.

JF I just like the idea that with the robots and creating a love robot, there’s this line between what is a sculpture and what is a tool for sex and what is an intimate partner.

JF But Jordan, does the art from that time inform your practice? Like McCarthy, Sean Landers, Cady Noland, Felix Gonzalez-Torres . . .

JW That’s how I feel about my life [laughs]. I’ve been bouncing around the art world doing this and that. SL I think you’re doing a little better than the guy in the story [laughter ]. But, also, yes, that’s part of it—he’s today’s everyman. This is the life of a lot of people I know, including me on some level, although I’ve been more tied to an institution for a long time. But also, part of the story—especially where it ends—was thinking about how we’re all the heroes and narrators of our own stories and sometimes we don’t realize how much we’re just doomed bit-players in someone else’s narrative. Or NPCs, as the kids say. It was rewarding to build Jason’s interiority, this grand, complex thing, and then have it completely snuffed out. In a manner of speaking.

JW Yeah, Joey, there is a difference. You know, being engaged sexually, with yourself or with a partner, is a different mode from that mode in which one looks at and with art. At least for me, those things are separate. Sam, can you speak to that at all? Because Joey, you keep on going back as if there’s a fetish hidden inside both Sam and me, and potentially there’s not, we’re just human beings who can switch these modes—you know, Sam is doing his writing mode and I’m doing my visualarts mode. And within those modes, we hope, there’s a space of brutal objectivity that doesn’t exist in our normal lives.

JF Sam, after this novella is released in the Pic ture Books series, I understand you have another book coming out that’s set in 1993. That feels like a year people keep returning to as emblematic of something in the worlds of culture. Jordan, do you remember we went to that exhibition at the New Museum, NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star [2013]? It had Paul McCarthy’s Cul tural Gothic [1992] and Derek Jarman’s Blue [1993], do you remember?

That by-product is what other people get from the artist going through the process of that telling.

JF Right, and we’re speaking about Marc, who has perfected the podcast as a genre, and your story for Picture Books is about a podcaster, Ted Goldwor thy, who hires the protagonist, Jason. Ted’s a great archetypical podcaster, right? He’s just this old guy in his basement in New Jersey with this huge con fidence; he thinks he knows better than Jason on everything . . . and, well, maybe he does.

I also had this image of two male lovers from a cel ebration in Brazil; I thought that would be a nice picture for the story.

PARADISEOFSIDETHISMITCHELL:TYLER

Brendan Embser reports on his encounter with Tyler Mitchell’s newest series of photographs, addressing their aesthetic motifs and art-historical references, while charting the development of these works in relation to the photographer’s earlier projects.

Mitchell had just returned from Florence for the spring 2023 menswear show by the British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, a frequent collaborator and an intellectual, he says, who’s always providing “reading lists” about art and literature. In a new suite of work, Mitchell explained, his insistence on picturing Black men and women in states of leisure and repose underscores an ambient concern for safety. Paring down to the elements, Mitchell’s latest photographs illustrate what David Gates, writing

By the time the twenty-seven-year-old photogra pher Tyler Mitchell came to prominence, a narra tive was beginning to emerge about the redemp tive power of fashion. Could Black photographers, working with designers, stylists, and subjects who share an identity and a sense of history, propel a new vision of desire within a notoriously exclusive sector? Could Black artists tell a new story about representation that would accrue benefits to the community rather than just propping up or sati ating white gatekeepers, legacy media, luxury brands, or the guilty liberal conscience? “There is a saying,” the artist and photographer Collier Schorr has said, “‘Make one picture for “them” and another for yourself.’ Slowly try to make them want the pictures that you want.” What Mitchell wanted, not slowly but as fast as possible, was an image of Black utopia and a way of living informed by that image, a way of being and belonging as much in the frame as in life. Would photographs always dwell in the dream world, or could Mitchell bend the world to his will? At first, it worked. Mitchell’s early portraits, influenced by the gemstone colors of Cuba and the lush green landscapes of suburban Georgia, cut a distinctive figure. There were lithe Black boys in enviable clothes in Edenic settings. There were glam girls in Gucci in grand old houses. There was light, delicate, impeccable styling. Together these young figures were presented for all the world like royalty: “teen dreams and prom queens,” as i-D put it in the magazine’s 2019 “Voices of a Genera tion” issue, for which Mitchell made a story about “powerful hair and beautiful faces.” In Mitchell’s photographs, whether made on his own terms or on commission for numerous magazines, the fashion-portrait gaze, that elusive combination of intensity and indifference, builds up a form of yearning that soars beyond material transactions. Between artist and subject there’s an impulse to learn more: to collaborate on the act of seeing, to collaborate on being seen. A quiet, insistent optimism. An idea, as Mitchell writes in his first monograph, I Can Make You Feel Good (2020), about visualizing Black people as “free, expres sive, effortless, and sensitive.” But a lot of that was shattered in the summer of 2020, and not because Darnella Frazier’s video of the death of George Floyd, which touched off what many writers called a “national reckoning,” was the first time Americans were confronted with a brutal manifestation of racist violence or the failed prom ises of emancipation. Celebrated for his fresh and youthful photographs, replete with joyful kite-fly ing and days spent lazing in the park, Mitchell’s work turned subtly toward a minor key. He began to make “dreamlike images,” he told me during a recent visit to his studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn, “that explore notions of paradise while simulta neously exposing their slippages and failures for Black folks.”

TylerOpposite:Mitchell, Cage, archival2022,pigment print, 50 × 40 inches (127 × 101.6 cm)

“I never looked at it as a door that I couldn’t open,” Mitchell told the NPR host Audie Cornish in August 2018, as the cover story rolled out. “I actually have always looked at it as a door that I was very much going to Mitchellopen.”says that his newest work is “pure,” meaning the photographs weren’t made on commission. Yet he often reuses images made for brands or publications in his own projects, exhibitions, and throughout his first monograph— and the fact that he can reuse them is a sign that they do work in multiple arenas, above all as art. The distinction, upheld by some critics and his torians, appears to be of minor interest to Mitch ell’s generation of photographers working between fashion and art, who want to have it both ways and often do. And anyway, as Parks, Richard Avedon, William Klein, and Irving Penn have shown— or in what the scholar Kobena Mercer would call the “belated” archival recognition of James Bar nor and Kwame Brathwaite—all fashion pictures become photographs in the end. That is, they reach equilibrium with history; they become historic. If they’re good. In Cage (2022), perhaps the icon of this new chapter of his work, Mitchell deploys a range of signs and structures, aligned with precision to his ongoing theme of Black quietude. A young woman in an embroidered white shift dress lies across a patterned bedspread whose chartreuse satin lining is folded up over two corners. A painted backdrop of a pale-green garden plot, demarcated by white-budded flowers, a picket fence, a thick hedgerow, and a languid sky, produces a trompe

By Brendan Embser

about Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy (2008), set in seventeenth-century America, has called a “post colonial pastoral,” a romantic evocation of a land that’s thorned with trauma. Can a paradise lost be discovered anew? Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1995. As a teenager, he became immersed in skateboard ing, which led in its way to photography. He stud ied film and television at New York University, and in 2015 he self-published a book called El Paquete , about skaters in Havana. El Paquete was picked up by Dazed magazine the same year, and the project displays Mitchell’s style in emergent force: his bold use of color in the found backdrops of green walls or pink-painted houses, his participatory elegance in seeking a sense of connection with his young subjects, and his effortless attention to fashion as a performance of self-determination. Three years later, Mitchell was commissioned to photograph Beyoncé for American Vogue ’s September 2018 issue, making history, at the age of twenty-three, as the first Black photographer to shoot the maga zine’s“Makecover.one picture for ‘them’ and another for yourself”—the Beyoncé cover was certainly one for them , but also one for Mitchell himself and for everyone else; one portrait from the feature was later acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. An incontrovertible triumph for Mitchell, the event might have occasioned a moment of humility for Vogue What took so long? In the 1940s, a decade after Vogue began running photographic covers, Gordon Parks was already shooting fashion editorial for the magazine.

“Vogue is not a place where you are pushy,” the late Vogue creative André Leon Talley once said. “You don’t go in there pushing and saying, you know, ‘We gotta have a black cover.’” It should be harder to believe. Still, the Queen was a kingmaker—and Beyoncé’s collaboration with Mitchell was shrewd.

Previous spread: Tyler Mitchell, Treading, 2022, archival pigment print, 50 × 40 1⁄8 inches (127 × 102 cm)

TylerOpposite:Mitchell, Flotation, 2022, archival pigment print, 20 × 16 inches (50.8 × 40.6 cm)

56l’oeil effect, as she appears to fully occupy both the fictional space of a garden and the performative setting of a studio, as indicated by the cold, precise light falling across her beguiling face, toned arms, and feet gently crossed at the ankles. Beware the “danger of denial,” Mitchell says of Cage , meaning the denial of life and liberty, of the pursuit of hap piness and of a land of one’s own. A white picket fence, a real one, also shows up in Mitchell’s earlier photograph Untitled (South ern Girls) (2021), a striking portrait of two young women in bouclé jackets, short skirts, and black heels, posed with a bicycle in the summer sun.

From Southern Girls to Cage , Mitchell extends that vernacular American symbol—the picket fence as sign of both aspiration and separation—and recalls Paul Strand’s indelible photograph The White Fence (1916). Made in Port Kent, New York, when Strand was twenty-six—by uncanny coincidence, Mitchell was the same age when he made South ern Girls The White Fence , with its stark contrast and charismatic geometry, is hailed as a break through in modernist photography. It’s a picture, John Szarkowski noted, that “has etched itself into the pictorial memory of every young photogra pher who ever saw it.” Mark Haworth-Booth, writing in Aperture’s “Masters of Photography” series, declares that with The White Fence , Strand dispatched pictorialism and announced “the birth of a new constructive day.” The curator Peter Barberie calls The White Fence “an unforgettable representation of the American homestead, viewed from a distance as if by an outsider or by someone returning. Its concise arrangement of forms imparts all the brevity and power of a masterful short story.” But that word : masterful. Masterly. Kerry James Marshall knocked off a vowel and called it Mastry. Riffing on his project Rythm Mastr, it’s a word “that extends Marshall’s commitment to making black subjects visible in the realm of pop ular culture,” as Madeleine Grynsztejn writes in the catalogue for Kerry James Marshall: Mastry , the artist’s 2016 traveling retrospective. “To failures of representation—including the lack of visibility for the black subject and depictions that compound racial stereotyping—Marshall retorts with icono clastic images that hopefully redefine our nation’s social fabric.” Mitchell’s radiant tableau River side Scene (2021), which owes as much to Georges Seurat’s Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884) as to Marshall’s masterpiece Past Times (1997), is an antecedent to Cage , possibly the wished-for pros pect that white-dressed woman imagines from the confinement or protection of her picket-fenced yard.

“The urgency that drives you, that propels you into the studio every day,” Marshall has said, “should

This Tylerpage:Mitchell, Simply Fragile, 2022, archival pigment print, 50 × 40 inches (127 × 101.6 cm)

“Those images from the civil rights movement, and when he was in people’s homes, he could see how people were dressed, and he knew that they were not dressing for his camera, but for themselves.”

Cage is Mitchell’s masterly short story, pulling into its field of vision the nineteenth-century apparatus of the backdrop, the modernist experiments with the American grain, and the long, vexing relation ship between the Black figure and the landscape, the unholy mix of persecution and potential.

Willis had been Mitchell’s professor at New York University; no living scholar has done more than she to expand the history of Black photographers and of Black subjects in front of the lens, and her signal contributions include her building of a mul tigenerational network of writers and artists— among whom Mitchell is a leading light—with a similar drive to advance the field. Willis wrote an essay for I Can Make You Feel Good and has done many interviews with Mitchell, one of them online for An Imaginative Arrangement of the Things before Me , his Gordon Parks Founda tion exhibition in 2021. For Willis, the parochial divide between fashion and fine art is largely irrel evant. The connections, which Parks made across the genres of documentary, fashion, and film making throughout his career, are more intrigu ing as a font of wisdom about how a photographer

In 2020, Mitchell was awarded a fellowship from the Gordon Parks Foundation, for which he made a series of domestic still lifes that recall both Parks’s midcentury work and Deana Lawson’s long-stand ing fascination with family pictures and the Black home as site of cosmological memory. Mitchell appears to deepen his connections with Parks’s legacy in several new photographs that also move toward the elemental, stripping away sartorial flair in favor of arcadian tranquility. Mud, water, sunlight, and heat are the primary materials in Rapture , The Heart , Treading , Simply Fragile , Distillation , and the diptych Self Decoration (all 2022). Some were made in upstate New York, along lakes and verdant territory seemingly unchanged for centuries; others are the results of an elaborate studio setup. Here, young men seek solace through ablutions. They are each alone in their own thoughts and worlds. Resting on the nose of a shirtless boy, a large bug is the source of captivation in the por trait Simply Fragile , an image that yields a startling and poignant resonance with Parks’s Boy with June Bug, Fort Scott, Kansas (1963), in which a Black boy lies in green and lavender grass, eyes closed, pulling a bug along his forehead with a taut white string. Boy with June Bug was originally published in a Life magazine story called “How It Feels to Be Black,” an evocative fictional sequence about a “recaptured boyhood of joy, of longing and sud den violence.” The feature includes Watering Hole, Fort Scott, Kansas (1963), Parks’s overhead image of five Black boys in silver-blue water, diving and swimming, standing in the shallows, being together. Watering Hole becomes a speculative antecedent to Mitchell’s Distillation , also made from above, in which water rushes over the body of a young man bathing in a rich white foam. The wet footprints across worn floorboards in Tenderly might be those of Parks’s watering hole boys. And the single hand emerging from the glossy flaxen mud in Mitchell’s Rapture calls out to Parks’s Unti tled, Fort Scott, Kansas (1963), in which a hand is raised from beneath green water—is it a plea for help or a sign of life? It’s the “postcolonial pastoral” again, with lush breezes and the slightest tremor of danger. Yet, decades apart, Mitchell’s and Parks’s photographs in nature appear to restore to Black boys a sense of private pleasure and wonderment.

TylerOpposite:Mitchell, Cage II, archival2022,pigment print, 50 × 40 inches (127 × 101.6 cm) This Tylerpage:Mitchell, Protect from all Elements, 2022, archival pigment print, in 3 parts, each: 30 × 24 1⁄8 inches (76.2 × 61.4 cm)

“Gordon Parks had the same experience, in terms of remixing the concept of fashion,” the photographer and historian Deborah Willis said in an interview with Mitchell for Antwaun Sar gent’s book The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (2019). (Mitchell con tributed the book’s cover image, a portrait of the model Ugbad Abdi originally published in Vogue .)

59 be the desire to see figures as yet unrealized.” Or as Toni Morrison implored, “you must write it.”

TylerOpposite:Mitchell, Tenderly, 2022, archival pigment print, 20 × 16 inches (50.8 × 40.6 cm) Artwork © Tyler Mitchell develops a career with verve and integrity. And a photograph like Mitchell’s Chrysalis (2022) is a successor, in a way, to Parks’s vision and Willis’s guidance. A boy lies on a twin bed, eyes closed, in a plain room with unpolished floorboards. Those expert seams on navy pants, the supple light over luminous skin, the perfect balance of color between the ocher sheets and the mint-green blanket, a pat terned bedspread that bears a resemblance to the one in Cage : could this be a fashion picture? But the title Chrysalis , referring both to the pupa of a but terfly and a protected state, implies that the image might be a form of autobiography, a story about emergence. The mosquito net casts a sepia glow; held aloft by wires to form the pentagonal shape of a pavilion, it looks like the rough draft for a Do Ho Suh sculpture. If a boy is protected, can there be freedom in dreaming? There’s always a temptation to imagine the purity of the early American landscape without any regret for what happened after. Even a hike in the forests of the Hudson Valley can evoke a primal sense of communing with an ancient territory, followed by the relief and trepidation in knowing that the city is just nearby—the empire is there, humming along, waiting for nothing but expecting everything. The pleasures and the perils await on every street. If Mitchell has made a world of joy and exuberance, he asked himself in creat ing this new work, but “on the other side of the hill is this political or historical or systemic danger preventing that from happening, how do I draw that out more, or have a conversation around that?” One response might be found in the enigmatic triptych that serves as a coda to these new photo graphs. Into his studio Mitchell brought a large, yellow, coffinlike container and filled it with soil, which ripples like a corrugated tin roof. Steadily, a young man pulls over the box a cloth backdrop painted to resemble a blue, cloud-scattered sky. In the final panel, the boy has disappeared altogether. A burial. A dream deferred. A broken promise in the promised land. Stenciled in black letters on the side of the box, Mitchell discovered the warning that gave the piece its title: “Fragile—Protect from All Elements.”

This Tylerpage:Mitchell, Chrysalis, 2022, archival pigment print, 50 × 45 7⁄8 inches (127 × 116.4 cm)

62 QuestionnaireMombaçaJotaHansUlrichObrist’s

A: On a beautiful13.day. The future is . . . ? A: Definitely confusing.

A: To spend time underwater.18. Are there any quotes you live by?

2. Does money corrupt art?

15 How would you like to die?

6. What is your unrealized project?

A: There are many, but I now recall two: one from Lauren Olamina’s radical teleology in Octavia Butler’s Parable series—“There is no end to what a living world will demand of you”—and the other from Esotérico, a beautiful song composed by Gilberto Gil: “Mistério sempre há de pintar por aí” (Mystery will always come around).

38. Any miracles today?

A: I shed a tear and, as it ran across my face, I remembered the river that crosses my favorite square in the city where I grew up. The miracle is the river crying through my eyes; it is the glimpse of inseparability that constitutes this moment; it is the elemental possession that occurs whenever tears are shed; and it is the aberrant geomorphology of diasporic tears.

In this ongoing series, curator 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 are invited to make a selection from the larger questionnaire and to reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the third installment, we are honored to present the interdisciplinary artist and poet . Hans Ulrich Obrist Jota Mombaça

A: I wouldn’t say it corrupts, for that would imply that art stands on a pure moral ground, and I don’t agree with that. My impression is that art is always already corrupted, formed and deformed by the very conditions through which it emerges. Art is never separated from power, speculation, interest, and possibility; and although it can extrapolate frameworks and enable experiments on what is not yet, art will always emerge in relation. What money does is extract from art— as it does with basically everything that exists within late-capitalist planetary reality.

39. Are we these images?

A: I do.

A: I hope not.

14. Do you write poems?

THERE IS NO THE ARCHITECTURE OF

DONALD

JUDD: PART 2

NEUTRAL SPACE

AdrianOpposite:Jolles, section drawing of Donald Judd’s design for the Kunsthaus Bregenz administration building, 1992, inkjet print on vellum. Adrian Jolles Papers, Judd Foundation Archives, Marfa, Texas

66 In this second installment of a two-part essay, Julian Rose continues his exploration of Donald Judd’s engagement with architecture. Here, he examines the artist’s proposals for projects in Bregenz, Austria, and in Basel, arguing that Judd’s approach to shaping space provides a model for architecturalcontemporaryproduction.

When Peter Zumthor wrote to Donald Judd in February 1990 to ask the artist’s opinion on his design for the Kunsthaus Bregenz, he explained that he had initiated the transatlantic dialogue in part because “there are few competent partners of discussion for this task to be found around here. . . . I’m not too excited about most of the new muse ums which have been built in Europe recently.” 1 Zumthor saw Judd, in other words, not only as an artist and architect he admired but as something of an authority on the art museum as well. This sentiment was echoed in the official invitation that Judd received from the Kunsthaus’s founding director, Edelbert Köb, that December: “I have been following your thoughts on art, art management and especially museum buildings which you have expressed in articles and interviews. They have made an impression on me and are compatible with my own views. I would therefore like to obtain your collaboration on a new museum project.”2 What had Judd said to make such a powerful impression? Never one to mince words, he had relentlessly repeated several scathing critiques of art museums since the early 1970s. The fundamen tal problem, he argued, was that the primary pur pose of these buildings was no longer to exhibit art. Instead, their role was symbolic and economic, as engines to drive tourism and urban growth: “A museum of contemporary art . . . has become a necessary symbol of the city and of the culture of the city all over the world.” The result was an “expensive efflorescence” of new institutions in which, ironically, “art is only an excuse for the building housing it.”3 Two corollaries followed. First was “atrocious” architecture. 4 In the neo liberal ’80s, the combination of populism, com mercialism, and historicism espoused by archi tectural postmodernism proved a heady cock tail, seamlessly blending pious appeals to the past with unquestioning exuberance over new devel opment, and most of the major museum projects constructed on both sides of the Atlantic adhered to this style.5 Not surprisingly, given the profound lessons about space that he had learned from stud ying Renaissance buildings, Judd was particularly incensed at these postmodern pastiches: “Recently

Previous spread: Donald Judd with Jeff Kopie, Architecture Office, Marfa, Texas, 1993. Photo: © Laura Wilson

This Donaldpage:Judd, Architecture Office, Marfa, Texas, 1993. Photo: © Laura Wilson

67 the symbols of the past are simply pasted on. . . .

The new use of Classicism isn’t even three-dimen sional, the essence of Classicism. It’s all paper cutouts.”6 But worst of all, the ascendance of this new style, all surface and symbol, branding and specta cle, had severed all connection between the archi tecture of these museums and their contents: “They never provide a true sense of what is being done in contemporary art.”7 It was undoubtedly this last point that was most appealing to Köb, who saw the Kunsthaus as a unique opportunity to reconnect art and architec ture within one institution. As he made the case to Judd, “This museum will be the first work of con temporary architecture for modern art built in Aus tria since the Secession.”8 It was a provocative prec edent to invoke: the Vienna Secession had been a cradle of the Gesamtkunstwerk. And it was one that Köb knew more than a little about, having served as the president of the Secession for the nine years preceding his appointment as director of the new Kunsthaus. A practicing artist himself—a prerequi site for the job, given that the Secession had oper ated as an artists’ association since its founding— Köb had also supervised the first major renovation of the Secession building, the Secessionsgebäude, since World War II, overseeing the restoration of both Joseph Maria Olbrich’s 1898 structure and the full artistic program it houses, including Othmar Schimkowitz’s sculptures in the entry portal and the famous Beethoven Frieze painted within by Gustav Klimt in 1901–02. But Köb’s intimate famil iarity with the Secession’s rich history also gave him a clear understanding of its distance from the present. It had, after all, promoted the Jugendstil model of a literal fusion of painting and sculpture with architecture. Its devices were medieval, even antique: the frieze and the pediment, the mosaic and the mural. Above all, the Secession version of the Gesamtkunstwerk had relied on ornament. That expansive and ambiguous category has pro vided fertile ground for connections between art and architecture in so many different styles and eras, but ornament became strictly verboten as architectural modernism gathered momentum in the early twentieth century, thanks in no small part to the vociferous anti-Secessionism of that other famous Viennese architect, Adolf Loos. Köb’s essential insight was to see that by the late twentieth century, the connection between art and architecture had become conceptual rather than physical, a matter of shared intellectual inter ests rather than complementary material praxes, defined above all by the emergence of “real space as a central concern of contemporary art.”9 Judd had unquestionably played a leading role in this shift, famously declaring in 1965 that “real space” had become the arena of the best new visual art. 10 And so, with Judd’s help, Köb proposed to take this “common intellectual position” as the “determin ing influence on the program of the Kunsthaus.”11 And yet, ironically, this conceptual affinity set up physical confrontation. How would art and architecture learn to coexist within the “real space” to which they both laid claim? A striking ambigu ity in Köb’s initial invitation to Judd reflected this difficulty. While he could clearly articulate what he wished to avoid, telling the artist that he hoped for “an alternative to the usual large sculptures (such as [Alexander] Calder’s very popular works) which stand in front of museum buildings as advertis ing symbols,” Köb’s description of what he actually envisioned was so vague as to be almost meaning less: “I have in mind an architectural sculpture/ structure/space segmentation.”12 In the end it was a purely pragmatic consideration that clarified mat ters. When Köb first contacted Judd, the plan was for Zumthor’s new building to contain only exhi bition space while the museum’s offices would be housed in a repurposed residential building nearby, but in early 1991 the local building depart ment declared the old house unfit for renovation because of structural damage. When he heard the news, Judd immediately offered to design a new office building. Carried away by his enthusiasm, Köb accepted the offer on the spot, before discuss ing it with Zumthor. He felt that the symbolic power of two great buildings—one by an artist and one by an architect—perfectly captured the interdiscipli nary ambitions of his institution and outweighed any concerns about the unity of the museum com plex. Zumthor was thus presented with the idea of a Judd building as a fait accompli, and it was this unpleasant shock that had provoked his furious letter to Köb in October 1991. 13 It was only with dif ficulty that the latter managed to convince him to at least await the results of Judd’s design. Meanwhile, Judd got to work. An annotation on his earliest surviving sketch for Bregenz reads “rounded like artillery sheds.” 14 And indeed he approached the project as a fresh version of the problem that had preoccupied him while he was renovating those two buildings in Marfa, Texas, to house his 100 untitled works in mill aluminum: what combination of proportions and geometry will merge a vaulted roof and a rectilinear volume into a harmonious whole? Initially trying a 1:1 corre spondence between the height of the main build ing and the vault above—the same ratio he had used for the Artillery Sheds in Marfa—Judd eventually decided that a multistory building would be neces sary to house all the required functions. His solu tion was to conceive of the building as a four-story rectangle (three above grade plus a basement) pre cisely circumscribed by the circle that set the curve of its vaulted roof. In the final CAD set, this circle is drawn into the cross-sections as a continuation of the double line of the roof; this explicit articulation of a regulating geometric schema lends the draw ings an unmistakably Vitruvian flavor. 15 A similar classicism is clearly legible in the plans, where Judd experimented with a series of planning grids that are almost Palladian in their simple modularity. Indeed, Judd’s single-mindedness recalls Rudolf Wittkower’s characterization of the Vene tian master, which Judd would have read in his classes with the eminent scholar: “What was in Palladio’s mind when he experimented over and over again with the same elements? Once he had found the basic geometric pattern for the prob lem ‘villa,’ he adapted it as clearly and simply as possible to the special requirements of each com mission . . . reconcil[ing] the task at hand with the ‘certain truth’ of mathematics.”16 Replace “villa” with “vaulted shed” and this could be a verbatim description of the design process Judd applied in

both68 Marfa and Bregenz. 17 His main innovation in the latter was to propose piers, rather than col umns, for the building’s structural system. By mak ing each pier extend the full width of one segment of the planning grid (1.5 meters, or just short of five feet), he created a system of implied equivalences whereby the same module could be expressed as both solid and void. As renderings suggest, this was an intriguing architectural extension of one of the paradigmatic ideas that Judd had explored in his stacks and Nevertheless,progressions.Zumthor was unimpressed, and he rejected Judd’s design out of hand. He was particularly vocal about his dislike for the overt anachronism of the vaulted roof, but he cannot have had much enthusiasm for the striated façade, either. Köb wrote that Judd’s building, “like his sculptures, is defined with the greatest clarity in terms of construction, proportion, and materi al.” 18 That was true; as in many of his artworks, Judd had produced a kind of diagram of concep tual synthesis, a whole in which visibly opposed elements—solid and void, structure and space, con crete and glass—were unified by being subsumed within the same overarching systems of geometry and proportion. Zumthor, too, believed in wholes; he ultimately justified his rejection of Judd’s design by arguing that it would undermine his stated goal of achieving “architectural unity” on the museum site. 19 But his notion of unity was far more synthetic, even atmospheric. His own design for the museum wove together a concrete core, a steel superstruc ture, and a skin of etched glass panels to create an enigmatic, translucent prism that rose like a gestalt from the edge of the city. As the architect officially commissioned by the state, Zumthor had ultimate authority over all aspects of the Kunsthaus project. His rejection of Judd’s design was therefore final, and Zumthor himself proceeded to design the administration building that currently stands on the site. (The building’s program was also expanded to include a bookstore and café on the ground level.) Yet Köb remained convinced of the importance of a Judd building for establishing the identity of his institu tion, and he eventually convinced the mayor and the city planning council to give him a new site in a lakefront park, a five-minute walk from the Kun sthaus. 20 Now that Zumthor himself was design ing the museum offices, however, Köb needed to invent a new use for the building as well. His solu tion was that it become a research and documenta tion center called the Kunst-Architekture Arkive. The new plan was fully in place by the fall of 1993, and it seems that it was only Judd’s untimely death early the following year that prevented the eventual realization of his design. But by this time a funny thing had happened: Köb had completely changed both the site and the function of Judd’s building, yet its actual design had not changed a bit. Presuma bly this did not bother Köb because he saw its pri mary purpose as essentially representational: in his words, a building by such a well-known artist would have “great symbolic and prestige value,” perfectly signifying the broader ambitions of the Kunsthaus. 21 Yet context and function are ostensi bly two of architecture’s determining influences, and this Judd-authored object—mobile, less spatial than symbolic, its form independent of function— was behaving as something much more like a large This page, above left: Rudolf Villas,”of“SchematizedWittkower,planselevenofPalladio’sillustrationinhis inArchitectural Principles theAgeofHumanism (1949; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). Used with permission of John Wiley & Sons; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. This page, above right: Donald Judd, drawing for the Kunsthaus FebruaryadministrationBregenzbuilding,4,1992,pencil on paper, 8 × 11 inches (20.3 × 27.9 cm). Donald Judd Papers, Judd Foundation Archives, Marfa, Texas This page, left: Adrian Jolles, rendering of the interior of Donald Judd’s design for the Kunsthaus Bregenz administration building, c. 1992, inkjet print on paper, 11 3⁄4 × 16 1⁄2 inches (29.8 × 41.9 cm). Donald Judd Papers, Judd Foundation Archives, Marfa, Texas Opposite, top: Adrian Jolles, rendering of the exterior of Donald Judd’s design for the Kunsthaus Bregenz administration building, c. 1992, inkjet print on paper, 8 1 4 × 11 1⁄2 inches (21 × 29.2 cm). Adrian Jolles Papers, Judd Foundation Archives, Marfa, Texas Opposite, bottom: View of the Kunsthaus Bregenz (1997), designed by Peter Zumthor, Bregenz, Austria. Photo: Dieterich/AlamyWernerStock Photo

The Kunsthaus’s programming evinces the wide variety that might be expected from a toptier institution with a well-established presence in the international art scene, exhibiting a represent ative cross-section of the vast range of heteroge neous cultural practices that fit under the capa cious rubrics of modern and contemporary art. The building, meanwhile, is justly renowned for its day lighting system, which combines a sophisticated multilayered skin with an ingenious structural sys tem to create enormous lightboxes between each floor, each one drawing sunlight in laterally and diffusing it downward into the gallery below. The effect is to suffuse the spaces with a perfectly even luminescence, creating a harmonious experience of vivid perception and heightened spatial aware ness, at once tactile, kinesthetic, and affective. This light falls with equal power on artworks of vastly different character, indeed on art that would seem to invite vastly different interpretive modes, or even posit entirely distinct modes of experience: from the lush colors of Abstract Expressionist paintings through the deadpan archival documentation of ’70s Conceptual and performance practices to the assemblages or dispersed artifacts of recent installation art. When Zumthor’s project won the EU Mies Award for 1998, the jury praised him for “creating an introverted place of contemplation.”23

And indeed he has, in an almost Kantian sense: it’s a space for moving slowly, breathing deeply, look ing carefully, and speaking in hushed tones, if at all. But it produces this contemplative mode even for some artworks that are not really asking for

69 sculpture than an actual building. Ironically, Köb’s very insistence on his interdisciplinary program had pushed Judd’s design back toward the status of the autonomous work of art. Did the relationship between art and architec ture fare any better inside Zumthor’s crystalline volume? After all, Köb was not the only one who believed that the new Kunsthaus should foster new kinds of interconnection between these fields. As Zumthor described his project, “It is no white cube, no abstract white shell. Its material presence was important to us: exposed concrete, polished concrete, and steel and glass of various qualities. We thought that works of art would profit from this explicit materiality, deliberately presented with understated, industrial clarity. We wished to have a physical, sensual framework for art.”22 It is cer tainly true that Zumthor’s spaces have abandoned any pretense to neutrality, and it is likewise true that the artworks exhibited within them tend to profit from his approach. Indeed, the most strik ing thing about Zumthor’s space is perhaps not how consistently good art looks within it, but how consistent the art looks—period.

contemplation,70 and for others that might not seem worthy of it if encountered in any other context. If there is no hint of neutrality here, nor is there any competition, any of the sense of architecture trying to upstage art that has drawn criticism in other museums by other celebrated designers. There is, rather, a palpable sense of augmentation, of enhancement. Given the impeccable installa tion shots these spaces produce, and the fact that the global circulation of such images is what keeps the art world turning—constituting not just the pri mary mode of reception of most artworks today but their primary mode of existence—it might be tempt ing to think about Zumthor’s building as a kind of architectural version of the Facetune app. But to characterize their effects as purely visual would be to overlook the extraordinary physicality of these spaces, immediately apparent to any visitor. What Zumthor has produced, ultimately, is the museum as prosthetic, a physical and optical framework that binds the two categories of thing within it—bodies of visitors and works of art—into a mutually sup portiveNeedlessembrace.tosay, this was not the relationship that Judd’s works were asking for. When a Judd exhibition was eventually held at the Kunsthaus, in 2000, the objects looked flat, almost pictorial, clearly missing the dynamic friction—the striking combinations of light and shadow, the obstrep erous materiality, the emphatically visible struc ture—provided by spaces like the Artillery Sheds.

“The building, however, is not a museum,” Kellein told Judd, almost sheepishly—but presumably by this time Judd welcomed that news. 25 And it was an enormous opportunity. Hans Zwimpfer, a promi nent architect and developer in Basel, was working on a massive urban infill project that would cover an existing rail depot with a new six-story office building, called the Peter Merian Haus. At over 325 meters (355 yards) long, it would be the larg est single building in the city. In part because of its huge size and staggering cost—it had required rais ing half a billion Swiss francs in investment capi tal—Zwimpfer was sensitive about public percep tion of the project, and, with consummate Swiss efficiency, he had formed an art-and-architecture working group, led by Kellein, to study “the best possible form of collaboration between artists and architects” with the ultimate goal of boosting the project’s prestige and cultural relevance. 26 Even with the best of intentions, there was ambi guity from the start. Kellein told Judd “the idea is to invite you to design the whole facade as if it were a sculpture.”27 But did that mean that Judd was invited to treat the building as a sculpture, manip ulating both surface and volume as he wished? Or was the implication that a Judd façade would make the whole building into a sculpture, no matter what form it was wrapped around? Judd clearly thought the former. Criticizing the look of the “thin, past ed-on facade” of Zwimpfer’s initial design, he pro posed a new massing in which he felt surface and volume were linked more deeply. 28 It was based, he explained, on a “form [I] developed in architecture

In Bregenz, then, neither Judd’s building nor his artworks found the kind of dialectical exchange to which he had aspired in Marfa, and by 1993, perhaps he himself would have seen that coming. When the buzz generated by his involvement in the project garnered him an invitation to speak at a symposium on museum design held that year, “The Museum of Contemporary Art: Towards the Next Century,” Judd refused—and, as if in a reminder to himself, he scrawled across the program, “Stupid. Don’t do it.”24 If he was serious about expanding his practice into architecture, he would have to escape the museum’s Incredibly,orbit.Judd did get a final opportunity to do just that. In July 1992, a few months after Zumthor had rejected his design for the adminis tration building, he received a letter from Thomas Kellein, then director of the Kunsthalle Basel, invit ing him to collaborate on an architectural project.

71 in renovating the artillery sheds in Texas.”29 The reply was courteous but firm: “The sketched vaulted roofs are less appropriate for this project, especially because of their height and the difficul ties they create. . . . In any case the building can not be enlarged.”30 It turned out, in fact, that noth ing about the building’s form could be changed at all: its length and height as well as the number of stories and their assigned functions had all been predetermined by economic factors. In the city, space was a commodity, and it would be shaped not according to an artist’s desires but rather, as Zwimpfer had insisted from the beginning of the project, “according to market development.”31 As long as he left the volume unchanged, Judd was told, he was welcome to explore variations in the color and material of the building’s surface. Judd may have devoted his career to working in what he called real space, but in the actual zone where architecture collided with the inexorable realities of urban development, he found himself squeezed into the fractional thickness of a sheet of glass. Judd was not known for his willingness to com promise, and the fact that he continued to work on the Peter Marian Haus after his vaulted-roof scheme was rejected is a testament to the depth of his desire to be involved in a real architectural project. Perhaps he even saw that the same high economic stakes that limited his role in the design almost guaranteed that the building would be real ized, and decided that the trade-off was worth it.

Judd’s instincts were correct; the Peter Marian Haus was too big to fail. While the artist’s death, in February 1994, had forced Köb to abandon all hopes of constructing the Arkive building in Bre genz, in Basel Zwimpfer forged ahead, realizing a façade with a pattern of variations based on Judd’s drawings. Yet while Zwimpfer was adamant about Judd’s authorship, making it the cornerstone of his branding of the project, this attribution seems questionable at best.32 In his last letter to Judd, from late December 1993, Zwimpfer had begun by wishing Judd a quick recovery before explaining that his office was engaging in a technical study of the façade, and that soon “we will therefore again have a lot of formal questions.”33 Sadly, these questions would never be answered; Judd’s health deteriorated rapidly and he passed away less than eight weeks after Zwimpfer sent this letter. Given Judd’s meticulous attention to detail, his hands-on approach, and especially the sketchy quality of the documentation he produced, it seems a stretch to characterize anything realized posthumously from his drawings—indeed anything he did not approve in person—as his “work.” But ironically, as in Bregenz, the tremendous symbolic and prestige value of Judd’s authorship ultimately outweighed concerns with the actual particulars of his design. And so, whether by institutional politics or urban economics, Judd found himself repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to realize his own build ings and was never able fully to take his place among the architects he admired. But this dis tance from the profession also made room for new approaches. Above all, it allowed Judd to see that it was possible to shape space without creating new form. At least since the beginnings of modernism, architects themselves had forgotten this, preoc cupied as they were with the tabula rasa condi tion assumed to be a precondition for innovation by most avant-garde practitioners. Ironically, too, in their pursuit of novel forms, architects largely ceded the actual production of space to forces out side of their discipline; to industry, to planning, to the market. For every iconic building designed by a celebrated architect—say, a new art museum—there Opposite, Installationtop:view, Donald Judd: Farbe/Colorist , Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, May 13–June 6, 2000.

TheDouglas(ARS),Artists©Marfa,Theview,1982–86worksDonaldOpposite,©Photo:SocietyFoundation/ArtistsJuddRights(ARS),NewYork.MarkusTretterKunsthaus Bregenzbottom:Judd,100untitledinmillaluminum,(detail),installationNorthArtilleryShed,ChinatiFoundation,Texas.Artwork2022JuddFoundation/RightsSocietyNewYork.Photo:Tuck,courtesyChinatiFoundation

In the fall of 1993, Judd delivered a design in which subtle variations of color and finish in the build ing’s glass envelope signaled the different func tions housed in the spaces within, attempting to link the building’s surface to its volume after all. Around the same time, he hung large-scale prints of the construction drawings for Peter Marian Haus on the walls of his architecture office. Prepared by Zwimpfer’s office, these documents conveyed an unmistakable air of real-world architectural pro duction—comprising dense palimpsests of inter layered structural information and technical anno tation that were in utter contrast to the ingenious simplicity of Judd’s own pencil sketches. Indeed, by hanging them even after learning that the over all design could not be altered, it was almost as if

Judd was celebrating the reality of the project and affirming the pride he felt in his contribution.

This page, DonaldThisArchives,CourtesyBasel,forPhotographabove:ofamodelthePeterMerianHaus,senttoJuddin1993.JuddFoundationMarfa,Texaspage,right:Judd,drawingforthePeterMerianHaus,1993,pencilonpaper,8×11inches(20.3×27.9cm).DonaldJuddPapers,JuddFoundationArchives,Marfa,TexasFollowingpage:ArchitectureOffice,JuddFoundation,Marfa,Texas,2018.Photo:MatthewMillman©JuddFoundation

4. Judd, “Una Stanza per Panza,” in Donald Judd Writings , 641. First published in German over several issues of Kunst International in 1990. 5. To name two high-profile examples, James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie, an explicit pastiche of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altesmuseum, Berlin (completed 1830), had opened in Stuttgart in 1984; and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, a Prince of Wales–approved mannerist confection, was under construction as Judd was corresponding with Zumthor and Köb (it would open to the public in 1991).

6. Judd, “A Long Discussion Not about Master-Pieces but Why There Are So Few of Them: Part 1,” 1984, in Donald Judd Writings 370. First published in English in Art in America in September 1984, and reprinted in English and German in Donald Judd Architektur.

7. Judd, “Ausstellungsleitungsstreit” (Exhibition direction’s dispute), 1989, in Donald Judd Writings , 559. First published in German in Kunstforum , April/May 1989. 8. Köb, letter to Judd, December 22, 1990. 9. Köb, Kunsthaus Bregenz , pamphlet published by the Kunsthaus to promote the new museum buildings in 1993, n.p. Author’s 10.translation.Judd,“Specific Objects,” in Donald Judd Writings , 141. First published in Arts Yearbook in 1965, this text had an enormous impact on the discourse around contemporary art in both America and Europe and came to stand as one of the core manifestos of Minimalism, although Judd himself repeatedly protested that he did not consider himself part of that artistic movement.

are72 thousands of structures instantiated by these other forces. Judd’s transformational insight was to recognize that in these overlooked remainders there might be plenty of space for both life and art; all that was required was a little elbow grease and imagination.Therewas an ethics in this approach, too. In 1992, somewhat ruefully describing his experience at a recent architecture conference, Judd recalled, “They . . . quoted Gottfried Semper, saying the first act of architecture is to break the ground. I think the first act of architecture would be to do noth ing whatsoever. . . . The major aspect of this cen tury, of the present, is an incredible destruction of the land.”34 Indeed, whenever he could, Judd tried to restore not only a structure itself but the envi ronment surrounding it; at the Artillery Sheds, for example, he had worked with a soil-conservation consultant to reseed the area with native trees and grasses, seeking to mitigate some of the ecologi cal damage that had accrued over decades of mil itary-industrial use. This was a radical approach for 1981, and as the field of architecture has slowly shifted, with “adaptive reuse” gaining currency as a legitimate form of architectural production, and increasing attention paid to everything from embodied energy and construction waste to build ing emissions and environmental performance, Judd seems like not just a precedent but a model. If his objects unquestionably changed the trajec tory of visual art in the twentieth century, from our contemporary perspective some of the debates they engendered—sculpture versus theater, Mini malism versus Postminimalism, art versus object hood—seem to be settling into the esoterica of art history. But the spaces he shaped will continue to speak to us as long as we have museums to build, landscapes to heal, cities to live in.

18. Köb, in “Donald Judd archiv kunst architektur, Bregenz: Projekt des Kunsthauses Bregenz,” in Jean-Christophe Ammann, Räume für Kunst. Europäische Museumsarchitektur der Gegenwart (Hannover: Kestner-Gesellschaft, 1993), 46. Author’s translation. 19. Zumthor, letter to Köb, October 23, 1991. 20. Köb, letter to Judd, July 19, 1993. Bregenz Project Files, JFA. 21. Köb, “Kunsthaus Bregenz,” in Sarnitz, ed., Museums-Positionen, 127. 22. Zumthor, “Art Museum of Bregenz,” project description provided for announcement of the EU Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture, 1998. Available online at https://www. miesarch.com/work/381 (accessed May 1, 2022). 23. “Edition 1998,” jury citation for 1998 EU Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture, March 7, 1999. Available online at https://www.miesarch.com/edition/1998 (accessed May 1, 2022). 24. Draft program for symposium to be held at University GhK Kassel, December 4–5, 1993. Bregenz Project Files, JFA. 25. Thomas Kellein, letter to Judd, July 2, 1992. Basel Project Files, JFA. 26. Kellein, letter to Judd, July 15, 1992. Basel Project Files, JFA. 27. Kellein, letter to Judd, July 2, 1992. 28. Judd, letter to Hans Zwimpfer, May 18, 1993. Basel Project Files, JFA. 29. Judd, letter to Zwimpfer, n.d. (likely June 1993). Basel Project Files, JFA. 30. Zwimpfer, letter to Judd, June 14, 1993. Basel Project Files, JFA. 31. Zwimpfer, “Some Notes on the Project ‘Banhof Ost,’” February 23, 1993. Basel Project Files, JFA. 32. In 2002, Zwimpfer published a book about the building in which Judd is posthumously credited with the façade design: Zwimpfer, Peter Merian Haus Basel: At the Interface Between Art, Technology and Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2002), 92. The book also documents contributions to the project made by other artists, but these were largely introduced after the design was complete and consist primarily of various installations in the building’s atriums. 33. Zwimpfer, letter to Judd, December 22, 1993. Basel Project Files, JFA. 34. Judd, lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, March 9, 1992. Courtesy University of Texas Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin.

16. Rudolph Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism , 1949 (London: Academy Editions; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 68. Judd purchased the 1952 edition of Wittkower’s book as a student in Wittkower’s class at Columbia in the fall semester of 1960; he kept his copy in his library in Marfa, with his final exam from January 30, 1961, tucked inside. He had chosen to write essays on the following prompts, both of which seem relevant to his approach to designing the Bregenz building: “Give an account of the Renaissance approach to proportion with reference to theoretical writings,” and “Discuss the problem of the Renaissance church facade with special reference to Alberti’s and Palladio’s contributions.” For a copy of the exam, see Donald Judd Student Records, Judd Foundation Archives, Marfa, Texas.

1. Peter Zumthor, letter to Donald Judd, February 24, 1990. Bregenz Project Files, Judd Foundation Archives, Marfa, Texas (JFA).

11. Köb, “Kunsthaus Bregenz,” in August Sarnitz, ed., MuseumsPositionen: Bauten Und Projekte in Osterreich/Buildings and Projects in Austria (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1992), 127. Text published in English and German. 12 Köb, letter to Judd, December 22, 1990. 13. Köb, correspondence with the author, January 19, 2022. Zumthor’s letter, cited in the first part of this essay (which appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of the Quarterly), was the one in which Zumthor wrote that Judd “should not be working as an architect for an administrative building.” Ironically, when he felt his own architectural authorship threatened, Zumthor expressed a preference for exactly the scenario that Köb had wished to avoid, raising the possibility that Judd could contribute an outdoor artwork to the project. Zumthor, letter to Köb, October 23, 1991. Bregenz Project Files, JFA. Author’s translation.

2. Edelbert Köb, letter to Judd, December 22, 1990. Bregenz Project Files, JFA. 3. Judd, “On Installation,” 1982, in Donald Judd Writings , ed. Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray (New York: Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books, 2016), 310–11. Originally published in LAICA Journal 32 (Spring 1982), this essay was reprinted later that year in English and German in the catalogue for Documenta 7 and in 1989 in Donald Judd Architektur (Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein), so would likely have been read by both Zumthor and Köb. It bears emphasizing that while Judd’s argument sounds familiar today, it was remarkably prescient given that he was writing a decade and a half before the so-called “Bilbao effect” had firmly established the idea of the art museum as an engine of economic development.

17. Judd also experimented with this geometry in a series of ultimately unfinished concrete buildings he envisioned for the Chinati Foundation. See Richard Gachot, “Donald Judd: The Concrete Buildings,” Chinati Foundation Newsletter 21 (2016): 24–92.

14. See the drawing dated September 28, 1991, Bregenz Project Files, JFA. 15. These drawings were prepared by Adrian Jolles, a young Swiss architect whom Judd had initially hired to work on the renovation of his country house in Eichholteren, Switzerland.

AMCD When you started, was any of it already digitized? MH Speaking for just the PMA, some things here and there had been digitized over the years for var ious projects, but not systematically. That wasn’t done until this project.

ALISON MCDONALD Antoine, Séverine, what were the origins of this project? What motivated the Associ ation Marcel Duchamp to embark on such a major undertaking?

This ongoing series features conversations with experts in the fields of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship who offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. For this installment, the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald met with Antoine Monnier and Séverine Gossart, the director and deputy director of the Association Marcel Duchamp; Margaret Huang, Martha Hamilton Morris Archivist at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Aurélien Bernard, assistant curator at the Musée National d ’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, to discuss the genesis and development of the online Duchamp Research Portal, a vast centralized digital platform created in collaboration by the three institutions to bring together and make accessible more than 18,000 documents and artworks, comprising nearly 50,000 digitized images, relating to the life and work of Marcel Duchamp.

SÉVERINE GOSSART Yes, digitizing Duchamp’s archives and making them accessible has been a goal for a long time, and from the perspec tive of the Association Marcel Duchamp [AMD] I think this project has a much longer history— it could even go back to Alexina Duchamp, the artist’s wife, who, right after his death, secured the preservation of the archives and started to make an inventory of everything. Teeny, as she was known, gathered rich documentation about Duchamp over the years and compiled several scrapbooks, which you can see on the portal. Of course she was helped by her children, first Paul Matisse and then her daughter, Jackie Matisse-Monnier, who later took over that work and founded the AMD.

AMCD Aurélien, how did those early decisions play out at the Centre Pompidou?

ANTOINE MONNIER My family gave a lot of archival materials to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and we wanted to make all of those archives more accessible. That was the wish of my mother [Jackie Matisse-Mon nier], and we have worked to follow it.

MH Well, in broad strokes, the PMA has more of the Marcel-centered items and the Pompidou and the AMD have much more related to Duchamp’s siblings, who were all talented artists in their own right. And putting them all together gives a lot of context about Duchamp’s family life and how that affected him as an artist. The PMA also holds the Arensberg Archives, which was a gift from his main patrons. Each archive speaks to different aspects of his life.

MARGARET HUANG The project started before I joined the PMA. Creating an integrated and accessible database, one that could combine information about objects in our collection with related infor mation from our archives, was an idea initially pro posed by our director, Timothy Rub. The life and work of Marcel Duchamp were in his opinion an ideal choice for such a project, as this would also enable us to collaborate with other institutions, initially the Centre Pompidou and the Association Marcel Duchamp, with important collections and archival holdings of the artist’s work.

AMCD Marge, what do you see as the main differ ences between each institution’s archival holdings?

AMCD Margaret, would you speak about how the idea for the digital portal was initiated at the Phil adelphia Museum of Art [PMA]?

AMCD Aurélien, is your role similar to what Marge was doing at the PMA? How does your work complement each other’s? What are some of the differences?

AMCD What were some of the earliest decisions that had to be navigated? How did you decide on the parameters and contributions for the collaboration between the institutions? AM Well, it was an early decision to link the PMA archives with the Pompidou archives and the AMD archives. That was already challenging [laughs ]—it’s not easy to combine archives from different institutions. Making a digital portal exclusively with the PMA would have been much easier, but there was so much to be gained in bring ing the collections together. Still, we were linking two unique institutions in different countries with unconnected legal systems.

Building a Legacy

AURÉLIEN BERNARD Cécile Debray, who was a curator at the Centre Pompidou back then and is now the pres ident of the Musée national Picasso, Paris, had made an exhibition that explored Duchamp as a painter [Marcel Duchamp: La peinture, même , 2014–15]. She started a discourse about this project between the PMA and Centre Pompidou. An early step taken by the Centre Pompidou was to survey what we had in the archives relating to Duchamp, because owing to its history, the Centre Pompidou has different repositories and archives across the institution.

AB When I was first approached, I was working at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Pompidou, to which the Duchamp family had donated archives in 1984. [The donation was made by Teeny Duchamp.] I worked closely with Marge on behalf of the Centre Pompidou, but the master plan for the project came from the PMA. My role was to facilitate the implementation and management of the project on the Centre Pompidou side and to bring in perspectives from across our institu tion. I would gather information from colleagues across all departments—archivists, librarians, curators—to identify the scope of the collections in the library, in our archives, and at the museum in general. All the teams would then discuss what could or could not be digitized, and of course I was responsible for keeping up with ongoing project management.

AMCD Would you clarify for me what you mean when you say “digitize”? It can mean so many dif ferent things—resolutions, file types, metadata, coding structures. How did metadata and file-nam ing conventions come into play? How did you put a structure in place for the files?

AMCD That’s great.

AM Another important early decision was whether it would include only archival materi als or whether images of artworks would also be included. And Cécile Debray was an advocate for including both. She felt that if we had the archives, we also needed to see the works to which they relate.

AMCD What about defining how people search for and find materials? Is that all navigated through metadata?

—Aurélien Bernard

AB Yes, it was a testament to the importance of international standards such as EAD. We were really glad to see that we were speaking the same “data language.”

AB Yes, many documents had been digitized before the project began, because for more than ten years there’d been a program to digitize many peri odicals, books, and archives at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky. And because Duchamp is such an important artist, any files relating to him had been prioritized and were already partly digitized. That said, creating more digital files was still part of our agenda, especially the Duchamp family papers and the archives of the 1977 exhibition on Duchamp that inaugurated the Centre Pompidou.

AMCD Did the metadata already exist when the files were digitized, or was it added through conversa tions with the group?

AMCD Antoine and Séverine, there was a survey phase for the project between 2015 and 2017 when decisions were made about selecting materials to be included in the project. Could you share more details about this process?

75 AMCD

AM That is correct. And that was a choice also.

AMCD The portal seems to me really useful for scholars. In concentrating on documentation, you’re dealing with objects as they exist—with facts that aren’t lent any kind of interpretive stance. The work is there for people to see, and they can make something out of it in their writing or their curating or however they want to use it.

MH At the PMA, even though we had things that were already digitized, we actually rescanned some materials because we were creating so many new files and we felt it was important for everything to look consistent. We created nearly 40,000 new images for the project. We had a vendor set up on-site for almost six months, because these were our most important collections and we didn’t want to send them off-site. Our vendors followed FADGI [Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative] guidelines and produced 24-bit color tiff images at 400 to 2800 PPI depending on the original size of the Butmaterial.what pulls it all together in the portal is our unified metadata schema. And thankfully, the Pompidou archives use the same standard that we do, which is called EAD [Encoded Archivable Description]. The project demonstrates why standards in our field are so important: they can facilitate projects like this, where data has to be shared or integrated together. And the fact that the Pompidou and the PMA were already produc ing archival data according to the same standard, which united all of the intellectual and descriptive content, allowed us to then share a template with the AMD to seamlessly create metadata according to the same standard.

AMCD Can you shed any light on the sheer volume of material included in the portal? The scope of the project is impressive.

SG Early on we had to think about the num ber of documents and images that would be imple mented in the portal. So we thought about the chronological range that would be included: we decided to add material gradually, rather than all at once, and to stop for now in 1969, which was the year Étant donnés was revealed after Duchamp’s death. We made two exceptions: we included files from the 1973 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the PMA, and files from the 1977 Centre Pompidou retrospective, together highlighting the history of our partnering institu tions. But we didn’t want the portal to be a showcase for scholars or art historians; instead, we wanted to focus attention on the primary documents. So the portal is not a place for interpretations of the work. That was quite an important decision, and I believe it followed the direction already set up by Jackie: she didn’t want to support strictly individual undertakings. This collective project, this portal, continues in that spirit as well.

And what about at the Pompidou?

MH There are three ways to navigate the site. You can use keyword searching, or you can use our filters, and those filters work because of the descriptive metadata. For instance, you can choose the correspondence filter and see all of the cor respondence across all of the collections. Or you can filter by a person, someone like Man Ray, and see all the materials that have Man Ray associated with them. Or you can combine filters such as “cor respondence” and “1920s” to get all of the corre spondence from the 1920s. The third way is to nav igate the materials through the finding-aid struc ture. If you’ve done archival research before, you might appreciate being able to browse the materials through the hierarchy of the archival arrangement.

MH A little bit of both. When the project first started, we did a data survey where we looked at what data everyone was already creating, what the overlaps were, what fields we were using or not using, et cetera. We came up with a minimum cat aloguing standard, the fields that everyone had to

MH Right now the portal consists of nearly 50,000 images, including correspondence, draw ings, photographs, exhibition ephemera, newspaper clippings, and images of the work.

AM Exactly. In fact, we could fill an entirely dif ferent portal with interpretations of Duchamp’s art works [laughter ]. It would be massive. But to mix the primary sources with interpretations would just make things confusing. We have to think long term—making the primary sources more widely available is the first goal. There’s a lot of critical writing on Duchamp, and I think the primary sources would be submerged by the interpreta tions if we tried to include both.

MH It wasn’t based on categories as much as on collections. We already had the Alexina and Marcel Duchamp Papers, the Marcel Duchamp Research Collection, the Marcel Duchamp Exhibi tion Records, the Étant donnés Curatorial Records, and the Arensberg Archives. We knew these doc uments had significance for Duchamp. It was the same at the Pompidou: they had groups of docu ments and then materials were selected from those.

SG The portal is not a forum.

To our knowledge, this was the first time a portal like this was shared between an American and a French entity— there have been projects like this in the United States and projects like this in Europe, but the rights issues you have to deal with in each of those cases are very different. We could see no precedent, so there were no readymade answers when we started.

AMCD How did you determine the categories that would help users navigate the site and find what they’re looking for?

AMCD The project is a generous gift to Duchamp scholars, and future generations will surely benefit from its creation. How do you anticipate research ers will use it? Has anyone surprised you yet with new ideas or connections that resulted from using this new system?

We certainly hope that scholars and the public will benefit from the direct access that it offers to primary sources, and that it will help to open new perspectives and develop a critical retrospective eye on the Duchamp literature.

Working on the portal confirmed that learning is often about un learning things we thought we knew!

76 have at minimum, and then filled it in from there.

AMCD Timothy Rub has spoken about the idea of seeking to create a richer online experience of art. Do you identify with this? If so, how does the por tal achieve it?

AMCD What legal considerations emerged? Was copyright and intellectual property law discussed, and if so, was it problematic that laws might be dif ferent in France from in the United States?

MH We’re still working with our development firm to refine the site. And since the very beginning the vision has been to work with additional part ners and to continue to grow the site’s content.

AM But you all make it look so easy [laughter ]. And you make it so easy for everyone who wants to use the material. I’m sure scholars are very, very grateful. I have to imagine it’s going to open up quite a bit of new thinking.

—Séverine Gossart The Duchamp Research Portal has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom, with additional contributions from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Martha Hamilton Morris and I. Wistar Morris III, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other generous donors. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this resource do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment of the Humanities.

AB To our knowledge, this was the first time a portal like this was shared between an American and a French entity—there have been projects like this in the United States and projects like this in Europe, but the rights issues you have to deal with in each of those cases are very different. We could see no precedent, so there were no ready-made answers when we started. It was a very interest ing problem to solve, and also to think about the future in terms of projects that might face similar challenges.

SG There were a lot of discussions involving legal counsel. We all agreed from the beginning on two essential aspects: to publish a noncommer cial portal, and to provide free access to everyone. Nevertheless, when a user connects to the web site, the very first page they see commits them to respecting the legal requirements of using the site.

AMCD When I’m using the site, I can see the mate rial but I can’t download it or use it for my own pur poses. That seems important to the legal consider ations—that it’s really there for study, like a refer ence library where you can’t check anything out, or use it without permission from the copyright holder. Similarly, for other creators whose works are reproduced on the site, do you direct users to places where they can license those materials for their scholarly or commercial needs?

SG It’s still too early to see all the ways it will be used, but we’ve received many emails from people telling us they were very excited about the portal. We certainly hope that scholars and the public will benefit from the direct access that it offers to pri mary sources, and that it will help to open new per spectives and develop a critical retrospective eye on the Duchamp literature. Working on the portal confirmed that learning is often about un learning things we thought we knew!

thinking about the decisions they made in the past, I could see that those choices were part of what made this project possible today. What if they’d decided to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Art Institute of Chicago? Duchamp’s work wouldn’t be at the PMA and we wouldn’t have gotten his papers and maybe I wouldn’t be working on this project.

AMCD So what this has done, quite clearly, is allow an audience all over the world to have the same level of access without traveling to see physical archives. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that, especially in light of the covid -19 pandemic.

AB Duchamp is such a central figure in art his tory that it felt intimidating at first to get involved in a project about him. But the more I read his words, the more I felt drawn to him as a human being and to his outlook on things. Ultimately I found it sur prising that, reading through his correspondence with, say, Constantin Brancusi, I could see how conversations from 100 years ago still feel unbe lievably contemporary. Marcel Duchamp sounded like an artist working today. MH Duchamp is such a larger-than-life figure— part of every art-history student’s curriculum. I never would have imagined that one day I’d be working on his archive, and, especially, seeing his personal items, like his passport, his rent receipts, that sort of thing. The project really humanized him, rather than presenting him as this monolithic figure in modern history.

AM It’s always good to visit a museum and expe rience an artist’s work in person, but the portal offers you another view that includes the knowl edge around Duchamp and where he came from. At AMD we believe that it’s important to see Duchamp in context. His brothers were quite influential on his practice, his family was very important, where he came from made an impact.

AMCD What does the future of the Duchamp Research Portal look like? Will you invite others to add to the archives? Will you continue to refine it or add features?

Another interesting thing that I learned, especially doing the cataloguing, was through fol lowing the negotiation that the Arensbergs went through to decide where they wanted to donate their art collection. Originally the collection was going to go to the University of California, Los Angeles, but the contract required that UCLA build a museum to house the collection and when it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, they nullified the contract. After that they were courted by many museums across the United States. Duchamp vis ited those museums on their behalf. And for me,

AMCD Any words of advice for others who might have ambitions to create similar resources in the future?

MH Thinking about other foundations or estates that might be interested in similar projects, it seems important to note that while it was totally worth it, these projects require a lot of resources, in terms of both funding and human energy. This portal is over eight years in the making, involving more than thirty people across three institutions, over 50,000 images being digitized and organized, tens of thou sands of lines of metadata being created, and so on. And then of course you need to have the funding. It was a huge effort.

SG The portal has been designed as an aggre gate of sources and it will be a work in progress for a long time. We plan to add new segments of mate rial little by little to keep it alive and fresh.

SG Yes. Users can contact any of us three, or the ADAGP in France or ARS in the United States, to receive information about licensing. Details and contacts are available in the “About” section of the portal.

AMCD Marge and Aurélien, what were you able to learn about Duchamp from your immersion in this material? What insight into Duchamp as an artist did you get from overseeing a project of this scope? Did you encounter documents that made you think about his work differently?

MH The analytics on the site confirm that we’ve had visitors from over 120 different countries so far.

CHRISTO & CURTAINIRONTHEJEANNE-CLAUDE

Previous spread: Christo and JeanneClaude’s Wall of Oil Barrels—The Iron Curtain (1961–62) on rue Visconti, Paris, June 27, 1962. Artwork © Christo and Jeanne-Claude’sinChristoThisJean-DominiqueFoundation.Jeanne-ClaudePhoto:Lajouxpage:standingfrontofhisand Wall of Oil Barrels—The Iron Curtain (1961–62) on rue Visconti, Paris, June 27, 1962. Artwork © Christo and Shunk-KenderFoundation.Jeanne-ClaudePhoto: CrowdsOpposite:on the rue Visconti during the presentation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wall of Oil Barrels—The Iron Curtain (1961–62) on rue Visconti, Paris, June 27, 1962. Artwork © Christo and ChristerFoundation.Jeanne-ClaudePhoto:Strömholm

So installing The Iron Curtain without authoriza tion was a bold act, particularly for Christo, who had defected from Communist Bulgaria in 1956. “I did many illegal things in those days,” Christo later stated. “I escaped from the Communist bloc to the West—that was illegal. I tried to go to Paris illegally. Sometimes, artists do illegal things.”2

Sixty80 years ago, on the night of June 27, 1962, the rue Visconti, a charming street on the Left Bank that is one of the narrowest passages in Paris, was the setting for a guerrilla art installation. This striking piece, Wall of Oil Barrels—The Iron Curtain , was by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and was only the second collaboration in their young career. It consisted of eighty-nine oil barrels stacked on top of one another, over fourteen feet in height, that stretched from wall to wall, completely blocking the street. Although The Iron Curtain stood for eight hours, it set off a series of shockwaves that have reverberated throughout the decades. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had requested per mission from Paris officials to construct the work but had not heard back. They intended to build the piece on the night of an exhibition opening that Christo was having at the Galerie J, his first solo show in the city. “Since our idea was technically never rejected, but simply ignored, Jeanne-Claude and I decided to do it anyway,” he later explained. “It was built very fast and was only up for one night, from 6 p.m . to 1 a.m . It stopped traffic—people got very upset—then the police arrived.”1 In the summer of 1962, the political environment in France was heated, with the Algerian War of Independence just coming to its bloody conclusion.

The impulse for The Iron Curtain had come the year before, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude were in Cologne for his exhibition at the Galerie Haro Lauhus and the first piece they had created together, Stacked Oil Barrels and Dockside Pack ages, Cologne Harbor (1961), a grouping of oil bar rels, some wrapped in large tarps and secured with ropes, that were stacked on the city docks. During their stay in Germany, a major historical develop ment took place hours northeast of Cologne, an action that was terrifying for Christo. “The Cologne exhibition opened in June 1961 and the Berlin Wall was built on the night of August 12 to 13, 1961,” Christo explained, remembering the dates even decades later. “I was still a political refugee with out a passport, without a nationality, and, of course, with this terrible fear that the communists would catch me. When the situation with the Soviets and the West had become increasingly tense, I reacted. I made the very modest proposal of building a wall of barrels on the rue Visconti—it was the aesthetic response of an artist.”3 Christo’s nephew Vladimir Yavachev, who worked closely with the artists after 1990, when he moved to New York from Bulgaria at the age of seventeen, witnessed how geopolitics had shaped his uncle. “Throughout his life, it defined him,” Yavachev points out. “Not just the Berlin Wall but the whole Cold War and the division between East and West. Especially because he really escaped— he was a political refugee. He always said, ‘I do the work I do because of where I come from and the experience that I had coming from the East.’”4 The Iron Curtain attracted quite the audience, including such artists as Arman, René Bertholo, Lourdes Castro, Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spo erri, Jean Tinguely, and Jan Voss; the influential French critic Pierre Restany; and such dealers as Sidney Janis and Leo Castelli.5 “It was a fantastic piece, extraordinarily beautiful,” Castelli said of The Iron Curtain . “It was really something to block an entire street like that. It was a statement that was Duchampian, very Dada, which I understood quite well because I saw it in other artists I was represent ing: [Robert] Rauschenberg, [Roy] Lichtenstein, [Claes] Oldenburg, [Jasper] Johns.”6 Convinced by The Iron Curtain , Castelli encouraged Christo and

“He was very classically trained in the Sofia art academy, which was a very old-fashioned art school,” explains Yavachev. “He had two semesters of dissecting human bodies to see how the muscles work—it was old school.” In the fall of 1956, Christo was able to visit family in Prague, and then escaped to Vienna in a freight car. After a stay in Geneva, he arrived in Paris in 1958. To make money he painted portraits of society figures. In October 1958, through portraits he did of the entire family, Christo met Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, whose stepfather, Jacques de Guille-bon, was a French general and director of the École Polytechnique, one of the most pres tigious universities in France. 9 They quickly embarked on a personal and creative partnership that would last for the rest of their lives. (Both born in 1935—actually on the same date—Jeanne-Claude died in 2009, Christo in 2020.)

Christo’s years in Paris, from 1958 until 1964, are considered the period of his early works. Wrapped objects and mysterious packages were key ele ments of his first personal pieces. A few striking examples: Package (1959), a tall, slender form cov ered with fabric, twine, and rope on a simple base, a black-painted wooden square; Wrapped Oil Barrels (1958), three steel oil barrels wrapped in painted fabric and wire; Wrapped Cans (1959), five metal cans covered in lacquered fabric; Package on Baby Carriage (1962), a baby stroller wrapped in pink plastic and twine; and Wrapped Car (Volkswagen) (1963), a VW Beetle wrapped with rubberized tarp and rope. At the studio of the artist Yves Klein on the rue Campagne Première, he even wrapped one of Klein’s models in plastic and twine.

The Iron Curtain is one of the most interesting early works,” explains Lorenza Giovanelli, an art historian who works with the Christo and JeanneClaude Foundation. “It really exposed Christo to the international art scene. It lasted just a few hours but it had such a strong and deep impact on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s career—it was actually their ticket to New York.”7

Christo Javacheff was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1935. Interested in art from his early childhood, and drawing from the time he was five years old, he took private lessons with painters and sculp tors who were friends of his parents. He then pur sued his education in traditional schools modeled on the nineteenth-century German academies.

“It was really in Paris that he became Christo,” points out Yavachev. “Before, with the portraits, very figurative, he signed using his last name, Java cheff. Once he started doing packages, and wrap pings, and barrels, those are the first works that he signed as Christo.”

The use of oil drums as a material came for very practical reasons: they cost little or nothing and Christo had a studio in the Paris suburb of Gen tilly that was next to a stockpile of used oil barrels. “Often, he would combine barrels with other found objects to create totemlike compositions, tall col umns or peculiar, shorter sculptures,” explains Gio vanelli. “Although they are no longer in existence, unfortunately, they show how Christo was curi ous about architecture itself, the architecture of the object, and the interaction of the object with space.”10

Instead of continuing to wrap barrels, Christo Christo,Opposite:Wrapped Oil Barrels, 1958–59, 18 barrels, lacquered fabric, enamel paint, and steel wire, overall dimensions variable © Christo and JeanneClaude Foundation. Photo: Thomas Lannes ChristoAbove: in his storeroom in the basement of JeanneClaude’s apartment at 4, avenue Raymond Poincaré, Paris. Artwork © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.

83 Jeanne-Claude to move to New York. He assured them that the center of the art world was shifting from Paris and he gave Christo his first American group show, Four, in 1964, and his first solo exhibi tion, Four Store Fronts Corner (1964–1965), in 1966.

“

Photo: René Bertholo

Once Christo and Jeanne-Claude began work ing together on their large-scale projects, they decided to sign their work jointly (all of the sculp tures and preparatory works—drawings and mod els—were done solely by Christo). The order of their names was not accidental. In 1998, Jeanne-Claude wrote a text correcting frequent mistakes about their lives and their work: “Because Christo was already an artist when they met in 1958 in Paris, and Jeanne-Claude was not an artist then, they have decided that their name will be ‘Christo and Jeanne-Claude,’ not ‘Jeanne-Claude and Christo.’”

Many elements of Christo’s work of course do endure, including all of the early sculptures and the preparatory works for the large-scale projects. “All the drawings and collages are preparatory works for the installations,” Koddenberg explains. “They have a lot of technical details and Christo often incorporated maps and construction drawings into his collages. They are works of art on their own and they were all done by Christo. He never had

Charming but firm, her text correcting the official record, entitled “Most Common Errors,” is pub lished on the foundation’s website.

A crucial aspect of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude is that they intentionally sur rounded themselves with a team of like-minded spirits. Their term for this group: “a working fam ily.” One key member has been Matthias Kodden berg, who first made contact with the artists in 1995, when, as an eleven-year-old in Germany, he saw what they had done with the German parliament in Berlin, Wrapped Reichstag (1971–95). “I saw that on television, and I was just so fascinated,” Kodden berg explains. “I had no ideas about art or what that meant but I was overwhelmed, and went and got a book about them. And in the book, I found part of their address in New York. I wrote them a letter, asked for an autograph, and some weeks later I got a huge package from Jeanne-Claude, filled with books and postcards and everything.”14

began84 to focus on them more as raw material, a kind of readymade.

This Christopage:with Wrapped Can and Bottle (1958) in his and Jeanne-Claude’s one-room apartment at the Chelsea Hotel, New York, 1964. Artwork © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation. Photo: Ugo Mulas Christo,Opposite:Shelves, 1958, 9 cans, lacquered fabric, rope, paint, wood, glass, and steel wire mesh, 35 1 2 × 11 7⁄8 × 7 1⁄8 inches (90 × 30 × 18 cm) © Christo and JeanneClaude Foundation.

“The sculptures became more purist,” Giovanelli says: He would not even clean them or repaint the barrels. He wanted to use them exactly as they were. By doing that, he was really incorporating the real world in his work, which is what they went on to do in the large projects throughout their career. For The Iron Curtain , he didn’t want to use pristine or new barrels, or paint the bar rels, he used what he could find. First, because they were free—Christo was very poor, so he would use everything that he could to create his work. But mostly because he found that aspect fascinating, for capturing the real world in his work. Although11 it may seem a dramatic leap from the early barrels and wrapped pieces to such grandi ose projects as The London Mastaba (2016–18) or L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (1961–2021), there was actually a continuity. In fact, the first iteration of a project to wrap the Arc de Triomphe came in 1961, when Christo had a studio not far from the mon ument in the seventeenth arrondissement. “The large projects that Christo realized with JeanneClaude find their roots in the early works that he began to create when he moved to Paris,” says Giovanelli. “In the early works one could see all the aspects that will characterize the later larger outdoor installations: the nomadic quality of the fabric, the concealment, the installation of mod ular elements in an environment, the attention to the surface and a tension between the interaction of the viewer with the object, the object with the whole environment, and therefore the viewer with the environment itself. In this sense, the projects are the natural consequence of the early works.”12

That was the beginning of a long correspond ence and working relationship. Koddenberg would travel to see their exhibitions and even tually, after studying art history, spent time with them in New York while doing an internship at the Morgan Library. He threw himself into research ing their work, conducting extensive interviews with Christo. “They were always very eager to sur round themselves with young people,” Koddenberg observes. “They were very much aware of having future generations talk about the art because all the projects were only temporary. There is only docu mentation, so it was important to have young peo ple on the team who can speak about their art and their personalities and their intentions.”15

Photo: Thomas Lannes Following spread, left: Christo, Package, 1960, embroidered tablecloth and rope, 19 3⁄4 × 8 1 4 × 7 1 8 inches (50 × 21 × 18 cm) © Christo and JeanneClaude Foundation. Photo: Thomas Lannes Following spread, right: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wall of Oil Barrels—The Iron Curtain (1961–62) on rue Visconti, Paris, June 27, 1962. Artwork © Christo and Jean-DominiqueFoundation.Jeanne-ClaudePhoto:Lajoux

1. Christo, quoted in Matthias Koddenberg, Christo and JeanneClaude: The Early Years. An Interview by Matthias Koddenberg (Dortmund: Verlag Kettler, 2020), 87. 2. Ibid., 87. 3. Christo, in Olivier Kaeppelin, Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Barrels/Barils (Paris: L’Arche, 2016), 60. 4. Vladimir Yavachev, interview with the author, July 15, 2022. 5. Lorenza Giovanelli, email to the author, July 19, 2022.

Although The Iron Curtain was much larger than anything that Christo and Jeanne-Claude had cre ated up to that point, it was modest compared with what would come within just a few years. In 1967, for example, they envisioned wrapping the Galle ria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome; in 1968, they proposed blocking West 53rd Street, Manhattan, in front of the Museum of Modern Art, with a wall made of hundreds of oil barrels; while in 1969, working with the collectors Dominique and John de Menil, they envisioned a mastaba built of 1,249,000 oil drums in the Houston-Galveston area. 21 And they realized the first of their massive projects, Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet (1968–69), when they used erosion-control fabric to wrap 1 1/2 miles of rugged cliffs along the Australian coast, south of Sydney. As Giovanelli summarizes, “In 1964, they moved to New York, and, in terms of scale, the whole vision changes.”22

an86 assistant in his studio—every line was done by Christo himself. Artistically they are very beauti ful, and they are very, very valuable pieces of art themselves.”16Giovanelli, born and raised in Italy, was also swept up into the world of Christo and JeanneClaude at a young age. Just after earning her mas ter’s in art history, she was hired to be the office manager for The Floating Piers (2014–16), on Lake Iseo, near Brescia. “After it was finished, I spent a long time taking care of the dismantling of the pro ject and the recycling of all the materials,” Giovanelli recalls. “So I was the last man standing. I closed the gates of the construction site on the lake in February 2017, and right after, Christo himself called me up and asked if I wanted to move to New York and join the core team.”17 She was given an apartment in the building on Howard Street, SoHo, where Christo and Jeanne-Claude had lived and worked since just after they’d moved to New York. All involved in the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation agree on the significance of The Iron Curtain to understanding the artists’ work. “It was the first big one that they did outside in the streets and it was the beginning of all the bigger projects that followed,” says Koddenberg. “From the begin ning, it was their intention to confront people with their art who are not normally going to museums or galleries, normal people using the city and the streets. They wanted to confront them with art and to see how they react, to find out whether they like it or not, to get into discussions with them about the piece and the art and how they use the space and the city and the landscape. So this was the beginning.”18Earlierthis year, on the sixtieth anniversary of The Iron Curtain , the Foundation conceived of an original way to commemorate this ephemeral piece: they installed a permanent record on the rue Visconti, just off the rue de Seine between numbers 1 and 2, on the exact site of the original sculpture. “We put out a sign to make people aware that the project happened there in 1962,” Koddenberg says. “And now, it’s very elegant, you will hardly see it, but if you look down on the street, you will see there is a marking where the wall was originally. And we did an augmented reality of the original wall. So you take your smartphone and you scan a QR code, which is now on the side of the street. The wall appears on your phone and you can direct it to the place where it was and then you see it on your phone as if it’s still there. So you can better imagine the size and dimensions of the piece.”19 Giovanelli feels that The Iron Curtain is increasingly relevant to understanding Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s larger intentions. “I think it’s important because it’s the first urban pro ject,” she says. “Dockside Packages and Stacked Oil Barrels installed at the Cologne harbor was officially Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first pro ject, but in Paris they really engaged with the city environment. It created the very first ‘gentle distur bance,’ which is how Christo and Jeanne-Claude described their works. Their temporary distur bance was gentle as they created something that would have an effect on the people who lived or vis ited that place, but after a few days or weeks they would take it away and everything would quietly disappear, as though nothing had ever happened. So this was the very first time that they created a gentle disturbance in a public context.”20

6. Leo Castelli, quoted in Laure Martin-Poulet, “De la rue Visconti au Pont-Neuf. Les Projets parisiens de Christo et Jeanne-Claude,” in Sophie Duplaix, Christo et Jeanne-Claude. Paris!, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2020), 153. 7. Giovanelli, interview with the author, July 13, 2022. 8. See Koddenberg, The Early Years , 7. 9. Ibid., 21. 10. Giovanelli, interview with the author. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Jeanne-Claude, “Most Common Errors,” 1998. Available on line at https://christojeanneclaude.net/most-common-errors/ (accessed July 23, 2022). 14. Koddenberg, interview with the author, July 14, 2022. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Giovanelli, interview with the author. 18. Koddenberg, interview with the author. 19. 20.Ibid.Giovanelli, interview with the author. 21. David Aylsworth, the Menil Collection, email to the author, June 19, 2018. 22. Giovanelli, interview with the author.

FURSTEN-DIANEANDFASHIONARTPART11:VONBERGDerekBlasbergspeakswithfashiondesignerDianevonFurstenbergaboutherrelationshipwithAndyWarhol,theliberationsofthe1970s,natureastheultimateinfluence,andwhyitisessentialtokeepadiary.

DB: Popular culture is obsessed with Warhol, more so now than when he died. This year, one of his Marilyn Monroe portraits sold for $195 million. Are you surprised by this legacy?

DVF: Those too started with Polaroids. Polaroids were a big part of his process—when he was doing portraits of living people, that’s how his work would begin. His first series of portraits of me, which are the ones where it looks like I’m reclining and my arms are folded over my head, he did in the 1970s. The Polaroids that were the basis [of that series] were taken at my house in the city. It was midnight and he was at my apartment and he’d been saying, I want to do your portrait, I want to do your portrait. So I said OK, let’s do it right now. He needed a white wall to shoot me in front of but I was living on Park Avenue at the time and the apartment was very decorated. Every wall had a print or upholstery or something colorful on it. But in the

DVF: To tell you the truth, I was surprised it took so long for people to understand how important he was and how cleverly he captured the contemporary moment. When he died, he was a famous artist, but he wasn’t as respected in that moment as some of the other artists of his generation. Of course that’s changed now.

DB: Let’s go back to the beginning. When you were young, did art play a big part in your life?

kitchen there was a small wall that was white. It was between two doors, very narrow, which is why my arm is up and folded over my head like that. For the second series [of his portraits of me], which he did in the ’80s, I actually went to the Factory to have the Polaroids taken. He had an idea for an exhibition, which by the way never happened, that he titled Beauties , and he asked many women to be a part of it, including me, Liza [Minnelli], Bianca [Jagger], Carolina [Herrera], and some other women. You’ve probably seen the paintings of those women from that series—he asked us all to wear kabukistyle makeup, so in the Polaroids you see all these women with white stuff on their face. It was probably easier for him to transpose the image onto the silkscreen that way.

In time, though, and after he died, I grew to like them and when they became available I bought them back. I have a few in my design studio in the Meat packing District in New York and some at my house in Connecticut.

DVF: I was born in Brussels, which means that as a child, I was exposed to such extraordinary art. And I don’t mean contemporary art, I mean true masters of painting. I remember the first time I went to a museum as a child and was surrounded by the icons of the Flemish school, which flourished from the Late Gothic through the Renaissance and to the Baroque. Rubens! Then, of course, the art in that part of the world became more modern and surrealist. [René] Magritte! Of course, when you’re young, you’re unaware of how special what you’re surrounded by is, but looking back at those painters, I can say now that they played a huge role in shaping my appreci ation for beauty.

Previous spread: Diane von Furstenberg. Photo: Michel Arnaud.

1 2

90 Derek Blasberg: In every issue of the Quarterly we have a conversation with a fashion professional and ask about the influence of art in their creative process. In September, at Gagosian’s Paris gallery, we’re opening an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s personal photographs and Polaroids, one of which is a fabulous image of you, so I thought this would be the perfect time to talk to you. Do you remember being photographed by Warhol?

Diane von Furstenberg and Andy Warhol. Photo: Getty Images

DB: I love them. And I love your sitting room, where several of the ’80s versions are hung high on a wall, which look incredible.

DVF: I have nine in total, four from the ’70s series and five from the ’80s DB:series.Did you like them when they were done?

DVF: I like to live with them because when I see them they remind me of a wonderful time in my life.

DB: I believe you own all of those portraits now, right?

DB: In addition to the Polaroids, he also did two series of his iconic silkscreen portraits of you. Do you remember those?

Above: Andy Warhol, Diane von Furstenberg, c. 1976, unique polaroid print glued to board, 4 × 3 8 inches (10.8 × 8.6 cm) © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

DVF: The first series I really liked. I remember that I bought two from him and he gave me the third one. I actually didn’t like the second series at the time, but he gave me one, which I put in storage, and I didn’t buy any.

Diane von Furstenberg: He photographed me a few times, actually. When I arrived in New York, in the late 1960s, Andy Warhol was part of the scenery. He was like a piece of furniture: he was everywhere, and I was everywhere too. I saw him all the time! He was a voyeur. He let you speak and he didn’t speak very much and when he did it was always something short and he would say it to make you say more. He wanted to know everything about you, he wanted to take your picture, he had a recorder in his pocket, he wanted to paint you. He was all-absorbing. But looking back, he had such an incredible sense of branding. He had a vision of what the world was going to be that none of us realized until it was here. In a way, he did social media before social media. He would have gone insane with Instagram! He was the original influencer.

DVF: When I arrived in New York, it was all about contemporary art. We had [Robert] Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, [Jasper] Johns, Warhol: all of them were everywhere and it felt like a thing , and I remember loving how you felt like they were really responding to a moment. Also, you’d see these artists out in the city. They were around. But it wasn’t just the artists we found inspiring, it was the whole contemporary-art gallery scene. For exam ple, this is when I first met Leo Castelli, and all of these other people who were doing new, interesting things, like Happenings in the basement of the Guggenheim [Museum]. We would go to art things all the time, much more than I think young people do now. It felt like art was very present in New York in the 1970s. In fact, I would go as far to say that the three most present things in New York at that time were art, the liberation of women, and, because this was after the invention of birth control but before the aids epidemic, sex.

DB: Can designers be artists?

DB: What inspires you now?

DB: I think so. Isn’t that the point?

Diane von Furstenberg, New York, 1975. Photo: © Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos

DB: Yes, of course! That exhibition was great. I remember all of the War hols were there too. I also remember that we went to a nightclub and they had people on horseback!

DVF: It was! New York in the ’70s was about reinventing freedom. We really thought we were doing that. We expressed it in many ways and the conver gence of the fashion and art worlds was a huge part of that. The fashion peo ple who inspired me at the time did an incredible job of capturing that part of the zeitgeist. I’m talking about Halston, most obviously, but also Stephen Burrows and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, and so many incredible fashion people who were inspired not only by art but by all the culture they were exposed to. I first met Diana Vreeland in 1972, and she was an intimidating woman but incredibly inspired. She saw things in people before they saw it in them selves. She was one of the people who gave me confidence with my brand.

DB: How does the world of art inspire you today?

DB: I’ve always admired how you keep a diary. It’s a wonderful practice.

DVF: Every day! For me, art is about emotion. A great artist manages to cap ture true emotion, whether it’s despair or ecstasy or loss or hope. On the other hand, design has a utilitarian purpose. It’s very different. Fashion is a reflection of the times, and when it’s good, it serves a purpose being beyond decorative. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art organized an exhibition of the 111 items that represented fashion’s most significant contributions to culture from the last 100 years. It included items like the bikini, the hijab, the fanny pack, Yves Saint Laurent’s safari suit, the kilt, the sari—and my wrap dress. It also included the surgical mask, which came back in fashion in a very utilitarian way during covid

DVF: Whoever created nature is the biggest artist in the universe because that manages to be both utilitarian and inspiring. That’s why, if you asked me who the biggest artist and designer of all time is, I would tell you Leonardo da Vinci. The single greatest inventor of all time. That’s because the thing he was the most proud of was that he could read nature. He realized that the pur est, most beautiful, and most utilitarian state of art was found nat urally in nature and in the human form. He was a genius.

DB: I try to, but I rarely write in it. Who has the time?

DVF: When you write in it, are you honest?

DB: What a time to be alive!

DVF: There have been a few exhibitions about my dresses. You came to my opening in Moscow in 2009!

DVF: I’ve never been one of those greedy collectors who buys a bunch of things and puts them in storage. The first paint ing I ever bought was a Pre-Raphaelite painting that I bought in a jewelry store. At the time, I figured I was making money from women so I should celebrate their beauty, especially in the art of Pre-Raphaelite painting. Soon after, I began acquiring art from my peers and my friends, including folks like Francesco Clemente, Barbara Kruger, and Anh Duong. More recently I found some Chinese artists that I admired and commissioned a few things from them. I’m also a fan of Damien Hirst—we acquired one of the paintings from his last Bev erly Hills show, it’s at our house in California. I have to give him a lot of credit because he obviously captures the moment so well and I think it’s important to support artists of your time. And something else I believe in: I don’t use art for profit. I have a funny story: once when I was in China, some one asked another person what kind of art they collected, and the person responded, I collect Gagosian art. I thought that was great and of course the person I called and told the story to was Larry. But I like to see and be inspired by my art, and that’s the purpose it serves me.

DVF: Yes, of course. And it can blend. If you do ceramics, you can be both utilitarian and inspired.

DB: In 1976, the wrap dress landed you the cover of Newsweek magazine, didn’t it?

DB: What’s your current relationship with art?

DB: I think you’re going to be the subject of your own exhibition, is that true?

DB: And then you moved to America, which doesn’t have a historical-art context like that. Was that a shock?

DVF: I brought Nicolas down there the other day to show him where the dia ries were. I picked one of them up at random and I opened it up and landed on my entry from September 11, 2001. I had written about how it started as such a beautiful morning and I was reading the newspapers. I had had a fashion show two days before and the reviews were coming out. Then my son called to tell me to turn on the news, and we both just watched in horror as the rest of the day unfolded. I wrote how my son had told me that this was the first brick in the wall of capitalism being removed. Do you keep a diary?

DVF: Yes, it is. And I’m happy to hear that. I have to say the one best piece of advice I could ever give someone is to keep a diary. A diary is a written record of the relationship you keep with yourself, and that is the single most important relationship you will have in your entire life.

DVF: My next show won’t be in Russia but I’m excited to tell you that next year there’ll be a show in my hometown, Brussels, curated by Nicolas Lor, at the Musée Mode et Dentelle. He actually spent the last five days in the archives of my house in Connecticut going through my diaries.

DVF: Yes!

AMANDA WILLIAMS

CANDYLADYBLACK

The informal economy sustains. Beyond the con straints of state bureaucracy, streams of income— untaxed, in theory unlimited—flow where needed and required, a self-regulating network feed ing, housing, and clothing millions. There are, by design, no advertisements, no backing; word of mouth and ad hoc business acumen is the req uisite modus. These enterprises exist within the universe of the elote stands, ice cream trucks, and snowball carts dotting each enclave, unique in their situation within the home. Among this class of entrepreneurs, the gendered order is evi dent: female vulnerability and socialization dic tate, as they do everything. A life or livelihood outdoors has always been safer and more avail able to men. Among the throngs of enterpris ing entrepreneurial masses in Black enclaves are women who sell candy and other small goods out of their homes. These women are the subject and source of Amanda Williams’s solo show, her third, at Gagosian, New York, titled CANDYLADYBLACK , a continued medita tion in color. Williams approaches and, in her own way, depicts the candy ladies and their consumers in her standard manner, mingling serious intellectual consideration of Black subjects with bright, fresh whimsy, capturing them at their most essential.

Williams is a Cornell-trained architect and a Chicago native. Through her paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, she has managed to com mingle these identities, conceptualizing fresh approaches to what has often been dismissed as unworthy of critical or artistic engagement: the makeshift artworks and labor of the work ing class, Black, female, and informal artists and artistry that exist outside of formal institutions and recognitions. She has work in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere, and has a permanent monument to Shirley Chisholm, the first Black congresswoman in US history, under way in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, all while serv ing on the design team for the Obama presidential

94 Jasmine Sanders addresses the economic, architectural, and chromatic roots of Amanda Williams’s new paintings.

95 library in Chicago. Williams repeatedly returns to questions of how space, commercial interests, value, and urbanity intersect with—and antago nize—Black existence. In the series What Black Is This, You Say? (2020–), for example, she pro vides a cheeky critique of Blackout Tuesday, a viral movement in which Instagram users posted black squares on the application’s pages after police violence in the summer of 2020. Her most praised and provocative project so far, Color(ed) Theory (2014–16), debuted at the Chicago Archi tecture Biennial in 2015: over two years, assisted by her loved ones, Williams repainted eight empty condemned houses in Englewood, Chi cago, each in a different, vibrant hue. The colors of the houses were unignorable, inviting exam ination and jutting out amid otherwise colorless expanses: the slate gray of winter skies, the slushy colors of long untended yards and lots ubiqui tous within neglected neighborhoods. Her pal ette evoked the commodities central to the culture of the city’s South Side: the ubiquitous, staining scarlet of Cheetos, the varied tones of the signa ture chicken shacks, the regal velvet of Crown Royal bags and personal styling products. Facing what had been dismissed, labeled “condemned,” Williams countered “Why?” and “According to whom?” She emphasized each home’s singularity, reminding us that the delineations between detri tus and sculptural wonders are innately racial ized, a matter of subjectivity. “When you grow up in a segregated city as I have, like Chicago, you’re conditioned to believe that color and race can never be separated,” she has said. “Racism is my city’s vivid hue.” The logics of architecture and of race converge.

Previous spread: Amanda Williams, CandyLadyBlack (The Champagne Is Burned), 2022 (detail), oil and mixed media on wood panel, 20 × 20 inches (50.8 × 50.8 cm)

AmandaOpposite:Williams, CandyLadyBlack (Can You Feel It Too Just Like I Do), 2022, oil and mixed media on wood panel, 80 × 80 inches (203.2 × 203.2 cm) This Amandapage:Williams, CandyLadyBlack (wine candy grape nowalater sneak), 2022, oil and mixed media on wood panel, 60 × 60 inches (152.4 × 152.4 cm)

AmandaOpposite:Williams, CandyLadyBlack (wine candy strawberry nowalater sneak), 2022, oil and mixed media on wood panel, 60 × 60 inches (152.4 × 152.4 cm)

96 Williams’s new exhibition is a return to old fixations, not only conversant with prior works but an impressive, lively expansion of them. Hav ing established her topics—the city of her birth, modernity, urban blight, Black expressivity, archi tecture as racial implement—she now bounds beyond previously drawn borders. Where the architect had previously concerned herself with exteriors, CANDYLADYBLACK , an expansion of What Black Is This, You Say?, peeks inside at some of their potential denizens, equally spec tral and systematically disappeared. The Black grandmother, an eponymous, seldom portrayed figure, is all too familiar: those stalwart, unbowed matriarchs, doling out candy hidden in purses and pockets, saccharine in their own right, and typically more object than subject. Here she is revealed as a hustler type, a character with whom we are less familiar. The name also inevitably brings to mind its obverse, the candyman, a more malevolent but equally well-known character. Sugar was a commodified good of the slave economy, the basis of untold fortunes. Here it is reclaimed by those who have not been the benefi ciaries of that system. The selling of goods out of the home blurs and does away with distinctions between public and private, work and pleasure, the sorts of delineations that Williams has repeat edly refuted. CANDYLADYBLACK opposes orderliness, unerring boundaries, and estab lished boundaries, welcoming a messier chromatic seepage. The tone of the pieces is a reenactment of chaos, melding the random and the ordered. What might the architect’s eye make of the absence of lines and symmetry, principal concepts of her training? In this way she seems to refuse the brutal, This Amandapage:Williams, CandyLadyBlack (Even When You Talk It Takes Over Me), 2022, oil and mixed media on canvas, 60 × 60 inches (152.4 × 152.4 cm)

97 colorless architecture of the contemporary realm.

In this series Williams utilizes nine evocative tones mimicking the artificial, chemically bright ened hues of beloved sugar treats. The paintings are delightfully, unnaturally saturated, alluding to the dextrose, sucrose, preservatives, and chemical dyes that constitute popular candies. The greens are iridescent, the color not of actual limes but of lime-flavored gummies, Frooties, Pixy Stix, bubble gum, and chews. Some of these hues traipse at the edge of repellent, a near Day-Glo. They drip and run nearly off the canvas, their formations sug gesting the little fingerprints of children and the candy women. These are less colors than flavors, pooling and melting into shapes with lives and tales of their own. They have about them the air of an event, some antic occasioning the parade of pigment, and not only a dazzling sunset brightness but a reminder of the brief wonder of Chicago win ters. The viewer is drawn in and invited to match each particular color to her own memory, her own favorite sweet. In this way the paintings recall the Rorschach inkblot tests, challenging each imagi nation to work of its own volition. The stickiness of the paintings is atmospheric, enveloping. Williams has provided an alterna tive color experience that manages to both sub vert and submerge, almost haptic in the sensa tions it induces. There has been much proselytizing regarding recent transformations of childhood: we lament the absence of outdoor play, the stringent, intricate diets, the overall loss of a certain sort of citified infancy. Williams’s retrospective is rumi native, playful, nostalgic, although not chastising or overprecious, considered but not overwrought. She recalls the play, the whimsy, of preadult life by envisioning it and inviting the viewer into her colored world. Slip into that bold magenta, that invigorating orpiment, that seductive puce and shocking pink, and recall the wonders of yore; Williams the chromophile is our guide. Viewing the paintings, I am reminded of Alice’s slip down the rabbit hole, how invigorating it is to be allowed entry into a realm of the artist’s making. It is a realm increasingly sparse. Chicago’s housing projects have largely been demolished. Summer, once relished for its brevity and singu lar relief, has now, with climate catastrophe, been extended, as autumn and spring grow warmer. Childhood, like summer, passes too soon. Poor and working-class Black neighborhoods are increasingly imperiled, their homes and land scapes reshaped, their people moved and relo cated. Gentrified modernist homes are put up in

98their stead, both the designs and the populations usually absent of color. Williams’s work and mind remain Colored, almost flagrantly so, urging the culture toward her. In its excesses, the work is also a critique of the austerity of government programs in the face of systemic poverty, of lives governed by having just enough to survive. The world Williams allows is predicated on succor and vibrancy. Her works are equal parts parade, memorial, tribute, and mourning ritual.

Black artists have always responded to the ills of the time—police brutality, white supremacy, xenophobia, homophobia—through their creative practices. In the wake of the summer of 2020, what was initially a turn toward the political side of Black art has instead grown into a demand. The artist must express her politics and they must be legible and digestible to the masses. Black art ists are rarely presumed to be technically astute stylists or abstractionists. Through this series, Williams manages a narrative without bodies or language, producing an alternative mode of fig uration. It is nothing as flat or simplistic as joy that she is relaying, but rather the entire spec trum of Black experience, our youths, homes, lives, elders—here and not. It is as if Williams had looked about, taken stock of the colors and options available, and found them insufficient. With CANDYLADYBLACK she has conceptualized new hues, new spectrums of thought and feeling, and a more dimensional Black collectivity.

AmandaOpposite:Williams

This CANDYLADYBLACK 2022 in her studio, Chicago, 2022 Artwork © Amanda Williams Photos: Jacob Hand

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101

When a little boy named Julius disappeared from a small Alabama town, much happened else where. A seamstress pricked her finger, four people took naps simultaneously, a wife threw hot coffee on her husband, fourteen of them read a newspaper, some literature was written. Some danced, prayed, gossiped, and fought for fun and not money. Men worshiped other men for the machines they created that did slightly different things from other machines. They wrote books. They considered economics. They harvested fields. While the town hunted for the hunted, Rebecca and Sadie found each other in the woods that night. There is a special kind of guilt that comes from abandoning the search for a lost child in order to make out against a tree; it is marvelous and deep bodied, a cabernet sauvignon of selfishness and disorder. My ghoul and I tasted the richness of their desire wrenched out of a nobler obligation, the tart red smoke of blasphemy. I am a poltergeist. To me there is no such thing as sin. There is no such thing as duty. There is no such thing as mortality. The woods in this part of the South were complex as the air holes in a three-layer butter cake. Rebecca and Sadie knew them all. Only when someone is born into this kind of nature does it become as familiar as running your tongue along the backside of your teeth. Each ridge of the tooth carries memory of a good meal, a means toward sustenance, a comfort, a worry, the looming inevitability of decay and loss become sudden and piercing. Old salted meat lies in between the molars. The growing humidity of the night only added to the ferocity of their lust. It was embarrassing to witness from so deep within the cave I’d hollowed out for myself beside Sadie’s own soul. The inappropriateness of it all kept my ghoul, my love, their mischief deeply cultivated more and more. Had Rebecca and Sadie been born 1,200 years sooner or 200 years later, they could’ve been diplomats. They could have negotiated the peace between the warring neighbors, used their knowledge of human tendency to unravel the irrational dysfunction that makes similar creatures want to eat each other. Still, to my kind, the gnashers, the socalled human beings, were all the same, the equivalent of broccoli and a hammock on fire. They were a thing to put into a salad for nourishment or to throw across the room against an enemy’s chest and let explode for dramatic effect. Unfortunately, I’ve been tormented with higher expectations. Decades before and after being in that town, I’ve met old men in musky bars that smell of licorice and vermouth. They tell me they’ve lived too long when no one is interested in their voices and their crotches no matter how much money they have. I always think how lovely it is to anticipate the end of their time with such resignation and foolishness. The night was warm in spots. Sadie moved along the odd pockets of warm air, calling the boy’s name until she thought she saw someone else. Rebecca, she said again and again, and there Rebecca appeared as if the night became her, arms bare, outlined in the moonlight, an impossible distance between them like a woman and her shadow. Sadie felt dread and pain and disbelief. I know because I felt them too, the recipe for addiction, for love, though my affection was for the other within Rebecca, a vice on her soul. We all needed relief, however temporary. Sadie hung her lantern on a poplar branch. Rebecca did the same and they moved to the dark side of the tree. With arms straight by her side and head tilted back to expose her neck for who knows what, a slit or a kiss, Sadie closed her eyes and breathed. Then I couldn’t see what was going on, even as I could feel my ghoul’s presence, close and content. Soft fin gertips grazed our throat, then ears, elbow, waist. Sadie shivered.

102 Am I already dead? Sadie asked. Is this my punishment? Rebecca laughed and leaned into her lover. The warmth of them overwhelming. Do you suffer so? I could feel the sting in the eyes, hear the bell of worry for the dead ringing in Sadie’s brain. Ugh. My patience had evaporated most thoroughly at that point, the perfect stage for an exercise of passion without the eyes of strangers, their judgments, their preoccupations, their wars and their tax on the living. I pushed Sadie down. I pushed her deep from the surface of her own consciousness to a place a little less pleasant than sleep but more quiet. I kissed Rebecca. I pressed her against the poplar and did the things. Shocking. To her? I’m thinking yes, since she slapped me for it, but did not take her other hand from Sadie’s waist. It was my turn to laugh and lean and taunt except I couldn’t remember how to speak that language and mumbled something less than coherent and sexy. Possession is hard. Possession is really hard. When a person’s mind is addled by intoxicants, grief, madness, or love, they can sometimes see me, even if I’m wearing someone else. They tend to ask lots of questions like When am I going to die? Where’s my daughter? Why do you torture us? What does God eat for breakfast? Where is the road to Mars? Or Why is everything like this? They’re all the same, the people not the answers. They have that locked-door stare, as if they’d just arrived at a bakery and there was a “Closed” sign swinging in the breeze. They just can’t believe it, and that is the moment they live in forever. I am not clairvoyant. I do not like ghosts. They drag the past around like horses whipped in a circle over a muddy track until their own bones are dug up or the house they died in burns to the ground. Even that is not a guarantee. Nope. I like the right now, where eating thirty-two Hostess cupcakes in a row is not just a good idea, it is a revelation, a thing to savor. The future is often merciless though occasionally a gift. The future of Rebecca, Sadie, the vanished boy, the whole town, could’ve been many things after that night. The boy could’ve been found, the cry of his mother’s voice shuddering through the woods, a chord of relief that even the toads would have recognized. The softness of his chest and arms like ripe tomato skin could’ve been punctured and cobbled by mosquito bites. Otherwise, the boy could have been unharmed, tired for a day and a half then full alive for years to come, living another seven decades to work in a lumber mill, marrying at fifteen, fathering eleven children, burying two, setting his mobile home on fire and suffering third-degree burns along his chest from carrying out his furniture in the flames, and dying divorced and happy at home. The town and its neighbor could’ve formed a truce, admitted to the improbability of friendship for another century, and generally minded their own business. Rebecca and Sadie could’ve completed the pageantry of mourning a husband, then started a fruit-pie business, adopted an orphaned child, and sent her to a school somewhere far north in a haven of mixed promises of dignity. They could’ve watched each other age like apricots drying in the sun, laughed about it all, and died seven months apart, an old widow and a spinster, celebrating nightly the bliss of being inconsequential in the minds of their peers. My ghoul and I could’ve escaped, recognizing that the strain of immortality is best born together. We could’ve been a nest of rats blanketing the last food stores of a starving village or rotted deer carcasses prancing through the moss. We could’ve been terrifying and fabulous, predators of mayhem, indecision, inconvenience, selfishness, and pride. How beautiful it could’ve been if

103 all of them, all of us—the gnashing people, the lost child, the doomed stupid lovers, the mur derers, the plumbers and hairdressers, astronauts, saints, and check-fraud perpetrators—if all of us could’ve been left alone. Rebecca receded so far from the crest of her consciousness that she almost looked like a thing between species, but only to someone not paying close attention. I knew that new face well. When I first met my ghoul we were in Bogotá, I was torturing a rich matriarch with irritable-bowel syndrome, and they were still learning possession through trial and error on a fishmonger with a gambling problem. I helped ease the gambling debts for a favor or two that of course I had to disguise as service for their affection. The goal is not to perpetuate stereotypes here. Ghouls are not the cause of mankind’s suffering; they just like it a lot. There is no better suffering than love unless a whole-ass war is nearby. Maybe I’m attracted to narcissists, immortal, amorphous, gooey, soul-plundering, eater-of-nightmares kind of narcissists. I am not a crazy exgirlfriend. This is just my process. I remember the look on their face, that changed face, more ghoul than human, more eternal than finite, that look of suspicion and recognition of love, love that persisted because of the pain not despite it. They were repulsed. I’d overshot my shot. It happens.

A fly crawled out of Rebecca’s ear and took flight into the darkness. When we, Sadie and I, should’ve been repulsed at the sight, the fusion of rot and desire, I was enamored. Rebecca, my ghoul, grimaced. A bell rang. A bell rang again and again. The shouts of the people combing the woods be gan to rise in pitch and generate an anxious hurried rhythm. A generation later, there would come a waterslide seven stories high known auspiciously for multiple decapitations yet just as auspiciously remaining in operation until a court order shut the park’s gates. Losing control during a possession feels like going down that waterslide and being decapitated. Sadie from deep inside the husk of her own body heard the bell and recognized the meaning and fought like a gladiator to have her body back. So there I was pressed down again, the head of my figurative soul lopped off while Sadie pulled Rebecca to the sound of the bell back in town. Sadie held Rebecca’s hand while running, turned to her and laughed. They giggled as if they were in a game and Rebecca held on tighter before the laughing stopped abruptly. Certainly they were entitled to the relief that the bell declared. The worry would end, the search would end, they would all run to a truth, whatever that truth happened to be. There were no promises of any kind in the note that rang across the night, just that the search for the child was over. Sadie stopped midstride and Rebecca collided into her, nearly taking them both down. Whatever nimbleness resides in young women that ’70s horror films fail to cap ture kept the two standing. The trees thinned and the light from the streetlamps of the town swelled into view. Sadie and Rebecca abandoned their lanterns in the forest to burn their fire out in the twilight. Running in the dark came easily. We’re almost there, Rebecca said. Why are you afraid? It’s cold, Sadie answered. The trees and the blind darkness held a warmth that evaporated the closer we approached the wood buildings and dirt roads. Behind them every leaf wore a luster from the moonlight, a concerto of insects played, even the wild hogs, turkeys, and water snakes put the hum of their sleep to a gentle pleasant pulse. Children are made to believe that monsters live in the

104 dark, that creatures like my ghoul crave havoc and blood crawl along the hours deep after sunset and long before sunrise. Children are made to believe many lies. All by herself, with her heart so torn between obsession and nobility, Sadie could see the pain that lived in the light. The sweat on their lips and collars dried in the chill. A man rushed past the pair, brushing Rebecca’s shoulder on his way. Then another. The bell continued and the call to come home demanded an answer. Rebecca turned to Sadie, took Sadie’s face in her hands, and asked, Will you let me go? For a moment there was a chance to undo every worry and return to the dim safety of ordinary living. A poltergeist does not have a wide range of solutions to humanity’s problems. We usually trip people down stairs, boil butter inside of refrigerators, start a fire or two or thirteen, maybe connect sewage pipes to shower stalls, the usual party tricks. I don’t always get invited to the party because I stay even when the people don’t give us their energy. The others call me a perv because, well, I do like to watch. I should’ve left a long time ago. This is what people do when they lose their children, the best of themselves, to negligence, cruelty, stupidity, or the thunder of an unpreventable accident: they decorate their kitchens with cut flowers and boil cinnamon to calm their nerves. Women look at the sky for a sign that it’s ok to leave the house, some sprinkle powdered bleach around their doors for protection, a few ask their God for many selfish things, they check on their jewelry, they read their mail, dress neatly, eat and fuck at appropriate intervals while thinking of little else while the days continue. Sometimes people are so wrecked by living that the intangible silk of their souls practically slips through their pores. It is then that they see me too, at a bus stop, a Lamps Plus, or the courtyard of a children’s hospital, full of animal circus topiary. They never ask me how I’m doing so I return the favor and do the same. Then I ask other things. Why do you watch the moon so expectantly? Why are your memories so bad? Why do you blame everything else for all that comes to you? Why do you gamble with your last dime and dollar, lose it all, and ask “Why me Lord” again and again? Why do you pray to the thing you corrupt? Why do you sleep in rot and dream of youth? Why do you forget yourselves every three centuries to just start over? Why are you so afraid of death? Pain? The unfamiliar? Each other? Aging? Poverty? Your own body odor? Growing up? Dependence? Independence? Judgment? Why do you choose debt over freedom? Why must you always justify your murders? Why do you believe you can own anything at all when even your body is a rental? I tell them to have fun soon, because a life completed in less than 100 years is very soon to me. All people are starving infants. God never eats and is always hungry. The only key to any door is already in their hands. They look at me and laugh as if it’s the first time and the sensation gathers deep in their nerves and presses their eyes and lungs into tearful suffocation.

105 TEXT © VENITA BLACKBURN

Cy Twombly, Treatise on the Veil (Second Version), 1970 [Rome], oil-based house paint and wax crayon on canvas, 118 ⅛ × 393 ⅝ inches (300 × 999.8 cm), The Menil Collection, Houston. Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation 108

Cy Twombly Imperfect Paradise 109

Eleonora Di Erasmo, cocurator of Un/veiled: Cy Twombly, Music, Inspirations, a program of concerts, video screenings, and works by Cy Twombly at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome, reflects on the resonances and networks of inspiration between the artist and music. The program was the result of an extensive three-year study, done at the behest of Nicola Del Roscio in the Rome and Gaeta offices of the Cy Twombly Foundation, intended to collect, document, and preserve compositions by musicians around the world who have been inspired by Twombly’s work, or to establish an artistic dialogue with them.

In a series of drawings made in 1990, Twombly noted the words “Delight lies in flawed words and stubborn sound,” a slightly modified quotation of the ending of Stevens’s “The Poems of Our Climate” (1938).3 The full passageNoteruns,that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

The creative process stems from the incessant state of need. The artist feeds on reality, investigating and probing it in all its details, conveying it naked. Overexposure becomes a filter, a veil that is needed in order to be able to focus the gaze better and perceive what is closest to us, but that we normally struggle to recognize in its original essence. The truth that would otherwise remain invisible to the eyes. The lens becomes an extension of the eye, “a subsidiary organ of sight, of memory.’5 Thus the use of mythology, the references to classical culture and modern literature, become a means of decoding the world and understand ing human emotions, beauty and its contradiction, the universal relation ship between things that governs the incessant forward movement of our existence. The coat of white paint with which Twombly covered his sculp tures, assemblages of objects found by chance, transfigures them, and in this process of abstraction the artist strips them of their names, of their human trappings, bringing them back to their essence, to what preceded us: There was a muddy center before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete.6

—Wallace Stevens, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction , 1942 In Notes toward a Supreme Fiction , the poet Wallace Stevens asks us to look at the sun with eyes that don’t know it, that are unfamiliar with its form, as if they were seeing it for the first time, perceiving its primordial idea, the sun as it was before we existed: How clean the sun when seen in its idea. Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven That has expelled us and our images . . . . . . There was a project for the sun and is. There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be.1

110

Cy Twombly playing the piano, Munich, 2005. Courtesy Biggi Schuler It must be visible or invisible, Invisible or visible or both: A seeing and unseeing in the eye.

The difficulty of being, the awareness of one’s own imperfection in the face of the perfection of nature, sparks in the poet the need to return the sun to its “first idea,” the desire to complete reality in order to reunite it with the reason of the world, to grasp a meaning in it that irremediably escapes the gaze of imperfect beings and is only ever revealed in brief moments, in the form of fleeting epiphanies.

Le Voile d’Orphée opens with the manipulated sound of a piece of cloth being ripped, a sound that serves to symbolize the dramatic death of Orpheus, whose body is torn to pieces by bacchants. The sound expands as if suspended in a time without end, which Twombly conveys in his Treatise on the Veil paintings through a series of continuous lines, parts of broken lines, and numerical inscriptions. Traced in wax crayon on a dark ground, the lines run along the lower part of the two paintings, as if to measure the space of the canvas and beat out the rhythm of an inner tempo, calling to mind the scores of postwar avant-garde music. That same tempo dilates in the echoing sounds produced by the piano of Harold Budd. He in turn took inspiration from the Treatise on the Veil works to compose his Veil of Orpheus (Cy Twombly’s) (2012), whose cadenced progress, made up of poetic pauses and suspensions, almost seems to be reminding us of the phrase Twombly used to describe his Treatise on the Veil: “a time line without time.”9

Republished from the introduction for the Un/veiled catalogue (translated by Christopher Huw Evans).

In the same way in which Twombly assembled the most disparate objects to create his sculptures, Pierre Henry, a pioneer of musique concrète and electronic music, manipulated and remodeled audio material—“sound objects”—to produce his compositions. In 1953, as Nicola Del Roscio has written, Twombly was struck by a concert of Henry’s Le Voile d’Orphée (1953) that he heard on the radio, and years later he drew inspiration from it for the paintings Treatise on the Veil (1968) and Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) (1970).8

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Cy Twombly, Study for Treatise on the Veil, 1970, [Rome], collage: (drawing paper, transparent adhesive tape), pencil, wax crayon, ink, 27 9 16 × 39 ⅜ inches (70 × 100 cm), Private collection. Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: Mimmo Capone

In their turn, the eyes of the artists invited to take part in Un/veiled , and their music inspired by and dedicated to Twombly’s work, become further filters, new points of view from which to observe the artist’s creations. On the one hand Eraldo Bernocchi, composer of Like a Fire that Consumes All before It , soundtrack of the documentary film Cy Dear (2018), uses the reverber ating sounds of his electric guitar to take us on a journey through the flow of memory.7 Time is deprived of its chronological progress, at times dilat ing, at others turning back on itself, in a continual alternation of instants, of memories of life lived, of meetings, of emotions. On the other hand, with To Neptune, Ruler of the Seas Profound (2019), Isabella Summers writes a per sonal story about some of Twombly’s most celebrated works, composing in fragmentary recordings and quotations of poems, just as Twombly used to notate and cite fragments from favorite poems in his paintings.

1. Wallace Stevens, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, 1942. Available online at https://genius. com/Wallace-stevens-notes-toward-a-supreme-fiction-annotated (accessed July 12, 2022). / 2. Ibid. / 3. See Nicola Del Roscio, ed., Cy Twombly: Drawings. Cat. Rais. Vol. 8 1990–2011 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2017), 68–73. / 4. Stevens, “The Poems of Our Climate,” 1938. Available online at /com/2006/06/poem-of-week-6192006-poems-of-our.htmlhttp://thepoemoftheweek.blogspot.(accessedJuly12,2022).5.PaoloMaurensig, L’ombra e la meridiana (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1998), 9. / 6. Stevens, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. / 7. Andrea Bettinetti, Cy Dear, produced by Good Day Films, Milan, 2018. / 8. See Del Roscio, ed., Cy Twombly: Drawings. Cat. Rais. Vol. 5 1970–1971 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2015), 9. / 9. Twombly, quoted in Isabelle Dervaux, “Interstices of Time: Cy Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil,” in Michelle White, Dervaux, and Sarah Rothenberg, Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil 1970 (Houston: The Menil Collection, 2019), 14.

—Peter Watkins, 1975

112 Carlos Valladares examines the varied attempts by filmmakers to capture the creative act of painting. Most art historians have to take an aesthetic or intel lectual viewpoint. They never, never, never try to go into the soul of an artist. Of course, you can’t really go inside the soul of a man; you can only go into your own soul in the end. That’s why [ Edvard Munch , 1974] is extremely personal.

—Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping , 1980

A maddening task, writing about filming paint ing. As they meet, these three unruly media inevi tably scramble, tussle, scrape against each other’s limits—and their possibilities. After the scramble, there lingers the unavoidable feeling that some thing , the medium-specific and unannounced spark that powers each of the three, escapes being captured—and that is what an artist strains to bring to the surface: a lovedeath, the hidden machina tions of a delicate process. Very few have faced it. What is it? The black point. The silence that emerges when a fragment melts into a mirage of a whole, or when talk becomes flesh. The unrepre sentable. Void. The word (for instance: “love,” the unbroached, shadowy state in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”) that, in remaining unspo ken by the writer, conjures up a terrain, vast and blooming beyond conscious will. The shivering detail in a painting that takes on its own ornery but beautiful life—away from plot, away from the foreclosing details of identity, and into the realm of purest spirit, propulsive drive. Especially in the best cinema about painters, it is the point at which the artist, glimpsing a long-pursued point of apoth eosis, turns suddenly away from total revelation and chooses a secret, privacy, a sneaky obfusca tion—not out of cowardice but out of a moral respect for the daily that changes dissipation into conversa tion, chaos into the briefest of strange harmonies.

That, I think, is what my favorite films about paint ers achieve: Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch (1974), Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956), Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh (1991), Victor Erice’s Quince Tree Sun (1992), Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), and Raúl Ruiz’s Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978). It is the sense that these films are not giving you what you, the viewer, initially thought you desired. Come for the dance, stay for the echoes of footsteps across the canvas. Film has a pronounced inferiority complex when it comes to showing any artistic process beyond itself. It can signify high culture, learning, unim peachable tradition, by depicting a monstrously sensitive Van Gogh writhing with a razor blade dangled near the infamous ear, or a painter con torting a nude pair of breasts-stomach-ass (barely a woman) into so many torturous positions that he captures “her essence,” his ideal of platonic plas tic beauty, curves and slopes and rosy hues that only he could mine. Ever mounting are the tri ple clichés of film: 1) its only function is entertain ment, straight-arrow narratives loaded with effects and sugar and hype; 2) it is a pure index of (what is perceived as) reality—we see all the steps that it takes to make a painting, all “tricks” explained and revealed, and thus film gives us, unvarnished, the truth of life itself, as André Bazin saw it; and 3) painting is leagues above film, in terms of difficulty and individual expression, since many of the pop ular films around painters are only a few degrees removed from story-book-time starring Vincent and Pablo and Jackson, action delineated according to the Griffith/Spielberg aesthetic complex: the shotreverse-shot, the melos in the drama, the myths Basically, narrative movies, to hook most audi ences, have had to flirt with the overtones of myth. A necessary evil, this. Myth—at its sweaty, vul gar, Hollywood purest—is what gives longevity to a film like Minnelli’s Lust for Life , that iconic study of Kirk Douglas’s gritted teeth and sweaty brow. It’s also a knotty, more-than-meets-the-eye mas terpiece, to which we’ll loop back. But for now, let’s just say that Lust for Life (made at the height of the high mythologizing that accompanied American Abstract Expressionism, and that’s no coincidence) set the tone and the questions that all subsequent narrative films about painters were to pursue: why make filmed works on artists who shirked away from or were contemptuous of photography? How much do we show of the personal, how much of the work—and are the two separable? When we narrate somebody’s life, how do we mitigate the inevitable simplifications for story’s sake? That last question is already thorny when the person in question is, say, a real-life activist ( Milk , 2008) or a fictional cooking-cleaning-trick-turning house wife ( Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles , 1975); what happens when the person is an artist, for whom reality feeds into an alternate dreamworld of lines and colors and ripples poured back into reality, such that many “persons” pile up, many realities contaminate, all of them insep arable from the very forms through which their story is shot? Which is the real Van Gogh? Is the artist under interrogation in Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991) the actor Emmanuelle Béart, Balzac’s fictional painter Frenhofer (Rivette’s film being based on Balzac’s novella “Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu [The unknown masterpiece], of 1831), or Rivette himself? Does the uncut “truth” of any of the three exist? To wade into the morass, we must inevitably con front myth. We can’t get rid of it. Its romanticism,

ONPAINTERSTHESHOOTINGMYTH:FILM

That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordi nary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.

its114passion, its sweetened memories, its seduc tive lies. Take, for a case study, one of the ultimate myth-makers: Pablo Picasso. The same year Lust for Life racked up Oscar nominations and was raved over by ultrabourgeois, gatekeeping, tastemaker magazines like Time and Life , a strange new cine matic experiment, billed as a “documentary,” pre miered at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival: Le Mys tère Picasso. It was an unprecedented collaboration between Picasso and the popular tradition de qualité French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear, Diabolique). As François Truffaut explained in his original 1956 review of the film, Clouzot, whose avocation is painting, has wanted to make a film with his friend Pablo Picasso for a long time. They were held back as long as they were by a fear of having to respect the conventions of the “art film”—didacticism, dissection of canvases, the recounting of anec dotes, of being boring by having repeatedly to show first the artist at work and then the fin ished canvas. A special ink made in America that was sent to Picasso by some friends settled this last problem. Clouzot was able to place the camera, not behind Picasso’s back or next to him, but behind the canvas. Instead of watch ing Picasso paint, as would a visitor to his stu dio, we are present during the pure creative act without the intrusion of any external or pic turesque element. This purity, this respect for the artist and his material, is pushed so far that there is no commentary to “instruct” or dis tract us. 1

2 There is one hell of a show-stopper: Picasso’s torturous attempt to paint and repaint a beach scene, framed to the dimensions of the ultrawide CinemaScope aspect ratio, in blaring oils and colors. All of these indi cate the presence of an auteurist director tipping reality to what he wants it to be. We are not quite in the fictive terrain of Lust for Life , but this is not an unworked, free presentation—certainly not just the facts, ma’am. In all of the staged discussions between Picasso and Clouzot on artistic method and intent, Picasso keeps riffing on one word: “risk,” the kissing cousin to “myth.” Risk suggests danger, thrills, adventure, setting off into unknown aesthetic terrain, planting one’s flag there and colonizing it in one’s name. The painter constructs a fiction around himself, remain ing guarded while letting his hand—and just that, the hand, trained in the finest schools of looking

There is a pound ingly dramatic orchestral score by Georges Auric (which Éric Rohmer, writing for Arts , found “rather mangled and overwhelming”).

Le Mystère Picasso is less a demonstration of Picasso’s “pure creative act” and more brilliant advertising of the act. It was shot over a grueling period of months, not only creating one myth— that Picasso rattled off these paintings in seem ingly a day, one after the other (which, yes, he could do)—but confirming another: that he possessed a genius that was a kind of miracle reservoir for him, allowing the perfect shapes to pour untrammeled from brain to hand to canvas. There are quirky dramatic interludes in which Clouzot eggs Picasso to “beat the clock” and complete a painting before the film in the camera runs out (moments that Truf faut derided as “not in the best taste” and “a circus act in the middle of a concert.”)

Truffaut goes on to praise Le Mystère Picasso as “a great work by reason of the calm genius of its character, by the beauty of the film’s material, and because of the filmmaker’s ingenuity.” High praise from the unruly young Turk on the French film scene, a twenty-four-year-old upstart whose print outlet, Cahiers du Cinéma , routinely heaped abuse on directors like Clouzot, those stalwarts of studio filmmaking whom they derided as the “cinéma du papa .” Nevertheless, one has to press what Truf faut means by his belief that “we are present dur ing the pure creative act without the intrusion of any external or picturesque element.” Quite the opposite: the less someone appears, the more pres ent they are. (Isn’t this the basic thrust of Truffaut and company’s auteur theory?) In Picasso’s virtu oso curves as documented by Clouzot, we have the illusion of emergence and spontaneity, the same arresting but false myth as that of the fate-forged genius above the rest of the antlike world, and doomed to be tormented.

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Previous spread: Still from Lust for Life (1956), directed by Vincente Minnelli. Photo: Bridgeman Images Opposite, top: Photo from the set of La Belle Noiseuse (1991), directed by Jacques Rivette. Photo: Jean Marie PosterOpposite,ImagesLeroy/Sygma/Gettybottom:for Le Mystere Picasso (1956), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Photo: Bridgeman Images This page: Still from Der Maler (2022), directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and being and loving around the world!—continue its loud work of pleasantly stunning the viewer and, even better, upsetting the arbiters of good taste at any given point in time. Meanwhile, the real process of painting remains obscure: why these figures? Why those splotchy inks? Le Mystère Picasso reveals something about what it means to be a painter, yes, but do we, as Clouzot suggests in his opening nar ration, delve into the mind of the artist through his hand, his work, his pure traces? Not really. The other side, perhaps, would have been provided by Françoise Gilot, or perhaps Picasso’s friends in the French Left, or his butcher. None appear. The spiritual and psychic reasons for fighting the canvas become the $64,000 question of another tall mythic work in the French cinema of painting, Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse . Balzac’s novella Le chefd’oeuvre inconnu , a nineteenth-century story set in the seventeenth century, is here set in the postmod ern 1990s. What a time crunch! We explore the myth of love—or, more precisely, of desire—and how it gets mixed up with not only “the artistic process” but also commerce, wealth, bargaining, the par allel circulations of value and aesthetics. Myth is expanded, but another myth is also gratuitously extended: that of mystery, particularly as it relates to the artist’s self-knowledge and knowledge of women in general. The allure of Balzac’s novella lies in the nature of Frenhofer’s titular painting: it is fundamentally misunderstood in its time, yet we in our time don’t know what it looks like, either. It is a work of per fection that surely we, reading it long after 1831, can understand to be the first modernist paint ing, but that propitious, dutiful, smart painters of Frenhofer’s time, like Balzac’s fictionalized Pous sin and Porbus, can only see as so many jumbles of lines and hazy colors. But what makes us think we’re so different from those two, with their lim ited historical vision? Frenhofer’s painting exists perfectly in our minds as text and only text. Rivette ups the stakes by cinematizing the story, using the medium of photographic reproduction, of seeming reality, in order to reveal—what? That within strug gling-painter films, cinema is capable of the richest unrealities, and of gaping absences that score our

La Belle Noiseuse , though invigorating and absorbing to watch, strikes me as strangely basic and conservative for Rivette, somewhat of a down grade from the scarier, boundary-breaking exper iments in cinema that he was conducting from the late ’60s into the mid-’70s: L’Amour fou (1969), Out 1 (1971), Out 1: Spectre (1973), Céline et Julie vont en bâteau (1974), Duelle: une quarantine (1976), and Noroît: une vengeance (1976). “I want the invisible,” as Rivette’s and Piccoli’s Frenhofer says. These, perhaps, are the unknown masterpieces (gradu ally becoming more known) that the painter in Noi seuse is straining so desperately to make. But when Rivette turns his conscious eye to the act of paint ing itself, as a stand-in for all art, all he uncovers (not without a trace of irony and self-awareness) are the beats of an age-old tale, older than Balzac: the desire to master nature and people (particularly beautiful women), the copyrighting and barter ing-off of the finished product, the toasts to another job well painted.

souls more deeply and widely, perhaps, than the painting that is our central focus. In Rivette as in Balzac, the painting is kept at bay, it is not shown (to us). Both the model (Béart) and the painter’s wife (Jane Birkin) recede from it when they see it, and the painter (Michel Piccoli) ends up stashing it in a hole in the wall, which he then covers up with brick and mortar, sealing it forever. Only he knows where it lies; only the three of them know what it looks like.

by Oliver Hirschbiegel, Albert Oehlen, and Ben Becker. It’s hard to settle on what this film even is. It would purport to move like a conventional behindthe-scenes documentary on a painter, in this case Oehlen, making a work of art from blank canvas to “Finished, for now.” But it’s weirder: Becker, a Ger man comedian and actor, has been hired to imper sonate Oehlen, improvising what Oehlen would say to himself in the process of making the painting that we see come to life. And because the film never questions Oehlen’s presence or Becker’s imperson ation, viewers who don’t know what Oehlen looks like may not realize that the man they’re following isn’t him until late in the film—if at all. The “real” Oehlen (but then, what’s real at this point?) never appears on-screen. He remains entirely off-screen, creating the painting that serves as the model for Becker’s painting. Oehlen’s every brushstroke is observed by Becker, who adds his own actorly flourishes to explain why he, the Painter, is making this brushstroke or adding that color: “It taunts me!” “Fight fire with fire; fight smear with more smear!” These hilarious, mag netic asides are a mix of genuine inspiration, hilari ous stand-up, pop-self-psychoanalysis, and parodic bluster. Oehlen’s off-screen blueprint painting was destroyed after the principal shoot was finished.3

I do my best to make what I feel—my impressions and sensations—happen on screen. . . . That said, it’s almost impossible to have been a painter and to no longer be one. Painting taught me . . . to mistrust paint ing in films. —Robert Bresson, interview on Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1972 After a certain point, the myth buckles under its own weight and must give. It’s unsustainable. The cracks in the image of the lonely, blustery, genius painter have been accumulating ever since the miraculous ones in Raúl Ruiz’s Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1977); one of the biggest cracks yet announces itself in Der Maler (The painter, 2022),

Between periods of painting, the intense, expert voice of Charlotte Rampling “explains” Oehlen’s process in half-poems: “A kind of drunkenness, ecstasy, is making me stumble as if I’m in a fog, trying it out, shaking, stirring, spraying. You can’t stop. Mounds build up. Tracks of slime. Nodules at the same time the names and the terminology make themselves known. Medieval yellow.” The squirming language is often touching nonsense, but a point emerges from it: the stumbles, the ecstasies, of teeth-gnawing creation. Becker’s Oehlen tramps around a finished exhibition of his newest work in cowboy boots, sunglasses, and a Texas ten-gallon hat, like an ass-kicking Jean-Pierre Melville of the twenty-first century, or Richard Prince’s Marlboro Man if he hung up the saddle and picked up the brush. It’s all a grand put-on—but it’s also a real doc ument, and quite an entertaining one, of the traces of painting as they briefly reveal themselves. What’s

Edvard Munch fractures time. As a narrator (Watkins himself) recounts episodes from Munch’s traumatic boyhood (the death of his sister Sophie, from tuberculosis, at the age of fifteen, his doomed

love affairs, another sister’s mental illness), the film jumps freely and without warning across scenes from Munch’s youth and from his present as a work ing painter. The personal, the political, and the aes thetic all exist as if across an ice sheet, crackling, time becoming miraculously horizontal. Watkins advances earlier directors’ formal experiments in fractured time: Alain Resnais ( Muriel , 1963, and Je t’aime, je t’aime , 1968), Richard Lester (Petulia , 1968), and Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout , 1971, and Don’t Look Now, 1973). As he himself said, “I believe that we are all history, past, present, future, all partici pating in a common sharing and sensing of expe riences which flow about us, forwards and back wards, sometimes simultaneously, without lim itations from time or space.”6 This is the type of free-flowing movement that only the cinema can provide, a movement that Virginia Woolf predicted would be its ultimate radical innovation: “We should see violent changes of emotion produced by their collision. The most fantastic contrasts could be flashed before us with a speed which the writer can only toil after in vain. . . . The past could be unrolled, distances annihilated, and the gulfs which dislo cate novels (when, for instance, Tolstoy has to pass from Levin to Anna, and in doing so jars his story and wrenches and arrests our sympathies) could, by the sameness of the background, by the repeti tion of some scene, be smoothed away.”7

Edvard Munch goes deep into the personal, which you’re not supposed to do in a serious film about the process of painting. Watkins, however, makes richly compelling arguments that Munch’s relationship with a Norwegian married woman, known in his diaries and in the film as “Mrs. Heisberg,” had an insurmountable impact on how he attacked the canvas. As Watkins says in a con versation with his biographer, Joseph A. Gomez, a “primary” level of Edvard Munch springs from “my

This page: Still from Edvard Munch (1974), directed by Peter Watkins. Photo: Photo 12/ Alamy Stock Photos

sneakily116 smart about Der Maler (what a title—the one and only!) is that it reverses the usual purpose of painter-at-work narratives: here, for once, it is paintings that are used to reveal the unruly non truths inherent in a seemingly automatic-truth medium like the cinema, and not the other way around. The gargantuan white man rages against the elements to finish the work in time for exhibi tion. It’s a string of evasions, the logical next step after Orson Welles’s F For Fake (1973), about the Picasso forger Elmyr de Hory. Here, what would have once been decried as imitation or forgery is in fact, in James’s words, “the real right thing.” But if the “real” is destroyed, the real is still somewhere, far off, always striven for. Does this not constitute another myth? Well, yes, that’s the point. We destroy myths and erect new ones in their wake. Nothing escapes total mythologization. What we must always pursue is the unshown, the bliss fully and sublimely blank. As the painter friend says in Bresson’s indescribably beautiful Four Nights of a Dreamer, “Neither the object there, nor the painter there, but the painter and the object which are both not there. Their visible disappearances make the canvas.” As for us, the viewers, we must be kept out of what truly goes on in the painter’s mind: the his tory they consciously struggle against, the people and places they have loved and hope to love—and have lost. The painter soon learns, finally, that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master;/so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is noHeredisaster.”4weslip into the erotics of filming paint ing. Their codes demand discretion. “I didn’t know conversations could be so erotic,” says a character in one of the simplest and most exciting films of recent years, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of For tune and Fantasy (2021). Sex and painting are the two phenomena that film cannot hope to capture with any measure of fidelity to their real-time expe rience, and for similar reasons: the fear of intrusion, of being inside a place where one does not belong, that is, the artist’s interiority, the artist in process, with flaws and insecurities hanging out openly before the chance to revise, adapt, backtrack, final ize. Recall, for instance, that Cézanne wouldn’t let people see him painting. I like to think that for him, those quiet shifts, when exposed, contained fatal whiffs of the pornographic; what he wished to be known for, as every great lover or artist does, was the final product, the shivering apple, not the hesi tancies, the nervous gestures toward an imagined profundity that will inevitably come out strained if one is too conscious of an audience beyond one self and the canvas (or, in the case of sex, beyond oneself and the judging, mercurial partner). There cannot be an audience—not yet. This is the reason for the intense charge of watching films about paint ing—especially in a cinema, an occult space of clan destinity and vision-swallowing. No better film to watch in this “site of availa bility,” this “urban dark” that makes possible “the body’s freedom” (Roland Barthes), than Watkins’s four-hour biopic on the life of Munch.5 The film, which traces about thirty years of the artist’s youth and development, certainly romanticizes, but it neither mystifies an art-for-art’s-sake credo that ignores the political nor raises the tortured-genius image to hosannas and heights. Instead, it looks hard, soberingly, and dartingly, and with neither sanguine pity nor sardonic distance, at the rea sons why somebody might seek out art when their life doesn’t take solid shape around their yearning wants.

StillOpposite:fromVan Gogh (1991), directed by Maurice Pialat. Photo: Album/Alamy Stock Photos

1. François Truffaut, The Films in My Life , 1975 (Eng. trans. Leonard Mayhew, Boston: Da Capo Press, 1994), 201. 2. Éric Rohmer, “Le Mystère de Picasso,” Arts 572 (June 1956). Available online at 3.mystery-of-picasso/https://letterboxd.com/notericrohmer/film/the-(accessedJuly7,2022).PictureTreeInternational,pressnotesfor Der Maler, 2022. Available online at July 7, 2022). 4. Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art,” 1976, in The Complete Poems 1926–1979 ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), Available online at The Art of the Personal Essay (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 6.419.Peter Watkins, in a tape-recorded conversation with Joseph A. Gomez, his biographer, while Watkins was reediting the cinemarelease version of Edvard Munch August 4-9, 1975. In the booklet for the DVD release of Edvard Munch , 1974, 11. 7. Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema,” The Nation and Athenaeum , July 3, 1926, 383. 8. Watkins, conversation with Gomez, 13. 9. Jean-Luc Godard, in a letter reproduced in “Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 25,” May 10, 2021. Available online at bypsb51m9sabzian.be/event/sabzian-selects-again-week-25#footnote2_https://www.(accessedJune30,2022).NotetranslatedfromtheFrenchCraigKeller.

117 own feelings, twisting in and out of what I perceived to be Munch’s feelings. Or rather, let me say, I never tried to make decisions about what Edvard Munch ‘felt’—at a very early stage, I realized the utter futil ity (and arrogance) of this—instead, I tried to fuse my feelings about my childhood, my own sexual experience, my own work, into a recreation of vari ous events that occurred to Munch.”8 We only have ourselves to work with. Film directors, if they are inspired, access not the beloved soul of the painter but their own. This, few can bear. For there lies again our old friend the lovedeath, the abyss. For four solid hours, Watkins manages it, in a film that embodies all the qualities I desire in cinema: being politically and artistically challenging (art = politics), self-aware (i.e., transparent), emotionally moving, brutally personal ( Edvard Munch invites me to connect Munch’s story to specific events and emotions and complex people in my own life), free-form, jazzy, out of sync, out of whack, out of time and yet timeless, unhectoring, unobvious, made with human feeling, aware of its subject’s limitations in relation to other classes and to women, aware of its subject’s exceed ing romanticism in relation to the lower class and to women, brutally critical yet not wholly dismissive (a distance that’s not quite objective), roving, roam ing, wandering, refusing to distinguish between past present and future, non-thesis-driven, warm, tender, bitter, dejected, cathartic, complicated, deli cious, and just plain beautiful. And that’s the tip of theSoiceberg.whatlies at the end of the road of myth? We happen upon, surprisingly enough, another film on the artist with whom we began the journey: Pialat’s Van Gogh , made in the same year as Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse . It’s the tonal opposite of Minnelli’s Lust for Life in every possible way. Instead of fol lowing the arc of Van Gogh’s life, Pialat burrows into the artist’s final sixty-seven days, in Auverssur-Oise. We get none of the writhing, desperate Van Gogh seen in Douglas’s brilliant performance; instead, Pialat casts the French pop star Jacques Dutronc to embody a hushed, puttering Van Gogh, who tries to sell his paintings, fails, and turns to a debauched (but unremarkable) world of sex, drink, and dance in bars and brothels to suppress the pain of his lack of acceptance. We are kept at a distance from Dutronc’s Van Gogh; we don’t know what goes on in his head, why he acts the way he does. He doesn’t physically appear for most of the film, we hardly see him painting, and the suicide seems like a quotidian gesture in a life chock-full of them. Pialat’s innovation: presenting the ambi ence that affected Van Gogh as he painted, not the literal act of painting. No less than Jean-Luc God ard was impressed by this daring shift in focus for a film on painters, as shown in a rare effusive note that he wrote to Pialat following the French release of Van Gogh : My dear Maurice, your film is astonishing, totally astonishing; far beyond the cinematographic horizon covered up until now by our wretched gaze. Your eye is a great heart that sends the camera hurtling among girls, boys, spaces, moments in time, and colors, like child ish tantrums. The ensemble is miraculous; the details, sparks of light within this miracle; we see the big sky fall and rise from this poor and sim ple earth. All of my thanks, to you and yours, for this success—warm, incomparable, quivering. Cordially yours, Jean-Luc Godard.9

This is not your traditional death-of-a-genius film. None of the clichés surface. That’s not to say it’s better than Lust for Life ; the two are complements for each another, and I would say that the pursuit

ed.,5.(accessedhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-artJuly7,2022).RolandBarthes,“LeavingtheMovieTheater,”inPhillipLopate,

of an all-encompassing, detail-obsessed love of the terrain around the viewer, a full awareness of sur roundings that bolsters the lonely subjective, is the same for both Minnelli and Pialat. Naturally, the two use considerably divergent means and lan guages to fulfill that love: Minnelli loves to project masculine angst onto inhospitable environments, while Pialat dials back within implosive, coiled pri vate worlds. Yet both of these films seek out the unheralded ripples of physical experience, the rev elation, for ever so brief a time, of the atomic struc tures of love, the artist’s final possession. Or rather, her state of being possessed.

html#pdf=81c04c299e54bd0dad2c0d690662c56fpicturetree-international.com/films/details/the-painter.https://www.(accessed

KH Not only have I grown up, but in those seven years—you and I are close in age, so I’m sure you’ve felt this as well—the art world too has completely changed. The world at large has changed: this was pre-Trump, pre-Brexit, prepandemic, pre-war in Ukraine. The gatekeepers have also changed dramatically. In 2016, Frances Morris became the director of Tate Modern—it was one of the first posi tions that really shifted—and she’s been instrumen tal in bringing women artists to the fore, curating Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, and Yayoi Kus ama exhibitions. To take these risks in an institu tion like Tate Modern, to say, I’m going to put these women at the forefront, is radical. Now the head of the National Gallery of Art in Washington is a woman; the head of the Louvre is a woman. It’s up to them to change this world. My own position in the art world has greatly changed from being an assistant at the gallery to now being able to curate my own shows and write my own books and try to forge my understanding of what art could be. I’ve written this book, The Story of Art without Men , but I explicitly say that it isn’t definitive. I’m standing on the shoulders of all these people who have come before. This is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the story of art. But what’s exciting is that all these stories are being discussed widely, and I think it’s such an exciting time to be in the art world. What do you think? Since you graduated from the University of Brighton and from the Royal Drawing School, how has your view of the art world changed? SC I came out of university feeling incredibly frustrated and confused, but not really knowing why. It was only during postgraduate study that I started to figure it out. I was back in London (whereas I had studied out of London initially) and heavily involved with visiting galleries and looking into art history through all these classes. There was a lot of talking about the same men, the same kind of canon and history of the art world. It made me realize where that frustration came from; it framed where things were then and how I felt. I can see how the art world has changed, but it’s weird because it seems to have coincided with a real personal jour ney for me. There’s so much in education that’s exciting, but I think to take it and make it work for you, instead of feeling alienated or excluded from it, isWhatliberating.didyou think when you were studying to be an art historian? How does that education tie into what you’re doing now and the changes that you think are occurring?

KATY HESSEL I’m not a curator by training, I’m more of an art historian. For me, the form of the group exhibition is most appealing, as it’s a place to exper iment, to put different artists together and spark conversations. I’ve never orchestrated a solo show so I don’t know what that’s like, but with group shows you can really explore a theme, a subject, or a concept, grappling with its varieties and resonances.Fromthe time when I really began engaging with art, before university, it has been a dream to curate. That said, it took a while to make it a pos sibility. I worked in galleries and museums, and then, in 2017, I was able to stage my first exhibition: it was in the foyer of an advertising agency! I always tell people, Never be precious about where you first show or curate—everyone’s got to start somewhere.

SC Is it right that you started your Great Women Artists Instagram page when you were around eighteen— KH I was twenty-one. SC Twenty-one, okay. So you were working at the Victoria Miro gallery in London. KH I worked at Victoria Miro throughout my whole time at university. And then, when I was twenty-one, I started working for a museum. It was straight after university that I started The Great Women Artists. It was very much inspired by Alice Neel. SC Alice Neel captivated me as well. She was working hard throughout that period of Abstract Expressionism, and obviously she didn’t get recog nition until much later. When that finally happened, she was like, I deserve this recognition, I’ve been doing this for years. I think it’s interesting to look beyond codified periods and movements in the art world, like Abstract Expressionism, and see what else was happening concurrently. Since starting the Instagram page, do you feel your thoughts on the art world have expanded?

SC When did you eventually have that realization?

KH In my final term there was this visiting teacher, Andrés David Montenegro Rosero, who taught an amazing course on activism in art. I’d had a very traditional art-historical education until then: I’d learned about the Surrealists, the Dada ists, the photojournalists, the Pop artists, et cetera, and they’d all been men. In this course on activ ism we suddenly learned about people like Ana Mendieta, and Land art, and what that meant. And the world shifted for me—I suddenly realized, Oh, okay, art can be a force of change. And yes, it might sound naive now when I look back at it, but I was a twenty-year-old and my world was turned upside down. Even just learning about Ana Mendieta and what she did, how she used the body, and how she talked about the world, migration, borders, mem ory, loss, death—it was mind-blowing. Did you have a turning point?

SC I had a classical technical training, but I didn’t know traditional art history so well. The bits I got were from family—Rembrandt and the National Gallery, you know. Because I went to a perform ing-arts school, we looked at loads of contempo rary art, but I’ve always felt much more of an affin ity with painting and the old masters. So I come at it from a really different point of view. I’m curi ous about the current drive in interest in minority and female artists in the art world, particularly in institutions, which I think feel this need to catch up. They’ve been putting on a lot more exhibitions by women. What are your thoughts on how this is being handled? KH Everything is very much in flux. My first thought is, How has it taken this long? Feminists and activists like Faith Ringgold, Linda Nochlin, Alice Neel, and many others have been doing this work for a long time, but it still shocks me that institutions were able to avoid these conversations until so recently. Still to this day, I can’t believe there hasn’t been a Remedios Varo retrospective or a major Magdalene Odundo exhibition in Lon don. How have we gotten to this point? As you said, there’s suddenly this scramble, and what I don’t want to happen is for the scramble to be a fleeting moment and for people to think that female artists are simply a trend, because they’re absolutely not. I spoke earlier about how Frances Morris has been putting on these amazing exhibitions at Tate Mod ern, but at the same time, are these institutions col lecting these works? Because the most important thing is legacy, and I don’t want people in the future to look back to the early 2020s and say, Oh, that was such a progressive time. They said that about the ’70s and then the ’80s happened. I don’t want his tory to repeat itself and I’m in this for the long haul;

Author, curator, and podcaster Katy Hessel met with the artist Somaya Critchlow to discuss Hessel’s latest publication, The Story of Art without Men .

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KATY HESSEL

When you started curating, was it something you always wanted to do or did it hap pened organically?

KH It’s so fascinating because when I was at [University College London], we had this overview course in which we studied legendary figures in art history. I know it’s very different now—someone who works with me is currently at UCL—but when I did it, we didn’t look at any women. The worst thing was that it didn’t even occur to me that something was missing.

SOMAYA CRITCHLOW

KH First, I have to say, I love Gombrich’s Story of Art . I grew up on it, I still reference it, and I love reading it. But it’s only representative of the old guard. What I hope is that my book is an additive. First of all, the title The Story of Art without Men makes people laugh—which I like, because I think humor’s a great way of getting people to be seri ous about something. And then suddenly you’re like, Oh, can I name ten female artists?, or, Did that art-history book I read when I was younger actu ally include any women? I hope it shifts people’s perspectives.WhatIlove about Gombrich’s writing in The Story of Art is that it’s readable, it’s enticing. He makes you think about so much, and that’s what I wanted to do with this book as well. The word “accessible” gets thrown around so much, but I really feel that this is a book for the twenty-first-cen tury reader. It’s dense, but it’s, I hope, energetic and exciting.Formy podcast I interview some of the world’s most renowned academics, artists, and curators— these are highly intelligent people, and what I like to do is break things down a bit and stand in as the perspective of the listener. I tried to do the same with my book. And I’m genuinely in love with every single artist in the book. I could talk for hours about Rachel Ruysch or Cindy Sherman or Elizabeth Cat lett or Loïs Mailou Jones. Art history isn’t offered at many schools, it’s not prioritized in the UK, or at least where I went to school. And for a kid to be able to find it in their library—I hope it invites them into something. SC It’s not that women are missing from art his tory entirely; obviously a few make it in. But a lot of women artists just haven’t gotten their due. KH Absolutely. This comes up a lot with margin alized artists working in different mediums, right? So I have a chapter on fiber arts in the 1960s. And when I think of work born out of war, especially World War II, I look at Lee Miller, as opposed to a male photojournalist, and think about what she had access to: just because she was so restricted, she told a completely new side of the war. Or, someone like—I’m sure you’re familiar with Charlotte Salo mon’s Life? Or Theater? [1941–43]? It’s the world’s most emotional and heart-wrenching piece of art, and somehow it makes what was happening human. This was a woman, similar age to me, who Opposite page: Katy Hessel, The Story of Art without Men (London: SomayaThisHeinemann,Hutchinson2022)page:Critchlow, Untitled, 2022, oil on linen, 8 ¼ × 6 inches (21 × 15 cm) © Somaya Critchlow. Image: courtesy the artist and Maximillian William, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates, Ltd shared what she went through and what it was like for a Jewish girl to grow up in Berlin at the rise of Nazism. These artworks make these historical events real, in a way.

SC How did you find putting the book together as a project? How long were you working on it?

KH I’m focusing on curating a few exhibitions. The book has sparked so many ideas for other pro jects and I think that’s what I want to be doing, to write more and curate more.

KH In addition to these writers I’ve mentioned, Eileen Myles’s poetry on Joan Mitchell enchanted me and gave me a totally different perspective.

119 hopefully I’m not going anywhere, so I want to cre ate substantial interviews and books and resources that people can use. I’m just a speck in this; it takes a whole army, which so many people are part of. SC I’m really excited about your new book, and I believe you’ve talked about the motivation for it coming from Ernst Gombrich’s Story of Art [1950]. I love this, because when I was studying, Gombrich was always on the reading list—it was this bible for artists. Yet looking back at it, it barely mentions any women. What’s going on with your book? It’s a big project, going from the 1500s all the way to the present. What were your hopes in putting this book together?

Ali Smith, the way she plays with words and art. I interview authors on my podcast—Olivia Laing, for example.

SC What authors have influenced you, in or out side of art?

THE STORY

A lot of these artists are evolving, as you are. You’re at this exciting part of your career, and yes, I have a work by you in the book, from about 2019. That will be reflective of one particular moment in your career, but you might be working on some thing completely different in a decade, and that’s fine. These are ongoing careers, these are ongoing questions. I was writing this book at a formative time in history, between 2018 and 2022, and this is my take on it. What I love about art is the fact that everyone is entitled to their own opinion and somebody can read something and disagree with me, and that’s great as well.

SC Are there any specific books that you hold close? I’ve continually returned for inspiration to Philip Guston’s essay “Faith, Hope and Impossi bility” [1966].

KH My favorite writers to read on art are actually nonart writers. Hilton Als, the theater critic for The New Yorker, I could read all day and all night. Deb orah Levy, one of the greatest writers of our time.

KH It’s been seven years in the making. I worked very intensely during lockdown, I shut myself off and worked straight. And I loved it. The book was meant to be 30,000 words and now I think it’s 100,000 words; every single artist led to some thing new. Honestly, it pained me to only write 150 words on Marisol or Augusta Savage, both of whom deserve so much more.

What I love about doing my podcast is that I can interview artists on the work of other artists. It’s not going to be by the book, because artists and writers have this imaginative approach.

KH I also invite interactions with the public, lis teners or readers, because I want to know what they think. And people don’t have to know anything about art to enjoy it. It’s about a feeling, it’s about a reaction, and that’s the strongest thing for me. OF WITHOUT MEN

ART

SC Having finished the book, what are you thinking about for the future?

SC Yeah, you’re interacting with the work on so many creative levels.

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—Minnette De Silva

In 1948, a year after Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) gained independence, Minnette De Silva became the first Asian woman to be elected an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). At the time, she was one of two women in the world to have an architecture practice in her own name. Ambitious and uncompromising, De Silva cut a beguiling if isolated figure within the post war modernist milieu. Her story reveals some thing of the complex landscape that architecture faced in the wake of World War II and during the world’s slow emergence from colonialism. De Silva responded to this terrain decisively, developing a prescient philosophy that centered the symbi otic relationship between building, environment, andDeinhabitant.Silvawas born in Kandy, Sri Lanka’s second city, in 1918. In her drily titled autobiography, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect , she describes growing up wild, rebellious, and with a keenly attuned political conscience. Her Sin hala Buddhist father, George, was a lawyer and activist who would serve in Ceylon’s first govern ment after it won independence from Britain. Her mother, Agnes Nell, a Burgher Christian, over came societal pressure to marry outside her caste. Nell campaigned tirelessly for women’s suffrage and to promote the country’s renascent arts and craft movement, which she saw as a sociopolitical as well as a cultural issue, given the poverty crafts peopleShowingfaced.a characteristic lack of interest in gen dered expectations, De Silva set her sights on a profession in architecture as a teenager, after a town planner visiting her father lent her some magazines on the subject. Despite her parents’ progressive political views, they disapproved of her ambitions—“Women architects indeed!” she quotes her father saying—but De Silva was determined. 1 She raised the funds for her stud ies through friends and extended family and trav eled to Mumbai and then to London. She success fully negotiated a place at London’s Architectural Association (AA) after encountering the head of a British parliamentary education committee in Sri Lanka, who intervened to facilitate her taking the school’s entrance exam. Once qualified, she returned to Sri Lanka at her father’s behest so as to contribute to the new nation. While De Silva’s practice was contained in her homeland, her world was transnational. She trav eled widely, fostering connections with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Jawa harlal Nehru and developing a close relationship with Le Corbusier, the feted pioneer of modern architecture. Throughout their decades-long cor respondence, Le Corbusier, who addressed De Silva as his “small bird of the islands,” made evi dent a deeply felt respect, as well as affection, for the younger architect. Prefiguring the develop ment of what came to be known as “critical region alism,” De Silva strove to adapt Le Corbusier’s pared-back International Style, with its system atized, modular proportions (based on the Swiss architect’s own anatomy), to a non-Western con text. Her arguments for the inclusion of indigenous crafts, materials, and traditions in modernist pro jects proved deeply influential, yet when she died, in 1998, in relative obscurity, only a handful of her buildings remained standing. The reasons for her decline reveal a complex intersection of problems andInprejudices.the1940sand ’50s, the modernist movement was struggling to regain momentum after World War II. Many doubted that it was equipped to deal with mass urban devastation and the need to inte grate principles of social welfare into architecture. 2 De Silva, while deeply enamored with the “pure white geometric loveliness” of Le Corbusier’s Purist work, recognized that the movement’s

DEMINNETTESILVA

Amie Corry traces the trailblazing Sri Lankan architect’s biography, philosophy, and achievements. I believe in building to suit our living needs in a living way.

De Silva made use of other materials and prin ciples favored by modernists, including rein forced concrete and random-rubble stonework, the open carport (which she noted might double as a playroom, office, or loggia), and stilts, which had their own long history in local architecture. But these nods to the International Style were accompanied by a distinctly Sri Lankan decora tive schema: exquisite lacquered balustrades, pol ished jackwood stair-treads, metal grilles bearing bodhi-leaf motifs, terra-cotta roof tiles decorated with temple-dancer designs, niches for pahanas (traditional oil lamps), and the use of local laterite and limestone. Many of her houses had ceiling or door panels made of traditional woven Dumbara mats (named after a valley in Kandy). De Silva went as far as establishing a weaving company, Cey lon Kandyan Handlooms, from out of her studio.

De Silva believed that in Sri Lanka, Western technological influences had resulted in a super ficial veneer of modernism, acquired secondhand and neglectful of regional traditions and condi tions. She was critical of Le Corbusier’s decision not to spend longer in Chandigarh in 1950 before embarking on the construction of the Punjab’s vast new state capital, and commented on his eschew ing of the Punjabi notion of collective working.

strip windows, De Silva carefully designed screens and latticing to encourage ventilation, and often integrated verdant gardens, sometimes sunken. Walls were made of glass bricks, pierced with openings, or entirely absent. Varied ceiling heights and pockets of space that could be easily expanded or reconfigured created areas diverse in feel and aesthetic, a necessity, the architect noted, given the likelihood of large family groups and the Sri Lan kan sense of hospitality.

122 analytical and rationalized approach risked flat tening regional differences, despite many of its proponents’ interest in vernacular traditions.3 For De Silva, the movement’s tragedy was that it was interrupted before it could reach maturity, its log ical growth malformed. She described the evo lution of architecture during the period as one of “trial and error”: “Our laboratory is the actual building site. Our mistakes are visible to all—but that is architecture. And so our modern masters have had to suffer ‘the slings and arrows of outra geous fortune.’”4

Like her Western counterparts, De Silva prior itized light, air, and space, but she was required to respond to different climatic and social condi tions. Her buildings, primarily residential houses and apartment blocks in Colombo and Kandy, were characterized by an expansive openness, a play of light and shadow, and the integration of as much of the outside environment as possible.

The company, which was tragically short-lived due to a lack of interest and funds, aimed to preserve the predominantly female-led craft of Dumbara through the implementation of new technologies andDedesigns.Silvaremained a passionate advocate and patron of regional artistry throughout her life. She recognized the potential political role of artists and makers in the establishment of a nation that was in the process of throwing off its colonial shackles and rediscovering its own sophisticated architectural history, which spanned two and a half millennia. She commissioned numerous site-specific murals from the Sri Lankan Cubist painter George Keyt for her buildings, and in the late 1940s she encouraged Cartier-Bresson to visit the country to document its traditions and landscape. Her last significant building project was the Kandy Arts Center, com missioned in 1982, which was conceived to emulate the natural amphitheaters of local villages.

The key houses—the Karunaratne House (1947–51), the Pieris Houses I and II (1952–56, 1963), and the Amarasinghe House (1954)—were organized around large cantilevered staircases and multiple open verandas, both giving rise to striations of dappled light on tiled flooring. Rather than use

Previous spread: Minnette De Silva climbing up to inspect concrete pillars and slab work at the De Saram house, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1951.

Photo: RIBA Collections

Although Le Corbusier did gather a small team to work on the project, fighting to include Brit ish architect Jane Drew in the face of apprehen sion over her gender, De Silva noted that “Corb” ended up the sole “master builder of Chandigarh.”5 In this she prefigured much criticism of Western modernism.In1926,Le Corbusier had described the pro found impact effected by strip windows, which had been made newly possible by the modern indus trial production of sheet glass: “Our senses are enchanted; our animal being is delighted. We have the sun in our room. It is bright in our house.”6

This page, DavidSriHouse,CoomaraswamyThisEllenPhoto:Colombo,Amarasingheabove:House,SriLanka,1954.LASWA,courtesyDissanayakepage,right:Colombo,Lanka,1970.Photo:Robson,1980

123

De Silva was an early proponent of what came to be known as “community architecture,” actively involving her buildings’ occupants in decision-making. In 1954, when she realized a long-term ambition to combat the crushing need for affordable housing in Kandy by working on the Watapuluwa Housing Scheme, she began with a series of in-depth consultations to ascertain the needs of the project’s future tenants, who were of mixed religions and incomes. The government was persuaded to buy a plot, and De Silva, partly inspired by the structure of village communities, developed five designs for different affordability levels and preferences. A rent/purchase scheme enabled Watapuluwa’s tenants to acquire their properties over a twenty-five-year period. De Silva proudly noted that they became “million aires” as the value of the land rocketed. Despite its wide-ranging ambitions, De Silva’s practice was beleaguered with problems. She regularly faced resistance to her designs, which in turn were often crudely adapted at the con struction phase. The cash-strapped engineers of the Senanayake Flats (1954–57), a large, curved modernist apartment block the likes of which Colombo had never seen, changed the design of De Silva’s vents, allowing rain to penetrate the structure. Many clients struggled with the orig inality of her ideas; the Karunaratne family felt the random-rubble stonework looked dirty and that the local timbers were no match for Bur mese teak. They also doubted that her workforce was up to the job of pouring reinforced con crete and decided they did not want to pay for the Keyt mural (De Silva eventually paid for the KarunaratneAbove: House, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 1950. Photo: Dominic Sansoni, 2020 PabloLeft: Picasso, Minnette De Silva, and other delegates at the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, Wrocław University of Technology, Poland, 1948. Photo: picture /pap/BridgemanallianceImages

commission124 herself). Meanwhile, the monk bless ing the Amarasinghe House consoled its owners for its unfinished state; in De Silva’s words, “he just did not think there was enough decoration or walls to hold the thing up.”7 She herself could be uncom promising—she refused to move her studio from Kandy to the commercial center of Colombo—and somewhat unsympathetic to practical concerns. When clients complained that the open structure of a building left them exposed to the elements and to security threats, she suggested buying a mop or a dog. 8 Cast as an outsider in both Europe and Sri Lanka, De Silva proved uninterested in assimi lation. In the West, she was endlessly exoticized in racialized terms. When Queen Elizabeth took an interest in her at a garden party at Bucking ham Palace in 1948, a British paper mused, “Was it all due to the picturesque saree. . . . Could it be the irresistible lure of the mysterious East?”9 She was renowned for her striking beauty, and the Brit ish architect Gillian Howell, a contemporary of De Silva’s at the Architectural Association, remembers her “always dressed in exquisite saris, with fresh

This page, left: Drawing of Coomaraswamythe House, 1948, Colombo, Sri Lanka, by C. Anjalendran. Photo: courtesy David Robson.

This page, above, and opposite page: Minnette De Silva, 1956. Photo: Brian Brake, courtesy Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (gift of Mr. Raymond Wai-Man Lau, 2001)

1. Minnette De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect (Colombo: Smart Media Productions, 1998), 59. 2. For more on this see Peter Minosh, “Moderate Utopias: The Reconstruction of Urban Space and Modernist Principles in Postwar France,” MS thesis, Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. 3. De Silva, Life and Work , 233. 4. Ibid., 87. 5. Ibid., 342. 6. Le Corbusier, “Notes à la suite,” Cahiers d’Art, no. 3 (March 1926): 46. 7. De Silva, Life and Work , 233. 8. See David Robson, “Minnette De Silva: The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect,” lecture at Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, May 6, 2016. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4JKQHLi8IU (accessed June 29, 2022). 9. De Silva, Life and Work , 102. 10. Gillian Howell, introduction, in ibid., ix. 11. See Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Crafting the Archive: Minnette De Silva, Architecture, and History,” The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 8 (2017): 1299–1336. 12. De Silva, Life and Work , 233. 13. Ibid. 14. Other key contemporary contributions to the conversation include Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, Village Housing in the Tropics (1947) and Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone (1956), and Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism (1963). 15. De Silva, Life and Work , 133.

The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect , was published the year she died. The act of compiling the book, its title citing the descriptors that hampered and defined De Silva throughout her career, was a radical one. In the absence of serious recognition, and with the demolition or deterioration of many of her build ings, she recognized the urgency of preserving her own archive. In doing so, she literally centered her self in the architecture’s narrative, often appearing in photographs of the buildings, at work on some detail or simply observing the scene. 11 Life and Work is replete with fascinating obser vations of the postwar melting pot. De Silva accom panied her father to such major events as the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, in Wrocław, Poland, in 1948, where she was photo graphed smiling with Picasso. In 1947, she repre sented India-Ceylon at the Congrès Internation aux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) VI, in Bridg water, England. In CIAM’s group photograph, De Silva—the youngest delegate and, she assumed, the first Asian—can be seen sitting front and center next to Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus. Already an expert in Asian architectural history, she hungrily absorbed Europe’s cityscapes dur ing this period, describing Venice as perfect in its proportions, “all at the scale which the human eye can comprehend” (she decried the gigantism tak ing over architecture), and Notre Dame, Paris, as “pure distilled light.”12 It was in Paris, at the age of twenty-eight, that De Silva first met Le Corbusier. She was, at first, intimidated by the “heroic great man,” while he was intrigued by the newly qualified architect. 13 At their first encounter, De Silva resigned herself to deferential listening, but she grew in confidence and they would correspond animatedly until Le Corbusier’s death, in 1965. De Silva identified “Corb” as the only friend who really cared about her work. She credited herself with teaching him about Indian art—which was enormously impor tant to his later work—and cherished a sketch of Siva that he drew after they visited an exhibition of Indian work at London’s Royal Academy together in 1948. Whether their relationship was romantic has remained the subject of speculation, the possi ble affair depressingly defining much of the narra tive around De Silva’s life and work since. In the 1960s, De Silva’s career was eclipsed by that of her compatriot Geoffrey Bawa, who is reg ularly cited as a chief proponent of “tropical mod ernism.” 14 Bawa qualified a decade after De Silva and his practice was heavily informed by hers—he employed her studio assistant, the Danish archi tect Ulrik Plesner, direct from her studio, and Ple sner reportedly took a lot of her ideas with him. Bawa was awarded a Sri Lanka Institute of Archi tects Gold Medal in 1982, an accolade De Silva eventually received two years before her death, in 1996.YetDe Silva remained committed to the case for a regionally assimilated modernity that made room for the “personal, emotional and ornamen tal elements” of a building. 15 She went on to lecture in Asian architecture at Hong Kong University in the 1970s, and despite the relative dearth of her existing buildings, her extraordinary life and pio neering sensibilities are increasingly seen as an important part of modernism’s global story. This is in large part due to the actions De Silva herself took to document a career that never reached its full potential.

125 flowers in her hair and always followed by a train of young men carrying her drawing board and portfo lio, her handbags, suitcases, scarves and shawls.”10 Back in Sri Lanka, she struggled on account of her mixed heritage and the English accent with which she spoke Sinhalese. That we know all of this is entirely down to Min nette herself, whose book-cum-monograph,autobiography-cum-scrap

HO� MUSEUMS �RE THINKING �B�UT NFT � B � ASHLEY OVER� EEK SC� EEN TIME

Many digital artists and collectors see NFT technology as a revolutionary tool, providing a tokenized proof of ownership for digital art, which by its very nature has the capacity to be infinitely reproduced.

t’s an unseasonably warm spring day in Florence, 83°F, when I approach the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. As I enter the open-air atrium I’m greeted by a colossal site-specific work by Refik Anadol, a Turkish-American artist known for using datadriven algorithms to create dynamic abstract visualizations. This piece is a non-fungible token (NFT) displayed using a nearly thirty-foot-tall LED wall that stands squarely in the atrium. Rich hues ebb and flow mercurially in impossible gravity, enclosed by the dimensions of the screen. Titled Machine Hallucinations Renaissance Dreams, the NFT is sentineled at the entryway to the Palazzo Strozzi’s latest exhibition, Let’s Get Digital!: NFT e nuove realtà dell’arte digitale/NFTs and Innovation in Digital Art.

Museums such as New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art have been paying attention to the NFT space for nearly a decade, long before Beeple minted his first NFT. Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of digital art at the Whitney, tells me that she has been “closely following the crypto art space since 2014, when Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash presented their proto-NFTs called monegraphs (short for ‘monetized graphics’) at [New York’s] New Museum.” (McCoy and Dash made their presentation as a contribution to 7×7, an annual program of the New Museum’s resident affiliate Rhizome.) The Whitney has done more than just observe the crypto art space; in 2019, it commissioned a work by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy called Public Key/Private Key, a reference to the two cryptographic keys central to blockchain transactions. In one part of

THE PERFECT PLA� E T � S TA� T TALKING ABOUT NFT� IS IN � � LASSICAL INS TITUTI �N. Arturo Galansino

Ashley Overbeek reports on the different ways in which museums across the world are harnessing the power of crypto art in their exhibitions, collections, and community building.

Since March 2021, when the sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days for 42,329 Ether ($69.3 million at the time) catapulted NFTs into the public discourse, crypto art has become a mainstay in art-world dialogue. Certainly the number of art organizations entering the NFT space has grown rapidly in the last two years. Yet in many ways the art world continues to grapple with what to think about NFTs and how they fit into the broader art ecosystem. Because of the position of museums as rarified organizations with the ability to cement artists, mediums, and movements into the canon of art history, museums’ interactions with NFTs will have a lasting impact on the ways we view and discuss these digital assets.

The Palazzo has two exhibitions open today. In the Strozzina, the undercroft of the Renaissance palace, Let’s Get Digital! features an array of digital artworks minted on a blockchain. Upstairs from the atrium, Donatello: Il Rinascimento/The Renaissance presents a collection of works by the fifteenth-century sculptor apposed to a subset of notable contemporaries (Brunelleschi, Raphael, and Michelangelo, to name a few). In discussing these synchronous shows, Arturo Galansino, cocurator of Let’s Get Digital! and director general of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, mentions to me that the museum is facilitating “an incredible and even a bit paradoxical dialogue between past and present” through concurrent exhibitions focused on historical and ongoing revolutions of thought. “The perfect place to start talking about NFTs,” Galansino continues, “is in a classical institution.”

The Palazzo Strozzi’s perspective represents just one of the myriad approaches that museums are taking as they begin to interact with the ever evolving world of NFTs. An NFT can be thought of as a “digital proof of authenticity” stored cryptographically on a blockchain, which in turn is a distributed digital ledger where transactions are recorded across a peer-to-peer network of computers. A large appeal of the blockchain is the difficulty of falsifying its records, so that users can trust information on-chain without the need to trust a central authority. In contrast to other types of digital content, NFTs are unique tokens and their scarcity and ownership are provable on a blockchain’s distributed ledger. This means that NFTs can offer a largely immutable public provenance for each piece of crypto art (digital art that is minted on a blockchain).

The project comprises algorithmically generated characters called “Punks”; developers LarvaLabs created bespoke software that generated precisely 10,000 24-by-24-pixel Punks sharing a subset of predefined attributes (“Rosy Cheeks,” “Mohawk,” “Cigarette,” etc.). The software was constrained by the parameter that no two Punks should have an identical combination of attributes.

Other museums have begun building their NFT collections through direct gifts. Last year, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (ICA Miami) announced the acquisition of a CryptoPunks NFT through a promised gift from trustee Eduardo Burillo. Launched in 2017, CryptoPunks was one of the earliest projects to be minted on the Ethereum blockchain, predating even the ERC-721 token standard that codified Ethereum-based NFTs. (There are many other blockchains besides Ethereum on which NFTs can be minted, such as the newer Tezos and Solana, but Ethereum is currently the most popular.)

this piece, fifty members of the public were selected to receive a digital donor certificate minted as an NFT, which could then be transferred, gifted, or sold as desired. Looking toward the future, Paul continues, “From my personal perspective as a museum curator, NFTs are mostly interesting as a medium that supports generative processes on the blockchain and not as a sales mechanism. The Whitney will keep engaging with the NFT space and explore models that can creatively enhance its programming and community.”

ICA’s Cryptopunk #5293, nicknamed “Priscila” is a pixelated depiction of a female with orchid-hued lipstick and ink-black hair.

The Whitney is not the only museum acquiring crypto art. This June, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced a special fund for digital-art acquisitions in partnership with blockchain enthusiast Paris Hilton. While the fund focuses on both on- and off-chain art, its first two acquisitions are NFTs: Continuum: Los Angeles (2022), by the Canadian-Korean artist Krista Kim (bequeathed to the museum by Hilton), and The Question (2022), by British artist Shantell Martin (commissioned through the fund).

Previous spread: Refik Anadol, Machine Hallucinations Renaissance Dreams, 2022, AI data sculpture, video loop LED wall, 29 feet 6 3⁄8 inches × 19 feet 8 1 4 inches (900 × 600 cm), installation view, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy. Photo: © Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio

Alex Gartenfeld, ICA Miami’s artistic director, tells me, “ICA Miami’s permanent collection is a platform through which to steward innovation. As one of the first series of fixed-set unique NFTs, LarvaLabs’ CryptoPunks project has pioneered a medium that has been the center of the cultural conversation. The work reflects artists’ efforts to innovatively disseminate their work and engage with developments in technology.”

A press release that Gartenfeld shared with me states, “The new work builds on a series of paintings and NFTs featuring pandemic-related motifs by Van Lew, who has been deeply inspired by the ongoing collective experience of the pandemic. In these works, the anonymous figures in hazmat suits, their faces obscured by masks, are uncannily rendered in the artist’s signature washes of warm pinks and blues.

Above: Cory Van Lew working on a painting at the ICA Miami annual gala, 2021. Photo: © Chris Carter

Beyond acquiring Cryptopunk #5293: ICA Miami has also started working directly with crypto artists. For its 2021 annual gala to support its mission and programs, the museum auctioned a series of pairs of NFTs and physical paintings by Cory Van Lew. The artist painted live at the gala; the finished pieces were then minted as NFTs to create a physical-digital twinset.

Van Lew used live figures in hazmat suits as subjectstencils—directing the figures through the museum space and rendering full-size body prints of their forms with an irreverent process of painterly gesture and chance.” Three NFT/painting pairs were sold and a fourth joined Cryptopunk #5293 in the museum’s permanent collection as a gift from the artist. While the ICA Miami has begun working with living artists such as Van Lew, other museums, including the

In addition to Public Key/Private Key, the Whitney acquired one of the 2,304 unique “atom” NFTs in Eve Sussman’s 89 Seconds Atomized (2018). Each “atom” contains a square, 20-by-20-pixel, roughly ten-minute-long video fragment of the artist’s original video 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2004). The project’s white paper states, “While each video atom will be a one-of-a-kind, induplicable art piece, we believe that the work—both individually and collectively—becomes truly meaningful, and extraordinary, in the community that it creates. And offering a unique mode of shared ownership will give the artwork a second life, allowing it to be far more accessible to a general audience, as well as evolving the meaning of the piece itself.”

Left: Krista Kim, Mars House, 2020 (detail), 3D files (NFT), installation view, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy. Photo: © Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio

Uffizi in Florence and the British Museum in London, have started to explore the possibilities of licensing their historic masterworks as NFTs. This strategy has been controversial: some argue that the approach reduces NFT technology to a mere device for selling souvenirs instead of an opportunity to showcase emerging crypto artists. Others opine that it presents a novel, digital way for art enthusiasts to engage with cherished museum masterpieces while also contributing financially to the maintenance of the physical artworks. Last year, the British Museum announced a partnership to sell digital collectibles based on paintings by Hokusai and J. M. W. Turner. “It’s a new space for [us] and we want to learn, listen to the community, and slowly build and adapt our model over time,” a spokesperson for the museum told me. “The NFT community is passionate and engaged and we recognize they are an important voice amongst our audiences as we consider our next steps. We are keen to start small and build. We see NFTs and especially the underlying technology as a potential long-term, multiyear play and our strategy will evolve over time.”

As I stand before Anadol’s operatic installation in the Palazzo Strozzi, the interplay between art history and neoteric technology is on full display. To create this AI-driven data sculpture, Anadol built a machinelearning algorithm and exposed it to a digital databank of thousands of fourteenth-to-seventeenth-century artworks of the Italian Renaissance. The resulting piece offers the algorithm’s “hallucinatory” interpretation of the collective set of classical paintings: a glimpse of a machine’s fever dream imbued with the pigments, shades, and tones of august Italian masters. Looking up at the towering artwork, I am reminded of something Galansino says: “The NFT space has unlimited potential in terms of art experience. . . . We are talking about artists, full stop. NFT artists are artists, full stop.”

[�UR] PERMANENT �OLLECTI �N IS A PL �TFORM THROUGH WHICH T � STE �ARD INN � VATI �N.

The Moco Museum, Amsterdam, is moving rather swiftly into the NFT space. This independent museum focusing on modern, contemporary, and street art opened two exhibitions of crypto art, one at their flagship location in Amsterdam’s Museumplein, just a stone’s throw from the Van Gogh Museum, and another at their outpost in Barcelona, in the historic Palacio Cervelló. The exhibitions include work by eminent crypto artists including Andrés Reisinger, Mad Dog Jones, and fewocious. So far, Moco reports that visitors to the shows have numbered in the hundreds of thousands (roughly 260,000 visitors to the Amsterdam show from December 2021 to June 2022 and 290,000 to the Barcelona show from October 2021 to June 2022).

“We’re all about innovation,” says Kim LogchiesPrins, cofounder and curator of Moco. “We have a young audience and the way we run our museum, we can move fast.” If an artist envisions their work ensconced in a blue room, Moco’s agile team will get the walls painted by the following day. Given the museum’s mission of bringing broader and younger audiences to museums (over half of Moco’s visitors are first-time museumgoers), Logchies-Prins states, she plans on dedicating 20 percent of the museum’s exhibition space to showcasing NFTs goingBringingforward.digital art into the physical world in a novel and engaging way is no small feat, especially given the “black cube” trope of darkened, inky-walled spaces that has become commonplace for showcasing digital art across galleries and museums. “We’re working hard to have the best pixels, the best screens, and to make it as beautiful as possible,” Logchies-Prins says. “We have an exhibit created by [DJ and crypto artist] Don Diablo in our garden, it’s a big physical piece which you can enter and then you can see his NFT inside.” Similarly, Galansino and cocurator Serena Tabacchi worked closely with the artists at the Palazzo Strozzi to create an immersive transmedia experience for Let’s Get Digital!, including adding a partially mirrored floor for artist Krista Kim’s installation. And on Anadol’s outdoor installation, Machine Hallucinations—Renaissance Dreams, Galansino remarks, “Even just technology-wise, it’s a masterpiece. So for us, it was also a great experience to work with these kinds of devices. And Refik was amazing because he created something new for us, thinking about our space, our architecture, and our history.”

Alex Gartenfeld

TARYN SIMON

THE CONVERSATION MACHINE

I think we are different people. Yes. But not because our brains have been made by different material. But I think that we are born to different societies. We have different religions and different experiences of lives and different individual issues also.

YASMIN ABOFOUL

HUMAN BRAINS:

We get our lobsters from these waters. And the fishermen, when they find a female lobster who is carrying eggs, they notch her tail and they throw her back. They will not bring in female lobsters. So if we wanted to study female lobsters, we would actually have to get a permit, and then get someone to collect them for us, because the fishermen won’t bring them in. The fishermen just want them in the water, making babies.

It Begins with an Idea, on view at the Fondazione Prada, Venice, through November 27, 2022, is an in-depth exhibition built around questions of neuroscience, understanding, memory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the nature of creation. Part of a multidisciplinary project of the same name launched by the Fondazione Prada in 2020, the exhibition, curated by UDO KITTELMANN in collaboration with TARYN SIMON, centers on the brain and the complexity of its functions, using objects, artworks, and installations to explore how it has been conceptualized, mapped, altered, and constructed. As part of this extensive investigation, Simon has created The Conversation Machine, a thirty-two-video installation on the second floor of the venue. The work brings together thirty-six neuroscientists, psychologists, neurologists, and philosophers from five continents—each individually interviewed and recorded by Simon—in a self-organizing, responsive immersion. Here we present excerpts from the 140 hours of interviews, allowing resonances, slips, gaps, and disagreements to converge.

I see the same structures across… from having dissected brain in Nigeria, to East Africa, to South Africa, to white brain, whatever you call white brain or black brain or whatever. I see the same.

EVE MARDER

You don’t know that you are not a zombie, whoever you are. You say, “Well, yes, I do. I have direct knowledge of my consciousness.” No, you don’t. You have a belief that you are conscious of the scene in front of you, that you are hearing my voice and so forth. Those are beliefs. Do you know how you get those beliefs? It is all due to brain processes. Do you know what those brain processes are? No. In fact, you know almost nothing about them.

MAHMOUD BUKAR MAINA

SUZANA HERCULANO-HOUZEL

DANIEL C. DENNETT

One of the key things that I have been trying to do is to see how we can incorporate more African samples in our research. And obviously you have to start somewhere.... A small pinch of skin collected from an individual can now be reprogrammed into brain cells. And someone is more likely to give you a small pinch of skin that you can now use to grow brain cells than him saying, “Okay, you know what, after I die, you can have my brain.”

SUZANA HERCULANO-HOUZEL

SUPRATIM RAY Cells in the brain are distributed very unevenly. There are tons of them here, not very many there, and then tons over there again. Very much like people in a country. So if you want to poll people in a country, you have to use these super-fancy, careful sampling strategies to make sure that your sample is representative. So the question was, how do you do that in the brain? I realized that with the brain, we could do something that you can’t do in a country with people, which is, you can dissolve the brain and just very much liberate all those units into one volume of fluid, which is the soup. So that’s how I created this method for counting cells in a brain that I call “brain soup.”

I have several fridges—No, I have several freezers—full of animal brains. I call it my frozen zoo. There are brains that are still whole. There are brains that are sectioned into parts, or in very thin slices, which is what we usually have to do to look at them under a microscope. I also have hundreds of little vials of brain soup that we keep from every single brain that we study.

If you look at it, it’s just this pinkish mass of tissue. It’s amazing that these connections together form everything that we are. But at the end of the day, if you look at it from outside, it is just a yea-big mass of spongy sort of tissue. You can’t see the connections or anything. You see some core structures, that’s about it.

AMADI O. IHUNWO

CATHERINE MALABOU

The brain is capable of creating out of trauma, out of destruction, a totally new person. It is like a negative metamorphosis. Like the one we see in Kafka’s short story, that someone is able, out of this destructive plasticity, to become someone else. And this capacity of negative metamorphosis is what I call “destructive plasticity,” which is a threat that inhabits each of us.

SUPRATIM RAY

ANIRBAN BANDYOPADHYAY

HUDA AKIL

HUDA AKIL A cell on a Petri dish—you will see that when the cell dies, its branches that were going out, they come together, and then the grid collects it together, and it forms this spherical cell. So it isolates itself, and then it is death. So isolation is death.

GYÖ RGY BUZSÁKI

CARL HART

ANGELA VINCENT

When we study the depressed brain in postmortem tissue— meaning that people have died and have donated their brain and we compare the depressed brains to the control brains of people who died of natural causes—we see differences everywhere. Some brain regions are more affected than others, but the activity of the entire genetic makeup of the cells is altered throughout the brains of depressed people. Some brain regions like the hippocampus, the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex, regions that are implicated in emotions and cognition are more profoundly affected, but hardly a brain region escapes the impact of depression. And what the brain looks like is as if it is impoverished. There are cells, the glial cells, that are really important for the health of neurons, for the connection between neurons. They participate in the immune responses and they are greatly affected by depression. So even though depression may have started with one circuit being disrupted or have started from some other place in the body, in the end the brain is affected, and it is like death by a thousand cuts.

And so I decided to subject myself to opioid withdrawal just to prove to myself that it was unpleasant, but not life-threatening. And so that is what I did.... I think it is absolutely critical for people to understand the effects of the drugs that they’re studying, understanding the effects from a personal sort of perspective.

If your body would be placed in a big jar when you were born and you were given all your sensors, quote unquote, you could see everything, you could watch TV, whatever you want. You can have your mother touching your skin, and so on. The only thing that you don’t have is the ability to respond to any of these. If you deprive the brain from these action outputs and from the verification that comes with it, the brain will never learn to perceive. It will never learn to think. It will never have any knowledge.

A boy committed sexual murder when he was seventeen years old. I also did the expert witness for that case. And he has been abused really severely physically, and his brain has been damaged.... And that kind of case, of course, he was arrested, but his father was not arrested. And his brain is damaged.

We know that people can survive for years on a machine that looks after everything except their brain waves and that they probably are, to some extent, conscious. I would hate to find myself in one of those situations where you can’t communicate, but you are actually conscious. I think that must be one of the most unpleasant things. And yet the few people one’s heard of who have recovered, actually, they don’t seem to have found it so depressing.

CATHERINE MALABOU

KUMI KURODA

There is this very amazing set of pictures that a painter drew. That person had spatial hemineglect. He had a stroke and he was recovering, and he used to draw himself by looking at the mirror. Initially the drawings were only on just half of the person. And it’s quite amazing that a person looking at himself but is only able to draw half side. And slowly the brain sort of heals and that picture becomes full. So I find it very profound that a person looking at himself is still drawing only half, as if the other half has just gone out of existence because you can’t attend to it anymore. It’s not a visual deficit. It’s not a memory deficit. It’s a deficit in your ability to pay attention.

I met a gentleman who had been in solitary confinement for over twenty years, and he told me that very early on his depth perception changed, because he just didn’t have enough room to focus beyond this nearby wall. But even more striking, after leaving prison, he had completely lost his ability to orient in space. And that is because space orientation happens in the hippocampus, but the hippocampus is also the brain site that responds to stress, where chronic stress, lack of activity, blocks neurogenesis, blocks the ability of the hippocampus to keep remodeling itself. And in a shrunken hippocampus, your ability to orient and remember space is greatly diminished. And this gentleman was lost all the time, including going home. He was never that way before being in solitary confinement. So these are just examples that show that solitary confinement changes the brain, and that is a physical change. And that, under US law, represents cruel and unusual punishment.

Emotions are vital. It means that they not only play a major part within the brain, they also play a major part in survival, because in order to survive, we need to be interested in surviving. We need to be attached, passionately attached, to survival.

People can have conditions where they may feel perfectly comfortable with having hallucinations or thoughts that are part of their personal experience. It doesn’t necessarily mean that this defines the person. This is something the person has. In the past, some of these extreme conditions were viewed as valuable and very cherished by the culture.

Error happens. Error occurs. Error occurs even in our genetics, sometimes to our detriment, sometimes to our advantage. So if it’s that far down in the making of our being that error is there, I would hesitate taking it out of anywhere else. Maybe it belongs there.

GYÖRGY BUZSÁKI

KARL FRISTON

The brain has to construct its own disorder; it has to, at some point, assimilate its own disorder. Otherwise it would be destroyed by it.

SUPRATIM RAY People with two selves, or three selves, or four selves, that are quite stable—this really has occurred, and I think a lot can be learned from looking at that. I think once we recognize that the unity of consciousness is an achievement, not a ground state.... You are not born unified. And most of us achieve a pretty good unity, but it can come hugely apart in some clinical conditions. And even in normal folks, it can come apart.

Opening spread and opposite: Installation view, Human Brains: It Begins with an Idea, Fondazione Prada, Venice, April 23–November 27, 2022. The Conversation Machine: videos, interviews, and orchestration by Taryn Simon. Produced by Fondazione Prada for Human Brains: It Begins with an Idea project. Photo: Marco Cappelletti, courtesy Fondazione Prada

The dream that we dream together is reality. Reality is a social agreement between you and me. Reality is what we experience and agree upon, that experience is real.... If that happens in a wrong way, I see the world very, very differently. Then I am a super-creative individual. But if I don’t find another individual who thinks the same way, I am just schizophrenic.

CATHERINE MALABOU

KARL FRISTON

JOSEPH LEDOUX

BIANCA MARLIN

I say I have a confusion and I go inside that, I find some more confusion. I’m confused that who am I? Then I go inside. I find my hand, leg and others. I say, my hand is me, my head is me, my heart is me. And then those are again, confusion. And then I go inside. And I go inside and inside and inside. I go to the single atom, and even I don’t find me.

DANIEL C. DENNETT

The first thing to realize is that you can’t get schizophrenia as a child. It’s just not a disease of childhood. It’s a disease of early adulthood that can, at the earliest manifest in late adolescence. And that tells you something quite important that if it’s hardwired into the genes, it’s not hardwired in a way that is manifest at birth. You have to wait decades before it’s manifest. So that tells you it’s something about learning about your world that is required of you when you get to a certain age, usually when you have left or are leaving home, there’s something goes wrong with the way that you learn about the world.

ANIRBAN BANDYOPADHYAY

I remember one patient with schizophrenia who was a very vocal and great contributor to our group meetings. And he would come up with the most appealing and odd conjunctions of words. My favorite, which I still remember to this day, is “angel shit.”

It makes a lot of sense for us to have a sense of self. Otherwise, my thumb and my leg and, you know— I need to feel that it’s all me, for me to survive and all my systems to work properly. So evolutionarily, looking at an organism, I think the sense of self, and I need to defend myself, and I need to eat, and it’s all just one unified percept of self, rather than just distributed things—it makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary point of view.

Le Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, in Éveux, France, is both an active Dominican priory and the last building designed by Le Corbusier. As a result, the priory, completed in 1961, is a center both religious and architectural, a site of spiritual significance and a magnetic draw for artists, writers, architects, and others. This fall, at the invitation of Frère Marc Chauveau, Giuseppe Penone will be exhibiting a selection of existing sculptures at La Tourette alongside new work directly inspired by the context and materials of the building. Here, Penone and Frère Chauveau discuss the power and peculiarities of the space, as well as the artwork that will be exhibited there.

TOURETTELAÀPENONEGIUSEPPE

FMC Now you’ve been invited to make and exhibit works here yourself. Since the priory was built by Le Corbusier, it has a special kind of architec ture— unesco has classified it as a World Heri tage Site—and it’s also housing for a community of ten Dominican friars. What does it mean to you to exhibit in a monastery where a community lives, works, and prays? GP It’s a unique experience. This is something I’ve never done before. There was something that struck me about the architecture, and I didn’t feel completely comfortable with it at first: we see nature in the priory, but we don’t enter nature. The priory is closed in on itself. It’s like a body with eyes that can see outside, but all life is contained inside. The windows don’t open and there are very few ways to get in touch with the outside. This creates a bit of tension in the space. But the fact that there was this life, this activity, that there were people working inside a place like this—a place of medi tation, a place for the spirit, for art, for prayer, for a relationship with the sublime—this interested me. It shows an openness: making a space available for this kind of activity is a great gesture of generosity on the part of the priory friars toward the visiting public and artists. All these reflections led me to choose works for the space that I hope will be able to dialogue with it, but that also, above all, relate to imagery absent from the monastery. It’s a very austere build ing, with very little Christian iconography, but that iconography is present in the imaginations of the people who come here. My works present a range of subjects that may have links with Christian ico nography. I’m Italian, Italy is a Catholic country, and even if you’re not a believer, you’re influenced by the iconography of religion, which comes to you through the nature of the space, through the his tory of the people who have lived there. Even if we don’t think about the history of the country where we were born, where we live, we’re completely impregnated by it.

142 FRÈRE MARC CHAUVEAU Giuseppe, we’re happy to wel come you to La Tourette, where you’ve just spent four days working. But you already knew the pri ory, having been here about ten years ago with students from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where you taught. Why are you returning here and what do you think of the place ten years later?

GIUSEPPE PENONE Actually, this is my third visit to La Tourette because I’d already been here, at your invitation, to see the space with your brother, Bernard, several years before I brought my stu dents. I didn’t create anything afterward; it’s a difficult space, you have to think before you do something. And the second time you invited me, I thought it could be a good experience for my stu dents. They came to the priory and stayed for a few days, identifying places where they could make and install works related to the space. It was an extraordinary experience, of course, because it allowed them not only to conceive works but also to display them in a well-known artistic context.

FMC The presentation of your work at La Tourette may renew people’s understanding of it. I think, for example, about the works you plan to put in the refectory, A occhi chiusi [With Closed Eyes] and Avvolgere la terra [Envelop The Earth]. They’ve been shown in exhibitions and in museums, but their placement at the back of the refectory will enrich them with a different meaning. GP It will give them a different meaning because I’m drawing on a range of feelings about the rigor of the architecture combined with the spiritual Previous Photographspread:ofthe execution of Giuseppe Penone’s frottages in La Tourette, Éveux, France. Giuseppe Penone, Le Bois Sacré (The Sacred Forest), 2022, prepared canvas oil and wax pastel. Photo: © Archivio Penone

LeAbove:Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, Éveux, France. Photo: Bildarchiv Monheim GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo GiuseppeOpposite: Penone, Albero in torsione sinistra (Left Twist Tree), 1988, larch wood, 328 3 4 × 15 3 4 × 10 5 8 inches (835 × 40 × 27 cm). Photo: © Archivio Penone

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FMC Could you speak about the beam that you plan to put in the church, sculpted in the form of a tree? For us, the friars, there may be connections between the beam of the cross and the tree of life.

Photo: Archimago/Alamy Stock FollowingPhotopage,

right: Photograph of Giuseppe Penone in his studio, Turin, Italy, with Le Bois Sacré –Troncs/Piliers (The Sacred Forest – Trunks and Pillars), 2022, prepared canvas oil and wax pastel, in 24 parts, each: 15 3⁄4 × 15 3 4 inches (40 × 40 cm).

GP This is a work I made in the ’80s, out of a roof beam. It’s imposing, very large, eight meters [twen ty-six feet] long. I shaped it as a tree, but it has things like nails, traces of its function, embedded in it, and they give it a meaning that similar works I’ve done don’t have, because there’s a story in the wood to do with a very simple function, supporting a building. And in the space of La Tourette, it takes on another dimension and becomes a symbolic object.

This Giuseppepage:Penone, Corpo di pietra – rete (Body of Stone – Grid), 2018, white Carrara marble and iron, 59 × 59 × 2 3 4 inches (150 × 150 × 7 cm).

Photo: © Archivio Penone Artwork by Giuseppe Penone © 2022 Giuseppe Penone/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris Le Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette designed by Le Corbusier © (ARS),Paris/ArtistsF.L.C./ADAGP,RightsSocietyNewYork2022

GP Much of the priory’s religious life is based on reading and recitation. Reading is done in books; there are books that are essential for the liturgy, so they’re used every day. This interests me because there’s a manipulation of the book. The book is not only an object holding words and prayers, it’s also something that we take in our hands, we touch, we

purpose144 for which it was made. I’m thinking of installing a work linked to hands, the gestures of hands. Objects inspired by gestures that are very simple and humble and ordinary will be placed on a wooden table. There are people eating in this space, but it’s not a restaurant, it’s something else. This is the spirit I’m hoping to capture: see ing something seemingly ordinary in a different, unexpected way.

LeOpposite:Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, Éveux, France.

FMC Yes, because it’s shown in the church, in the symbolic and sacred space between the stalls and the altar. GP A church is not a neutral space. We enter the church and we’re in a space made for a purpose, which is that of prayer, of the spirit, and of belief in divinity. It’s a space with a meditative purpose that other spaces don’t have. Here, people will observe the work more closely and see it differently.

Following spread, left: Le Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, Éveux, France.

FMC You’re exhibiting not only works that you’ve already made but works you’re creating specifi cally for the priory. I’m thinking, for example, of the chapter room, an important place for us that we use as a chapel in the winter. What is the work that you’ve created for this place?

FMC You’re also attentive to the architecture of the priory. You mentioned the rigor of Le Corbusier’s architecture, with its exposed concrete. We have

walls in the priory with rough-cast casings; many architects who visit mention the “skin” of the con crete. And of course this idea of concrete skin must affect you, since it goes to the heart of your work on touch and sensation.

GP All the concrete here was laid using planks of wood. The technique is rarely used today but it was the old method: wooden planks were assembled to make a casing and the concrete was poured inside it. Le Corbusier kept the unfinished appearance of the concrete, the imprints of every piece of wood. That gives it life. I think of each piece of wood as having the form of a tree inside it. The building’s form can be compared to what you see in a group of trees. All the friars’ cells are fra med by balconies that have small stones embed ded in them, creating a vibration like the vibration of leaves. Then there are the columns, which we can think of as trunks. The whole structure that sup ports the floor of the building can be compared to the bases of trees. There are also roots: the crypt of the church is in contact with the earth. It’s the only part that touches the ground. All of these elements suggested to me the idea that a kind of sacred wood is embedded in the architecture of this place. From that idea I thought of doing a rubbing revealing the skin of the building. I did that using the system of sixty-three colors that Le Corbusier developed for his architecture. I had sheets made measuring 40 centimeters by 40 centimeters [15 3/4 by 15 3/4 inches], which is the size of the meditation square in each cell. Then, on sixty-three of these sheets, I did rubbings of the different parts of the building: the crypt, the church, the beams, the coatings, and the rest, following the idea of the structure of a tree.

FMC Your use of the sixty-three colors of Le Cor busier’s palette is new in your work; you usually use more natural colors, like green or ocher.

145 turn the pages. There’s a beauty in the quality of the book itself—the binding, the paper, these ele ments of that kind—and also in relation to the body of the speaker, because one holds it in one’s hands.

GP You sent me photos of three books that I could use to create the work, and that was the one I liked best, because it had a kind of simplicity. Its dimen sions also seemed right to me, allowing me to cre ate a work that measures about three meters by two meters [10 by 6 1/2 feet].

There are traces of the person’s hand on the book. This idea was the basis for the work in the chapter room, which is made of fingerprints on canvas. I tried to copy the color of a particular book, creating a kind of landscape where the fingerprints become like leaves and form a space of vegetation.

FMC And the book you chose from the library is a liturgical book, a Dominican missal that we use very often.

GP Yes, but I don’t think it’s really that differ ent, because I always work with existing materials. It’s not as if I created the colors to do the rubbing; I used the colors of the person who created the architecture. The palette is completely connected and coherent to the architecture.

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GP For Le Corbusier, it probably represented a freedom in relation to what he’d done before. There’s a kind of acceptance of the defects and character of the material. These surfaces aren’t soft to the touch; they’re aggressive, they have a very strong character. All of this enriched the relationship with the skin of the architecture. It demonstrates what I was trying to say before, the idea of sacred wood embedded in the materials of the priory.

FMC Giuseppe, what’s your approach to sculp ture? Particularly in connection with the archi tecture of the priory? GP My job has been to observe material and to reveal the forms it has. My work is an indication of form, not a creation of it. The first works I did put my body in direct relationship to a growing tree: I brought my body into contact with the tree, and the tree memorized the moment of my presence. I perpetuated this contact with a steel cast of my hand that I placed on the trunk of the tree. As the tree grew, the imprint of my hand was patterned into itsAfterflesh.that, I did a work in which I found the form of a tree inside an industrial beam. This was the period when there was a minimalist approach to sculpture; industrial elements were displayed as they were. I took this industrial element and found the form of a tree in it. It was one of the first works I did in 1969, and it gave me the idea of continuing to do this work, revealing the forms inside the beams, the forest inside the wood.

The same idea led me to the work in marble, revealing the veins and making sculpture from them. The veins in marble are actually layers of material inside the block. By cutting the block, we can see them as veins, as if they were the veins in our bodies. Using this idea, I made the works I call Anatomie [Anatomies, 1992–]; there are some in the exhibition here. The idea of revealing something in the material is the same principle that led me to think of architecture as sacred wood, as if there were in it an existing form, which I tried to demon strate with the rubbing technique. To create work based on architecture, on a single building as steeped in history, and as impor tant for the history of architecture, as the priory of La Tourette, was a very exciting experience for me, inspiring me to create a series that encouraged— FMC A culmination. GP The culmination of an idea that was present in my work but had not yet found a complete form. The series encouraged me to do that with great joy.

FMC Le Corbusier built the priory on an agricul tural estate. So we’re in the country; from much of the building we can see the trees of the for est surrounding us. This dialogue with nature is important—as you say, Le Corbusier was very attached to the imprint, the trace, of the wood in the unfinished concrete. This makes the building part of the brutalist trend of postwar architecture; it’s totally different from his purist architecture of the interwar period. It’s a real aesthetic choice Le Corbusier made, which you demonstrate with these rubbings.

Translated from the French by Liesl Schillinger

The 1213 leavingtheroom.Sheheardtheringingofthetelephonemanytimes withouteverbeingabletodeterminewhetheritwascomingfromthe roomtotheleftortotherightofhers.Shebarelydaredapproachthe tall,openFrenchdoorsforfearthathemightbeontheneighboring balcony.ShemissedlivingtogetherintheirParisapartment.Latein themorningshewouldcallacar,givethedriverthenameofavillage, orjustadirection,andletherselfbedrivenalongthecoastalhighway orthewindingroadsofthebackcountry.Farfromthehotel,away fromotherpeople’seyesandfromthesun,beneathherbroadhat,she walkeddownrandomstreets,lettingherselfbeovertakenbysensations,previouslyunknowntoher,thatherintimacywithEliMosserri, tenuousasitwas,hadawokenwithoutherquitedaringtorecognize themforwhattheywere.

Incollege,thegeneralindierencetoherheavinesshadrevivedthe memoryofaconversationinwhichshehadheardherfatheraskher motherwhattheyshoulddoaboutherweight,towhichhermother hadreplied,“Ittakesallkindsofpeopletomaketheworld,andthere’s roomforthefatonestoo.”Atthetime,thisoutrageousresponse,far fromspurringthechildtoloseweight,hadmovedhertoeatmore; whereasincollege,thememoryofthephrasehadinspiredtheyoung womanshehadbecometorejectthenotionthatherappearancewas fated.SoitwasthatJeannehademergedfromherexcesspoundage, hercamouflageuniform,herstudentrooms,andhaddiscoveredin herself,notwithoutsurprise,anadmirablephysique,abeautifulface, andcentmagnifiskin.Becauseofhernewappearance,shefoundherselfbeingflirtedwithforthefirsttime,butthemetamorphosisshe hadpursuedhadnotbeenaccompaniedbyanyurgetocatchuponthe experiencesshehadbeendeprivedofuntilthen.Whereastheyoung menwhoogledherwerecowedbyherbeauty,oldermenweredrawn 16 caress of the water that undulated around her face. It was as if the elements had conspired to remind her that everything was all right. The current carried her out to sea, gradually taking her beyond the promontory behind which the sun was retreating. The wind picked up, she felt a shiver and rose up in one motion. In front of her was a high outcrop that she would now have to go around to get back to the beach. Although from a distance the cli had seemed to her to drop o abruptly, as she drew near it, big fl at rocks emerged on which the light of the setting sun played. On one of these rocks, a silhouette appeared. Despite the distance, and even though she had never seen him without his clothes on, Jeanne recognized Eli Mosserri standing fi rmly on his long legs. He was stretching his whole body. Freed from his bespoke suits, his body exhaled a fragile delicacy and grace, setting o inside her, with sudden brutality, her wish for that unknown pleasure. Eli Mosserri did not suspect, floating on the surface of the glistening water, the presence of the blossom that he had carefully selected and plucked with the secret hope that it would never bloom, but which now unfurled itself before his eyes, saturated with desire. When another silhouette of a comparable height but a much more substantial build materialized behind her husband’s silhouette, enveloping it, Jeanne sti ened. A wave stifled her cry. In the purple glow of the last rays of sun, petals of an exceptional whiteness rippled, scattered across the black sea.

PB A BOUQUET OF GARDENIAS Anne-Laure Zevi GAGOSIAN POCKET FICTION #1 4 suggestedthattheyspendtimetogethersoshecouldgettoknowhim. Heseemedtohaveanticipatedallthequestionsthatacontractofthis naturemightraise,andJeannefeltnoneedtoaskanyquestions.

Thenextday,JeanneDumonetdeclinedEliMosserri’sinvitation togotoaconcert.Hedidnotinsist,buthecalledhertwodayslater, thedayafterthat,andallthedaysthatfollowed.Healwayscalledat thesametime,attheendofthemorning,andhedidmostofthetalking.Hespokeofwhathe’dbeendoing,whathe’dwrittenaboutthe concertortheoperathathe’dattendedthenightbeforeinParisorin someprovincialcity;herecommendedexhibitionsorfilms,hetold herwhohe’dhaddinnerwithandwhathehadtalkedaboutwithhis guest.OncehehadJeanne’sattention,EliMosserriwouldtrytomake hertalkaboutherself,andwouldaskheraboutherworkasatranslator—hespokefourlanguagesuently,flhadreadalot,andhiscuriositywasunfeigned.WhenJeannestartedspeaking,theirsentences wouldbumpintoeachother,theirvoiceswouldoverlap,eachwould breakotolettheothertalk,andthentheywouldcuteachothero alloveragain.Jeanneblamedherselfforbeingsoawkward.Gradually,inthecourseoftheconversations,shelearnedtoassertherself,to makeherselfheard,andtoendurethelulls.Forthetimebeing,Jeanne seemedtobeedsatisfiwiththesedistancedencounters.Shieldedfrom theconfusionthatphysicalproximitytoEliMosserricausedher,she wasabletoletthebestsideofherselfcomethrough.OnedayJeanne waitedtheentireafternoonforthisdailycall,whichshebynowhad cometoexpect.Whenitcameatlast,sheacceptedEli’sinvitationto accompanyhimtoanartopening.Thenextdaytheymetfordrinks, thenwenttodinner.Theirtête-à-têteswerenolongerlimitedtotheir telephoneconversations.Butevenondayswhentheyhadagreedto seeeachother,EliMosserriwouldalwayscall,evenifonlyy.briefl

With the same modesty that made her put a hand to her décolletage when Eli Mosserri’s eyes landed on her, Jeanne Dumonet turned her face away when the man who was looking at her smiled at her. She nevertheless resolved to sit by him as the seating plan instructed. He knew how to put her at ease, and the bell that sounded at the end of intermission interrupted them in animated conversation. Eli Mosserri said then to Jeanne, “You can take pride in having dined with a man who was seated next to the great Irène Orlov, to whom he did not address one word because he was too busy talking to you.” Jeanne blushed, and Eli Mosserri apologized for causing her embarrassment. Despite the bell that exhorted the audience to return to their seats, many guests came up to greet Eli Mosserri, walking against the flow of the crowd that was carrying Jeanne o . Once Jeanne was back in her seat, she sat still and kept her eyes riveted on the stage: you would have thought she was truly captivated by the performance. Opera hardly interested her at all, and she found La Bohème especially dull, but the second half of the production seemed less tedious to her than the fi rst. Irène Orlov’s voice was seductive even if the story was insipid and the music melodramatic; at the same time, as an actress, the soprano leaned so much on her sensuality that Mimi’s hesitations seemed more like feigned prudishness than charmingElireticence.Mosserri and Jeanne Dumonet next saw each other at a dinner party to which she had accompanied the husband of a friend. Eli Mosserri greeted her a little solemnly, and during the hour that preceded the dinner, he did not pay her the attention that he had the fi rst time. Once at the table, they were seated across from each other, and more than once, Jeanne felt Eli Mosserri’s glance lingering on her insistently. She wished she hadn’t worn her black fl annel dress, which contrasted sostarklywithhercoloring.Jeanne’sskin—herface,herneck,her hands—waswhite;notthewhiteoftheabsenceofcolorbuttheluminous,intense,secretwhiteofthenapeoftheneck,whichissometimes hidden,sometimesrevealed,bythecollarofasilkkimono;orthestrikingvelvetwhitenessofwhiteowers.flHerred-blondhairwastheonly elementofartificeinherappearance.Theirthirdmeetingwasnot bychance.WhenEliMosserriaskedtospeaktoJeanneDumoneton thetelephone,Jeannehadnotroubleidentifyingthevoiceoftheman whowascalling.Herown,however,perchedinanundulyhighregisterthroughouttheirconversation,whichculminatedinaninvitation fromEliMosserritolunch. Oncetheyhadordered,EliMosserri,withoutpreliminaries,said, “Fornearlyadecade,I’vebeeninvolvedwithapersonwhoismarried. Thetimeswespendtogetherhavealwaysbeenstolenmoments—too fewofthem—complicatedlast-minuterendez-vous,whicharesometimescanceledatthelastminute,inhotelsunconducivetoromance,in citiesthatareoftenforeigntobothofus.Ourrelationshipisrestricted ononesidebythisperson’sworkscheduleanddomesticlife,andon theotherbythefactthatIcannotstayonFrenchsoilaslongasIwould like.Torestoresomespontaneitytothisrelationship,andalittleof thelightnessofitsbeginnings,IwouldneedtohaveFrenchnationality;andthatisthereasonthatIcalledyoutoday.Ibegyoutoexcuse theimpertinenceofmyrequest:Iwouldliketoknowifyouwouldbe willingtomarryme.Thiswould,ofcourse,beamarriageofconvenience.”Jeannewasbewildered,butsincesheshowednosignofbeing shockedoroendedbytheproposition,hecontinuedtomakehiscase. Respectfully,butwithoutflattery,withoutcurryingfavor.Hedidnot hidefromherthefactthatifsheagreedtohelphimtheywouldhave tomoveintogetheruntilhehadobtainedhispassport;andlastly,he 14 tothefragilevirtuesheprojected,whichsheherselfdidnotsuspect— herwayofevadingglances,ofwithdrawingherhand,ofrefastening hershirtwhenthecollarhadopened.Theyoungstudentwasboth flatteredandintimidatedbytheattentionthatwasfocusedonher. Butwhetheritwasbecauseshewasnotsmittenenoughorbecauseher suitorsweretooeager,sheneverencouragedthem,andasmuchasshe wouldhavelikedtoprolongthepleasureofbeingcourted,orevento takeharmlessrevengeonthepast,Jeannewasinnohurry.Sheliked beingbeautifulandshefeltpure. Now,however,itwasherturntowaitforasignandtobeimpatient. Shewasconsumedbycuriosity,yet,atthesametime,hervitalenergiesseemedtobeabandoningher.Shewouldletherselfsinkintoa lullingtorporthatderivedfromthewaiting,andthenunexpectedly, revoltingagainstthisunfamiliarstateoflanguor,shewouldwalkmore quickly,propelledbyasuddenspurtofenergy,beforestoppingafew yardslater,ed.stupefiAttemptingtocontainhertorment,toquellthe embarrassmentarisingfromtheincongruousnessofhermarriageand honeymoon,sheconstantlysoughttopersuadeherselfthatshefeltno desire,thatsheonlylongedto“doit”inthehopeofneverhavingto thinkaboutitagain,ofneveragainhavingtoaverthereyesfroman eroticsceneonscreen,ofneveragainblushingwhensomeoneordered aVirginMary.Shehopedtobeabletoconvinceherselfthatitwasher mindthatimploredher,notherbodythatcompelledher—thebody thatyouwouldhavethoughtshewastryingtocallattentiontowith thedressesandsuitsshesheatheditin,whenonthecontraryshewas tryingtokeepitcontained,toreinitin;thebodythathadbroughther shameforsolong,andthatagainstallexpectationshadrevealeditself tobeasourceofpride.Andso,inthedenceconfishehadsobelatedly acquired,Jeanne’svoluptuousnesshadformedovertheyearsaround 14 15 the single pole of exciting admiration and covetousness. She had come to fear her own sensuality. The pale vestal was flushed with fever. One day, as she idled on the shady terrace of the hotel after an excursion that had been too hot and dusty, Jeanne heard a woman talking about a splendid calanque, a hidden cove that was di cult to reach but had a secluded beach that was rarely visited; on the basis of which she decided to go out again. The chau eur dropped her o on a road overlooking the sea. Above and all around her was the sky of a late summer afternoon. She set o with a fi rm step down a steep path; at the most precarious places there were wooden steps and a makeshift railing. The beach was deserted. She took o her sandals, her dress, and her hat and headed toward the sea. An almost imperceptible breeze ru ed the surface of the water, whose innocuous waves came at regular intervals and covered Jeanne’s ankles; as they withdrew, they carried o with them a little of the sand beneath her feet, and she felt herself tilt forward. She walked into the water; when it came up to her waist, she stopped. Around her the water created a line of demarcation, like a slender belt that held in nothing but divided her body precisely in two, the top part blazing, bridled, conscious of its limits, restrained, and the lower part refreshed, its contours di use. She submerged and disappeared. A few yards away, a beam of light pierced the surface before breaking into a graceful breaststroke; Jeanne swam a crawl, a backstroke crawl, dove under again, reappeared, and ended up on her back, immobile, overwhelmed by her impromptu physical exertion. The echo of her heartbeat faded and she heard nothing but the hushed sound of her own breathing. Above her, the sky was blue and pink at the same time; the two colors melted into each other without blurring, each shining with its own distinct hue. The di erence between the temperatures of the air and of the sea was summarized in the oval

45 naturalandlivelycharacteroftheiroutingsalmostmadeitpossible toforgetthepurposeofthetimetheyspenttogether.Thequestionof theanswershewouldgivenevercameup.EliMosserrihopedtorally Jeannetohiscause,toearnheresteemwithoutattemptingtoseduce herentirely.Ifhesometimesmadeherblush,itwasnotonpurpose—it hadmoretodowiththefactthatnotsomuchearlier,Jeannehadhardly daredtomeetthisman’sgaze. Unexpectedly,EliMosserriannouncedthathewouldbegoing away.Hedidnotsaywherehewasgoing,whohewasgoingwith,or whenhewouldreturn.Nothingrequiredhimtodoso;notonlywerehe andJeannenotacouple,butiftheirunionweretocometobe,itwould betoeasetherunningofhisprivatelife,nottohobbleit.Jeannecould demandnoexplanation,yetnowshewouldhavelikedtoaskhimquestionsthatshehadthoughtshecoulddispensewithatthetimeofhis marriageproposal.Diditappearthattherewasnooneinherlife?She gaveonoairoflonelinessordesperation,andexhibitednoneofthe ﬂawsassociatedwitholdmaids:shewasneitherold,norugly,norpeevish,norbitter;shedidnotseekinordinateaectionfromherfriends, orlavishitoutrageouslyonotherpeople’schildren,thewaypeople sometimesdowholongforchildrenoftheirown.Shehadherown money,andshewasnotalwaysfreewhenshewasinvitedout,forthe verygoodreasonthatshewasingreatdemand.Certainlyherethereal smile,hervestalbearing,couldsometimeselicitcoldnessfromwomen andabruptnessfromcertainmen,butherconversationandsenseof humorwerewidelyappreciated.Didthosequalitiesmakehertheideal candidateforamarriageofconvenience?Whoelse,apartfromher,was awareofEliMosserri’slovelife,orofthepropositionhehadmadeher? Wasitpossiblethatshewastheonlyonewhodidnotknowtheidentityofthepersonforwhomhewaspreparedtocommitanillegalact?

8 sleeping as we write, rewrite, and replay them in the dark. When the man she had been waiting to hear from ﬁ nally called, Jeanne knew for the very ﬁ rst time the relief of the woman who has waited, who has been impatient for someone’s return. That same night they went out for dinner. Jeanne wore a midnight-blue suit. Her beauty, heightened by the traces in her eyes of the debilitating anxiety of the last few days, and by the excitement, still intact, prompted by Eli Mosserri’s return, made a vivid impression on the other guests. Looking at her, you might have thought her indi erent to the silence provoked by her appearance—the admiring looks, the engaging smiles, the compliments murmured as she passed—but in fact the attention she received at that moment overwhelmed her. She accepted an ice-cold martini. The alcohol burned her throat and the heat traveled to her chest; the second mouthful made her stomach glow; the third invaded her entirely. Jeanne let herself surrender to it. The indignation, the resentment, of the recent days seemed laughable in the exhilaration of reunion; forgotten the pettiness, the inappropriate jealousy; she simply lacked experience, she was not hardened to the little agonies in the life of a couple. None of that mattered now, everything was so simple. As the guests made their way to the dining room, Jeanne pulled Eli Mosserri aside and—although she had never even glimpsed his apartment, the objects he surrounded himself with, or the light under which he read, so it was said, history books and historical novels late into the night; with no idea what the last thing he did before he went to sleep was; never having shared with him the consistent intimacy of waking up together, eyes full of sleep, face pu y, hair in disarray—she murmured into his ear, “The answer is yes.” And without concerning herself with the e ect produced by her unexpected declaration, she went to take her seat at the table. That night, if a glowing halo had been 8 9 set above Jeanne’s head, it could not have shed a more divine radiance than her face. The night that Jeanne said yes, the future spouses still lived apart, but the next morning they began apartment hunting. On the wedding day, Eli Mosserri came to pick up Jeanne Dumonet at her home, because she had wanted to spend that last night at her own place.

Jeanne wore a shimmering dress with a ﬁtted, elegant jacket. Eli Mosserri presented her with a bouquet of gardenias, heady with fragrance. The next morning, husband and wife awoke in an apartment that belonged to neither of them and that smelled of newness; they went out for breakfast. Like someone who wakes up next to a stranger the day after a drinking spree, Jeanne Mosserri, wrapped up in her newspaper, struggled to explain to herself the presence of her “husband” at her side, but her unease dissipated during the walk they took afterward through the streets of Paris. Every object Eli Mosserri looked at, every book he leafed through, every street he chose, was a source of wonder, and the day that they spent strolling together was much more remarkable than her wedding day, of which the image she retained was confused—she regretted in particular that she could not remember the exact moment when he had taken her hand and put the ring on her ﬁ nger.

As time passed, the young married couple discovered that they shared the habit of waking at dawn and stumbling to the kitchen in search of breakfast, which they then would carry back to their respective bedrooms. Each of them, without the other’s knowing, would often fall back to sleep while reading or listening to the radio. Once dressed, Jeanne would install herself at the living room table; brighter and less cluttered, this new setting for her work pleased her. The opera and its lyrical ﬂ ights, the windows, open and closed, the distinct squeak of a certain section of parquet in the adjoining room, all 12 JeanneMosserriwoketothesoundofpoundingrain.Stillheavy withsleep,sheremainedimpassive,listeningtothehammeringof thewateronthewindow,butwhenthenoisesuddenlystopped,she openedhereyes,incredulous.Seeingthebedroomthatwasnothers, sheimmediatelyclosedthemagain—shedidnothavetolookunder thecoverstoknowthathernightgownandrobewereinplace.Abright lightcomingfromthebathroomdazzledherface,andthenapuof steamﬁlledwithEliMosserri’sperfumedispersedacrosstheroom.

Ittookhimagestogetdressed.Afterhearingthemetallicclickatthe frontdoor,Jeannethrewthewholelengthofherbodyintothescent andwarmthoftheimprintleftbyherhusbandinthemattressandburiedherfaceintherumpledpillow.

Inabeautifulhotelattheedgeofthebeach,EliMosserrihadreserved twoconnectingroomsforhimselfandhiswife,roomsseparatedby twoupholstereddoors.Eachofthemspentthedayontheirown,and theymetupwhenitwastimefordrinksbeforedinner.EliMosserrihad regainedhisenthusiasmandhisgoodmood.Nothingreallyseemed dierent,apartfromthefactthatJeannekeptaskingherselfaboutthe meaningofthis“honeymoon.”Fromnowon,wasEliMosserria“free man”?Hadn’theinvitedherintohisbedroomthatnight?When,duringtheﬂightfromParis,shehadwokenupwithherheadonhisshoulder,hadn’thesmiledathermoretenderlythanhewouldhavebefore hisunfortunateescapade?Jeannewasnowtemptedtoreadeverylook, everycompliment,everyectioninﬂofhisvoice,asasigninherfavor. Shesleptrestlessly,wokeupearly,weary.Heranxietywasheightened byherinabilitytoclearlyidentifyasinglesoundfromherhusband’s roomontheothersideofthewall:neitherthenoiseoftheshower,nor themurmuroftheradio,noranyindicationofanyoneenteringor

EliMosserrispokewithanexaltationthatJeannedidnotrecognizeinhim,andthatshepreferredtoattributetoalcoholthantogenuinedistress.“It’snotasifIknewnothingaboutself-disgust,Iwhoam alwaysessentiallyonoer,”headdedbitterly.Uponwhichhelooked herstraightintheeyesandsaid,“Iwouldhavebeenunabletocontemplatemarryinganyotherwomanbutyou.”Jeannedidnotblush. Shesuggestedinsteadthattheygotosleep,andwenttowardhimto helphimstandup.Hetookheroutstretchedhandandbroughtitto hischeek;whenhemovedaway,Jeannecouldfeeltheexactspotwhere hisfacehadrestedonthebackofherhand.Sheaccompaniedhimto thethresholdofhisbedroomandwishedhimagoodnight,buthe beggedhertostayalittlelonger,andgesturedtohertositonthebed. Ashegotundressed,hekepttalking,sayinghewantedtotakeherto theCôted’Azurintheguiseofahoneymoon;hedescribedthehotel wheretheywouldstay,thevillageshewouldshowher,therestaurants shewouldlovesomuch.Thenheslidunderthesheets,closedhiseyes, mumbledafewmorewords,thenfellsilent.Hisbreathingsuggested thathehadfallenasleep.Hisforearm,nakedandsmooth,carelessly emergedfromtherolled-upsleeveofhispajamas.Athiswrist,abraceletofskinlighterthantherestattestedtolonghoursspentinthesun; attheexactpositionofthefaceofhiswatch,theskinshone.Thathand thatwassogracefulwhenittoyedwithhiscigarette,soelegantwhenit broughttheglasstohislips,nowseemedsomehowoutofproportion tohisdelicatearm:hisinertﬁngersweretoolong,toonarrow,thenails toomanicured.Yetwhenthatsamehandreassumeditsformwhile adjustingthesheet,Jeannefounditbeautifulagain.

Shefeltallthemorevulnerablebecauseshewasstillgrippedby melancholyafteradinnerthepreviouseveningatwhichamanhad declaredashesawherpass,“Whatwhiteness,whatsplendor!”and shehadfeltherselfshrink.Complimentslikethat,madealoudsothat everyonecanhearthem,particularlythepersonthey’redirectedat, havesomethingcondescending,evenmenacingaboutthem.Although EliMosserrihadbeenathersidemomentsbefore,hehadevaporated, andshehadfoundherselfstrandedamidacliqueofgossiping,fashionablewomenwhohadglaredatherdisagreeably.Noneofthemhad takenthetroubletospeaktoher,andJeannehadremainedinastate ofdistress,thedesignatedvictimoftheirwhisperingandburstsof laughter,asifshewerebackinthejungleofherhighschoolcourtyard. Inmiddleschool,thewhitenessofherskinhadneverbeenasubjectof mockeryamongherschoolmates,whowerefartoobusyteasingher aboutherweight,untilthedaywhenanewprofessorhadexclaimed, uponseeingherentertheclassroom,“Lettherebelight!”Fromthen on,thestudentshadtriedoutthisnewthemethemselves,andtheir imaginationprovedinexhaustible:“OhmyGod,enlightenme!”“Jesus said:‘Donothideyourlightunderabushel.’”Oragain,whentheadolescentgirlstoodontheladderoftheswimmingpool,fatandluminous,someonewouldshout:“AndGodinventedthelightbulb.”When theyreadMobyDick,shehadexpectedabarrageofnewbarbs,butin theevent,nonecame.Thesilenceofherschoolmateswasevenmore humiliatingbecausesheherselffelt,beyondtheterror,therevulsion inspiredbythesmoothwhitenessofthewhale’sskin. InthiswayJeanneadvancedfrommiddleschooltohighschool,clad intoo-bigsweatpantsandtoo-longsweatersinbleakshadesofmottledgray.Toremoveherselfstillfartherfromherclassmates’gaze, shehadendedupnotgoingoutwiththemonweekends.Shedidnot 6 7 feel she was missing out on anything, except, after several months, she noticed a change in their behavior. On Monday mornings the girls often displayed new clothes or new hairstyles, they smelled good, and some of them wore makeup. It soon became clear that the ambition of these weekly forays went beyond being seen in town, which had been the goal up to then. In short, whether they were girls who had “done it,” who pretended they’d “done it,” or who were still light-years away from “doing it,” their conspiratorial whispers, their fl irtations, their long sighs, had one single solitary focus: sex. As a high school student, Jeanne did not su er as much from the absence of sex in her life, or even from the absence of any immediate prospect of “doing it,” as she did from the way her classmates treated her, the strained silence that fell when she interrupted their hushed conferences, the impersonal smiles they gave her when she bumped into them when they were in the company of a boy, the winks revealing a complicity that had developed around activities and secrets from which the adolescent Jeanne wasTheexcluded.flightfor which Eli Mosserri had not, so to speak, prepared Jeanne took her by surprise, and the agitation that seized her was all the more confusing because it was foreign to her. During those endless days, Jeanne went over in her mind the women he had introduced her to in the past weeks, lingering on the most beautiful among them and trying to remember whether they were married. The ringing of the telephone made her jump—the inopportune caller found his conversation cut short. The big mirror in the bedroom saw her walking back and forth more often than usual. Confi ned at home, dreading being seen alone when Eli Mosserri was with “another,” she abandoned herself to this new trouble, fueled by questions that had no answers, reproaches that had no basis, those little dramas that keep us from 10 the sounds that came to her from the bedroom occupied by her husband, became agreeably familiar to her. He would appear at the end of the morning, at the time when he was formerly in the habit of calling her, and together they would have their second co ee of the day. One morning, Jeanne Mosserri found the following message on her work table: “Went out at dawn. Sorry for not having seen you before I left. Will be back in time for the concert.” For all that he had become a husband, Eli Mosserri did not say where he was going and left no telephone number to call in case of emergency. Jeanne forced herself to chase away every thought connected to this episode, which she was not reasonably entitled to resent. Late in the night, as she was getting ready for bed, Jeanne heard the sound of a key in the lock. She rushed into the entry hall, where she found Eli Mosserri with a travel bag in his hand; he headed toward his bedroom without a word. Not knowing what to do, Jeanne went to sit in the living room, where he eventually joined her, a cigarette and a glass of vodka in his hand. Jeanne had smelled the scent of tobacco on his clothes before, but she had never before seen him smoke. In silence, Eli Mosserri surveyed the apartment, whose aesthetic reflected a shared taste for great comfort combined with a certain sparseness, and whose decoration had occasioned unexpected moments of bonding. As if only then becoming aware of Jeanne’s presence, he excused himself for intruding at such an hour, and assured her that once his passport was secured, he would return to live at his place and would not bother her any longer. Then he said, “The person I’ve told you about has decided to end our relationship on the pretext of concern for family, wanting to protect the fragile happiness of the children, wanting to be free of the deception, the guilt, that our love has supposedly already su ered too much—a tired refrain, given the challenges we overcame and the joys we shared; emptywordsthatshowcontemptformycessacrifiandmyloneliness; lonelinessedintensifibytheuncertaintyofmyfuture,butthatInonethelessrefuseevertoexpress.”

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GHADYANLOOMEHDI frominspirationshisandslides,withpreoccupationhisTehran,inmuralshisaboutartistthewithspeaksAzimiNegar Hitchcock.AlfredtoChiricodeGiorgio

MG Our master taught us how to paint flowers, horses, and birds, and how to use color in the traditional manner. More than anything, paint ing miniatures taught me the value of patience. My first, which was probably ten by ten centime ters [four by four inches] or so, took me something like sixty hours to paint. I suppose it was a form of meditation.

MEHDI GHADYANLOO I grew up in a small suburb of Karaj, Iran, itself a satellite city outside the capital, Tehran. My father was a farmer and I was expected to become a farmer, too. Childhood games involved playing in alleys with small stones—very low fi! I had no contact with formal fine art. In retrospect, the artist in my life was my mother. She comes from an old nomadic tribe and only settled in one place at the age of seven. Before that, she and her family had moved from place to place by camel. When I was a child, she and her mother—my grandmother—were constantly in the background weaving carpets, kilims and gabbeh , so our house was full of textiles decorated with animals and flowers and trees in beautiful symmetrical designs. Years later, when I became acquainted with the Western tradition of still lifes, I found similarities between those works and my mother’s visual world. But I had never thought of her work as art; to me, it had always been a form of labor.

NA Can you tell me about your Persian-miniature classes? What kind of training did they offer?

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MG To be honest, I didn’t believe I had a gift. I’m not even sure if the portrait was any good [laughs ]. But I loved the feeling of giving life to something with my hands.

NA And your transition to painting? How did that come about?

MG The more I think about our way of life back then—children running along the rooftops that connected the mud-brick buildings in our small town, our mothers weaving methodically—it all seems like a form of performance art [laughs ]. It was an incredibly rich visual environment.

EGAR AZIMI Mehdi, your recent body of work features extravagant, seductive, otherworldly playgrounds made up of slides and ladders and other talismans of childhood. Naturally I’m curious about the visual world you inhabited as a child—television, books, art, toys— what did you grow up looking at?

MG One day, when I must have been about seven teen and in high school, an aunt of mine asked me to draw her portrait. I had no concept of what draw ing a portrait would involve. She asked me to draw her face. So I did, and to my surprise, she liked the result. From there she became my sponsor and sent me into Karaj, about an hour and a half ride by bus, to take art classes. At the time, we didn’t have many options when it came to painting classes, so I started with a course on Persian miniatures.

NA Or craft. So over time, you began to undo these tired dichotomies and your idea of what art could be grew more expansive?

NA She made this proposal out of nowhere? She must have sensed something. Was this the first time you understood that you had a gift?

NA I love that: art and its narcotic effects. Can you tell me a little about the first mural you painted? What was the subject? MG It was in Vanak Square, which was meaning ful because it’s one of the most important squares in Tehran—you probably know the histories of peo ple celebrating and demonstrating in that square. I painted a garden and a vast sky—in fact twothirds of the painting was this beautiful vast sky, set against one of the busiest intersections in Teh ran. My mural replaced a famous image of Imam Khomeini, the gnomic figure at the center of the Iranian Revolution. Over time, I saw people taking selfies with my mural, saw it on blogs and on the Internet. It felt like public art could begin to change the face of the city. NA And create a miniutopia, away from the leg acies of the revolution, the war with Iraq, crushing sanctions . . .

MG Exactly, to distract people from their problems. NA I’m now looking at a folder filled with images of your mural work. Some of the murals are incred ibly surreal: flying cars, children on bicycles

MG Exactly. He presided over a golden age of public art in Tehran.

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MG I got accepted into the University of Tehran to study painting. Right after getting that degree I began to study animation. But I was terrible at it. I had no gift for storytelling [laughter ].

NA Tehran isn’t exactly a feast for the eyes; cit ies like Esfahan and Shiraz are appreciably more beautiful. Tehran is rather gray, architecturally a little humdrum.

NA What happened next? What made you pur sue painting further?

MG It’s gray. Successive Western urban planners had been invited to Tehran over the years—like Vic tor Gruen, the mall-maker who is known as the architect of the American dream—but a lot of their plans weren’t realized in the end, or were poorly executed. All of which is to say, Tehran isn’t a good city for cars and it isn’t a good city for pedestrians, either. It’s polluted and overcrowded. I thought of my murals as a sort of painkiller for the city. I knew I couldn’t change the city fundamentally but maybe I could ease the pain, you know?

NA This was almost an extension of his election campaign.

NA Traditional narrative was not for you. I was fas cinated to learn recently that you spent some years painting murals for the city of Tehran. For people who have seen the city, or even images of it, its enor mous murals are iconic—synonymous with the city, especially with the immediate postrevolutionary period. I’m of course thinking of the often maudlin and dramatic depictions of revolutionary martyrs, the evils of imperial America, the Supreme Leader, et cetera. How did that mural work come about?

MG While I was studying animation, the Tehran municipality made a public call for artists to beau tify the city. I didn’t take it seriously at first; I didn’t believe they’d actually give artists the freedom to paint what they wanted. But after a few months, I noticed some good murals here and there in Teh ran. They were different from the revolutionary murals we were used to. The mayor of Tehran at the time, Mr. [Mohammad Bagher] Ghalibaf, was hoping to run for president, and . . .

Previous spread: Mehdi Ghadyanloo working on Finding Hope (2019), a mural in the lobby of the Congress Centre for the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 2019. Photo: Jack Hardy Opposite, top: Mehdi Ghadyanloo, We Didn't Start the Game, 2015, installation view, Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, London Opposite, bottom: Mehdi Ghadyanloo, Spaces of Hope, 2016. installation view, Greenway Wall, Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston This Mehdipage:Ghadyanloo, The Unreachable Beauties , 2022, acrylic on canvas, 70 7⁄8 × 98 ½ inches (180 × 250 cm). Photo: Farzaneh Ghadyanloo

MG My aim was to add a poetic element to the slides, especially with light. In a way, I gave them a new life. They may seem like banal objects, but at some point I began to think about them the way I think about [Gior gio] Morandi and his bottles.

MG I found them very beautiful. I loved the way sunlight passed through these trans lucent plastics. I found them painterly, too. And of course, I was intrigued by how much children loved them, you know? My daugh ter could sleep in one of those slides! [laughs ]

MG [Laughs ] I remember those lights. NA So tell me more about the slides. What specifically drew you in?

158 careening off walls, winged humans. There’s a distinct sense of wonder, of otherworldli ness. Did you paint on canvas at all during this period?

MG Not at all. I spent the next eight or ten years making public art. Tehran has like 10,000 mural-ready walls. It was a fantasy in some ways; even if we knew that this golden age wouldn’t last forever, it was a dream for a while. But yes, at some point I went back to painting on canvas.

MG I’d had some small exhibitions in Europe, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my painting. I guess I was still searching, hop ing to capture a form that more closely resem bled life, with all its ups and downs. One day about six years ago I took my daughter to a playground in Tehran. The slides in particu lar were very colorful—much more colorful than any playground you might see in New York, where everything seems more designcentered, gray, black, and white, you know? But these playgrounds were imported, largely from China, and in a gray city, the bright colors created an incredible contrast.

NA It’s funny, I remember that when I lived in Iran briefly, in my early twenties, there were some exuberant urban-planning elements, very ostentatious, very colorful: glow-in-thedark palm trees, flashing lights strewn across city squares, that sort of thing. Almost camp. My friends and I used to joke that someone was having a lot of fun in the urban-planning meetings. Come to think of it, they were prob ably, at least in part, a reflection of the coun try’s political and economic ties to China.

NA Thinking about the series you presented at Gagosian, I’d like to talk to you about child hood, which occupies a unique place in Ira nian culture. I mean, you see Iranian film makers such as Abbas Kiarostami and other members of the Iranian New Wave exploring childhood as a way of smuggling in weight ier themes, to the point where it’s become something of a cliché. When and how did you begin to think about childhood, play, and playgrounds?

NA I love that.

She loved the pure yellow, the pure red. The colors reminded me of some of the colored tubes in my studio that I’d never touched— fresh, transparent reds and violets. Just like that, one day I began painting slides. I remember I was about to have a show in Nor way at the time, and I told the gallery owner, who was expecting the waterscapes I’d been working on at the time, that I’d be presenting slides instead. He said, Okay, do whatever you want, but I don’t think I’ll sell even one! [laughs ]

NA If I may, I’d like to talk about darkness, even if that feels incredibly incongruous. Although these playgrounds are ostensibly sites of child hood innocence, there’s a darkness to them; at times, the frame is claustrophobic. The play grounds feel imprisoned within indoor spaces, their spatial elements nonsensical. I can think of at least one painting in your recent body of work in which there’s no access point to the slide depicted; elsewhere, I see a ladder that leads nowhere. And the lighting—it’s a bit sinister, no? Finally, the absence of human bodies leaves me feeling like something has just happened, or is about to—a touch of the apocalypse. All of which is to say, these strike me as psychological spaces as much as physical ones.

NA I think more about what’s absent in Hitch cock’s films than about what’s present. And now I’m pondering the phantom children in your paintings.

There are signs of their existence, but they remain signs only.

NA What else inspires you, Mehdi?

NA Yes. Let’s talk about the lighting?

NA Dualities are integral to Persian culture— the layers of meaning, the elaborate taarof —which is our national politesse, or even the way people tend to live double lives, especially today under the Islamic Republic. All of which is to say, your topog raphies of play are anything but straightforward.

MG A universal lament.

MG You see it in Milan Kundera’s literature and in Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema, among other places.

NA How so?

NA De Chirico’s abandoned plazas remind me of your paintings. There’s also something filmic about your work, or rather, I should say that some of them have the quality of a film still—that sense of encompassing worlds, a glimpse that leaves you wanting more. What has film taught you, if anything?

MG I suppose I learned a lot from Alfred Hitch cock, especially when it comes to manipulat ing small elements in my paintings and creating atmosphere.

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MG I was always fascinated by the way masters like Vermeer and Velázquez play with light, the chiaroscuro and so on. And I was taken by how Surrealist painters like Giorgio de Chirico play with walls, with those sharp perspectives that are both scary and beautiful.

MG I get inspired by the Persian poets, espe cially in studying Rumi and the place of light in his poems. Sometimes you see a sudden shadow in my paintings that fights the light, that invades it. I love to explore these dualities.

MG I’m creating a kind of atmosphere, a space of ambiguity. I don’t want to tell a story that’s good or bad per se. I want to leave things open to interpretation.

NA It’s true. The feeling of an uncertain future is increasingly our shared reality, and is one of the lessons of these last two years.

NA It’s an anxiety that isn’t bound by geography.

MG Exactly. We can’t see the children, but when I’m painting I can hear their laughing and playing.

MG If an ordinary bottle can speak to you, then why can’t a red slide do the same? Over time, I began to redesign the slides I’d seen. I added more fun, more adventure, more meaning. And I feel like I’m just beginning.

MG Yes, and yet over time I’ve come to think that these dualities are universal. The fear and existen tial anxiety that I associated with my homeland is everywhere, too.

MehdiOpposite:Ghadyanloo, The Memory of the Future, 2022, acrylic and oil on canvas, 92 ½ × 47 ¼ inches (235 × 120 cm). Photo: Farzaneh Ghadyanloo MehdiAbove:Ghadyanloo, Finding Hope, 2019 (detail), mural for the lobby of the Congress Centre for the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 2019. MehdiRight: Davos,Ghadyanloo,Switzerland, 2019 Artwork © Mehdi Ghadyanloo Photos: courtesy the artist

Y.Z. KAMI I remember fondly the evening when we met at my book signing in Paris. It was just before the pandemic, and we shared a lovely Japanese meal afterward. If I recall, we spoke quite exten sively about Balthus.

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YZK Thank you, Setsuko. This means a great deal to me. Ever since my student years in Paris, Balthus’s work has been very special to me. Around that time, in the late 1970s, it wasn’t very visible in museums, so I was familiar with it primar ily through books. And through those reproduc tions, you were an important figure for me because you were the sitter for La Chambre Turque [The Turkish room, 1965–66], which I absolutely love, as well as for Japonaise au miroir noir [Japanese girl with black mirror, 1967–76] and Japonaise à la table rouge [Japanese girl with red table, 1967–76]. Later, I saw reproductions of your own paintings and ceramic works. Then I finally got to see your work in person at Gagosian, during a trip to Paris in 2019. Those glazed terra-cotta trees have stayed vividly in my mind. I always think that one has to experience sculpture in person, because it’s threedimensional. S Thank you very much. When I saw Daya’s Hands II [2015–16], your painting of praying hands, in Paris in 2018, I thought, in a deep sense, that to pray is to paint a portrait. And today the portrait is a difficult thing to paint, I suppose because of pho tography. But you keep painting. YZK Yes, absolutely. It maintains something that the photograph can’t. As you well know, in repro ductions of paintings, what we lose is the surface of the canvas, which is essential. The surface of Balthus’s paintings, especially the later work with casein and tempera—that surface is so unique to him. I’ve always said that every painter has to

The artists address their shared ardor for poetry, the surfaces of painting, and nature.

SETSUKO Yes, it was really moving to talk with you about him, painting, and prayer. He used to say that to paint was the same thing for him as the act of praying. So naturally I felt a deep connection to your work, especially the paintings of the pray ing hands.

SETSUKOCONVERSATION

YZK Yes, you otherwise work with water-based paint, like watercolor, gouache— S Gouache, and I use some traditional Japanese mineral colors for certain works. Do you use oil?

YZK When I was finally able to see Balthus’s paint ings in the retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 1983, it was a revelation, because being in front of the work, not the book, I could experience the sur face of the canvas. S He cared about the surface, and about the act of seeing a painting in person. It was very interest ing, when I was twenty-something, I wanted to do a painting and I told Balthus I would like to paint. He said, If you don’t do an oil painting, it’ll be better [laughter ]. I asked him why. He explained that I’d be best served by following my roots, and because the Japanese tradition is very light, it would be bet ter to use the light, transparent materials of our tradition. And for the most part, I followed this advice—I’ve done only two or three oil paintings.

YZK Yes, it’s said that indigo is the color of the sky on a moonless night, that dark darkness—that’s why I call them Night Paintings , although I paint them in daylight. S In that series, and in the portraits that I saw in Paris, you seem to have mixed a little bit of casein in with the oil.

Y.Z. KAMI

S And if you see the reproduction, they remain small. So it’s fortunate that there’s that difference. It’s like music, with the differences between being at a concert or listening to a record.

161 invent her or his own surface. All of that is unfor tunately lost in a photograph of the work.

YZK Absolutely.

YZK Yes, my paintings are nearly exclusively oil. All the portraits and figures are oil, and also the series of Night Paintings that I started a few years ago. S Oh yes, those indigo works.

S Yes, but also fortunately, in a certain sense: the reason why we have to see the real is because there’s a difference. Each work has its own energy, which asks to be experienced directly. This was made clear to me when I saw an exhibition of Leon ardo da Vinci’s drawings. Even the small ones, when you see them, they are huge and strong—

YZK Oh [laughs ], I’m so happy that you noticed! Well, I do make a special mixture with oil paint, but it’s not casein.

162 S This makes sense, because it’s a sort of fresco surface that you achieve, a fresco effect.

YZK That’s beautiful. S Nature doesn’t need us, but we need nature. Trees can live much longer than I can. In Japan there are cherry trees that are 600 years old. These trees have special guardians; if there’s a typhoon or a heavy rain, the guardians go out to save a single branch. So we have that connection with nature very, very strongly. I’m sure that in Iran—it’s an old tradition—you have something to honor the trees. YZK Exactly. In Iran—except for the north, around the Caspian Sea, where it’s green and lush—the

YZK I’ve been developing that for years, exactly because of what you said: to bring the surface closer to wall painting, to fresco, by getting rid of the shininess of the oil. I’m happy that you noticed that dryness of the surface. S Yes. The effect also gives the paintings a timeless quality . . . you can’t situate when they were made, if that makes sense? YZK It could be today, or it could be centuries ago. S The unknown period [laughter ]. YZK I’d love to hear about the relationship between your work and nature. This September you’re having an exhibition of new ceramics, paint ings, and drawings at Gagosian in Rome, titled Into the Trees II S In Japan we have Shinto, preceding even Bud dhism. Shinto is animist. We find soul everywhere in nature: the stone, the tree, the river. It’s similar to many Native American peoples, the belief that power and sacred things are found in everything, from the smallest flowers and beyond. In Shinto the tree especially is praised. Let me show you: we write in Chinese characters—see here—here is the sign of a human being and here is a sign of tree, and the two together make the sign for rest. If you take the tree from the human being, we have no rest.

Previous spread, left: Setsuko, Chat assis sur fauteuil en osier vert (Cat sitting on green wicker chair), 1996–97, oil and gouache on paper, 45 1 2 × 31 1⁄2 inches (115.5 × 80 cm) © Setsuko. Photo: Zarko PreviousVijatovicspread, right: Y.Z. Kami, Messenger III, 2022, oil on linen, 66 × 48 inches (167.6 × 121.9 cm) © Y.Z. Kami. Photo: Rob McKeever This page, left: Setsuko, Untitled, 1967, watercolor and india ink on paper, 42 × 30 inches (106.5 × 76.2 cm) © Setsuko. Photo: Thomas Lannes This page, right: Setsuko, Raisin II, 2022, enameled terra-cotta, 28 3⁄8 × 11 3⁄4 × 9 1 2 inches (72 × 30 × 24 cm) © Setsuko. Photo: Thomas Lannes Y.Z.Opposite:Kami, Night Painting I (for William Blake), 2017–18, oil on linen, 99 × 99 inches (251.5 × 251.5 cm) © Y.Z. Kami. Photo: Rob McKeever

YZK It’s the same for me—poetry is so much part of everyday life in Iran. Although I left as a teen ager, and lived in Paris, then in New York ever since, there are two Persian poets that I read daily; I don’t exaggerate when I say this! The thirteenth-century poet Rumi and the four teenth-century poet Hafez—I always read these two poets. That’s my connection with my mother tongue, Persian. But then one encounters other

163 landscape is very dry, with large expanses of desert, so the presence of a tree, an oasis, is sacred. Much attention and prayer are given for the benefit of the Intree.my work until now, you won’t find land scapes. Recently, though, I’ve been working on a new series of paintings called Messenger. The first one is being shown right now in my exhibi tion at musac in [León,] Spain. In these paintings you see a figure from the back, walking toward a green landscape. The landscape and the figure’s garment could be from India, or somewhere in Southeast Asia or Africa. It’s probably the only time I’ve painted a figure from the back—we don’t see the face.

YZK Very true and quite mysterious. I think it’s fair to say that we both have an interest in mystery. It’s something I think we both find in poetry. And of course both Japan and Persia have rich, ancient traditions of poetry. S Poetry is very important in Japan. When I was living in Rome, my grandmother used to write me letters, and she would end each letter with a poem.

S The figure is seen only from behind? It’s interesting, something I’ve noticed—sometimes from the back you can sense another person’s feel ings more. It’s a mysterious experience. From the front, you have a face, you have expression—of course that helps—but something unsaid can be seen much more from a person’s back, particularly a sort of sadness or suffering.

S Absolutely, understanding is done intellec tually, but feeling, communication, this happens in the senses. I think we both hope that art can do much the same thing. YZK So you’re working on this continuation of ceramics that are connected to these elements of nature and the trees? S Yes, and to make ceramics, you touch soil. I like that contact, physically interacting with the material, it’s very important. You mentioned an exhibition at musac; what are you doing next? YZK I’m preparing a project that’s due to open in Florence in February of 2023. It’s going to be a sort of survey, installed across three different venues: the Palazzo Vecchio, the Museo Novecento, and the church of Santa Maria Novella. S What a beautiful project. YZK I hope you will come. S Yes, I will!

164poets, sometimes by chance, sometimes by fate. Recently I’ve been reading Fernando Pessoa, but then, you know, there’s the big problem of poetry in translation.

S Sometimes it’s just impossible. Language has a territory, no? And if you make a translation, the territory is different. It’s very difficult. I was fortu nate to be educated by my grandmother in poetry at a young age; encountering poetry when you’re very small—even if you don’t understand it, you get this feeling of beauty all the same. YZK You can feel it. T. S. Eliot said, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

ON VIEW

River of Forms: Giuseppe Penone’s Drawings has been made possible by the Directorate-General for Contemporar y Creativity by the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (2021) Unti tled (Senza ti tolo), 1982 by Giuseppe Penone (Philadelphia Museum of Ar t: Gift of the ar tist in honor of Dina Carrara, 2019-183-88) © Giuseppe Penone/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome

Additional funding is provided by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Ar t, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, Ginevra Caltagirone, Ms Jennifer S. Rice and Mr Michael C. Forman, Susan and James Meyer, Agnes Gund, Katherine Sachs, Thomas and Alice Tisch Constance and Sankey Williams, and ot her generous donors Support for the accompanying publication was provided by Gagosian, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Susan and James Meyer.

SEPT 24 – F EB 26

We’ve known one another for—I’ve lost track, but fifteen-plus years now?—working on books and talking about art. You’re very ded icated and deliberate in your collecting. How did you come to art? PAUL MARKS When I was younger, my father had a fantastic library— general books, historical books, but also art books. I was always looking at them from an early age. As a kid, maybe you collect hockey cards and things like that, and I suspect there’s a whole psychology of why people collect or how the composite of a collection repre sents their own lives. I collected, at the beginning, books, prints, and drawings. They were accessi ble. I started with a very classical art education, in a way, where I would meet with curators and they would take me in the vaults and show me prints and drawings of artists like Rembrandt. I started to read voraciously about these things. And then I came upon [Marcel] Duchamp and the world just exploded.

DF Duchamp turns all of that on its head. PM He, in his genius, redefined and challenged things and provided the arguments, provided the basis, for a new discussion in art. I tried to read everything I could on Duchamp. My mother is originally from Philadelphia, and of course there’s the great Duchamp collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This became my road to discovery and exploration, and as I hap pened upon Duchamp, other artists became quite apparent, whether it was Andy Warhol or Robert Gober. These artists in a sense took the baton from Duchamp’s mastery and ran with it. Various themes emerged in my collecting for various reasons. From Duchamp I began to under stand appropriation, replication, duplication. How many iterations away from the original is origi nal? This question then points to publication and photography. And I also became very interested in themes of time, like in On Kawara’s Date Paintings [1966–2013]. They are very conceptually based and have always intrigued me. I think one of the other major themes beyond conceptualism for me has been the ideas of the void and negation, whether that’s a Sherrie Levine knot painting or Rachel Whiteread in her sculpture practice—the negative aspect of I’vespace.alsobeen drawn to themes of black and white, like in the work of [Robert] Ryman or [Ad] Reinhardt. And then I would say my early inter ests in art traversed into elements of social rele vance—what are the issues in society, what are the difficulties facing different marginalized groups, what should be central for all of us as individuals and part of humankind in terms of fairness, in terms of equity, in terms of how people should be treated? My wife Shawna and I feel that our great est responsibility is to teach our children, of which there are five, their obligations to their community. Art becomes a vehicle to teach that. Art is a great educational tool, and artists, to me, always function a number of steps ahead of most of us in defining the time.

Paul Marks speaks with rare-book specialist Douglas Flamm about books as tools of selflearning, reference materials for collecting, and a mode to share his love of art with others.

DF So from Duchamp, you wound up conceptu ally with Ryman, [Josef] Albers, and others—there’s a narrowing down, a movement away from the object, going in a much more painterly direction. And then the more contemporary artists that you’re interested in are stepping away from a reductive modernist approach and really looking at the world around them. It’s not only art for art’s sake. How did you begin collecting socially engaged contemporary art?

The art library, or the library in general, for me is central to the collecting practice. It’s the educational tool, the engine of knowledge. WITHCOLLECTINGPAULMARKSBOOKCORNER

166 DOUGLAS FLAMM

DF Theaster Gates’s work is steeped in the his tory of art, society, and culture. He manages to bring together many themes at any one time, all coming from a very well-informed place. Librar ies, reading, and reference material are important to his practice and to you. I know you’ve always collected reference books to go along with the art in your collection. Would you speak a little about developing your own library and what that means to you?

PM I was fortunate to encounter Theaster Gates very early on in his career. He had these firehose pieces; we have one in our collection called In the Event of Race Riot IV [2011], this coiled-up firehose in a vitrine. It was one of those things that I just could not get out of my mind: what is going on here, what are the societal issues that have not been addressed? He captured the essence of these critical things going on in the world at large that have not been fully considered and appropriately confronted to date. When I go around to see art at various venues, whatever they might be, I wait for that feeling of getting hit in the gut. This collecting practice is somehow a titration of, one would hope, intellect and intuition. And when I encountered Theaster’s works for the first time, they impacted me and con tinue to do so.

PM The art library, or the library in general, for me is central to the collecting practice. It’s the educational tool, the engine of knowledge, and over time I’ve been very focused, as you know, on finding manuscripts and publications that can provide the education. The catalogues raison nés—I would study those, trying to be a good student, and trying to see what I thought were the

TheasterRight: Gates, In the Event of Race Riot IV, 2011, wood, paint, plastic, metal, and adhesive, 28 × 21 × 8 inches (71.1 × 53.3 × 20.3 cm)

167

This page, left: Marcel Duchamp, Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Valise), 1935–41, 1963–66, wooden box and cardboard with red leather cover and red linen finish, including 16Marcelofandminiature80replicasreproductionsworksbyDuchamp,14×151⁄8×378inches(41.2×38.5×9.9cm)©2022ArtistsRightsSociety(ARS),NewYork/ADAGP,Paris/EstateofMarcelDuchampThispage,below:StanleyWhitney, Purple Haze, 2017, oil on linen, 72 × 72 inches (183 × 183 cm) © Stanley Whitney PaulOpposite:Marks’s home library, Toronto Photos: Michael Cullen

key168 pieces in that artist’s entire creative trajectory over time. Those tools of self-learning have been important. In the contemporary art world, people don’t always value the historical context. And con versely, some people in the historical art world, after a certain arbitrary date, whatever it might be, they don’t think very much of the art that’s produced; they haven’t really turned the page. I’ve always tried to situate artists in what has come before and what has come after. Over time, I’ve collected books that are quite rare and difficult to track down and obtain. One of the quintessential artists’ books of all time is Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations [1963], including the ephemera that goes with it and the documentation from Laurence McGilvery, a book dealer who was the first one to take a chance on Ed Ruscha, and how Ruscha had corresponded back in the early 1960s. Mr. McGilvery was the first one to obtain his book “without doubt or hesitation.” It’s fascinating to see the origin of the distribution of these types of books—they weren’t considered very important back in the day. DF Yes, I understand. But of course they were important for Ed. PM Oh, absolutely. But the rest of the world hadn’t caught on yet. Once again, the artist was function ing numerous steps ahead of the rest of the world. That’s the element of their genius, in my mind. To study that material to me is a voyage of discov ery andNumerousexcitement.artists over time have made phenomenal books and I’ve endeavored to capture those as a grouping. You know, Ed Ruscha, Richard Prince, Sol LeWitt. You’d have to ask an artist their perspective on the role of books, but I would say

There are many different levels on which individuals can participate in the art world, whether you’re a professional who’s curating or a director or gallerist or art collector. Of all these individuals, to me the artist has the most difficult job. They are the ones who are putting themselves out there, and anything we can do to champion someone who’s going to provide that educational tool for us and for society should be done.

DF You have a busy schedule—you’re an ortho pedic surgeon, you’re the medical director for an NBA team—but at the same time, you spend an awful lot of time thinking about art and books and traveling to exhibitions. I’m curious how you stay on top of it all, yet it all stays meaningful.

PM With Mathieu, I thought this was a fantas tic young artist. There was a conceptual compo nent behind the abstraction and it was very care fully considered. We had acquired a work of his for the collection and I wanted some funding to go toward that publication. I spoke with Gaëtane Verna, the director of the Power Plant [Toronto]—a public gallery, not a collecting institution, that was mounting this show of his (that’s now traveling, actually)—and offered to help. I know how impor tant these books are to an artist’s career, especially at the beginning, because it gives another avenue for them to be discovered.

DF I’m also curious about your approach to giving back: donating things so that others can learn from them and helping younger artists, like Manuel Mathieu, get books published.

PM Participation in this world, this domain, makes things better in a similar way to having a great meal that’s enhanced by a nice glass of wine.

169 that they feel it’s a crucial aspect of their production and their creative output. People think everything’s going digital, but there’s still something special about the tactile experience of picking up a book and looking at the illustrations. That is really quite an intimate thing. And I know from the print and drawing world that in days past, collectors would have prints, etchings, and drawings in their drawers and they would pull them out, with their white gloves on, and study them, and it was a very personal, contemplative experience. That’s some thing I’ve always cherished, those moments when you can have your own revelations and epipha nies. I think that’s why the library’s been forma tive forPeopleme. are generous enough to send pub lications on various artists that you’re maybe just discovering. Sometimes that just opens up another world. And as a collector, I’ve always allowed myself what I call a left-hand-turn card: I may encounter someone like Theaster Gates at the beginning, whose work I don’t understand at first, but I see there’s something here and I need to stop for a moment of silence and contemplation to see if I can comprehend just a small percentage of what the artist is proposing.

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 or enhancing an archive they have already established. Douglas conducts individualized consultations, working to produce and acquire bespoke lists of titles.

I think art—not to equate it with imbibing, but it’s an enhancer. It’s an intellectual stimulator. Many of my worlds end up colliding. I’ve taken medical students to the museum to look at works and discuss them. I’ve bought art books for professional athletes who’ve asked me about art. It’s interesting because they’ve come back later and said, “Doc, you know, you bought me those books and now I’m collecting art.” Sharing books can open the door to other worlds for individuals to join in the journey. So all of that—everything’s morphed together, whether it’s sports, sneakers, photography, archi tecture, fashion, music, or art. It’s all become one big composition. Things shouldn’t be siloed, they should be interacting and merging and enhancing for all these different worlds. You know, I just thought recently how impor tant music is in my life. They always say, if a picture paints a thousand words, music paints a thousand pictures. So many artists have been influenced and motivated by music. For example, the Stanley Whitney painting in our collection is titled Purple Haze [2017]. And I’m a guitar player and I’m a big Jimi Hendrix fan, and every time I stand in front of that painting, it seems to riff back to the Hans Hofmann painting from 1959 that’s also in the col lection. I could stand in front of that for literally hours just exploring the brushstrokes in the juxta position of colors versus other colors that Hofmann talked about in his color theory of push and pull. So all of these things have a relationship to each other, and I think, for me, that’s it.

Sharing books can open the door to other worlds for individuals to join in the journey.

Brice Marden, Rivers , 2020 –2 1 Oil and graphite on linen, 96 × 72 inches (24 3.8 × 1 82.9 cm) © Brice Marden/Ar tists R ights S o ciety (ARS), New York Brice Marden Catalogue Raisonné The Brice Marden Catalogue Raisonné is announcing a call for works for the preparation of a catalogue of all of Brice Marden’s paintings and works on paper The project is now accepting submissions for unique works of ar t on canvas and on paper If you are an owner of an ar twork by Brice Marden, please visit the catalogue raisonné website to access the submission form. bricemardencatalogueraisonne.com The completed publication will document Brice Marden’s oeuvre with an entry for each work that includes des criptive information and a comprehensive provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography. Ti any Bell is the editor of the catalogue raisonné, working closely with the ar tist’s studio, Plane Image, which initiated the project in 2019.

175 Through October 30 | Getty Center FREEPlanADMISSIONyourvisitLeaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (IV) , 2009, Cy Twombly. Acrylic on canvas. Private collection courtesy Gagosian. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: Rob McKeever. Text and design © 2022 J. Paul Getty Trust

Returns, Revisions, Inventions KA TH AR IN A GR OS SE STUDIO PA IN TI 1988–NGS2022

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum September 23, 2022–January 23, 2023 St. Louis, United States Kunstmuseum Bern March 3–June 25, 2023 Bern, Switzerland Kunstmuseum Bonn April 25–September 1, 2024 Bonn, Germany Left : Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2008. Acrylic and soil on canvas, 290 × 201 cm. Photo by Olaf Bergmann. Right : Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2021. Acrylic on canvas and wood, 349 × 248 × 80 cm. Courtesy of Gagosian. Photo by Jens Ziehe. © 2022 Katharina Grosse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

IDEE DI PI ET RA GI USEPPE PE NONE A CA RACA LL A Unti Octolber 30, 2022diellionPSebastianoPh.Persano TERME DI CARACALLA soprintendenzaspecialeroma.itROMA

Dance with Me Henri HenriMatisse

November 20, 2022–April 23, 2023 Baltimore Museum of Art STANLEY WHITNEY, UNTITLED (SKE T CH FOR STAINED GLA SS WINDOW COMMISSION) , 2021, THE BA LTIMORE MUSEUM OF AR T: COMMISSIONED BY THE BA LTIMORE MUSEUM OF AR T. BMA 2021.193 © STANLEY WHITNEY. IMAGE: COUR TES Y THE AR TIS T

Curatorial Advice Appraisals and Valuations Insurance, Estate Tax, Charitable Donation Collection Management Short and Long-Term Strategic Planning Collection Database Management Global Art Market Access Galleries, Auction, Art Fairs, Private Sale Negotiation Expertise GAGOSIAN ART ADVISORY Laura Paulson – Director and lpaulson@gagosianartadvisory.comPrincipal917.755.9233MaryPhelps–DirectorofCollectionsManagementmphelps@gagosianartadvisory.com917.636.8126 Contact Information Jenny Mittica – Associate Director of Collections Florenceblagrange@gagosianartadvisory.comjmittica@gagosianartadvisory.comManagement917.853.4459BernardLagrange–Director609.751.8303Poynor–AppraisalCoordinatorfpoynor@gagosianartadvisory.com929.343.6824 Michael Walker –Nicolemwalker@gagosianartadvisory.comDirector+44782.729.7223Fromer–AdvisoryAdministratornfromer@gagosianartadvisory.com917.756.7518

Martin Wong, Sunset Park Panoramic , 1985 Sotheby's Contemporary Day Auction | May 20, 2022 Price Realized: $756,000 Sold on behalf of a client of Gagosian Art Advisory

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Constance Lewallen and John Baldessari in his studio, Los Angeles, 1977. Image: ThomasLewallen Gallery records, 1970–80, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

GAME CHANGER CONSTANCE LEWALLEN

For186 a half century, Connie Lewallen was a cura torial force, alternating between New York and California—a bicoastal pioneer. The path to becom ing a curator of contemporary art in the 1970s, when Connie began her career, was not just a matter of academic credentials; it was about a certain kind of hustle in which you learned to pivot among places, evolving aesthetics, and the distances between art history and the art of the moment. Energy and intellect had to be fused with determination andGrowingperseverance.upon the West Side of Manhattan, Connie traveled to California in the late 1960s to get a masters degree in art history from San Diego State. Her thesis focused on Mark Rothko. At the time, the content of Rothko’s abstractions was a deep and challenging subject, and scholar ship on it was only in its early stages. Afterward she moved back to New York, where she made her first of many daring career pivots. Connie was relatively unique among curators in that her early initiations were spent in commercial galleries. At that moment a foray into the gallery scene was typically considered a path to the dark side. In fact, however, it was a bonus, because all the action was in galleries; museums had not yet wholeheartedly embraced contemporary art as they do today. Connie had a fortuitous start as a gallery attendant: she sat at the front desk of New York’s cutting-edge Bykert Gallery, which hosted pioneering shows of young, soon-tobe-well-known artists associated with Min imalism, Post-Minimalism and Process art (Chuck Close, Brice Marden, Dorothea Rock burne, Barry Le Va, Alan Saret, Judy Rifka). It was the right time and place for Connie to hear directly from artists about their work and to learn how to talk about difficult art as it was making its precarious entrance into contem porary culture. In the early ’70s she moved back to California and settled into the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene. There she quickly found work at the Cirrus Gallery, which hosted exhibitions and published prints with some of the best artists working in Southern California, includ ing Ed Ruscha and Vija Celmins. She was later lured to the Broxton Gallery, owned by a young Larry Gagosian. She had good ideas, and Gagosian, who was at an early point in his own career, embraced them. He had offered her a big raise (a whopping $25 more a week, which was a lot back then) to leave her previous job and she remembered that time fondly, even sometimes recalling, “He let me bring my kids to work when they weren’t in school and I couldn’t get a babysitter.” In those early years, Connie’s expertise was influential in shaping the gallery’s burgeoning program, which spanned between classic modernism and the new avant-garde.In1977,after her time at Gagosian, Connie teamed up with Morgan Thomas to create the ThomasLewallen Gallery in a small second-floor space in Santa Monica. Their roster was a smart and diverse group that consisted mostly of Con ceptual artists but also featured a few important painters. Connie was the one you talked to when it came to the Conceptual ones; it wasn’t that she didn’t like painting, more that it didn’t need her as much. Painting had been around for centuries and was attended by a relatively simple, formal ist vocabulary. Conceptual art was new and com plex, and it benefited from her thoughtful and engaging explanations. I remember visiting their gallery when they introduced LA to the young, relatively unknown artist Jonathan Borofsky, who had just moved to the city from New York. She installed what seemed like hundreds of his Dream drawings on small sheets of paper, hung floor to ceiling in the stairwell that led up to the tiny gallery. We smoked and talked about them for hours. Ten years my senior, she had the youthful evangelism of a radical and ener getic teacher. It was fun and enlightening, but talk ing to a poor graduate student like me didn’t pay the rent. Connie was always about ideas, not profit. She later reminded me that not a single drawing was sold from that show. Maybe it was her interest in teaching (and a lit tle of that Connie hustle) that soon took her north to the University Art Museum in Berkeley, where she made the pivot to museum curator. There she capitalized on her special calling in the art world.

The Bay Area had a large number of interesting Conceptual artists who were basically ignored by New York and Los Angeles. Bay Area Concep tualism didn’t have as much of a popular-culture element as LA art, meaning it seemed less funny, more sly and darkly political and metaphysical. It was just the new challenge she needed. She befriended, and often supported, more of those artists than I can name (Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, David Ireland, Paul Kos, Suzanne Lacy, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tom Marioni, Bruce Nauman). She paid particu lar attention to Nauman’s early development at UC Davis and in San Francisco. Through her traveling shows and writing, Connie put the history of Bay Area Conceptualism on the map. In 2001, she brought the Conceptualism of Southern California together with that of the Bay Area in her critically acclaimed exhi bition State of Mind: New California Art c. 1970 (which she cocurated with Karen Moss). Meanwhile, she never lost her need for New York. She loved visiting New York gal leries . . . every one of them, or so it seemed. Many of us have stories of being worn out by accompanying her on forced marches through the New York shows. There was rarely time for Whenlunch. she married the poet Bill Berkson, her trail between San Francisco and New York grew even deeper. They had Bill’s place in New York and Connie’s in San Francisco, and they had a voracious appetite for learning about new art in both places. Just having din ner with them could be both enlightening and exhausting. I am someone who has followed contemporary art for almost fifty years, and the conversation often went something like this: Connie: Did you see that show? Me: No . . . Connie: What about the show at that little gallery on the Bowery? Me: No . . . And so on. When Bill died, there was only a short pause in the action. Even the covid -19 pan demic didn’t really slow her down. Stuck in her house in San Francisco, she found Phong Bui’s Brooklyn Rail and became something of a Cali fornia correspondent, continuing to proselytize through the magic of Zoom. And she wrote an arti cle on the San Francisco Art Institute for Gago sian Quarterly, exploring the challenges that faced an institution she saw as hugely influential for the many artists who had passed through it over the course of its 150-year history. When Connie suddenly died, at the age of eighty-two, all her friends on both coasts could say was “But she was just here. I saw her last week.” And they would all be right. Now, in her startling absence, we can only be grateful for the energy and ideas she transmitted.

Michael Auping pays tribute to the bicoastal curator, admiring her contributions to the proliferation of Conceptual art.

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