Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2022 by Gagosian Quarterly

LA ROSE DIOR COLLECTION White gold and diamonds.

his issue marks our fifth anniversary in print. Since our launch, we have added to our coverage of art with more voices from the worlds of film, fashion, music, poetry, dance, storytelling, and beyond. We recognize that the cross-pollination of influences often leads to interesting creative pursuits and we try to capture that spirit in our pages. This year we are unveiling “The Questionnaire,” a new column by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. The initial installment features the poet and artist Precious Okoyomon. For our fiction feature we are thrilled to present a story by Venita Blackburn that will continue to unfold over the next three issues. As the world performs an alternating dance between pandemic isolation and renewed activity, the medium of film remains a constant presence, at home if not always in theaters. In this issue, Natasha Stagg reflects on a selection of conspiracy-minded films curated by the artist Jim Shaw as part of Gagosian’s ongoing program with New York’s Metrograph cinema; Rennie McDougall writes on Shirley Clarke’s dance films, feature-length movies, and documentaries; and we devote our Game Changer feature to the visionary Brazilian director and film critic Glauber Rocha. Gagosian’s long-standing engagement with the work of Chris Burden continues with its latest publication, Poetic Practical, a book dedicated to the artist’s unrealized works. A conversation about the project reveals insights into some of Burden’s most ambitious ideas, the complexities of putting a publication of this depth together, and the importance of the artist’s archive. Awol Erizku and Urs Fischer get together to discuss the importance of working beyond traditional genres and their love of Los Angeles. And as the Calder Foundation unveils its recently completed artist’s proof of Alexander Calder’s historic BMW Art Car, Robert Rubin tells the story of the original machine. Gaia Repossi and Michael Ward Stout speak with Wyatt Allgeier about the unveiling of a new Repossi jewelry collection inspired by the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, discussing their admiration for the artist. Picture Books, an imprint organized by Emma Cline and Gagosian, recently published a new novella by Percival Everett. Author Brandon Taylor speaks with Everett about the book, the role of history in the writing process, and the similarities between science and literature. Our cover features Maurizio Cattelan’s Father (2021), a work included in his exhibition at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, his first solo show in China. The exhibition was curated by Francesco Bonami, who joins the artist here in a wide-ranging conversation about some of his iconic artworks, the question of flaws, and what it means to be taken seriously. Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

Precious Okoyomon answers Hans Ulrich Obrist’s questionnaire, inaugurating a new series.

42 Chris Burden: Unrealized Projects Gagosian editors and writers Andie Trainer and Sydney Stutterheim join Yayoi Shionoiri, executive director of the Estate of Chris Burden, in a conversation about their forthcoming book Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden.

50 Maurizio Cattelan: The Last Judgment Francesco Bonami interviews Maurizio Cattelan on the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition in China.

70 A Perfect Storm: Jim Shaw and Conspiratorial Film Last fall, in partnership with Gagosian and New York’s Metrograph cinema, artist Jim Shaw organized a series of six conspiracy-minded films revolving around thorny questions of truth, guilt, fantasy, and innocence. Here, Natasha Stagg reflects on the movies he chose and on the wider implications of what it means to go down the rabbit hole.

76 Ellsworth Kelly The second volume of the catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings, reliefs, and sculpture was released in October of 2021. Covering the years 1954–58, the new book was written by Yve-Alain Bois and published by Cahiers d’Art. Here, Bois speaks with Bob Monk about the origins of the project and the parameters and missions of this ambitious endeavor.

90 58 Memoir of a Picture Books: Poltergeist: Part 1 Percival Everett The first installment of a short and Brandon Taylor story by Venita Blackburn. The second book published by Picture Books, an imprint organized by Emma Cline and Gagosian, is Percival Everett’s novella Grand Canyon, Inc., with Untitled (Original Cowboy), a photograph by Richard Prince from 2013, included in the text. In celebration of the publication, Everett met with author Brandon Taylor to discuss the novella.

64 Awol Erizku & Urs Fischer: To Make That Next Move

On the occasion of the Calder Foundation’s unveiling of its recently completed Calder BMW Art Car (Artist’s Proof), Robert M. Rubin recalls the origins of the project.

104 Building a Legacy Art historian Richard Shiff speaks with Caitlin Murray, director of archives and programs at Judd Foundation, about the archive of Donald Judd, materials in the gray area between document and art, and some of the considerations unique to stewarding an archive housed within and adjacent to spaces conceived by the artist in Marfa, Texas.

Anne Baldassari reflects on the art-historical influences and radical breaks reflected in the artist’s work with color.

116 Anonymous Club In celebration of Anonymous Club’s multimedia engagement at the Shed, HEADLESS: The Demonstration, the artist Lengua contributes a new photo series to the pages of Gagosian Quarterly.

122 Shirley Clarke Rennie McDougall traces the blurred line between truth and fiction in the cinema of Shirley Clarke, with particular attention to the 1967 film Portrait of Jason.

128 Robert Mapplethorpe’s Jewelry: Gaia Repossi and Michael Ward Stout As part of an ongoing collaboration, Gaia Repossi, creative director for the Paris jewelry-house Repossi, has created a collection of pieces inspired by the art and jewelry of Robert Mapplethorpe. Speaking with Michael Ward Stout, president of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier, Repossi recounts the origins of the project.

146 Walton Ford: Assuming an Animal Form Walton Ford narrates the histories and myths behind two of his newest paintings.

154 Flags Gillian Pistell discusses the loaded symbol of the US flag in American art, focusing in particular on postwar and contemporary artists.

162 Jasper Johns and Samuel Beckett: A Conversation between Anthony Atlas and Bob Monk Nearly fifty years ago, Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns met in Paris and began to collaborate on what would become Foirades/ Fizzles, a deluxe, limited-edition artists’ book published by Petersburg Press in 1976. The Quarterly looks back to the work’s genesis in a conversation between Gagosian director Bob Monk and researcher Anthony Atlas.

186 Game Changer: Glauber Rocha Carlos Valladares celebrates the visionary Brazilian film director and critic.

132 Tetsuya Ishida’s Testimony Edward M. Gómez writes on the Japanese artist’s singular aesthetic, locating him as an astute observer of the culture of his time.

140 Fashion and Art, Part 9: Rick Owens Derek Blasberg speaks with the fashion designer Rick Owens about kid’s clothes, his upbringing, and the comparative freedoms and constraints between the art and fashion worlds.

Front cover: Maurizio Cattelan, Father, 2021; installation view, Maurizio Cattelan: The Last Judgment, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, November 20, 2021–February 20, 2022. Artwork © Maurizio Cattelan. Photo: Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

SPRING 2022

On the eve of Erizku’s exhibition in New York, the two artists discuss what it means to be an image maker, the fetishization of authorship, and their shared love for Los Angeles.

96 Alexander Calder Steps on the Gas

106 Hantaï

TABLE OF CONTENTS

40 Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Precious Okoyomon

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Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2022

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald

Founder Larry Gagosian

Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier

Published by Gagosian Media

Associate Editor Gillian Jakab

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Text Editor David Frankel

Associate Publisher, Lifestyle Priya Nat

Online Editor Jennifer Knox White Executive Editor Derek Blasberg Online Layouts Andie Trainer Design Director Paul Neale Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility Website Wolfram Wiedner Studio Cover Maurizio Cattelan

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 Wyatt Allgeier Anthony Atlas Anne Baldassari Venita Blackburn Derek Blasberg Yve-Alain Bois Francesco Bonami Maurizio Cattelan Emma Cline Awol Erizku Percival Everett Urs Fischer Walton Ford Edward M. Gómez Lengua Rennie McDougall Bob Monk Caitlin Murray Hans Ulrich Obrist Precious Okoyomon Rick Owens Gillian Pistell Gaia Repossi Robert M. Rubin Richard Shiff Yayoi Shionoiri Natasha Stagg Sydney Stutterheim Brandon Taylor Andie Trainer Carlos Valladares Michael Ward Stout

Thanks Karrie Adamany Claude Adjil Richard Alwyn Fisher Frank Appio Julia Arena Jin Auh Priya Bhatnagar Gina Broze Michael Cary Serena Cattaneo Adorno Michael Childress Vittoria Ciaraldi Dennis Doros Andrew Fabricant Elsa Favreau Kate Fernandez-Lupino Mark Francis Hallie Freer Mari Fujiuchi Brett Garde Beryl Gilothwest Lauren Gioia Darlina Goldak Miki Higasa Jackson Howard Delphine Huisinga Sarah Jones Liu Kaiyun Mary Anne Lee Kelly M. Quinn Sabyrzhan Madi Lauren Mahony Rob McKeever

Gregory Miller Olivia Mull Louise Neri Shayne Oliver Kathy Paciello Charles Penwarden Hervé Poulain Richard Prince Annie Roff Nancy Rubins Antwaun Sargent Jim Shaw Isabel Shorney Diallo Simon-Ponte Nick Simunovic Micol Spinazzi Chandler Sterling Andrea Walsh Sarah Watson Caroline Waxse Penny Yeung

Opposite page: Awol Erizku, Last riddle (The Night of the Purple Moon), 2022,Duratrans on lightbox, 61 5⁄8 × 49 3⁄8 × 3 ¾ inches (156.5 × 125. 4 × 9.5 cm) © Awol Erizku

CONTRIBUTORS Natasha Stagg Natasha Stagg’s books Surveys: A Novel (2016) and Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011–2019 (2019) were published by Semiotext(e). Her writing also appears in Vanessa Place’s book You Had to Be There: Rape Jokes (2018), Lou Cantor and Katherine Rochester’s Intersubjectivity Vol. II (2018), and Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections (2018).

Maurizio Cattelan A failed accountant who kills time doing art.

Caitlin Murray Caitlin Murray is the director of archives and programs at Judd Foundation, where she has worked since 2008. She is the coeditor of Donald Judd Interviews (2019), Donald Judd Writings (2016), and The Present Order: Writings on the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay (2011). Murray is the coowner of the Marfa Book Company and of 300 South Kelley, a gallery in Marfa, Texas.

Francesco Bonami Francesco Bonami has curated more than 100 exhibitions, including the 2003 Venice Biennale, the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and recently a Maurizio Cattelan survey at UCCA in Beijing. He writes for Il Foglio and Vanity Fair Italia. He is the artistic director of by art matters in Huangzhou and a member of the Board of Ges2 in Moscow. His last book is Post: the work of art in the age of social reproduction, published by Feltrinelli, Milan. He has fun on Instagram @thebonamist while writing a book about the destiny of painting. Artwork © Urs Fischer

Robert M. Rubin Robert M. Rubin is a historian of architecture, film, and contemporary art. He recently edited and wrote the introduction to Richard Prince Cowboy (2020). His curatorial credits include Richard Prince: American Prayer, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, in 2011, and Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact, which originated at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, in 2016.

Percival Everett Percival Everett is the author of twenty-two novels and four collections of stories. His novels include The Trees (2021), Telephone (2020), So Much Blue (2017), and Erasure (2001). He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and Creative Capital. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Brandon Taylor Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life (2020) and the collection Filthy Animals (2021). His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vulture, the Cut, and elsewhere.

Anne Baldassari Anne Baldassari entered the French Ministère de la Culture in 1983, where she was responsible for a program of support and innovation in contemporary art. In 1985 she joined the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and in 1991 was appointed to the Musée national Picasso–Paris, where she was a curator, director, and then president of the museum until 2014. Baldassari is the lead curator of two major exhibitions of modern French collections in Russian museums: Icônes de l’art moderne. La collection Chtchoukine (2016) and Icônes de l’art moderne. La collection Morozov (ongoing), both at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. In 1992 she published the complete catalogue of Simon Hantaï’s work in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou.

Derek Blasberg Derek Blasberg is a writer, editor, and New York Times best-selling author. In addition to being the executive editor of Gagosian Quarterly, he is the head of fashion and beauty for YouTube. He has been with Gagosian since 2014.

Gaia Repossi Growing up in Turin, Italy, in a family of jewelers, Gaia Repossi absorbed her father’s and grandfather’s passion for jewelry and early on developed a taste for visual art. In 2007 she joined her father in the family business, the Maison Repossi, taking on the role of artistic and creative director. Her inspirations include such artists as Joseph Beuys, Walter De Maria, Donald Judd, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Smithson, and Franz West. Her influences are also architectural, including the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier, and Repossi’s new boutique in the place Vendôme is the result of her collaboration with Rem Koolhaas. Her creative direction also receives input from designers, artists, and environmentalists she feels close to, such as photographers like Glen Luchford, David Sims, and Juergen Teller. Photo: Antoine Doyen

Michael Ward Stout Michael Ward Stout was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin (BA 1965, JD 1968). In 1974, he founded a legal practice focused on image-based issues and the rights of visual artists. He has represented a number of painters, sculptors, photographers, choreographers, and fashion designers, as well as arts foundations, museums, and artist’s estates.

Maison FRED is looking for pieces of its high jewellery for a book project and exhibition retracing the history of the Maison since its founding in 1936. Please feel free to send any relevant details by email to the following address:

heritage@fred.fr All details will remain strictly confidential and anonymous.

Richard Shiff Richard Shiff is Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at the University of Texas at Austin. His recent book Sensuous Thoughts: Essays on the Work of Donald Judd collects his various writings on the artist over a twenty-year period. For Gagosian he recently wrote “Haunting,” a text for the catalogue of David Reed’s exhibition of new paintings in 2020.

Hans Ulrich Obrist 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.

Precious Okoyomon Precious Okoyomon is a Nigerian-American poet and artist who lives in New York. Their second book, But Did U Die?, will be copublished by the Serpentine Galleries and Wonder Press in 2022. Okoyomon was a 2020 artist-in-residence at LUMAArles and received the Frieze Art Fair Artist Award in 2021.

Rennie McDougall Rennie McDougall is a writer based in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, frieze.com, Guernica, T Magazine, the Village Voice, and other publications. He received an Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2018. He was also the archival researcher on Stonewall Forever, a digital monument commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

Venita Blackburn Venita Blackburn’s writing has appeared in thenewyorker.com, Harper’s, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, and other publications. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction for her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. She is the founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative-writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories, 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.

Gillian Pistell Gillian Pistell joined Gagosian in May 2017 as a researcher and writer. She received her doctorate in art history from the Graduate Center, CUNY, in February 2019. She previously worked as a research assistant in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Sydney Stutterheim Sydney Stutterheim, PhD, is an art historian and writer whose research focuses on postwar and contemporary art. She joined Gagosian in September 2018.

Awol Erizku Awol Erizku is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, film, sculpture, and installation, creating a new vernacular that bridges the gap between African and African American visual culture, referencing art history, hip hop, and spirituality, among other subjects, in his work.

Urs Fischer Urs Fischer mines the potential of materials from clay, steel, and paint to bread, dirt, and produce to create works that disorient and bewilder. Through scale distortions, illusion, and the juxtaposition of common objects, his work explores themes of perception and representation while maintaining a witty irreverence.

Carlos Valladares 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. Photo: Jerry Schatzberg

Yve-Alain Bois Yve-Alain Bois is a professor of art history in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has curated many exhibitions, including the 1994–95 retrospective of Piet Mondrian in The Hague, Washington, DC, and New York; Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry, at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (1998); Ellsworth Kelly: Early Drawings, at the Fogg Museum, Harvard University (1999); Ellsworth Kelly: Tablet, at the Drawing Center, New York (2002); and Picasso Harlequin (2008), at the Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome. Among other projects he is currently working on the catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings and sculpture, of which the first volume was published in 2015 and the second just appeared. He is an editor of the journal October.

Bob Monk Bob Monk has been a director at Gagosian, New York, for twenty-five years, working closely with Ed Ruscha and Richard Artschwager.

Andie Trainer Andie Trainer is an editor and the print production manager in Gagosian’s publications department. She joined the gallery in 2008. Photo: CS Muncy.

Walton Ford Absorbing the techniques of scientists’ field studies, explorers’ notebooks, and natural-history-book illustrations, Walton Ford recasts, reverses, and rearranges the conventions of animal art. He is a devout researcher, responding to everything from Hollywood horror movies to Indian fables, medieval bestiaries, colonial hunting narratives, and zookeeper’s manuals. By shifting between the minute and the monumental, scientific distance and passionate emotion, human and animal points of view, and informational and narrative modes of discourse, Ford transforms his research materials into something like hallucinations. He grew up in the Hudson Valley, graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently lives and works in New York.

Anthony Atlas Anthony Atlas is an independent researcher based in New York who consults for artists’ estates and foundations. He is the editor of William N. Copley: Selected Writings. Photo: Dan McMahon

Yayoi Shionoiri

Edward M. Gómez

Yayoi Shionoiri serves as executive director to the Estate of Chris Burden and the Studio of Nancy Rubins, where she is responsible for stewarding Burden’s art-historical legacy and promoting Rubins’s ongoing art practice. She has degrees from Harvard University, Cornell Law School, and Columbia University. She serves as an advisory panelist to the Serpentine Gallery’s Legal Lab. Photo: Munemasa Takahashi

Edward M. Gómez is an arts journalist, critic, author, curator, translator, and graphic designer. Based in New York and Tokyo, he is the founder of the recently launched art-and-culture magazine brutjournal (www. brutjournal.com) and its related print publication, The brutjournal Annual.

Hans

Ulrich

Obrist’s Questionnaire

Precious Okoyomon 40

For this new series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents are invited to make a selection from the larger questionnaire and to reply in as many or as few words as they desire. Additionally, they are invited to provide an additional question of their choosing that will be added to the list for future participants. For the inaugural installment, we are honored to present the artist and poet Precious Okoyomon . 12.

What is energy?

The love that keeps us all grounded.

Does money corrupt art?

Absolutely.

23.

What is time?

The love that makes us free.

16.

Your favorite color?

The color of pomegranates and the soft blue/pink when the sky and the sunset start to kiss and god comes to bless us.

28.

Whom are you working with/thinking with?

Right now, I’m working and thinking with Toussaint Louverture through Édouard Glissant’s play about his life and the revolution he led, Monsieur Toussaint.

What is the role of titles?

To confuse, to trouble.

My unrealized project is a new way of everyday life, a movement of errant roots, a forest, a series of communications, of rhizomes spreading information into the world, a new language created by an environment, a new way of breathing and an ability to breathe. I want to make a space for fragilization, a utopia to feel in! That manifests in what one might call an existential healing center, a place outside of time in the middle of a forest.

What music are you listening to?

Justin Bieber, Messiaen, Standing on the Corner.

What was your first museum visit as a child?

Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

38. Any miracles lately? A:

My miracle is the unending love of everyday life, the magnetic energy of love, a whirlwind of encounters, the wind kissing my face and brushing me anew; today I wrote a poem while walking my dog and it felt like held and held in the world itself.

What is your definition of art?

Entangled organic movement and everyday life.

6. What is your unrealized project? A:

31.

33.

What couldn’t you live without?

Choosing love.

20.

What ought to change?

Everything. 41

CHRIS BURDEN POETIC PRACTICAL A new publication exploring the work that Chris Burden conceived but left unrealized delves into his archive to present sixty-seven visionary projects that reveal the aspirations of this formidable artist. The book’s editors, Sydney Stutterheim and Andie Trainer, discuss its development with Yayoi Shionoiri, executive director of the Chris Burden Estate.

This project was five years in the making and has been such a labor of love. Given that most artists must have ideas that go unexecuted for various reasons, what makes Chris Burden a particularly good subject for a sustained examination of unrealized projects? SYDNEY STUTTERHEIM Burden’s work was always about testing limits—that’s a through line in his performances, his installations, his sculptures— and there’s a speculative dimension to that. This is very different from someone who makes a sketch, or has early plans for a project and then executes them following an ordered logic of operations. Burden’s working process often started with a problem or a question that he sought to solve. That reflects his rootedness in the scientific method— in developing a hypothesis and then producing a series of tests to see whether or not something could be executed. This conceptual approach made it all the more likely that some projects would never be achieved. The fact that he thought about his work in that way, and set out to make projects that could potentially fail, was incredibly brave, and it also meant that there was the very real possibility of things remaining unrealized from the get-go. YAYOI SHIONOIRI Throughout Burden’s practice, he was committed to identifying limits, and then really trying to push those boundaries or somehow overcome them. Limits are multivarious in Burden’s work. Sometimes they’re physical, like testing the limits of his physical body in his ANDIE TRAINER

performances. Sometimes they’re mechanical or chemical. Then there are some that are invisible, and maybe even more insidious because they’re invisible, and Burden was trying to make them evident: sociopolitical limits or institutional limits. Often I get asked, what’s most representative of Burden’s work? Was he a performance artist? A sculptor? A site-specific-installation artist? And I answer, He’s all of those things because he’s in pursuit of the idea and the concept. AT On a poignant note, in addition to the fact that he was conceiving work that was testing the limits of possibility, there are also projects that Burden didn’t get a chance to realize because his life was cut short. The book presents the most recent evidence of this in the form of his last notebook, where he had pages and pages of ideas that he wrote down and didn’t have a chance to get to. Some are sketches, some are just titles. He was clearly an artist who always had many things he was mulling over and developing in his mind. SS The projects in the book really range in terms of their elaboration. Buddy L Helix [2012], for example, exists only as a single-page sketch. On one level you may think that doesn’t give you much information at all, but in fact it’s an incredibly rich document—as we started unpacking it, things came to light. “Buddy L” in the title refers to an American toy brand, therefore connecting to Burden’s extensive work with children’s toys. The spiral design recalls both Burden’s realized

Beehive Bunker [2006] and his unrealized kinetic sculpture The Matterhorn [1997], which have very similar structures, and in Medusa’s Head [1990] the trains go about in a spirallike design. Even when we had very little material, we worked synthetically, trying to think through even the simplest sketches. Other projects were highly developed. Some had models, some had extensive plans. Between the digital archives and the physical project folders at the estate, a fair number of projects had literally hundreds of pages worth of archival materials. The projects also vary in ambition. Some were intended to be public, like My Dream Show at the MAK [1994], where Burden wanted to make an entirely water-based travel route for his work from his studio in Los Angeles all the way to Vienna. He developed extensive plans for flooding the streets of Vienna, looking at what types of barges he would need and what kind of logistical or institutional support would be necessary to transport his art completely via waterways between these two cities. There are also projects that were much more private and intimate. Something like Bottle Pile, which has been ongoing since the early 1980s and is an accumulation of the glass bottles that have been consumed on Burden’s property over the years, is a very different type of project. The circumstances also varied: some projects were engineered purely from Burden’s own imagination, while others, like Gold Boat [1999], 45

Opening spread: Chris Burden, model for the installation Xanadu as proposed to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2008. Photo: Joel Searles Previous spread, left: Chris Burden, sketch for Swimming Lane, early 1980s. Photo: Brian Forrest Previous spread, right: Chris Burden, drawing for The Ever Burning American Flag, 2009. Photo: courtesy the Chris Burden Estate This page: Chris Burden, model for the installation Xanadu as proposed to the New Museum, New York, 2012. Photo: Liza McLaughlin Opposite: Chris Burden, Sex Tower (Architectural Model of 125 Foot High Sex Tower), 1986. Photo: Douglas Parker

came about as a result of a commission. There are also project proposals that sort of took on a life of their own. YS The sheer volume of material in the archive for some of these projects may be indicative of certain things, like that Burden kept coming back to a particular project. Sometimes there was a lot of correspondence in the back-and-forth between him and the potential organizers; interestingly enough, I’m not sure that necessarily indicates the mind space or the intensity of the thoughts that Burden directed toward it. For me there’s this complexity of acknowledging and honoring the sheer volume of the material that may have existed for a particular project, while also thinking about what isn’t there and why it didn’t make it into the archive. We then used our forensic, historical, critical, and even legal skills to try to fill in those gaps. AT Yes, our job was really to present as comprehensive a picture as possible of each project while also representing the range of materials that were saved for each in the archive. For a project like Sex Tower [1985] there was such a wide range, from formal drawings to loose sketches to technical calculations to periodic tables to site photographs to a sample of gold leaf that he wanted to use at the top of the tower—as well as an eleven-foot-tall sculpture, titled Sex Tower (Architectural Model of 125 Foot High Sex Tower) [1986] and made of wood and gold leaf, as the full-scale version of the work was intended to be. We really wanted to present that 46

range in the book so that readers could see what we saw in the archive, what Burden was mulling over, these certain concepts again and again with varying degrees of formality, so you could really get a sense of the gears turning in his brain. Yayoi, we’ve touched on a few of the reasons why the projects in this book may have remained unrealized, but there were others as well. YS Financial or budgetary restrictions were very real for many of these projects. Although Burden may have been interested in exploring a concept, and there may have been curatorial support or advocacy from some of the institutions with which he was corresponding, for many of the unrealized projects either time or financial resources ran out, unfortunately. In addition, some of Burden’s ideas were several decades early in terms of technological capabilities. One of those is When Robots Rule: Two Minute Airplane Factory, where Burden attempted to actualize a robot that would create balsa-wood toy airplanes and send them flying every two minutes at the Tate Gallery in London. Burden was trying to achieve this in 1999, and he was way ahead of the times because he didn’t have access to open-source coding, which makes the technological aspects of the projects more viable. We’re excited that the estate is currently working on finishing the object, keeping intact Burden’s artistic and design intent but using updated technology and materials.

No matter how interesting a project is or how established an artist may be, at times there are basic practical limitations to executing art that can’t be overcome when an artist is working in the real world. That doesn’t mean that those projects don’t have value. There’s power within the process, and one of the book’s strengths is making that process evident. What, for you, were some of the major themes of the unrealized projects that emerged over the course of the book’s development? SS We considered various organizational possibilities for the book, such as arranging the projects chronologically or by geographical location, but ultimately there were certain ideas and topics that kept reappearing across the individual projects. The major themes that ended up structuring the book we actually derived from Burden’s own words. These we found in a letter from 2005 in Burden’s archive in which he talks about his realized works. He comes up with four categories: energy, systems of transportation, architecture, and power. While we ended up broadening “systems of transportation” to “systems,” using this thematic organization that came from Burden’s own analysis of his realized work situates the unrealized projects in a really helpful way and follows a logic that’s already understood within his oeuvre. YS It felt like an “aha” moment when we started thinking about the project based on that letter. There were additional “aha” moments in finding

This page: Chris Burden, drawing for My Dream Show at the MAK, 1994. Photo: © MAK Opposite page: Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden (New York: Gagosian, 2022). Photo: Rob McKeever All images © 2022 Chris Burden/Licensed by the Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

so much crossover—there were works that could be considered under multiple themes and subthemes, which I think shows that his oeuvre is very cohesive. AT The work can be viewed through many different perspectives. Other themes we thought about that connect a lot of works were water, recycling, accumulations, Americana. . . . We hope people will see themes emerge for themselves, or make connections that we didn’t among the realized and unrealized works—we want this to be a jumping-off point for future scholarship and engagement with Burden’s work. Yayoi, given the extensive nature of some of the plans Burden provided before his passing, how does the estate handle the possibilities of execution since then? YS This can be a complicated question for artists’ estates. From an art-historical as well as a legal perspective, the artist’s intent is most important. How do we identify what that intent is, and how do we acknowledge and honor it? With Burden’s notes and voluminous archive, there’s a lot in those archives giving us instructions as to how to potentially proceed if we wanted to actualize a project. In terms of practicality, there are a number of vectors of analysis, both about the “what” and the “how.” The first, I think, is viability: do we now have the technology available to us that maybe Burden didn’t have when he first conceptualized the project? Is the work practicable or logical to achieve? Another vector of analysis that we think about is how far along Burden was in both the conceptualization and the actualization of the idea. Are there, for example, models or maquettes? Is the work already partially produced? Then some of the other vectors of analysis include how much information we have that would allow us to piece the 48

puzzle together, and, of course, financial considerations. The final vector of analysis is the significance to his overall body of work, which is highly subjective but is important to think about. And again we’re very lucky that Burden left us this rich archive to help us gain these insights. AT What do you hope readers will take away from the publication? YS Had Burden still been with us on earth when this book was finished, he would have been seventy-five. It feels particularly momentous that we’re putting this project, five years in the making, out into the world. In the public eye, Burden is often associated with site-specific installations that have become iconic, beloved landmarks of LA, like Urban Light [2008], for example. I consider these gifts that he left to the community to behold, love, and enjoy. But Burden also produced a body of work that was incredibly layered, complicated, political, and message based. He was persistent, and he consistently challenged the status quo, and I think this book reminds us of that innovative spirit. Finally I think the book is a testament to the art-historical stance that an artist’s body of work encompasses both realized and unrealized projects. SS That last point is incredibly important, right? For me, as a Burden scholar, I hope this book illuminates the enormity of his aspirations and the scope of his projects beyond what’s materialized as finished work. Going into it, I wasn’t aware of many of these projects, and it ultimately helped me to understand his career and his practice much more comprehensively. Also, on a more practical level, the book offers an interesting framework for handling unrealized projects by other artists. Analyzing realized and unrealized projects together, synthetically,

might present a new way of thinking about artwork more generally. YS I’m very curious to hear which projects were an epiphany for you both? SS The first project I was shown when I was approached to work on this book was a reproduction of Swimming Lane, which was a plan dating to the early 1980s for a suspended glass swimming pool to be built at a future date on Burden’s and Nancy Rubins’s Topanga property. Despite the conceptual ambition of this work, it only exists as a single sketch on a paper plate and in Rubins’s recollections of it. It was never completed. The concept is so elegant and simple and yet ambitious at the same time; it outlines this sort of aspirational quality. It’s very romantic in how it speaks to the artistic impulse of striving to create something more than or different from what is currently present. That’s a major contributing factor in what drives an artist to create and continue to create, despite the fact that so many works might remain unexecuted for whatever reason. AT I came to love so many of these projects as we put the book together. But for me it’s really about the more intimate, Topanga-based works. On the property are Beehive Bunkers, train parts, Erector-set skyscrapers, Bottle Pile . . . the communal and temporally open-ended nature of Bottle Pile in particular is very fascinating to me. Burden really surrounded himself with his art and it manifested at every level of his life. There were so many homegrown ideas that no one would otherwise know about. They weren’t pitched to museums, they weren’t pitched for art prizes, but they were so representative of his practice and preoccupations. It’s a special privilege to know about them and a special privilege to present them here.

MAURIZIO CATTELAN: THE LAST JUDGMENT

For his first solo exhibition in China, at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Maurizio Cattelan presented a selection of twenty-nine works that spanned his career. The exhibition was curated by Francesco Bonami, who joins the artist here in a wide-ranging conversation about some of the iconic artworks, the question of flaws, and what it means to be taken seriously. While organizing the first major retrospective of Maurizio Cattelan’s work in China, at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, I had the opportunity to convince my friend to agree to this interview. We met first at the Torre di Pisa restaurant in Milan, then at a Chinese restaurant near his apartment in New York. Despite his early retirement after his exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2011–12, Cattelan has never lost his taste for a good provocation, crashing back into the art world, for example, with his prescient golden toilet, America, at the Guggenheim in 2016. He is deeply entertaining yet equally deeply capable of transforming the rules of the game. One of his better skills has always been to avoid roadblocks, whether in his own imagination or arising through the cowardice of institutions. In China, to spare the host institution questions from officialdom while keeping two seminal works in the show, he transformed the famous pope in La Nona Ora (The ninth hour, 1999) into a homeless person covered with pigeons, suggesting a likely destiny for the head of the Catholic Church after its tsunami of sexual scandals. him (2001), the kneeling and praying Hitler, already presented at Gagosian in London in 2014 in front of a pink Fine di Dio (The end of God) by Lucio Fontana, was presented in Beijing with a paper bag over his head. I asked if this was a reference to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Why? You have to see something violent in a simple paper bag? I was always fascinated by the hypocritical law in the United States that forced people drinking beer in public to hide the bottle in a brown paper bag. Most of the time MAURIZIO CATTELAN

you just had to look at the person’s face to figure out he or she wasn’t drinking a soda. So I thought I could hide the face of Hitler by just placing a paper bag on it. But then I was walking in Milan and I saw a bunch of tourists standing in front of a church wearing these very clumsy VR glasses and I thought, Wouldn’t it be great if technology could create a simple paper bag that you put over your head and inside you could experience a totally different universe? Outside you see the lowest-tech device and inside you’re projected into a totally different dimension. I like the contrast between the paper bag and an augmented reality of the utmost sophistication. Plus it came in handy to present the work in a complicated context like Beijing. FRANCESCO BONAMI I didn’t want to open a can of worms. MC I’ve never used worms but that could be an idea . . . FB You used pigeons, which are a kind of worm with wings and feathers. Why did you call the work Tourists, Ghosts, Kids? MC When I was a kid I used to see all these pigeons in my city’s squares with people selling corn to tourists who wanted a picture taken with a pigeon eating from their hands. But one day my mother brought me to the movie theater to see Hitchcock’s The Birds [1963]. It freaked me out. For years, I couldn’t go near a square invaded by those birds. Luckily they became pests and they were . . . let’s say . . . relocated. The titles refer usually to groups of individuals seen as a whole. The tourists in particular—in Italy we see them not as a group of people each with his or her own identity but as a bunch of humans who all look the same and who are threatening our environment and peaceful daily life. Kids are a little bit the same. They move in a group; they’re noisy and in some ways also a menace. Kids together can produce quite a bit of damage. They’re a liability. Ghosts, I don’t know but I feel they’re the same: they move in groups, they gather together to divide houses to haunt among themselves. You think of pigeons as a mass, not as individual animals. . . . Forget about pets.

Why so many? Why everywhere? I use them as decoration the way someone would use a motif of flowers on top of a room. But my decoration is disturbing. Actually, I think all decoration is disturbing. I agree with the architect Adolf Loos on this. Pigeons give any space or architecture an eerie feeling—the viewer feels watched, controlled in some way by an unknown entity. When people are uncomfortable, they’re more aware of what they’re looking at. I guess pigeons help my work to avoid being dismissed right away. FB Are you afraid of being dismissed? MC Very much so! It’s my life’s worst fear. It took me a long time to climb up to where I am and I’m still terrified of being kicked out. I have an intruder complex: sooner or later I fear they’ll find out I wasn’t invited and they’ll throw me out of the art world. FB Once I said you were an impostor and you got kind of upset. MC Yes, I was upset because an impostor is someone who wants to be someone else, who presents himself as someone he is not. You can say whatever you want about me but you can’t say I tried or try to be someone else. I am who I’ve always been. I have many flaws, okay, but my flaws are not someone else’s. FB Do you work on your flaws? MC Do you work on yours? I mean, what kind of a question is that! No, I don’t work on my flaws because I built my identity on them and if I’ve ever been able to make a good work of art, it was because of my flaws and the flaws of the people I grew up with. You work on your flaws if they stop you from being what you want to be, or from being successful in what you do. FB With America you ended up on the front page of the New York Post. If you had to choose between selling the work and being on the front page of the Post, what would you have chosen? MC The front page for two reasons. First, a work’s goal and duty are to reach as many people as possible. Any artist who denies this is a liar. Second, because it’s like that famous saying from Naples: “Having power is better than fucking.” That’s FB

Previous spread: Maurizio Cattelan, No, 2021, silicone rubber, natural hair, clothing, boots, and paper bag, 39 ¾ × 16 1⁄8 × 17 inches (101 × 41 × 43 cm) This page: Maurizio Cattelan, Kids, 2021, taxidermied pigeons, dimensions variable Opposite, top: Maurizio Cattelan, Zhang San, 2021, clothing, boots, and taxidermied pigeons, dimensions variable Opposite, bottom: Installation view, Maurizio Cattelan: The Last Judgment, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, November 20, 2021– February 20, 2022

Following spread: Maurizio Cattelan, Spermini, 1997 (detail), painted platinum silicone, dimensions variable Artwork © Maurizio Cattelan Photos: Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

It took me a long time to climb up to where I am and I’m still terrified of being kicked out. I have an intruder complex: sooner or later I fear they’ll find out I wasn’t invited and they’ll throw me out of the art world. simply because if you fuck too much, fuck most of the time, you can’t concentrate on getting power, but if you have power, you can usually find time to fuck as much as you like. That’s the big problem with powerful people. So if I’d chosen to sell the work and not have the front page of the New York Post, I would have given up the work’s purpose. But having the front page I’m sure helped sell the work. FB America was supposed to be a public work, used by as many people as needed to use it. Now it’s in a private collection, used, maybe, by a few people, though maybe it’s presented on a pedestal. How do you feel about that? MC No good. The meaning of the work is definitely diminished. Its true meaning was activated at its maximum when common people had the opportunity to use something very elitist. Sure, part of the meaning is due to the encounter between a precious material like gold and poor discarded elements from our body. I want to hope that the owner of the work frees himself in it to give it its meaning as an artwork. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard this story of [Marcel] Duchamp being pestered by some relative to give him a work. Finally Duchamp agreed and gave the guy a book to hang outside the window. The work was the book hanging from the window. If the owner pulled the book in to show it, it wasn’t a work of art any longer. Well, I think a little bit the same about America: if you don’t use it, it goes back to being just an expensive toilet, not a work of art. FB You’ve told me that you didn’t sell a work for almost six, seven years. Is that true? MC Yes, it is. FB You didn’t want to sell work? MC No, people just weren’t interested in my work for a while. FB Why? MC I’d announced my retirement. Can you blame them? It was like buying a car from a company that had announced it was closing. With artists it’s even more problematic because if they’re alive and stop working, that could do a lot of damage to the existing work. When you stop being an artist you become very bitter and you maybe want to take revenge with your existing work. FB Why did you decide to come back? MC I didn’t want to be bitter. FB And you started selling again. MC Not right away, it took me a while. America helped me to get back on track without selling out. FB Why that work? 54

It belonged to the luxury world but at the same time it was accessible, popular, understandable, not really even for sale. It stirred desire in the head of the elite but maintained its place in people’s imagination. FB Then Comedian [2019] came and eclipsed everything you’d done before. MC I think that’s an exaggeration. It definitely took me by surprise, it started to have a life of its own I wasn’t expecting, but I don’t think it erased everything. . . . I hope not. FB Where did it pop out, this banana idea? MC You must know one of my biggest frustrations is not being able to paint. I tried many times in different ways but I’m the negation of a painter. I can’t, that’s it. I have to live with it. I was in New York, it was the fall of 2019, and I was going through galleries and looking at auction results. Painting, painting, painting. Most of them sold for absurd prices. FB You were envious of the prices. MC Yes, of course I was. But I also thought about the idea of painting and what a painting is. A painting is the most recognizable symbolic space in the history of art. Anybody, really anybody, can take a rectangular or square piece of wood, canvas, or paper, put something over it—color, shit, straw—hang it on the wall, and whoever sees it will call that thing a painting. Never mind good or bad. So I thought about something that, without being a painting, could compete with a painting. Something that anybody could see and know what it is. I guess everybody knows what a banana is. FB But now, those who see that banana attached to the wall with gray gaffer’s tape will think about you. MC I don’t know what they think; I just know that Comedian has a life by itself. FB Why “comedian”? MC A comedian is not an actor but is not a normal person either. A comedian lives in the limbo between fiction and reality. A comedian is someone who can fail very easily. A comedian is doomed to make people laugh—an actor has the option of making people cry. Comedian is not a painting, it’s between conceptual art and a joke. Conceptual art doesn’t have any emotion; a joke usually doesn’t carry any big thought. FB So why is it so successful? MC Like a joke makes you happy, makes you smile, it’s comfort art, if you want to call it art. Not much art makes you truly happy and comfortable. But it has another quality: it’s not a gadget. It’s not art turned into a gadget. It is what it is. FB People compared it with Duchamp’s Fountain [1917]. MC I know I risk sounding slightly arrogant but Comedian is more honest than Fountain. Duchamp took an object and presented it as an abstract sculpture, deceiving the viewer with its presentation and with its signature. Comedian takes the existing context—two existing elements, the tape and the banana—and places them as they are on a white wall. The fact that it was presented at an art fair changed the perception a little but not much. It works perfectly well on a huge wall in the show in Beijing. As people used to say, “It holds the space very well.” FB The last time you chose to show in a private gallery was in 2002, at Marian Goodman in New York, where you presented Frank and Jamie, two policemen leaning against the wall upside down. There’s a reason why you chose not to do shows in galleries for so long. MC

It’s a little like with sentimental relationships. Until you break the habit of seeing each other you never end any relationship. In this case I didn’t end a relationship with any of my dealers but I ended the bad habit of being tempted by gallery shows. Like smoking—it doesn’t mean I won’t start smoking again, but it’s unlikely. I trapped myself in a sort of public sphere that I can’t escape any longer. I guess it was the same for Christo and Jeanne-Claude: once you wrap the Reichstag, you can’t go back to wrapping a chair for a gallery show. FB That’s why in your last show in Milan you went for a work—Blind [2021], a clear reference to 9/11—that I feel demands a public context. MC Yes, I tried to pitch Blind for a public space but nobody wanted to take the chance. 9/11 is still a loaded subject. FB Did you want to push people’s buttons? MC Not at all! I wanted to push the button of our collective memory. But I realize it’s too soon to reset it. Until now, with covid, 9/11 was the only event the whole world shared and could not cope with. I deluded myself that Blind could be a kind of closure through art. People responded, Wow! Not, Ouch! Which I guess was what I went for. FB Compared with other successful artists of your generation, you’ve kept a very modest lifestyle. Is it an attitude or your real way of living? MC What do you mean “modest”? I live a very comfortable life. There’s no modesty in my lifestyle. It is what it is, which means it is what I need. If you want a more philosophical answer, I could say that I know how to fall but I’d rather fall from not too big of a height. FB What is your work really about? People revere you. People praise you. People despise you. Do they really know what the work’s about? MC My guess is as good as theirs. My work is about wondering who we’re around for. My work is about getting the attention of the grown-up. I guarantee you it’s still a struggle, and it’s very painful to keep seeing in the eyes of many critics and curators that glance of mistrust about my work. I often still fight to be taken seriously. It took me years to shed the stigma of being a one-liner artist, or even to be considered an artist. FB I still vividly remember when in Venice in 1993 I was walking with a very influential and powerful art consultant under Lavorare è un brutto mestiere [Working is a bad job, 1993], the huge billboard a perfume company put up in the space I gave you and that you leased to them. I was explaining the “meaning” of the “work” to her and she dismissed it: “Boring, nothing new, already done.” I still think about it. I met her a few years later and she told me you were a genius and she was trying to buy one of your works for a client. MC Is she still around? FB Not really. MC Well, I guess it matches what you and I always remind each other: names in the art world are written in pencil. FB As a middle-aged white European male, are you concerned about ending up canceled in some way? MC That goes with the fear of disappearing or being kicked out. In my case it has nothing to do with culture, it has to do with social status or class struggle. But I wouldn’t be surprised if soon enough some kind of mob pulled down my L.O.V.E. monument in Milan. You never see hedge-fund guys taking to the street to protest. If, for once, they had the guts to do it, I think they’d be the ones to throw that sculpture down. MC

My work is about wondering who we’re around for. My work is about getting the attention of the grownup. I guarantee you it’s still a struggle.

Percival Everett is a trickster, his writing always shifting and twisting in dazzling and surprising ways, his books dancing a two-step with the reader. In his novella Grand Canyon, Inc., published by Gagosian’s Picture Books imprint, he takes us on a bawdy trip through the American West via the larger-than-life character of Rhino Tanner. Grand Canyon, Inc. is presented alongside work by Richard Prince, another of our great tricksters. Both Everett and Prince subvert the iconography of the West, interrogating its mythic visual and narrative tropes with a canny s ide w ay s v ie w. T he pairing of their work is especially resonant. Brandon Taylor, whose novel Real Life was short-listed for the Booker Prize of 2020, wrote the introduction for last year’s reissue of Everett’s canonical novel Erasure (2001). He re Tay lor s p e a k s w it h Everet t about Gra n d Ca n yon , Inc ., self-mythologies, and the American fantasy of the western. —Emma Cline

the American government would sell the rights to the Grand Canyon. And of course the very next thing that a person does after buying it is plop this monstrous gift shop theme park on it. How did those different threads—national landmarks, public lands, this very American impulse to turn everything into money—come together for you? PE I think it probably started when I was thinking about the privatization of prisons. My first idea was not the Grand Canyon; my first idea—and I

I’d love to hear you talk a little about how you approach things that seem absurd on their face and then make them feel totally natural in the context of the story. PE I have to start by saying it doesn’t always work. So I have to back up. As with most strange things, the more matter-of-fact the presentation, the more believable they are. If no one in that world thinks they’re strange, then they’re not. Therefore, I usually try to go with understatement. Understatement in fiction leads to overstatement in reality [laughs]. BT And with the protagonist of this story, you’re able to approach something akin to the idea of “the man, the myth, the legend.” Rhino Tanner is this outsized character when we meet him, and then, in the course of the book, you include these quieter moments of his childhood. There’s a vulnerability to him in his youth that you don’t quite see when he becomes the R h i no Ta n ner. How did you go about finding the squishy human [laughs] inside someone that legendary? P E We l l , I t h i n k a t some poi nt a l l of us are squishy humans. No kid starts out bad. I ’m no t e ve n s u r e I was tr y ing to be fair to him as much as . . . if he’ d star ted out bad, he wou ld n’t be nearly as interesting as he is. It’s the insecurities that drive that manic desire for power and wealth and fame. Aga i n, it’s t h is ver y American experience. You know, think of all the kids who’ve gone off to war for this country with no choice but to follow orders, and of the mythology that surrounds all of it, the idea of masculinity that comes out of films of the West and of war. BT Absolutely. Rhino makes h is for t une k i l l i n g e nd a n ge r e d animals; there’s that incredible scene where he and the sultan are in the balloon and they drop grenades on giraffes and water buffalo. It’s total carnage, but he’s like, Yeah, another day on the job. How did you decide to have Rhino’s sidekick Simpson Trane, aka BB, narrate the novella? PE I couldn’t really achieve Rhino’s voice, and I realized I needed someone else to tell this story. And by having it in BB’s voice, while it’s effectively written in the third person, I could editorialize without intrusion. BT

PICTURE BOOKS

I’m so glad we get to talk. PERCIVAL EVERETT Yes, what a pleasure. First, thanks for writing the introduction to the reissue of my book Erasure, that was great. BT Oh, I’m thrilled. It was nerve-wracking to write about that book; it’s so important. And I’m equally thrilled to be speaking with you about the novella Grand Canyon , Inc. W hat a wild and wacky ride it is [laughs]. PE I’m glad you like it. BT My first question is about t he or ig ins. What possessed you to write about this character Mr. Rhino? PE Well, you know, he’s s o A me r ic a n . I think that was the first part of it. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Grand Canyon, and I watched over the years as the area deteriorated and the infrastructure of the parks system in general fell away. I imagined what the government might do to keep it open. And that’s where it started. BT There’s a dark exuberance to the book, this sort of gleeful rollicking absurdity that you bring to almost every one of your stories. But here, the extreme Americanness of this particular setup really stood out to me. It’s funny and absurd at times, but the more you think about it, the more you realize, Yeah, that would happen, BRANDON TAYLOR

PERCIVAL EVERETT & BRANDON TAYLOR

even remember its title, Cottage Industry—was a world in which private citizens are able to take in prisoners because the prison system is overcrowded. And as the system is privatized, actual families have to show that they have a cell in their houses and take in a prisoner who then works for them. It’s a little bit like the Stanford prison experiment [1971], where no matter how nice the people are, they still become abusive to the people they’re holding prisoner. That was the thinking that led to Grand Canyon.

I love that moment when he reveals himself as the narrator and you get a little bit of his story, too. You start to realize, Oh, that poor little sidekick is actually acting with agency within that larger man’s narrative. He’s a fascinating character, BB, because he’s pulling the strings in a certain secret way. PE Whoever tells the story is pulling the strings. Which is the thing about history: the victor writes the history and it becomes truth. BT Yeah. That makes me wonder about fiction as a space to take on some of the larger questions and contradictions of history. Every time I read one of your books, there’s always a part that engages with history. What does it mean to bring history into fiction, and how do you use fiction to talk about history? PE T hat’s a big quest ion, Bra ndon, a nd I’m not sure I’m smart enough to a nswer it [laughte r ]. Basically, I just trip over it. It’s always in the room and it’s hard to avoid it, given that basically we’re all horses [laughs]. I used to train horses and mules. I love mules because they’re really smart, but what we used to say about horses was, That’s just a thousand pounds of dumb muscle. The difference between t he t wo is, i f you have a two-acre pasture and there’s one nail out in that pasture, the horse will find that nail and throw himself on it repeatedly. And that’s essentially what we writers do: if there’s trouble in the room, we will find it. BT Oh, t hat’s my l i fe that you’ve just described so succinctly. I feel like I’ll never recover [laughter]. And I do feel like Rhino Tanner is throwing himself on some of the great nails of American history, right? There is the West, for which he seems to be a bit of an avatar in its various beauties and troubles. There’s alertness, grandness, and natural beauty there, but then there’s also the injustice of American Manifest Destiny and all the horrible things it portends. The West looms large over your work—as a site of imagination and inquiry and plot, but also as a source of a lot of America’s ideas about itself. PE First of all, there’s the real West and then there’s the western. What I love about the real West is, first, it’s sparsely populated. What you get in sparsely populated areas is a weird mix of self-sufficiency and interdependence. Nobody’s going to survive out here alone, but people come here to be alone. What that gives birth to is this weird idea of individualism; everyone wants to BT

underscore the self-sufficiency part. And so the hero of the western, the one in the movies and in pulp fiction, is the character who doesn’t need anyone and knows everything. And that’s how America would like to see itself. BT It’s a very romantic genre. PE It is. BT And in some ways it descends from the Romantics, like Longfellow, no? PE A b s o l u t e l y, a n d e v e n f u r t h e r, f r o m the Greeks. BT Yes.

of course get shot off horses and all. But in general, the movie’s trying to deal with big issues, and that’s what starts happening in the 1960s, after the heyday of the westerns: America starts to try to deal with itself, with racism, and with the war in Vietnam. All sorts of things come into it as a genre, and it shifts. BT I feel like those impulses are also present in this novella, in that it talks about war, it talks about capitalism, and it talks about climate change. It addresses natural disasters, the government’s inadequacy in the face of its citizens’ needs, and it also, in an incredible way, talks about the mob. And even beyond all of that, there’s this incredible thing where this Japanese family enters witness protection and takes on these ve r y s e e m i n g l y w h i t e names, and then there’s a group of white people who go into witness protection and take on Korean names. There’s a moment of something like a racial uncanny happening. I was like, How can he do this? How can he create this mélange of genres and just keep going like nothing at all is happening [laughs]? PE I’ve always been fascinated by witness protect ion and I’ve always wondered what it would be like if an entire community were in the prog r a m . No one c a n s ay they’re in witness protection but everyone is in witness protection—they’re all pretending. BT That feels like one of the quieter but very present themes of the novella: identity, and the fungibility of identity, the collectively decided terms of identity. That’s something that I feel a lot of fiction tries to take on in really unsubtle ways and this novella does in a really swift, concise way. PE It’s a kind of complicated passing story. B T Ye a h , t h e r a c i a l uncanny of passing. And in some ways I feel like even Rhino Tanner’s identity undergoes some shifts and changes in perspective. PE Well, he’s that western hero that can’t exist, so he’s constantly constructing his own identity. And that’s this American thing of how can there be a Rhino Tanner—forgive me for saying the name, but how can there actually be a Donald Trump? You know, if I wrote a character as ridiculous as that, no one would believe it. But America can produce one. BT With shocking regularity; there are five on the news every day, it feels like. But you know, as depressing as that is, you’re so good at capturing what’s funny about it. There’s just something intrinsically funny about this dorky kid who grows

THE SECOND INSTALLMENT OF PICTURE BOOKS, AN IMPRINT ORGANIZED BY EMMA CLINE AND GAGOSIAN, PRESENTS AUTHOR PERCIVAL EVERETT’S NOVELLA ‘GRAND CANYON, INC.’ ALONGSIDE ‘UNTITLED (ORIGINAL COWBOY),’ A PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD PRINCE. EVERETT’S STORY RELATES THE TRAGICOMIC TALE OF CRACK RIFLE SHOT WINCHELL NATHANIEL “RHINO” TANNER; HIS SIDEKICK SIMPSON TRANE, AKA BB (NAMED FOR THE BB PELLET LODGED INEXTRICABLY IN HIS SKULL); AND THEIR BATTLE TO “ACQUIRE” THE GRAND CANYON BY CONSTRUCTING AN AMUSEMENT PARK ON PLATEAU POINT. IN CELEBRATION OF THE PUBLICATION, EVERETT MET WITH AUTHOR BRANDON TAYLOR TO DISCUSS THE NOVELLA, THE ROLE OF HISTORY IN THE WRITING PROCESS, AND THE SIMILARITY IN METHODOLOGIES FOR SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. And they’re complete fantasies, fantasies that become more absurd than anything I’ve ever written. There’s a film called The Unforgiven [1960] that’s about American racism. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to watch it, for no other reason except Audrey Hepburn’s supposed to be a native person. BT Oh no. PE Yes. But the film addresses racism head on, despite these absurd things that you’ll see in it about the depiction of Hepburn as native and the dismissing of the lives of all these Indians who PE

up to be this self-mythologizing man who shoots all these animals and thinks he’s doing something good, and then uses the money he makes to buy a national landmark. And you know, the impulse is to say, Well, of course it’s insane that anyone could own a national landmark. But it’s also kind of insane that the American government can just decide that it owns land. And in some sense the real absurdity is that that land was stolen anyway [laughs]. PE Or, speaking of absurdity, think about January 6— BT Oh my gosh. I mean, again, a thing that seems utterly ridiculous. If you were to pull a person from 2012 and tell them that on January 6, 2021, people are going to storm the US Capitol, they’d be like, No, this isn’t Napoleonic France. This isn’t England circa the 1600s. We don’t do that. PE And then you say, Wait, let me describe these people to you. There’ll be a guy wearing horns. BT The QAnon vegan shaman. If a person wrote a novel about the events of that day ten years ago and tried to publish it, they would have been laughed out of every publishing house. PE And it’s a place for fiction to predict in some way the extremes to which we will go. I think of Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here [1935], which tells us that January 6 was going to happen. BT In times that feel as extreme as these, I wonder how fiction gets its arms around the times, as it were? PE That’s the challenge. And you’re a young man, so it’s up to you [laughs]. I give up. BT But when you were writing it, did it feel like the world was too absurd for you to even come close to, or were you just focused on telling the story? PE I don’t take my political concerns, and the philosophical ideas I’m trying to address, to work with me. I trust that those things have either been worked out or are working themselves out, so when I go to work, I’m simply trying to serve the story. Also, you know, I’ve chosen to write fiction to make a living, which is ample evidence that I’m mentally deficient. No one needs to hear my opinion or my message about anything. So I leave behind all that stuff, and I just create the world. BT Yeah. I feel like that’s the way it’s got to be; it seems too impossible otherwise [laughs]. I have no idea how the muckrakers did it—you know, back in the day, writing those novels that were so, quote/ unquote, “socially engaged.” And I’m just like, I have no idea, guys, how to turn political thoughts into fiction. PE That’s why we don’t read those novels anymore [laughs]. BT In his book On Native Grounds [1942], Alfred Kazin says that the socialists didn’t have novels, they had pamphlets. But there’s a kind of political fiction that calcifies really quickly, because it’s so concerned with recreating the fact and detail that it loses sight of the moving human components. PE Are you familiar with William Melvin Kelley’s dem [1967]? BT No. PE You’d love it. It’s one of the stranger political novels in that the bones of it aren’t political at all. The bones of it are human and the flesh of it is political. BT I’ve got to read it. I love Ann Petry’s The Street [1946] for that reason. Previous spread: Richard Prince, Untitled (Original Cowboy), 2013, chromogenic print, in frame, 70 1⁄8 × 100 1⁄8 × 2 inches (178.1 × 254.3 × 5.1 cm) © Richard Prince, courtesy Richard Prince Studio

Oh, amazing. I’m really honored. Writing that novel was a strange experience. I’m not sure how I did it. Maybe all novel writing is like that. PE Was that your first novel? BT Yes. PE All right, well, I officially hate you. BT [laughs] I mean— PE That’s a nice way to start. That’s great. BT Yeah. I wrote it while doing science work all the time and— PE What kind of science? BT I was in a research lab. I was studying stem cells and nematodes and I was working at UW Madison. I was in a PhD program in biochem. PE That was one of my undergraduate majors. So you were a wet-bench chemist? BT I was. PE Wow. You don’t find too many wet-bench chemists anymore. BT No. Increasingly the dry lab is taking over. And something I found really fascinating while working in research was the growing schism between dry bench and wet bench. The culture war was really heating up. PE Really? BT Yes. I think in the next four to five years especially, it’s going to become a thing that people who aren’t in science know about, this schism between wet and dry bench [laughs]. PE You’ve got to write this right away [laughter]. I did summer work for an entomologist as an undergraduate, isolating and synthesizing the trail pheromone of a certain ant. It was the most boring job I’ve ever had, crushing ants and doing gas chromatographs of what was there and then trying to make these things— BT The mundane aspect of work. Very exciting. PE But without that stuff I wouldn’t be a writer now. BT How so? Because I feel similarly, but other people often look at me like I’m nuts when I say it. PE I think it generates a certain attention to detail. And being comfortable with the scientific method is a good way of proceeding with a story, explaining why I’m interested in it and what I hope to do with it. Not that stories ever do what you think they’re going to do, nor should they. But it’s a way to springboard into it. BT I totally agree. I always feel like science and writing are so similar. Even the process feels similar, because it’s you and this . . . thing for many months and years, and you have no idea if it’s going to work, and if it doesn’t work you don’t know if it’s you or if it’s the thing or if some other random thing has interceded. The lines of inquiry feel quite similar. PE You’re trying to piece together a world that makes sense. And it really has nothing to do with reality. BT Ultimately, what you’re trying to do in science and in fiction is to see some alternate version of the world. PE You’re trying to have it make sense. BT Trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. So great! You’re like the first other scientist who is also a writer that I’ve ever spoken to, and I feel— PE I’m hardly a scientist [laughs]. BT Doing gas chromatographs on ant pheromones? Hard to get more science-y than that [laughter]. PE As one nerd to another [laughter]. BT Amazing. Oh my gosh. I think we have to end on that, right? One nerd to another. BT

I don’t take my political concerns, and the philosophical ideas I’m trying to address, to work with me. I trust that those things have either been worked out or are working themselves out, so when I go to work, I’m simply trying to serve the story. –Percival Everett Oh, great novel. That novel is so much about a woman just trying to make it, and she’s trying so hard. And I used to not understand that—I used to think, These writers say they’re not political but how can they not be, there are obviously political resonances here, I don’t understand. But now, older and maybe a little wiser, I’m like, Oh yeah, you’re just trying to tell a story and if you’re engaged in the human context, in the human circumstances, in the characters’ social reality, all that stuff, what you think about it finds its way in, hopefully. PE You can’t hide from yourself. I tell my students this all the time. I give them a challenge: I say, Write down your five most profound fears, death not included. Then give me a real story. If I can’t find every one of those fears in what you’ve given me, you get an A for the semester. And they’re going to work so hard trying to make their story that they’re going to do what I want them to do anyway. BT My writing teacher, Ayana Mathis, said something similar: you’re never going to betray your sensibility. No matter how hard you try to write away from yourself, you’re never going to betray what you hold fundamentally core to yourself. You’re just never going to get far enough away in order to be able to. PE That’s right. In grad school I had classmates who would say, To pay the bills, I’m going to write a romance novel. And I said, Do you read romance novels [laughs]? Well, then you can’t make one. If I tried to write a romance novel, I know I can put sentences together, but ten pages in, everyone would realize I was making fun of it. And there’s nothing I can do to stop that. BT That reminds me: one thing I value about your stories is that I never feel like you’re making fun of your characters. Sometimes you’re laughing with them, perhaps, but you’re never making light of them. PE Not in the most recent novel. I don’t know if you’ve read my novel The Trees [2021] yet, but I’m sorry, I’m not very fair to white people [laughs]. BT I haven’t read it yet, but all of my friends who have read it love it and are like, He’s never been better. It’s doing the Instagram rounds, it’s resonating. PE Well, speaking of that, I have to tell you, [the novelist] Danzy [Senna] doesn’t do any social media, and I don’t know where it is she follows you, but she’s a fan of yours. She gave me Real Life to read. I enjoyed it very much. I was really taken with it. And I don’t read novels often. PE BT

AWOL ERIZKU & URS FISCHER TO MAKE THAT NEXT MOVE On the eve of Awol Erizku’s exhibition in New York, he and Urs Fischer discuss what it means to be an image maker, the beauty of blurring genres, the fetishization of authorship, and their shared love for Los Angeles.

I remember the first time I encountered your work in person, when an exhibition at the former Marciano Art Foundation in LA included a grouping of your Problem Paintings. It blew me away. Those works resonated with me as an image-maker so directly; it was clear to me that you don’t have boundaries, and that’s something I work toward, too. I did my undergrad at Cooper Union in New York, and I never declared a major. When I went to Yale, I was in the photography department simply because I had more image-based work at that point, but once I got in, I was making sculpture, and the professors didn’t like that at all. Long story long, when I see artists who can just flow through multiple disciplines without any boundaries, without any sort of rigidity, it affects me. And correct me if I’m wrong, but my read of your work is that it’s exceedingly fluid. URS FISCHER I like that you said “image maker”; that’s how I understand my practice, too. It’s funny, I started in photography as well, for the same reason. When you come from photography, even when you do things by hand later, you think differently. When I was nineteen, I moved to Amsterdam and I ended up in a postgraduate program there, and that was the first time I encountered people who had a real “arts education.” There were all these kids coming out of art school and their heads were already filled with the “right order,” the “right thing,” “This is how you do it.” They were so structured, I was in shock. I realized that the AWOL ERIZKU

guys who were painters had their heroes who they wanted to take down. . . . It was very macho, some idea of, This is your hero/dad/enemy, you adore it but you’ve got to kill it. AE Yes. I know the type. UF They weren’t looking at anything else, they were just set on that battle. It didn’t make sense to me, then or now, and it’s part of why I’m really hopeful and pleased with the present moment. That battle, that historical reverence, isn’t as constricting today. Through cultural shifts, through social media, it seems that everything can originate from everywhere and mix. This is so different from how I grew up. Looking at your work and seeing the progression over time, it’s great. If you come from a place and time where it’s more open already, you can enjoy all these things. It’s like going to a buffet and just eating instead of having to sit at the table and wait. AE Exactly. I have to say, this is one of the more compelling things about your practice, that it comes as a buffet. When I look at your work, I’m not thinking about Urs the painter or Urs the sculptor. I don’t process it the way I would a Gerhard Richter, for example. I think you’ve taken that father figure and made an unprecedented, surprise move. I often approach the process of making art much like the game of chess: if we’re playing against our father/ mother figures, it’s then up to us to make the next move, since they’ve already made the first. The primary motivation is to keep the game moving forward. Especially now, with social media and technology advancing every year, you have to update it, right? You have to use what’s available to you to update everything around you. Part of what I’m doing in this exhibition with Gagosian is just that: I’m collapsing the concept of the sphinx, which in Egyptian mythology and culture has one, semistatic interpretation: it’s solely depicted with a human head and the body of a lion. But over time, multiple cultures have contributed interpretations of this creature. In ancient Greece it has the wings of a falcon, with feminine attributes; in Asia it has a snake for a tail. So I try to play with all these things and deconstruct these myths in time and space through image and sculptural form. The works will be presented as a constellation, with a rotating Nefertiti disco ball in the center of the gallery. I remember thinking, Urs would get a kick out of this work! Music . . . scent . . . artmaking . . . to me there are no borders. If I’m listening to a song and I’m thinking about some historical figure, some historical moment, some monolith, I’m immediately drawn to blend these concepts to synthesize something new. This ties into the sphinx as well. UF I look forward to seeing the sphinx. I’m Egypt obsessed. To this day, one of my favorite artworks ever made is the pyramid. It’s the simplest form of connection to a cosmic thing. I mean, what can I do in the face of that? AE Here we are, from two completely different backgrounds, yet we’re talking about the sphinx and the pyramids. I love that you reference the pyramids as one of your biggest artistic inspirations, instead of feeling you have to stick to European inspirations. What I aim to contribute to the ongoing global conversation about Blackness is to point to areas that we all have access to by way of an affinity to cultural heritage. It’s about how we interpret it and how we bring our own twist to it, how we update it, which, again, I feel you do so freely, and it’s admirable. What’s the secret? UF I don’t k now! It’s just t he way I t hink. Everything we do is one thing. Everybody that 66

adds anything at any point in time is in existence, and everything only lives if it’s seen, experienced, and passed on. Otherwise it becomes dormant or it dies. The other thing is, we only see what we see. I’m always shocked how rarely I see something new, and that’s not because it’s not there; it’s incredible how easily your brain erases information and singles out parts that your neural functioning can connect. With art, with images, you can tap in and you can be part of anything, which is a creative act. You can communicate with any point in history and place. I don’t understand myself as somebody with a message— AE Oh, that’s interesting. UF —and then I think, Maybe you’re right, I don’t know. My message is that I just try to have fun with this, and if that’s not message enough for you, then that’s okay. AE Right. These days it’s a common preconceived notion about art that it’s supposed to have a direct message. I think some of the weight I’ve had as an artist, and maybe it’s self-prescribed, is that I feel my work should have a message or that it should reflect the time. And in many cases I push against that. I never thought I needed to stick to any sort of plan. I think the artist who has this one body of work that keeps evolving, and just changes incrementally until it becomes a megahit with museums and whatnot—that isn’t the model I find exciting. I almost think of my practice as a Maison Margiela runway show. I could never stage this sphinx show again. I don’t think I’ve ever put any show that I’ve done in any city back together in another city. Can we discuss the idea of authorship in art, and in your work in particular? I definitely want to talk about your Yes project [2011–]. UF I mean, what is an author, anyway? The problem of being an author is there’s a fetish around it, and I’m personally buying that fetish too with other artists. So to try to question that impulse to fetishize, for a while I tried to make these works out of wallpaper, and from there I moved to these bigger clay sculptures that started from the same premise. You make these sculptures that lie before the moment you make an image, so it’s just really like an action. Who’s in control of the boundaries? AE I feel like some people should stay within a boundary, you know what I mean? I’m a little biased, but I sometimes see painters who pick up a camera and think they can make a decent photograph, and it’s like, Yeah, that’s not it. UF Why not? AE In any prac t ice, I t hink, it’s benef icia l to have some knowledge of the history of the medium, so that you have some form of anchor, some sort of grounding. I’m a purist at times; I believe that if you don’t have an understanding of where you belong in history, you’re just spinning in circles. UF But who are we to say? I mean, the way I see any artwork is, it just gives. It’s there for you, and you can hate it, you can love it, you can be inspired by it, you can ignore it. It’s just there. It’s just a thing. AE Fair. That’s a generous rebuttal. UF I’m very often exactly where you are, I think, This is horrible, this is garbage, but in a way, every time I say this, it’s to shut myself up. What do you think about authorship? AE I’m a huge fan of the Pictures-generation artists, like Richard Prince, John Baldessari, and

Previous spread: Awol Erizku, Lion (Body) I, 2022, Duratrans on lightbox, 49 3⁄8 × 65 5⁄8 × 3 ¾ inches (125.4 × 166.7 × 9.5 cm) © Awol Erizku This spread: Awol Erizku, Falcon (wings), 2022, Duratrans on lightbox, 60 7⁄8 × 49 3⁄8 × 3 ¾ inches (154.6 × 125.4 × 9.5 cm) © Awol Erizku

Sarah Charlesworth; I actually had the pleasure of studying with Prince when he was at Yale as a visiting artist. My respect for him and others, again, goes back to chess: as long as you’re making the next move, you can take whatever is out there to have. If you take an image from someone and you’ve done something to change it and then you’re sort of rocking with that, that’s fine. It’s like bootleggers, right? UF Or language. Which word did I invent? I use it every day, but is it mine? AE Exactly. UF But the way I use it is my own way. It’s not even that much my own, but it’s for my own use in some way to express something. AE Could we go back to Yes? I’d love to hear more about that project. UF It was the best experience I ever had making art, because it didn’t matter what anybody made. There were only two rules. First, we used clay. We just used one material, making it akin to a minimalist artwork. And the other thing was, there was no editing. I didn’t edit what others made, and no one else was allowed to edit their fellow participants. There were always aggressive people who wanted to destroy, but if it got to be a little much, you had a chat with them, got their mind on something else, led them back to a place of no editing. You said yes to the whole thing. What effect does Los Angeles have on your artmaking? When I look at your work—me, I’m a cyclist in LA— I see a lot of the city in there. AE My mom was just in town to celebrate my daughter’s birthday this past week, and she was like, “You have to move back to New York.” I’ve been in LA seven years now, and I’m like, “You know, Mom, I can work until three in the morning, and if I just get in my car and drive a mile, I’m already home. In New York, I can’t imagine having a studio in Red Hook and then having to drive.” I don’t miss that about New York. I think LA gave me freedom in a sense. Also, LA has had an effect on my palette. In New York, my studio was in the basement of a flower shop on Lafayette Street, and it was just pitch black, no windows, all I heard were the trains, so in LA it was nice to be out in the world and drag anything in from the street. I used to collect stop signs and put hoops on them, and some of the early tarp paintings were heavily inspired by the community. My first studio was off Stanford and Pico, right by the Coca-Cola factory in Downtown, and there was so much happening. So the work got bigger, the palette expanded, and I got to work with flowers a lot more. UF I love the car with the flowers coming out of it; it’s awesome. Also, the erasing of the markings, the composition, in your painting—there’s a sense of receding and the passage of time. AE When you live in LA, if you’re a cyclist or you drive around all the time, you’re bound to see these types of markings and erasures while in motion. It’s been very inspiring. UF There’s a large factory that I see on my way to the studio in LA, it has a blue wall, and there are always new markings on it: text, graffiti, all this kind of stuff. And with great frequency they attempt to fix it with different kinds of blue; it never matches, and the blue becomes so beautiful like that. I just see so much creativity in LA’s unfinishedness in some way. It’s made me start to love garbage. I remember the first time I came to the United States, when I was ten, and we drove to South Carolina from the airport in Atlanta. On the 68

freeways back then there was no fine for littering and they were just giant avenues of garbage, people just threw stuff out of their cars. I never saw something like that before, and it hurt me when I saw that as a kid. But when I see garbage now, I think it’s beautiful. I can’t speak for nature, but it’s just a reminder of who we are, and it’s right there in front of us, and the absurdity of it. . . . I see LA as a very flat, sprawling monument of our idiocy. AE Well, you should come by my studio. It’s right by one of those big dumpsters, and I can smell it from time to time when they’re burning stuff, and I’m like, This can’t be healthy. UF Next time I’m out, let’s go on a bike ride. AE Let’s do it. I’m down. UF Because you know, on the bike, I go on little side streets, I go in-between buildings, when there’s a hole in a fence I ride through. And in some ways, in LA you seem to see so many layers from the side, versus in New York, where it’s maybe hidden in the verticalness of it all. But you see all these things in the parallel societies of the two cities. I see that when I look at some of your paintings, I feel that. AE I appreciate that. I still have more work to do, but I’ll take it. I recently started following you on Instagram, and you have some NFT projects coming up. I want to know where you think that’s going to go. There are people who are literally selling anything and just calling it an NFT, and to me, when it first started, I was like, Yeah, NFTs, I get it, I can sell this digital thing. I think the way you’re doing it is actually the smart way, because it feels like it was intended to be an NFT, as opposed to. . . . I think I just saw somebody minted [former Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver] Antonio Brown’s reaction to his teammates [in leaving a football game in the middle], and they’re now selling that as an NFT. First of all, who’s buying it? And what does it really mean? Anybody can access that clip on their laptop, you know what I mean? UF Who knows where it’s going—what I realize is, nobody knows. There are things people react to. People started to pay attention to the sixty-whatever-million-dollar NFT sale—all of a sudden, Oh my God, what is this? Or, This is not art. When you look at the short history it has, from my understanding and talking to a lot of people who have been involved in it from the start, it actually began as more of a philosophical question: Can you attach an image to a piece of blockchain? What could that be, and how could it communicate? Then the way I understand all of that is that in some way it’s a collective subconscious, with all its ugly sides and beautiful sides. And the number of people who engage in it is so much larger than the number who engage in art. AE I thought I understood it when it was first becom ing a t h ing, a nd now I’m completely lost again. UF Yeah, but that’s kind of great, no? AE Yeah, it is, it lets you keep wandering and hopefully stumble on something. UF It’s amazing, all of a sudden you have hordes of “experts” who everybody talks about. It’s like they come out of nowhere, like mushrooms. It just grows out of . . . Poof! You know? Would you ever do an NFT? AE I’ve been approached by a few people, but I’ve always decided to abstain. Then when I came across your NFTs, I thought, Oh, this is great because I can see the development from one thing to another. Whereas I think a lot of people think of

NFTs as like, Let’s mint your most popular piece and then that’s an NFT. UF Yeah, that’s a money-grab, you know. But I mean, why not? AE But that’s not interesting. I like to think of NFTs as a space where I can do something new and completely justified in that form. UF The problem in art, I think, personally, is that you’re forced to tell one story. That’s why it feels so sensitive at times. It’s as if you have clear water and if you drop a drop of yellow food coloring in the glass, everything gets tainted. So if your story has authenticity but you do something sloppy later, it makes what you said before unbelievable. Every story you tell adds up to one story in the end, and logically we all slip. We all find ourselves not in the best frame of mind sometimes, and there’s just so little room for that. This goes back to the fetishization of the artist. It all gets linked to some kind of narrative, and I’m a sucker for this too: if I see somebody fuck up, I’m like, Maybe they weren’t that good from the start. But why do I have to put these two things together? Let the person have a life. And I think that’s the problem with collaborations if they don’t feel like an extension of your work—if they exploit your work in some way, they undermine everything else you do. AE Troubling [laughs]. UF I mean, it’s incomprehensibly complicated and painful, but also very—I don’t know, human, to think in narratives. AE I’m thinking about that David Hammons exhibition in 2019 at Hauser & Wirth in LA. In terms of narrative—and what we were speaking about earlier, about Los Angeles and the complexity of its beauty mixed with certain painful scenes and existences—the show was very conflicting. The opening night alone, where the art world came downtown to see Hammons’s tents in the gallery space, knowing that these things being presented as art were made in imitation of the homeless encampments that you had to drive through to get there . . . it’s tricky. UF Could you elaborate on what you mean by “conflicting”? AE When you know Hammons’s practice, you know that it’s meant to do more, but if it wasn’t Hammons, if another artist did a piece like that, would we talk about it in the same way? UF Context is the new content. AE Yeah. Unfortunately. And as artists, as these community relationships grow and build, what’s our responsibility to bring on that sort of change, or to advocate for it? I’m still trying to decide about that show. UF I hear what you’re saying. But on the other hand, it stirs a lot of conversation. It moves discourse and it conflicts people. The way I understand a lot of art, in any medium, any form, is in terms of energy. If you sing, you make molecules vibrate through your body, and somehow they travel and you assemble this stuff. Ideas travel, provocations travel, concepts travel. The existence of the work defines the pitfalls and limitations. When you’re blindfolded and you walk into a room and bump into something, it doesn’t matter if the idea is good or bad—it’s just something that’s there and it’s real.

THE PROBLEM IN ART IS THAT YOU’RE FORCED TO TELL ONE STORY. THAT’S WHY IT FEELS SO SENSITIVE AT TIMES. EVERY STORY YOU TELL ADDS UP TO ONE STORY IN THE END, AND LOGICALLY WE ALL SLIP. —Urs Fischer

This spread: Urs Fischer and various artists, Yes, 2011–ongoing, unfired clay sculptures modeled on-site by multiple authors, dimensions variable © Urs Fischer, courtesy the artists. Photo: Stefan Altenburger

A PERFECT REDACTED STORM: JIM SHAW REDACTED AND CONSPIRATORIAL FILM

redacted Last fall, redacted redacted in partnership with New York’s Metrograph cinema and Gagosian, redacted redacted artist Jim Shaw organized redacted redacted redacted a series of six redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted conspiracy-minded films redacted redacted red acted redact ed re dacted revolving around redac ted redacted redacted redact ed redacted redacted redact ed redact ed red acted re dacted re dacted redacted redacted reda cted redacted redacted r eda cted reda cted re dac ted redacted edacted redact ed redacted redacted redacted thorny questions redacted of truth, redacte d redacted around thorny reda cted questions of truth, redacted guilt, red acted r ed acted fantasy, and innocence, redacted redacted and leading Shaw redacted reda cted to revelations about redacted r edacted redacted redacted redacted the fringe notion redacted of “frazzledrip.” redacted Here, Natasha Stagg redacte d redacted redact ed reda cted redac ted redac ted redacted redacted redacted redac ted redacted r edact ed redacted redac ted red acted redac ted redacted re dacted red acted redacted redacted redacted reflects on the movies he chose redacted redacted redacted and on the wider implications of what redacte d redacted it means to go redacted redacted down the reda cted redac te d redacted redacted redacted rabbit hole. redacted re dacted

“I knock on this door, and I go in and it’s a nice suite; there’s a young woman there, half undressed; she has a trench coat, which she’s just taken off; there was money in the inside pockets of the trench coat; she has an open briefcase on the bed with money in it; she’s taking money out of her brassiere.” So says production designer Robert Boyle in Who Killed “Winter Kills”? (2003), a documentary short that accompanies a DVD reissue of Winter Kills (1979), a comedic fictionalized exploration of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Boyle isn’t describing a scene from the feature, though: this exchange, he says, happened behind the scenes. “That’s how I got paid.” “And then,” says director William Richert, “we found out somebody shot and killed [executive producer] Lenny Goldberg—somebody he owed money to; they blew his brains out; they handcuffed him to his bed.” Not mentioned in the documentary: another executive producer, Robert Sterling, was sentenced to forty years without parole for narcotics distribution and other charges. Winter Kills (which Boyle has called the “most delightful” film he’s worked on) bobs and weaves around the unsolved murder of an American president named Kegan, pausing to focus on the interpersonal relationships that make conspiracies so difficult to predict or trace. Screening at Metrograph in collaboration with Gagosian this past October, it was one of six films curated and introduced live by artist and conspiracy-connoisseur Jim Shaw. The program included two of Hollywood’s best depictions of justified paranoia set in Earth’s market-driven, alien-run future, They Live (1988) and Total Recall (1990), as well as some deeper cuts. In Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion and Leo the Last (both 1970), a protagonist is painfully aware of his position within a corrupt, cushioned inner corridor, in the former as a murderous police chief, in the latter as heir to a dethroned royal family. Each can’t help but be curious about just how far the networks that protect them stretch. The spoiled but suspicious heir in Winter Kills (Jeff Bridges) follows Previous spread:

clues that lead to ever more nefarious discoveries about his powerful relatives.

Still from Joseph H. Lewis’s

In one horrifying aside, President Kegan’s father (John Huston) mentions that

So Dark the Night (1946)

he is undergoing blood-replacement therapy: “I take it from the kids at Amherst. Got a deal with the Red Cross.”

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Shaw has been thinking a lot about the proliferation of conspiracy theories

Stills from William

in the past couple of years. He’ll watch any documentary about one, no matter

Richert’s Winter Kills

how unprofessional, he told me before we entered the theater to watch So Dark

(1979)

the Night (1946). If copyright law didn’t matter, he added, he would have chosen some YouTube rabbit-hole discoveries for his series. “For me,” Shaw said, “and for anybody that’s entranced by conspiracy movies, by true crime podcasts, by endless depressing documentary series about horrible events that took place at some boys’ school sometime in the ’70s, it’s stimulating the frazzledrip in our brains.” “Frazzledrip,” as far as I can tell, was coined by people at the website NewsPunch (formerly YourNewsWire). According to QAnon followers on social media, the term comes from the file title for Anthony Weiner’s personal footage of Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton terrorizing a child before drinking her blood in a Satanic ritual. One surmises that it is slang for the release of adrenochrome, an excuse for torturing a virgin sacrifice these days: in a widely shared conspiracy theory, panic causes this chemical compound to be released into the youth’s blood, which consequently becomes the perfect elixir for evil energy-harvesters. Conspiracy, or the dramatization of it, conjures another kind of energy. “There’s an aspect of conspiracy theory, and everything that engages people with, say, QAnon, that creates a sort of adrenochrome in your brain by stimulating it,” Shaw said. “It’s like frazzledrip is a frazzledrip. The idea of frazzledrip gets someone who believes in frazzledrip all excited in the same way that torturing

children is supposed to bring about adrenochrome. . . . That’s kind of what goes on in the cinema.” Soon, the lights dimmed and the next movie rolled, opening with a sex scene that turns into a bloody murder. Adrenochrome, by the way, is a real thing, and scientists have been interested in its properties for decades, without publishing much in the way of findings. Its name has been dropped in literature and song lyrics since the 1950s, mythologizing it into a rarefied drug found only in living humans. Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception (1954), Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange (1962), and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) all describe adrenochrome as a psychedelic. Rich people filling their This page:

veins with fresh blood to stay young, like the joke in Winter Kills, is real, too.

Stills from Elio Petri’s

According to a Los Angeles Times article from 2019 (“As age-obsessed billionaires

Investigation of a Citizen

turn to ‘vampire’ therapies, the FDA takes a stand”), the government recently

above Suspicion (1970)

issued a warning against the injection of young donors’ plasma. Older patients would pay $8,000 a liter, said one start-up that offered these injections. Science-backed institutions have found no evidence that young blood, whether full of fear-induced chemicals or not, is energizing, mind altering, or age fighting. But many conspiracy theories posit that institutions have much to gain from spreading false information about such things. Either way, the news being reported from all sides is that there are in fact American sex cults entrapping young people to pacify the elite. And when, say, Jeffrey Epstein’s life and death are at least as sinister as any vampire fiction, the defining characteristics of a reliable narrator start to blur. When Shaw was installing his three-story takeover of the New Museum, New York, Jim Shaw: The End is Here, in 2015, he found that he was missing a video component for The Hidden World, his massive collection of propaganda from “secret societies, evangelical and fundamentalist movements, new-age spiritualists, Scientologists, Freemasons, ultraconservatives, and all kinds of conspirators.” So, he wrote in an email after the screenings, “I looked for stuff on YouTube and found endless docs about the Masons, pedophile conspiracies, etc. Most had an English accented narrator that I realized was a computer voice reading a script to give it ‘authority.’” This started yet another content collection: a list of conspiracythemed movies, from film noir to “the various low-budget documentaries that helped me through [2020] and stimulated my dopamine receptors . . . usually featuring a narrator droning on about the Illuminati with cheap panning graphics.” Shaw’s work tends to face far outward, seeking and hoarding alternative forms of truth and religion that would normally never enter New York art-world circles. In his collages and collections of media and marketing, messages contradict one another using similar languages, in turn muddying their individual initial intents. But in these wandering, decades-long surveys of fringe thinking, Shaw is looking inward, too. Born in Midland, Michigan, Shaw graduated from the University of Michigan before getting an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Just out of school, he got a job doing sketches of “the dream of a god and prehistoric animals made from living ones” for Terrence Malick’s planned follow-up to Days of Heaven (1978). (The project was put on hold, then released several decades later, in 2011, as Tree of Life.) Other film and advertising jobs included “designing monsters for a [Roger] Corman Alien rip-off called Forbidden World [1982], a couple of months airbrushing on Tron [1982], a four-year stint at [Robert Abel and Associates] working on high-end FX commercials, various stints at DreamWorks doing the effects animation for The Hidden [1987], A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 [The Dream Master, 1988], and a scene in The Abyss [1989]; I designed the titles and alien fur and spaceships for Earth Girls Are Easy [1988], then there was a 3D CGI thrill ride for a Sanrio amusement park . . . ” A Midwestern sensibility and a fascination with the theatrical are plainly felt in Shaw’s sprawling yet somehow humble art, which comes in the forms of scenic painting, video, installation, and other mediums. And his extensive

experience of the mechanisms that animate so many runaway imaginations has not inured Shaw to their effects. In fact, ever since he’s been behind the scenes in the production of thrillers, simulations, arcade games, commercials, and cartoons, he’s only grown more fascinated with the extended lives of certain science fiction and horror scenes as they appear in countless paranoid hypotheses, especially since, as he said at the screening of Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, “conspiracy theories exist because conspiracies do.” Meaning: power-hungry people who want to live forever do pull society’s strings; that these strings are so intertwined with everyday life means that they are indecipherable. Movies that metaphorize conspiracies like Still from John Carpenter’s

the ones in Shaw’s list stimulate in the same way a YouTube explainer does,

They Live (1988)

frazzledripping down our washed brains as we attempt to determine truth from trope. Fleshed out with bouncy Ennio Morricone soundtracks, sexy actresses, and Franz Kafka quotes, these movies simplify complex themes in the style of the truth-revealing sunglasses in They Live. We see the curtain and what stands behind it, all while getting wrapped up in the excitement of falling down a rabbit hole. Then, leaving the theater, we might wonder: if that was all okayed by studios, commercial markets, and investors, how much of the story wasn’t? As cynical as Winter Kills seems, for example, the making of the film was apparently as dark and tangled as its script, inadvertently proving some greater point about what happens when one attempts to reveal something seedy using the same systems behind such seediness. The story goes that the shoot was shut down multiple times because the crew were not getting paid by the production company, which had only ever made softcore Italian sexploitation before and had hired first-time director Richert based on the recommendation of the director Milos Forman’s agent. After the death of Goldberg, Richert (who was then dating one of the stars of Winter Kills, model Belinda Bauer) came up with a plan to finance the half-done bankrupt film: he took Bridges and Bauer to Germany and directed another movie with them, The American Success Company (1980), which somehow raised enough funds to get Winter Kills running again. To recap, a Germany-set movie about an American credit card company (“AmSucCo”) saved a movie made with dirty money about the American government’s endless plots to keep its citizens ignorant. And then Winter Kills (budget $6.5 million) bombed, making just over a million at the box office. But maybe that was because it was blacklisted for unpatriotic sentiments. The movie was based on a book, and

Still from John Boorman’s

the book’s author, Richard Condon (who worked for decades in Hollywood before

Leo the Last (1970)

becoming a satirical novelist), later wrote a piece for Harper’s about life imitating art. There he described, in as much detail as he knew, the whole crazy tale of Winter Kills, including its inspiration. In 1963, after the American public learned that many groups and individuals had motives for murdering JFK, Condon writes, “Overnight, a belief in conspiracy came to be equated with raging paranoia. To believe in any conspiracy against the government was paranoid, the public was told again and again.” Richert told Condon that, when reading the book, he’d thought it “too far-fetched, too criminal, seditious, incendiary, poisonous in its rendering of the big time,” but that “since making the picture I’ve met all the types.” When the star-studded film was finally released, it won ecstatic reviews but was pulled from theaters early and never widely distributed. Everyone had their own theory about why. “It was 1979,” writes Condon in 1983. “A presidential election was coming up. Avco, which was the parent company of Avco Embassy [distributor of Winter Kills], had revenues of $864,646,000 that year for its products and services, and these included important contracts with the US

Departments of Labor, State, and Defense. It is tempting to speculate that Avco might have felt it expedient to please powerful political friends”—meaning the Kennedys, in particular Ted, who was campaigning for the US presidency—by killing Winter Kills. Shaw told me to read the story of the making of this movie as itself a twisted conspiracy theory about the Kennedys and the American government at large. It is easy to see, when looking at any of his art, that he is interested in seeing stories from every angle, and his movie list is no different: there’s the controversial murder, the conspiracy surrounding it, the narratives spun out of hypothesizing, the suppression of such narratives, the stories of suppression, etc. So goes the endless stream of theorizing uploads online, which often use popular cinema to explain themselves, even when said theories claim that Hollywood is an evil agency. Making connections, no matter how far-fetched, is intoxicating. We are taught to search for meaning in narrativization, and so we do, constantly scanning for revelation. Also on Shaw’s recommendation, I watched homemade video after homemade video, their slapdash, train-of-thought structures part of their allure. Some of these adrenochrome explainers, for example, are exciting to watch because through them we can witness adolescents trying to untangle their own mindsets from social conditioning. As I was inundated with wild theorizing in every direction, it all started to blend together, becoming a bigger story about what people—everyone, from the unassuming Midwest to the master manipulators in DC and Silicon Valley—do with guilt. Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion centers on a detective (Gian Maria Volonté) who commits murder but is naturally not considered a suspect. Knowing what he does about his department, he is intentionally sloppy about hiding clues when he commits the crime. His prints will soon be all over the scene anyway once he is called in to investigate. Eventually, he admits to himself that he has waffled between wanting to get away with the crime, to prove the existence of absolute authority, and wanting to be caught. He breaks down, believing that everyone Above:

exercising power over citizens, such as police and politicians, internalizes

Still from Paul Verhoeven’s

this dichotomy, and that they cling to a kind of sadomasochism. His desire both

Total Recall (1990)

to control and to be controlled is a human desire just as all desires are human. His addiction to danger produces diminishing returns, so he resorts to killing

Below:

a woman and later torturing a man, getting a thrill from the suffering of others

Still from William

at his hands—suffering for its own sake.

Richert’s Winter Kills (1979)

In QAnon thinking, the suffering of the innocent has a purpose, and the greater the suffering, the more innocent the sufferer, the greater the outcome for the offender. I asked Shaw what he thought of the obsession with tortured kids that binds so many alternative worldviews together. Based on a few examples of acquaintances, friends, and famous people, Shaw hypothesized that “if your emotions are severely stunted, you might need the slaughter of the innocents just in order to get any emotion.” (Shaw believes that he himself likely has Asperger syndrome.) “Abortion horror,” he says, “has been a unifying issue for the conservative Christian Right for five decades, and I think the whole Illuminati baby-blood-drinking thing just goes along with that mindset, as well as the need to think of one’s enemies as the most horrifying entities imaginable. The fact that there are several organized groups like the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, smaller cabals like Jeffrey Epstein’s or Cyril Smith and his pals, that allow, overlook, or use pedophilia for influence, makes fantasy conspiracies like QAnon seem possible, and being out of work or holed up because of Covid (or both) for long periods of time and plenty of time to kill on the Internet while algorithms feed you the most alarming information? It’s a perfect storm.”

ELLSWORTH KELLY The second volume of the catalogue raisonné of paintings, reliefs, and sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly was released in October of 2021. Covering the years 1954 to 1958, the new book was written by Yve-Alain Bois and published by Cahiers d’Art. Here Bois speaks with Bob Monk about the origins of this ambitious endeavor, as well as its parameters and missions.

Previous spread: Ellsworth Kelly with a brass model for Sculptural Screen in Brass, 1957. Photo: Onni Saari This page: Ellsworth Kelly, Pony, 1959, painted aluminum, 31 × 78 × 64 inches (78.7 × 198 × 162.6 cm). Photo: Glenn Halvorson Opposite: Ellsworth Kelly, Black Curves, 1954, oil on linen, 36 × 26 inches (91.4 × 66 cm)

Yve-Alain, I can’t tell you how excited I was five years ago when you brought me the first volume of the raisonné. Now we’re here today to speak about the second. How did you first get involved in this project? YVE-ALAIN BOIS I was asked to write an essay for the catalog ue of the exhibition of Ellswor th Kelly’s French years [1948–54] that was held at the National Gallery of Art in 1993. I also organized exhibitions on Ellsworth, one at the Sackler Museum at Harvard [1999], of his drawings for the same French years, and one at the Drawing Center, New York [2002], of what he called his Tablet, a set of more than 200 boards in which he pasted sketches, collages, clippings—something one could compare to Gerhardt Richter’s Atlas. I kept being commissioned to write texts on Ellsworth for various occasions—exhibitions in museums and galleries, special issues of journals—and you know, it seemed to me absurd to continue to do multiple little things when what I really should do was a monograph. I thought I knew the material well, especially Ellsworth’s early work, because I’d written the texts and I’d organized the exhibitions I mentioned. But I realized that even for those early years there were really a lot of things I didn’t know about the genesis of each particular painting. I realized that to write a monograph covering his entire career I needed to have a precise idea of the whole corpus; I needed to research every single work. And when I started doing that, I thought, Well, what I’m doing is basically a kind of catalogue raisonné for myself. So, if I do it for myself [laughs], why not benefit the whole world, especially with regard to the genesis of the works, the way they evolved, the way they started from one point and sometimes finished in a totally different vision. I decided, Okay, then I’ll do a catalogue raisonné. BM What I was so impressed with, starting with volume one, is that you write a really fantastic, concise introduction and within the introduction you tell me and the other readers where we’re going to go. Then you go into all the scholarship for each and every work. You’ve said that for volume one you actually viewed every work except one? YAB Yeah, there was one owner who didn’t want me to see it. And in volume two, it’s about the same, there were about two that I didn’t get to see. BOB MONK

That’s phenomenal. And in many cases you physically inspected both the front and the back. YAB The thing is, I wouldn’t have been able to do this project if I hadn’t. You gain many things besides pleasure by looking at the real work—you know, all kinds of things, scale, sometimes pentimenti (though that’s rare with Ellsworth), or the way he handles the tacking edges, painting them or not. It’s crucial. I promised Ellsworth that I would do that. This past Friday I schlepped all the way to Sag Harbor from Princeton, a nine-hour roundtrip, just to see one sculpture. BM And was that for volume three? YAB Yes. Well, I don’t know where it will fit in exactly, but it’s one of the sculptures that’s not frontal. Most—I mean, 99.9 percent—of Ellsworth’s sculptures are frontal, but this one is one of the type he called Rockers and you really have to move around it to take it in. BM I love the Rockers. Before I read volume one, I had this idea in my mind that there were these parameters that Ellsworth had set up. What I loved about the catalogue is that you make it very clear: no, they were systems. Ellsworth’s work is not about setting parameters; the systems are actually very open. So going through the first and now the second volume, even for someone who knew Ellsworth, it opened my mind to a whole new way of appreciating his work. Could you speak a little about how you decided to demarcate where one catalogue ended? You did that very naturally. YAB It’s an interesting case with Ellsworth. The split between volume one and volume two was very natural because he moved back to New York in 1954, and there’s a clear change between what he was doing in Paris and what he started doing in New York. I say “started” because there was a transitional period: in the first two years he hadn’t yet abandoned his Paris strategies, he carried them over for a while, but concurrently he began something entirely new. The first two paintings he makes after his return to the USA are based on a completely different aesthetic from the works he had been doing in France, but at the same time, for a while he still made paintings based on collages he had brought back from France, collages he had produced according to what I call his Paris strategies and what you call “systems.” BM

What were those Paris strategies? There are four basic ones: change, transfer, the grid, and the monochrome panel. Those were the four things that he used in Paris as a system for not composing, and as I say, he progressively let go of them. All in all, if you skim over the “transitional” period, you realize that there’s a clear cut between volume one and volume two, which covers the years 1954 to 1958. Later it’s much more complicated because he often returns to earlier periods of his work. He could pick up a collage that he had made in the early 1950s when he arrived in New York and do a painting out of it ten years later, or twenty years, or thirty years. I want to be chronological, but at the same time, it’s complex. I have a rule, which is that in an entry about a work, let’s say from 1955, I’m not going to write about a work from 1985. BM In the introduction to the second volume, you mention this one little disagreement that you had with Ellsworth: he felt that if he did a collage in 1954 and then used it in 1966, he wanted you to mention the 1966 work in the 1954 entry. And what I love about you, you had to be absolutely tough—you said it was an abomination to try to use the word “precursor” retrospectively, but the narrative of inspiration in the opposite direction made sense. So, you write, when you get to the 1966 work you have no problem going back and mentioning all the previous works that informed it. YAB Exactly. Because one thing that’s fascinating in Ellsworth’s work is—and I don’t know any other artists who do this—let’s say we’re in 1992 and he finds a wonderful collage that he made in 1965, he looks at it and he says, Why didn’t I make a painting out of it? Most of his paintings came from many little sketches that get more and more refined until they’re made into the final collage, which then is transposed into painting. From the final collage to the painting, there’s no change except the size and the medium. I don’t know any artist who’s able to look at a work twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years later and do it exactly as he would have done it originally. Ellsworth thought, This particular thing seduced me then and it seduces me now, and I cannot change. And the particular thing can be a sketch he’s made but also something he found in the street and pasted on one of the boards of his Tablet. BM

YAB

So those things in his career always live in the present, in a sense. YAB In many ways, yes. He said it himself, actually: someone asked him, “Why do you go back to all these old things,?” and he replied, “What do you mean, old things?” [laughs]. BM I’d like to hear more about your amazing story of first reaching out to Ellsworth when you were seventeen years old. YAB I was in America as an exchange student through a program called ICYE, International Christian Youth Exchange. I was sent to high school in the countryside, in Hanover, Pennsylvania. And you know, all I wanted was to go to New York, which was not possible. These people were very, very anxious. They thought New York was Babylon. BM Exactly [laughs]. YAB So my parents had to write and explain, You know, we’ve been letting him go by himself to see the museums and galleries in Paris since he was fourteen and we were living in the South of France, just let him go to the city. It was very complicated and they had to sign all kinds of letters. Anyway, I was in New York for a few days on spring break in February 1970. I’d prepared that trip like two months in advance to make sure I’d see the Museum of Modern Art and this and that, so I’d written to Ellsworth and said, I’m this young French guy, I’m in the countryside, I know you live in New York, could I come and see you in your studio? I told him exactly when I’d be there. And you know, for years I thought he didn’t answer, or that’s the way I remembered it. But he always disagreed. I ended up first meeting him later at the opening of the Malevich show at the National Gallery [in 1990]. Soon after, I was invited to come to Spencertown, because by that time I’d already agreed to do the essay for the National Gallery show of the French years. It was very jolly; he and Jack were very hospitable. And I started working on the archive a little bit. I was very impressed by what I saw and what I read. At some point I asked Ellsworth, “Why did you never answer the letter I wrote you when I was a kid?” He said, “You wrote me a letter when you were a kid?” “Yeah, I did, but you didn’t answer.” He said, “No, no, no, that’s not possible. A French kid and you were seventeen? Come on, at that time I wasn’t very social, so I would have answered. And if you wrote me, I’m BM

sure I kept the letter.” Ellsworth was kind of obsessive in some ways, and he was a fantastic archivist. He spent hours looking through his papers and he found the damn letter [laughs]. BM That’s amazing. YAB He gave me a copy, which I lost instantly [laughter]. But I’ve retrieved it since. I’ve told this story just to point to the fact that he was really an incredible archivist. And just before he died, I did in fact find a postcard in which he’d answered me! He hadn’t understood that I could only be in the city at the exact date I’d told him and asked that I phone him, which wasn’t possible for me, and that’s probably the reason I’d totally forgotten the letter. BM He died around the time you completed volume one? YAB He died a few days after Christmas in 2015; the book was printed in May, though it wasn’t put in circulation until the fall. I really wanted the first volume to be out soon so he could, you know, see the way it was going and approve. And that’s what happened. BM So he got to see it. YAB Yeah, he spent a lot of time rereading it and he kept asking, “Did you change this?” And I kept saying, which is absolutely true, “I didn’t change anything” [laughs]. BM The amount and balance of scholarship in these volumes are above and beyond. YAB There’s something very weird in the practice of writing a catalogue raisonné. First of all, you write a book, right? But it’s not going to be read as a book. It’s not going to be read from A to Z. You just go to one entry. Because you want to know— BM You’re looking for something specific. YAB Specific. It’s not like a novel, you know? BM No. YAB You write a book for nonreaders, basically. Or, you know, it will be eventually read over the centuries, let’s hope there will be a cumulative reading, everything will end up being read, but by different people. So you have a strange addressee. It’s like tossing a message in a bottle into the sea in some ways. I always understood the entries as separate essays that you should be able to read without having to read the other ones. In the first volume this led to some repetition, and in the second volume I

Opposite: Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Curves, 1954, oil on linen, 23 5⁄8 × 12 5⁄8 inches (60 × 32 cm) This page: Ellsworth Kelly, Gauloise Blue with Red Curve, 1954, postcard collage, 3 ¼ × 5 ½ inches (8.3 × 14 cm)

allowed myself some cross-referencing, like, “Dear reader, if you really want to know more about this particular issue, go see entry number X.” BM Yes, I noticed that. YAB But I do that very rarely. It could have become a little dry, except that to sustain the desire to write that huge thing, what I did was transform every single entry, every single work, into a question mark: what’s curious about that work, what’s new about that work, what has to be explored? It’s not necessarily something the reader will feel, but that’s the way I did it for myself: what’s tickling there and why? I was looking in the catalogue raisonné that Angelica Rudenstine did of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which in many ways was my model, you know, kind of dosing hard evidence with interpretation. She said something similar, that for each work you have to find an enigma. And there are some works for which the enigma was unbelievably complicated. For example, there’s one particular set of works, the screens that Ellsworth made for the Philadelphia Transportation Building restaurant. The evidence was so complicated that it took me almost three weeks to understand what I was looking at, between the sketches and the photographs. The work consisted of screens separating a restaurant and a bar. Some photos were taken from the restaurant side, some were shot from the bar, some were mirror reversed, some printed upside down. Everything was destroyed soon after it was made except the models in wood and cardboard. Just to understand what I was looking at and to correct all the mistakes that had been written about it—because people, including Ellsworth, didn’t remember very well—was just an unbelievable task. That entry is one of the longest in the book. It took forever. One thing people had warned me about with this project was getting bored, but in fact I gained more and more respect for Ellsworth and for his

minute sense of detail, the way one millimeter of change changes everything. BM As an object, the book is so beautifully designed. YAB It was a good team: all the people at the studio in Spencertown, first of all, for many years, and then, at the end of the process, the editor Eric Banks and the designer Joseph Logan. BM I had the same experience when we worked together. They’re brilliant at their craft, but they also understand the art of collaborating with the person who’s putting the thing together, in this case you. I love that you’re sharing many things that Ellsworth said to you while he was alive and you were working together. YAB That was one of the reasons I wanted to get as much information as I could from—what’s the expression, from the horse’s mouth? I spent at least ten years going twice a month to Spencertown and spending sometimes two, three days with him. And you know, Ellsworth always claimed that he didn’t like to talk. In fact— BM You couldn’t get him to stop. YAB You couldn’t get him to stop. But what I understood was that if you asked him something very precise, you’d get a direct answer, and then he’d stop. So I adopted a different tactic that wouldn’t prevent him from going into lots of interesting digressions, which led to other things about other works that he wouldn’t have remembered otherwise. For example, we were speaking one day about Pony, one of his first sculptures. That led him to a whole discourse about the Rockers, very complicated works with several iterations, the 1950s for the first one, the 1960s, and then the 1980s. So I don’t know exactly how we’ll do it in the catalogue raisonné, probably in three different batches. But what’s interesting is that they’re all based on the principle of a circle cut up in different ways. First of all, you have to turn them around to appreciate

them, which is very unlike most of Ellsworth’s sculptures, as I mentioned before. And when you think they’re symmetrical and look regular, it’s the reverse: in fact they’re nonsymmetrical and irregular. And when you think they’re irregular, in fact they’re symmetrical and regular. So it’s really a trick that he developed, it’s amazing. To discuss them all together is kind of crucial. BM Early on, people didn’t really understand the breadth of his genius and what he was doing. That’s why I’m so happy to see, when I look in the provenance, that even things from the 1940s and ’50s are now, over the last twenty years, in these incredible collections. YAB A big change happened after the National Gallery show. If I remember well, there were only seven works in that show that didn’t come from the studio, and except for one of those, all had been gifts of the artist to their owners, including the one he had given to [the Museum of Modern Art]. It was unbelievable that not a single museum or collector had ever inquired about them during the four or so decades after they were painted. Today most of these “French” works are in museum collections or are promised gifts to them. BM People didn’t really understand what he was doing. He probably felt fortunate to have you as a friend and someone working on these projects. YAB We had a very good relationship. And you know, he was a very exacting critic of his own work. Especially during one period of his life when he wasn’t satisfied with one work, I would go there, and at the beginning of one month there was a three-panel work on a wall of his studio, let’s say red, blue, and black. But he didn’t like the red. The red is no good, he’d say. I would come back two weeks later: the red is still no good, it had changed a little bit but barely. And then suddenly— BM The red was good. YAB The red was good [laughter].

This spread: Ellsworth Kelly, Sculptural Screens in Brass, 1957, 7 brass screens, each: 60 × 54 × 12 inches (152.4 × 137.2 × 30.5 cm) ; installation views, Philadelphia Transportation Building. Photos: Lawrence S. Williams Artwork © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation Photos: courtesy Ellsworth Kelly Studio

·A·POLTERGEIST·

PART·I·BY·VEN

ITA·BLACKBURN·

MEMOIRS · OF

Before Rebecca, my first encounter with a ghoul was in 1492 sailing the ocean blue lolol, ok I didn’t actually sail anywhere being a spectral spirit of utter chaos, but I lingered on ships and would drift about. Most of my actual experiences with ghouls are just watery memories of dreams rather than true connections. Ghouls don’t follow back. I always swiped right you know, but what will be will friggin be and drive me to the wall in despair. They love that shit. The ghouls I’ve known used to wear purses sewn from the skin of flayed soldiers during the crusades or was it the revolution, which revolution is hard to say. The gnashers will always have their wars. Gnashers call themselves lots of things: people, human, politicians, jurors, barbers, dentists, husbands and daughters, men and their lust for punishment and validation through brutality. I call them boring. The gnashers are full of fear and shame, a buffet for the ghouls. I’ve glimpsed a few here and there in their varied forms, one a rolling tumbleweed of kidneys that left a sluglike trail of fluids, another a wall of rotting teeth in a blind face wearing the pristine suit of a Moroccan merchant or maybe a Welsh librarian. Don’t get me started on the colonial era, total shit show. They have many names too, some forgotten, others only thoughts, and if you speak that language by accident or instinct in your mind they will manifest at your feet or sometimes right around your chest bones and walk the earth as you for a lifetime. That kind of ghoul is a maestro, a savant, a genius, sure to give every poltergeist within the continental radius a lady boner. That kind of ghoul was a rare bird as they say. Mostly they are an echo of madness that eat up a nightmare after they cook it in someone’s mind. Then there was Rebecca. Rebecca smelled like cardamom and tasted like candy cap mushrooms. I’ve said too much already, but secrecy has never been a strong suit for me, and Rebecca would want me to be secretive, our shames so muddled like snow, oil, and urine in a New York street of any postindustrial decade or century, a thing to look away from and pretend that the day is beautiful and all good things don’t end in ruin when they quite obviously, quite astoundingly do. Can a poltergeist like myself, a being of long life, terrible will, and the most freeing disregard for the living be so butt-fucked to total destruction that they find it hard to wring a scream from an arachnophobe with a camel spider? Rebecca is the answer. I’m already wet. Now I’ve seen other rascals, lesser ghouls than Rebecca, crash subway cars, create tidal waves on ports that sent containers of goods cascading into the sea, pop every balloon at a birthday party in terrifying sequence, spill folks’ coffee after waiting in line for thirty-seven minutes at an overpriced café in downtown Portland then cause a hallucination so real it forces women to leave their husbands and children to become generational curses. Friggin cool. Most ghouls have demicorporeal forms, meaning they are there and not there, real and not real, a massless link to the other worlds yet fleshy as a bowl of rotting fruit and just as fragrant. I’ve seen ghouls look like boulders of shredded muscle and bone with arms shooting from all sides like a virus. One in the Andes back in 1701 had four heads of buffalo stacked on top of each other and no torso, just tibia coming out of the jaws and little bells on the toes. Weird af. Those are not the most interesting ones though. Some are what the gnashers call gorgeous. These ghouls are beautiful to them, symmetrical, with pheromones like cedar trees and ambergris. To smell them is to feast on a dream, to crave the heat they emit like healing post wound. They are clever and irresistible, true fiends that are difficult to spot for the inexperienced. I, a poltergeist of some wisdom if I do say so myself, can spot any ghoul by smell alone and of course the flies. We dated.

That ghoul had already possessed a grieving school teacher named Rebecca in Alabama back in 1907, and so began Rebecca’s unraveling and to me her becoming. The teacher recently buried her preacher husband because of a skirmish with rogue gnashers. Gnashers will kill in the name of their god, in the name of the shade of their own flesh, and sometimes a combination of the two. It was a ghoul’s paradise in those times and all times really, but don’t mistake my point. The ghouls are not the creators of suffering and not wholly instigators either. They get a bad rep among people who will blame their own mothers for every failure of conscience from infancy to the tomb. I’m just like wow. Anyway, I watched the ghoul roam in and out of the townsfolk letting their words flow out of its mouth: So sorry for your loss child. We are praying for you. The Lord has a guiding light at your eyes. Don’t turn away. The ghoul loved the taste of pain on its tongue, but it was the people that spoke to Rebecca, always reminding her of the grief whenever something as small as a cricket or dandy lion dared take her mind off of it. Some of the gnashers even thought they were doing the right thing. LMAO. They love to hurt and will call it kindness. Everyone reminded her of the grave, and the rot, and the promise of tomorrow that does not exist today because today was shit and pain. Everyone except Sadie. Rebecca took walks in the daytime when it was safest in case any of her husband’s murderers returned to play a more cruel joke on the dead and defile a widow. It would’ve been delicious to the ghoul but difficult to pull off with the will of so many people aimed at revenge instead. That is far more appetizing. Sadie was a prostitute, dark like the woods with eyes that carried the weight of living in a hot world. They would meet on their walks around the town in the dewy part of the day when most were still sleeping. Take this. It’s too early. Take it. I put coffee in it this time. Rebecca waved away a pesky fly and drank the spirits in all the ways. Sadie, a woman who knew men in the biblical sense ha, was not an ideal friend or lover for a respectable schoolteacher, but I suppose losing a loved one makes people question the rules of the living. So Rebecca slowly and unknowingly nursed an infatuation with that Sadie. I’d been hopping from rat to pirate to donkey to governor for nine years and was bored out of my mind. Don’t get me started on the fleas, and if anyone asks you which is cleaner, a donkey or a governor, I’ll swear on my immortal soul the donkey can sleep in my bed any day. I watched the two women then while resting inside of a lizard, occasionally compelled to lick the dry out of my eyes. Terribly annoying. The two had nothing between them very interesting and the ghoul could not possess them both so was always a little malnourished whenever Sadie was around until one day.

Poor Sadie, so sweet, smooth skinned, and popular. On those late mornings Rebecca would bring Sadie sugarcane before opening up the bar and they’d walk again for a short time along the dirt road chewing together. Sadie had her own sad tales to share like her father dying of consumption (whatever the hell that was), his bloated body loathed and discarded like moldy cheese. Sadie was alone and weepy as a child, and a sad lonely girl is good for only a few things in any gnasher town. The day circumstances changed for, well, the better depending on who you’re asking is when Rebecca dropped her sugarcane into the dirt. Sadie laughed and moaned into her own treat as a healthy tease. Mockery is fun but still too tainted by love to be useful to my ghoul. Rebecca proceeded to take the sugar by force and there was a bit of girly tugging and touching and whatnot, ugh obvious foreplay if they’d ever figure it out, but that bunch hadn’t the slightest clue after so many centuries of sexual repression and fascination with ownership of everything except their own orgasms. Sadie surrendered her sugarcane in exchange for holding Rebecca’s hand while they walked. The deal was struck. As they held each other, the tendril of attraction snaking so thoroughly through their hearts, a boy crossed their paths. Hi Ms. Sadie. He spoke before giggling and running off. It was one of Rebecca’s students though every child under fifteen was one of Rebecca’s students. Rebecca snatched back her hand from Sadie the moment the boy spoke. He saw their subtle intimacy. He mocked them. He acknowledged a harlot before his own teacher. Half of that imagined or none or all. There it was. The ghoul trembled. I trembled. The feelings were small then, but they rang out loud to us—shame, pride, and a sprinkle of vanity. That was worth sticking around that dusty little gnasher village for as long as necessary to cultivate Rebecca into a quivering mess of dark energy. I could see the ghoul nestling tighter into Rebecca, grotesque and lovely, roosting over the shame like a hen. So friggin cute! Sadie started cooking meals for Rebecca, which she was thankful for less and less. Sadie would swat and kill flies that bothered Rebecca and divert any unwanted attention from the meddling townsfolk whenever she could and so the ghoul noticed and I noticed the ghoul. A cloud of flies floated across the town like a plague, but by then everyone was used to it as if it were always there. I watched the flies disappear and Rebecca’s eyes grow cloudy, irises rimmed in blood, leaking mucus from the infection of the beast. She was so beautiful. The locals thought she was just grieving hard, but I knew the ghoul saw an opportunity for mayhem in Rebecca. When one is loved and weak there is a chance to corrupt that love into something so bitter it curses a land for seasons. Even weeds won’t grow. If I were stronger, I would’ve let the artist work, let the ghoul finesse the love and obsession into a shredding of the conscious self where another’s impossible salvation and happiness will take every drop of energy and cost her weight in suffering as payment. I’m not strong! I wanted to get close to the monster inside of Rebecca, so I possessed Sadie before she could see the change in her new girlfriend. Let me be clear. Possession of the human soul is not easy. People think we just jump from one wretched soul to another like hopscotch. It’s more like filling a raw egg with another yolk. First you drill a tiny hole in the shell then with some patience and a lot of fucking skill, possession is manifest. Most of the time we just hold the egg and roll around with it before the inevitable

crack, but true integration of the spectral and the corporeal is a big fat ordeal. And there’s no manual! We just have to figure this out one exhausting leap at a time. Typically, there’s a lot of vomiting (movies totally nailed that), and allergic reactions like rash and suicidal ideation, of course, unless the host is totally vulnerable, so lost they are barely present in their own skin. That’s when it’s less of a grueling hike and more of a sit-down at a table in a fancy restaurant. With Sadie the linens were pressed nicely and French onion soup was on the menu. The evening after Rebecca tore her hand from Sadie out of self-disgust there was a town meeting. Gnasher men stood inside the church before a densely packed congregation. Springnight chill turned to humidity from breath and panic. Women screamed “We have to do something.” Men screamed “We will protect ourselves at any cost.” Others feared for the youth. Sadie saw Rebecca near the rear of the church where she always sat if she dared sit at all those days. Funny how grief will make people hate their god that never promised them much of anything else. The ghoul was in her. The ghoul was not yet her. Sadie sat beside Rebecca on the pew, a tight fit, but all made room. Everything was still to the two of them despite the chaos and blood lust that distracted both the ghoul and I. There was so much to eat. Sadie put the back of her hand against Rebecca’s thigh as if she only meant to smooth the skirts between them. They were still again, that silvery tingle of love and forgiveness charging between them as well as an apology. If you all die in this fight for revenge, who will care for the children? I can fight! It was the boy from the morning, Rebecca’s student. The men cheered. The women cheered. Rebecca stood and everyone around then stood as well, taking her rise from the pew as a signal of agreement. It was easy for Rebecca to leave at that moment under the chins of tall men eager to shake each other by the shoulder and stir the storms of battle no matter how self-destructive. Rebecca and the ghoul walked out into the new night, leaving Sadie and me in the hum of our lust, a small cruelty in comparison to the delectable suffering yet to come. So Sadie and I followed, both of us wanting to touch our loves more than ever, having come so close. There were streetlamps on the road and plenty of shadows for us to fondle ourselves dizzy in, but this ghoul knew better. Cultivating shame requires the risk of exposure, so Rebecca stood under the lamp light, her skin blue as the sky above, radiant and warm. Sadie and I could feel her before even coming into contact. Whether it was me horny as hell or Sadie or both didn’t matter anymore. To me the town could burn us all as fornicating Salemites because I had to have it, but Sadie was not there yet. A glance over her shoulder, a glance to the “heavens” oh my. I was getting vertigo from the head swivels. There was more than shame now. We had guilt. We had a devout-man-of-God husband barely dehydrated in the grave, a town full of judgy angry motherfuckers, and a God with who knows what to say. Personally, I’m sure Jesus knows what’s good. Sadie landed both hands around Rebecca’s ribs their faces with almost no air between them. The sounds of people and the doors of the church opened. Rebecca didn’t let go until the lust was swamped by fear and Sadie wrenched herself free before anyone could see. There were plenty of names for their crime among the gnashers even if Sadie and Rebecca didn’t know them all. My ghoul was fed and the promise of tomorrow would keep Sadie and me awake until the sun rose.

TE T © VENITA BLACKBURN

ALEXANDER

CALDER STEPS ON THE GAS

On the occasion of the Calder Foundation’s unveiling of its recently completed Calder BMW Art Car (Artist’s Proof), Robert Rubin recalls the origins of the project. Calder knows there is nothing more serious than play, and that a race car is the most sophisticated toy available to those who aspire to be serious. —François Mathey, Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, 1975 A mobile is a car without wheels. —The critic Michel Ragon, to Hervé Poulain, c. 1975 Alexander Calder gave the world its first Art Car in 1975. By “Art Car” I mean the series of, now, nineteen BMWs painted by the likes of Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Andy 98

Warhol. 1 The Art Car was by no means the first to aspire to “art,” or to be the medium of an artist’s mark-making or conceptual gesture; Sonia Delaunay painted a Bugatti 35A as early as 1926. In the 1960s, while American Pop artists mostly celebrated car culture, European artists such as the Nouveaux réalistes were more inclined to evoke the degradations wrought on society by the internal combustion engine. César crushed cars into cubes. Wolf Vostell encased them in concrete. Others, such as Arman and Jean Tinguely, straddled the divide, creating lyrical art out of automotive detritus. Calder’s response to internal combustion was more literal and radical, in line with his faith in the dynamic power of color, his practice of moving abstracted forms through space, and his preoccupation with the social activation of his sculptures. What better way to achieve social activation than to hurtle your sculpture down the Mulsanne Straight at 200 miles an hour in front of 200,000 spectators, the force of your composition of shapes and colors projected far beyond the “canvas” of the car as it whizzes by?

Cars entered the twentieth century as playthings of the wealthy but quickly, thanks to Henry Ford, became mass-produced appliances, meant to get us from point A to point B. Soon they will even drive themselves. The intrinsically ludic element of movement persists, however: cars will always, somehow, be toys, and racing them is a high-stakes, gladiatorial form of play. Calder himself said of racing, “With its colors, and with the presence of death, it’s like a bullfight, but better than war.”2 From War Paint to Billboard: A Potted History of Race Car Heraldry In the beginning, no one gave much thought to what a race car looked like, let alone considered its possibilities as a vessel or container for graphic design.3 Edwardian cars were rough beasts: platform chassis, engine, a couple of bolted-down seats. Numbering was functional and essential for administering a race, but painting a race car was the last thing anybody thought about. Team and marque badges were discreet affairs, usually applied to the engine cowling or radiator cap. At some point the idea of national colors evolved, and

stripes and arrows became a thing: think tribal war paint. Advertising stickers were an American innovation, first appearing on the side panels of racing cars between the wars. At first they were limited to automotive products, but consumer brands would inevitably follow. By the early 1970s, car bodies had evolved into what sponsors call “real estate,” a term also applied to the jerseys and caps of professional athletes. War paint yielded to revenue opportunity. Before the complete takeover of this real estate by multinationals, Porsche had messed around with psychedelic schemes on its Martini-sponsored cars. These highly entertaining optical experiments were improvised in the garage, where they were spray-painted with an air compressor normally used to inflate the tires. But those were precursors, “art cars” with a small “a.” Le Ramage Vaut le Plumage (She Goes as Good as She Looks) Perhaps BMW was already thinking of a graphic competition when it was approached, in late 1974, by the French auctioneer Hervé Poulain with the idea of the Art Car. An amateur racer when not wielding his gavel, Poulain brought a perspective that was more Big Art than Big Tobacco to the intersection of art, spectacle, and the automobile: instead of decorating the automobile with graphics selling the products of a sponsor, why not use an artist’s intervention to elevate the automobile itself? And who better than the creator of the mobile to launch a program that would in time constitute a mechanical tour d’ horizon of contemporary art? The Calder BMW is a throwback to a purer era of racing. There was to be no sponsor crap whatsoever on this baby. Calder’s paintwork enhances rather than exploits the vehicle. It’s a pure homage to movement and speed. Of course, the best advertising doesn’t look like advertising. BMW-works driver Sam Posey recalls that corporate brass was very open to “what the project would teach them about their car, to see it from a different perspective.”4 Poulain’s day job may have been auctioneer, but where cars and art were concerned he was a poet. He described the fauve colors Calder employed as “pure, already dynamic in themselves.” For him, the car was “an inhabited mobile.”5 The man at the Previous spread: Calder BMW Art Car (1975) racing at 24 Heures du Mans, June 14, 1975. Photo: Cheyco Leidmann © BMW AG. Artwork © 2022 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Above: Calder BMW Art Car (1975) and Calder BMW Art Car (1:5 intermediate maquette, 1975), Saché, 1975. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York © 2022 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

wheel added a human dimension to its mechanical movements. As for the noise—another dimension whose frontiers in art Calder had crossed, w ith works such as Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere (1932/33)—Poulain cited a famous verse from LaFontaine’s fable of the fox and the crow to say that the car sounded (and went) as good as it looked. Commanding this kind of Gallic eloquence, Poulain had no trouble enlisting either BMW or Calder. Drawing on his racing connections (and the fact that the wife of BMW racing chief Jochen Neerpasch ran an art gallery), he convinced the company to prepare a car for Le Mans that Calder would paint. Poulain brought Calder a commercially available plastic model of the car on which to paint his design, then for a next, intermediate step, a larger, 1:5-scale maquette in fiberglass, purpose built by BMW in Munich. The paint scheme would be applied on the BMW by Walter Maurer, a Munich-based specialist (who would also paint the artist’s proof nearly fifty years later). The completed car was sent to Calder’s home and studio in Saché, not far from Tours in the Loire Valley. Parked among various non–internally combusted mobiles, the great machine was signed by Calder with a paintbrush. The Calder BMW was a proper race car that actually raced. One of nineteen competition-prepared versions (out of a total of 167 roadgoing units produced between 1973 and 1975) of the “Batmobile”— so called for its aerodynamic rear-mounted spoiler—the 3.0 CSL (Coupé Sport Leichtbau [lightweight]) was a competitive GT racer.6 In its life before Calder, VIN #2275992 raced several times in 1974, winning first place at Salzburg with Jacky Ickx and Hans Stuck at the wheel. Later in the season, the great Ronnie Peterson—aka “Superswede,” two time F-1 runner-up champ—would also drive it, taking pole position at the Nurburgring, though failing to finish. The car’s pre-Calder provenance alone makes it a significant historic competition auto. The car made a cultural pit stop at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, before going to Le Mans a month later. There Poulain was joined by two professional drivers: Posey, who had finished in the top ten at Le Mans five times in ten outings, and Jean Guichet, who had won Le Mans a decade earlier

Right: Calder with Hervé Poulain holding Calder BMW Art Car (maquette, 1975), Le Carroi house, Saché, 1975. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York © 2022 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

in a Ferrari 250LM. So the car has had five legendary drivers—Ickx, Stuck, Peterson, Posey, and Guichet; has represented four European countries plus the United States; has had multiple pole positions and one first-place finish; and is painted and signed by Calder. That’s a tough pedigree to top. In approaching Calder, Poulain was no doubt inspired by Braniff International Airways’ commissioning of the artist to paint airplanes, in 1973.7 Whereas Braniff had to write Calder an enormous check to entice him to cross the line between art and commerce, for BMW Calder worked free. In return, BMW agreed to conserve and display the car in perpetuity. Under this arrangement, the Calder BMW has avoided the usual degradations that ensue when the factory deaccessions an obsolete road warrior. It has had a transparent, continuous history, as well as a healthy intermittent exhibition schedule at venues from museums to automobile concours. In the second book of his two-volume biography of Calder, Jed Perl discusses the Braniff episode in considerable detail but mentions the Calder BMW only in passing, as eliciting the same unease in the art world as Braniff’s shotgun marriage of art and commerce. For many, including Calder’s wife, Louisa, this was the clear, negative verdict on the airplane project. Calder himself seems to have been less conflicted about it, but who wouldn’t want to see his art fly by in the sky? The Le Mans adventure was something else entirely. If Braniff had been a shotgun marriage, the Art Car project was great sex among multiple consenting adults. Calder was one of several artists, including Pablo Picasso, whom Braniff had approached; Poulain never had anyone but Calder in mind.8 (Picasso died before discussions with Braniff could advance, but he would later suffer the posthumous indignity of his heirs licensing his name for a mass-produced Citroën.) Braniff went under long ago, leaving the two Calder planes to be recycled and then junked. Today the Calder BMW occupies pride of place in the museum at BMW’s Munich headquarters. On the first day of the race, on June 14, Calder was whisked from Saché to Le Mans in the helicopter of Frédéric Chandon de Brailles, heir to the Moët-Hennessy champagne concern. Chandon saw to it that the artist got the VIP treatment at the circuit’s Club Moët et Chandon before being coptered back home. Le Mans was the first auto race Calder visited in person and the helicopter ride was probably also his first. One can only imagine the wonder of discovery he must have felt in the presence of all those fantastic machines—among which the Calder car, the most fantastic of all, caused the greatest stir. Posey would recall, “Le Mans is always a zoo, but there were literally hundreds of people around the car, all vying for pictures with or autographs from Calder. When he saw me in my driver’s suit, he put his arm around me and said, ‘Get me outta here.’” The day before, Posey had driven “one of the great laps of my life” to qualify the car way ahead of every other car in its class. “The Calder car really stood out on the grid, chest high among all those knee-high prototypes,” he told me. “BMW gave me the choice of driving that weekend at Mosport with Brian Redman—which would have been a pretty much guaranteed win—or driving the Calder car at Le Mans. The final result notwithstanding, I made the right choice.”9 Although the Calder BMW ran fifth overall for several hours, it was retired a little more than a 100

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third of the way through the race with mechanical failure. Falling in the immediate aftermath of the oil crisis of 1973, 1975 was not a good year for the Bimmer boys at Le Mans: their highest-placing car came in twenty-seventh (behind nineteen Porsches, no less). The ’75 race was derisively referred to as the “Le Mans Economy Run,” due to fuel restrictions. Calder too was running out of gas. He died a year later, barely three weeks into Calder’s Universe, his retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, where the car was on display. Its presence in the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building was not uncontroversial. A common critique of the show was that it failed to distinguish a hierarchy of value between Calder’s art and his other stuff (or, as Perl puts it, between his masterpieces and his follies). Lucky for us the car was there, though, because Calder was able to show it to his then-thirteen-year-old grandson, Alexander S. C. “Sandy” Rower. Sandy asked the obvious question: Can you start it up for me, grandpa? According to him, Calder laughed and said he was going to make one for himself so he could do exactly that. As the keeper of the Calder flame, Rower eventually made good on his grandfather’s intentions. Working with virtually the same cast of characters, including Maurer and Neerpasch, he has executed a true artist’s proof, indistinguishable in art-historical terms from VIN #2275992 except for the latter’s racing provenance. As Rower puts it, “It’s not a replica, clone, copy, reproduction, or 1:1 model. It’s the artist’s proof my grandfather was entitled to make but never got around to. As in 1975, BMW Group Classic converted a 1974 3.0 CSL road car to identical racing specs. It has the same serial number as the first car, plus the AP designation, as in any unique or editioned artwork for which an AP is made.”10 The artist’s proof made its debut last summer in the exhibition Alexander Calder: Minimal/ Maximal, at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and then appeared at the Bridge, an annual concours on the Long Island site of the former Bridgehampton Race Circuit (where Posey raced on many occasions, including his professional debut with the

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Roger Penske team in 1968). It has joined the Calder Foundation’s “stable” of mobiles and will be a regular presence on both the art and the concours circuits. Through April 2022, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach is hosting the car’s North American institutional debut. What’s next, Sandy—an operational Boeing 727 in Calder livery? Here’s an idea: there was a third plane for Braniff, the “Flying Colors of Mexico,” that never got off the drawing board. I’ll bet you can find the right donor plane in one of those airline graveyards in the southwestern desert . . . and I know a guy with an engine.

1. For a complete history of the project see BMW Group, “BMW Art Car,” n.d., available online at https://www.artcar. bmwgroup.com/en/art-car/ (accessed November 9, 2021). 2. Alexander Calder, 1975, quoted in Hervé Poulain, Mes Pop Cars (Waterloo, Belgium: Editions Apach, 2006), 41. Author’s translation: “C’est comme une course de taureaux à cause de la couleur et à cause de la mort. . . . C’est tout de même mieux que la guerre.” 3. For a tongue-in-cheek look at race car graphics see Reyner Banham, “Notes toward a Definition of U.S. Automobile Painting as a Significant Branch of Mobile Modern Heraldry,” Art in America 54, no. 5 (September/ October 1966): 76–79. For a more straightforward history see Sven Voelker, Go Faster: The Graphic Design of Racing Cars (Berlin: Gestalten, 2010). 4. Sam Posey, telephone conversation with the author, November 2, 2021. 5. Poulain, in the film 24 H Du Mans 1975. Author’s translation from the French. 6. The car raced in the GT class—modified road-going, series-produced cars—rather than the faster (and lower) prototype class of purpose-built machines. 7. See Jed Perl, Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940–1976 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), 510–16. 8. Braniff apparently approached three artists, Calder, Pablo Picasso, and “Mireaux” (presumably Joan Miró). See Thomas E. Mowry Jr., “‘Flying Colors’ Braniff Soars into Flight with their Biggest Promotion Ever,” Wharton Account 13, no. 2 (Winter 1974): 21. 9. Posey, telephone conversation with the author. 10. Alexander S. C. Rower, telephone conversation with the author, November 4, 2021.

Previous spread: Calder BMW Art Car (1975) racing at 24 Heures du Mans, June 14, 1975. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York © 2022 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York This page: Calder BMW Art Car (Artist’s Proof, 1975/2021) in Alexander Calder: Minimal / Maximal, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, August 2021. Photo: David von Becker, courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York © 2022 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Building a Legacy 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. In this installment, art historian Richard Shiff speaks with Caitlin Murray, director of archives and programs at Judd Foundation, about the archive of Donald Judd, how to approach materials that occupy the gray area between document and art, and some of the considerations unique to stewarding an archive housed within and adjacent to spaces conceived by the artist. Judd Foundation preserves Judd’s permanently installed living and working spaces, libraries, and archives in New York and Marfa, Texas. The collections in the Judd Foundation Archives support major research initiatives on the artist’s life and work such as the catalogue raisonné project.

CAITLIN MURRAY One of the distinctive aspects of the

Judd Foundation Archives is its location. Unlike archives in libraries and museums, often far from the artist’s work, in Marfa you see Judd’s archive in the context of his work. This is rewarding for scholars but creates difficult questions, archivally speaking. For example, in addition to the materials housed in the Judd Foundation Archives in Marfa, some archival items—drawings, for example—remain installed in Judd’s living and working spaces. These drawings aren’t works on paper per se, but they’re significant in their reflection of Judd’s thinking. It’s been an interesting process for us to determine what remains on view and what should be moved into an archival setting, where these items can be more easily and safely studied. RICHARD SHIFF Do you run into situations where you don’t know whether what you have is an archival document or a work of art? CM Yes, certainly, especially with drawings. We’re working toward understanding this with more clarity. Right now, the idea is to leave things as open as possible and to treat drawings as a study collection of the Archives, a kind of hybrid space between the art collection and the Archives. What we’d like to explore is the variety of the drawings— which Judd sold, which were framed, which went on exhibition, which were left in situ, which were 104

stored among project files or intermixed with correspondence—to get a better sense of how to proceed. It’s a process that necessitates conversations with studio assistants, gallerists, art historians. Additionally, there was a retrospective exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1976 that included drawings from Judd’s early sketchbooks—the last major exhibition of Judd’s drawings, interestingly— and because that exhibition happened within Judd’s lifetime, I think it tells us a lot about what he thought about his drawing practice. RS You mean because he had a hand in saying “These are worth displaying”? CM Yes, exactly. But still, many challenging questions remain. For example, the drawings from Judd’s early sketchbooks aren’t signed or dated. Also, it seems that Judd only removed pages from his bound sketchbooks, or framed them, when they were included in an exhibition; he appears to have kept them together as a way to reflect on a crucial period in his development as an artist, the period in which he began making works in three dimensions. The Archives also contain drawings that, from a drafting standpoint, are more finely articulated—in pen as opposed to pencil, for example. A number of these are dated and signed, and you see these out in the world—they’re drawings that

he would have sold or given as gifts. RS These are finely rendered schematic drawings of particular works? CM Yes. And the Archives also contain drawings related to his architectural practice. Not all of these were made by Judd: he commissioned drawings by the architects Lauretta Vinciarelli, Adrian Jolles, Claude Armstrong, and Donna Cohen. Their collections are now part of the Judd Foundation Archives. RS On the question of determining whether something is a document or a work of art, one thing I think of is that Judd thought like an architect and worked like an architect. He made a lot of sketches of ideas and possibilities: What would it look like this way? And what would it look like this other way? He could very quickly sketch it out, and then you have something that might look like a throwaway drawing yet embodies a lot of thought. Then you have to decide, how much is thought worth as a component in art? CM Recently we were photographing a group of drawings. In this case all of them related to architectural projects, but they were reflective of Judd’s general drawing practice in their size and style— quickly drawn ideas, as you’re saying, not presentation drawings. In some instances the paper is stained or ripped. There are different ways of

thinking about the value of those drawings. As one example, there’s their value to Judd, who kept drawings and artwork that he made at quite a young age, as well as his notes from when he was studying art history and philosophy at Columbia. RS Yes, that concern for documenting his own evolution is a remarkable feature of Judd. CM It’s fascinating that he kept so many of these documents, and that he kept them in the spaces where he was living and working many years later. I think you could even say they were part of his studio practice. These are documents that he was reflecting back on to generate new work; they’re not just relics of the past. RS He’s someone who kept all of his thought alive, all of his aesthetic notions over the years. CM Exactly. For those who are stewarding Judd’s legacy or want to know more about his life and work, the Archives and this special case of drawings are exceedingly significant. If the work itself is the primary documentation, the drawings are extremely close to it, because you can see in them the working out of ideas. And it’s rare to have documentation that you can then triangulate with extensive correspondence from the time—correspondence with dealers and gallerists and other artists. RS And the third term is the space, right? CM Right. These spaces that Judd created, both in New York and in Marfa, are the third element of that triangle. RS He’s probably not alone in this respect, but it’s certainly significant that when he dated sketches of ideas, he included the location along with the date. CM In his writing practice, too, he would note where he took down the note, be it at Spring Street or in Marfa or in Europe. RS He was extremely sensitive to the location wherever he was at a given time. CM Right. In the library at the Block, for example—another special case, in that it exists within an installed space and contains around 13,000 volumes—Judd would occasionally write in a book where and when he bought it. One interesting thing that we’re looking at right now, which relates to Judd’s desire to keep his thought present, is his art writing, which dates from between 1959 and 1965. As you know, Judd wrote hundreds of reviews during that time, and in addition to showing the development of his thinking, they’re an important record of what was on view in New York in that period. His papers include well over a thousand pieces of exhibition ephemera that he gathered, and a significant number of these have notes that he presumably made as he walked through the exhibitions. So we have the ephemera and Judd’s notes; handwritten drafts of the articles and essays; the typed drafts, with corrections; and the published versions. And we’re able to see his thought process all the way through. It’s really very special. RS For me as a scholar, ever y thing you’ve organized in the Archives is extremely valuable. There’s a lot that I’ve never seen, I’m sure, and that I have no inkling of, but the things that I do have an inkling of, like the drafts for the more important essays, are extremely important. Then also the occasional sketch that represents the kind of “aha” moment where he’s not just saying, It could be this way, it could be that way—he’s saying, It should be this way. CM There’s still a lot of material yet to be discovered for us as well. We’re embarking on a two-year project to complete the processing of Judd’s papers, which will help us to complete an effort that’s taken

many years of work. The papers are extensive, including many hundreds of boxes of published and unpublished writings, correspondence, photographs, moving-image material, drawings, exhibition ephemera, publications, and museum, gallery, and exhibition files. The goal is accessibility. We don’t know exactly what’s going to be important to art historians in the future, certainly, so making this material available is key. In that we’re in the process of organizing Judd’s papers, the research time and materials available are limited, and access will expand as we complete processing. One of the most rewarding research experiences for me, outside of the publications we’ve been able to produce using materials from the Archives— such as Donald Judd Writings [2016], Donald Judd Interviews [2019], and Donald Judd Spaces [2020]— was to support the research of the curatorial team for Judd, the retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2020–21. That was an extensive, multiyear research process that involved every part of the Foundation’s holdings. I wonder, Richard—in several of Judd’s essays he talks about the work of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, and how at the time of those artists’ deaths, their work was scattered and it became increasingly difficult to see it, especially to see multiple paintings at one time. That seems to have made an incredible impact on Judd as a young artist. I’m wondering how those statements struck you, or how you see them in relationship to Marfa, to the Chinati Foundation, and to Judd’s own archival endeavors. RS Well, Chinati was his project to make sure that what had happened to Newman and Rothko didn’t happen to him, and to John Chamberlain and Dan Flavin and whoever else he would eventually have decided to display in depth. He had an unusually ambitious sense of himself and he extended that to the artists he appreciated in his generation. It all became a single project, and it could not have been done by a person who did not have great faith in his own importance and in the seriousness of his own work. The Archives reflect that seriousness, because he did keep things—meaning that there could be a future for people who wanted to think the way Donald Judd thought, or at least wanted to understand the way Donald Judd had been thinking. CM When he conceived of Judd Foundation, in 1977, Judd wrote, “The purpose of the foundation is to preserve my work and that of others and to preserve this work in spaces I consider appropriate for it.” Separately, he said of his spaces in New York and Marfa, “Almost as much thought has gone into the space surrounding the work as has gone into the work itself.” That raises interesting questions about the role of thought as a determining factor in Judd’s art, and about the importance of his papers and their location. RS Yes, it’s something I wanted to get to, that the only thing that prevents it from being art is that we have this categorical distinction. You know, there’s visual stuff and there’s stuff you make that has a material presence and there’s the thought that goes along with it. But the thought, we usually say, is not the art. Just recent ly t here was t he wonder f ul Cezanne drawing exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. A lot of the drawings were in sketchbooks, where it’s clear Cezanne was exploring ideas. Some of the pages are carefully constructed, but a lot of them are really casual; there

are some very beautiful drawings, and then there are some trivial pages. But it’s drawing, and it’s in the sketchbook, so it’s automatically a work of art. With regard to the Judd Foundation Archives and this question, Are these drawings or works of art?, if you were to take all the drawings for a particular project—not one by one, but all together—it seems to me that it’s like a Cezanne sketchbook: it’s a work of art because it’s a package of thought, and the thought is expressed in these visual diagrams. CM I totally agree. All sorts of questions become possible when you’re able to see things together. That’s even present in the way Judd organized his working spaces, with tools alongside drawings alongside photographs alongside material samples and completed artworks. When everything is visible, you’re likelier to understand the questions that were being asked at a given time, and perhaps you can produce an idea that’s whole rather than just a part of a thought, which is of course so central to the formal qualities of Judd’s work. These elements—the drawings, the material studies, the works, the spaces, the library—they form a whole. Judd’s papers would of course still be valuable if they were at a large collecting institution with many other artists’ papers, and there would be benefits to that: they could be studied alongside other artists’ archives, and that’s important in that it encourages different questions. But if you were to remove Judd’s archive from Marfa, from its adjacency to his work, and all of these other modes of his thought and interests, I think something important would be lost. RS I agree with you, because, as you’ve said, that sense of place was so important to him. He was a beautiful nineteenth-century anarchist or utopian, you know, creating a total society and organizing this town in a beneficial way. It’s really very utopian. CM And at the same time, he wasn’t searching for something that wasn’t here and bringing it here; he was creating from what already existed. He was working with locally made adobe bricks, with easily purchasable pine two-by-fours, with native plants. Of course we know that Marfa is remote, and can be hard to reach for our colleagues in other parts of the country and the world. It’s important that we do our best to provide access to the Archives remotely. But people doing in-depth research really have to come here to visit the Judd Foundation and the Chinati Foundation. I think being here, using the Archives and visiting Judd’s spaces, will generate new ideas and thinking for a long time to come. I think, too, that the Judd papers attest to how much more there is yet to discover, even for an artist who has had a significant amount of recognition. Whether it’s learning about his engagement with astronomy at Texas’s McDonald Observatory, or about his political activities, or reading his correspondence with other artists, these constellations of activities are significant and for generations of artists will allow for new ways of connecting his life and work. I think when one is steeped long enough in Judd’s work, his way of living, and his interests, one sees a way of understanding the world in terms of its materiality. And with Judd, the scope is so grand. When people say, Wow, you’ve worked on one artist for thirteen years, I think to myself, But with this artist, there’s still so much there. RS It’s like working on Leonardo. With certain people, you don’t run out of interest. 105

LES BLANCS DE LA COULEUR, LA COULEUR DU BLANC

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SIMON HANTAÏ

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Anne Baldassari reflects on the art-historical influences and radical breaks reflected in the artist’s work with color. With pliage [folding], it is the problem of modernity [in] painting that is being addressed; for me, [the] two extremes of contemporary modern painting [are], on the one hand, the decentered space of [Jackson] Pollock, and on the other, [Henri] Matisse’s paper cutouts, in which drawing is totally absorbed by color. . . . I was thinking that I needed to see how Matisse’s color could be introduced into the random space of Pollock and what would happen when it was. . . . Paradoxically, the method of pliage is based on the fact that canvas stops being a projection screen and becomes a material . . . ; and [I needed] to consider just this new relation to the canvas: never again will we be face to face with the canvas, never [again] will we be able to control [it], never [again] will it be possible for its [visual] preconception to be [the matrix] of its construction. —Simon Hantaï, 1981 108

The exhibition Simon Hantaï: Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc (The whites of color, the color of white), at Gagosian, New York, in January 2022, was the second part of a diptych of shows begun with Les noirs du blanc, les blancs du noir, at Gagosian, Le Bourget, in 2019–20. 1 At the two extremes of the visual spectrum—prismatic color on one end and the theory-based bichromy of black and white on the other—these exhibitions explored the question of color and of its extinction. They aimed to reflect the winding, sometimes paradoxical paths of Hantaï’s experiments in achieving the “immaterial colors” described in Goethe’s Theory of Colours of 1810. In an earlier article for the Quarterly on Les noirs du blanc, les blancs du noir, I showed how Hantaï effected a deliberate reduction of pictorial means through the absolute contrast between the noncolors of black and white. 2 His goal was to bring about a limitless extension of the phenomena elicited by that binary contrast, an extension of its optical effects and of its psychic consequences for the beholder. Hantaï effectively placed himself in the heritage of Matisse and Pollock, a key frame of reference for him. Ignoring color, relying simply on the vibration of filamentary lines in black and white, these artists had approached and sometimes obtained the psychic and optical appearance of

purple, mauve, and lavender. Matisse’s experience of designing the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, in 1947–48 (conception) and 1949–51 (construction), was central to his experimentation with and understanding of this “immaterial” dimension of color. Pollock knew about the Vence chapel, in particular from an article in Vogue in 1949, 3 and it could have been a model and inspiration for the ceiling and windows he designed for a church conceived (but never realized) by Tony Smith, and on which Pollock worked with Smith and Alfonso Ossorio. 4 Hantaï was also interested in Henri Michaux’s experiences with mescal, which induced the artist to see subtly colored clouds above a cluster of marks he had made in india ink. In the monumental Études (Studies, 1968–71), the Laissées (Leftovers, 1994–95), and the Sérigraphies (Silk-screen printings, 1996–97), Hantaï conjured immaterial worlds, leaving the field open for the appearance of novel perceptual phenomena. He saw that it was the relation and interaction between the gouache cutouts that Matisse began to produce in the 1940s and their white grounds—the wall or the space of the room—that ensured both the purity and the intensity of their color. Without that relationship, color was weakened—“killed,” as they say in painters’ studios—by its juxtapositions and proximities. Returning to this dialogue between

Previous spread: Antonio Semeraro, Simon Hantaï cutting out a monumental yellow Tabula (1981), Meun, France, 1995. Artwork © Archives Simon Hantaï/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Antonio Semeraro Opposite: Simon Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–95, acrylic on canvas, 118 1⁄8 × 107 7⁄8 inches (300 × 274 cm) © Archives Simon Hantaï/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes This page: Simon Hantaï, Laissée, 1981–95, acrylic on canvas, 69 3⁄8 × 43 ¼ inches (176 × 111 cm) © Archives Simon Hantaï/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: David Bordes

form and ground introduced by Matisse’s cutouts, Hantaï applied its principles to the procedure of pliage but refused visual euphoria. Like Barnett Newman, he opposed “choreographic” jubilation and its risk of decorativeness. In these works of Hantaï’s, it is the quality and density of white that institutes color. White models color and ensures its radiance, its full existence. Furthermore, what gives each color its dimension and full expression is white light—a spinning synthesis of all the colors mixed together—not its simple pigmentary transposition into the white of the canvas or the wall, which gives each color its full expression and dimension. Hantaï’s bichrome reductions in black and white are accompanied by their contrary, by strategies of color excess: whether polychrome or monochrome, pure pigments drown and overrun the surface of the painting, attacking it from its edges or its center. The Études and then the Blancs (Whites, 1973–74) thus systematically examine the alternating and complex modalities of the pure color/white ground relation. The Tabulas series of 1972–76 and 1980–82 are programmatic in character. Here, Hantaï deepened his observation of color. Formed of grids obtained by tying the canvas into knots set at regular intervals, covering it edge to edge in monochrome paint,

then untying and unfolding the knots, the Tabulas end up looking crinkled with multiple “gussets.” The texture of the knots was stiff, resilient to the painter’s brush. Never was the act of painting “on canvas” more exact. The epistemological fault line of the Tabulas lilas (Lilac tabulas, 1982) lies at the convergence of the chromatic and the bichromatic modes. The achromy of their white paint on white grounds, interacting with the white space of gallery and the white light from its overhead windows, provokes the appearance of an infinitesimal degree of color, color at the limit of perception. Perhaps that is the reason for their name: “lilac” adds to that color the ineffable perfume of sensations glimpsed, buried, and forgotten. Simon Hantaï : Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc presented eighteen paintings from the Études, Blancs, Tabulas, and Laissées series. They were united by the principle of primary and complementary colors and by the ternary sequence derived from cyan/magenta/yellow: yellow/purple, red/green, and blue/orange. The exhibition applied the opposition and complementarity of colors to the selection and hanging of the paintings. According to Goethe, the confrontation of opposites heightens the visual effects engendered by their contrast. Accordingly, red and bright-green Tabulas,

rhythmically punctuated by the white walls, reflected and opposed each other. When the eye sees a red Tabula, the retina automatically invents a reverse, “green” image equivalent in power to this red source. It is a kind of optical phantom, floating and sliding through space and back-projecting itself, particularly onto white and gray surfaces. In Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc, its aura finally suffused the green Tabula hung opposite it. This play of chromatic echoes between primary and complementary colors also produced more specific phenomena: the fissured, white-spangled grids of the Tabulas vibrated and were haloed with their complementary colors. Hantaï quotes Matisse on Goethe: “The most beautiful, most fixed, most immaterial hues are obtained without their actual material expression. For example, pure white becomes lilac, ibis pink, Veronese green or angelica blue simply because of the proximity of their opposites.”5 In 1982, representing France at the fortieth Venice Biennale, Hantaï created a theoretically based installation of large-format Tabulas that contrasted with and complemented each other: a cyan-and-magenta Tabula on the center wall (four rows of large squares), and a lemon-yellow Tabula (eight rows of small squares) and a bright-green Tabula (nine rows of small squares), hung opposite 109

Simon Hantaï, Tabula, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 92 1⁄2 × 210 5⁄8 inches (235 × 535 cm) © Archives Simon Hantaï/ ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Thomas Lannes

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With pliage [folding], it is the problem of modernity [in] painting that is being addressed; for me, [the] two extremes of contemporary modern painting [are], on the one hand, the decentered space of [Jackson] Pollock, and on the other, [Henri] Matisse’s paper cutouts, in which drawing is totally absorbed by color.

Antonio Semeraro, Simon Hantaï cutting out a monumental yellow Tabula (1981), Meun, France, 1995 (detail).Artwork © Archives Simon Hantaï/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Antonio Semeraro

—Simon Hantaï

two polychrome Tabulas (five rows of large squares) on either side of the room’s entrance. Here, color imposed its arbitrary rule while the grids, now taut, now loose, either regulated or broke down the gaze. These panels were in no way intended to be decorative, yet that function is always hard to avoid when color starts to play its often hazy score of optical seduction or irritation. To avoid this trap, Hantaï emphasized the mathematical side of the installation. If the gallery was read from left to right—the usual Western mode—the Tabulas were seen in this order: polychrome, yellow, magenta, blue, green, and polychrome again. We went from one side of the spectrum to the other, and from warm to cold, with the polychrome acting both as an opening and a closing, tracing an open space of multiple possibilities. In this way the chromatic plan of the French Pavilion avoided any kind of will to prettify, to arrange, instead affirming the brute fact of color and the effectiveness of the setup, which enjoined the visitor to look, perceive, record, and feel, here and now, the terribilità of color. Although made using completely different pictorial means, the group brought to mind the four manifesto paintings that Newman painted in 1966– 70, collectively titled Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?, which shocked and angered both the public and the critics. Hantaï repeatedly expressed interest in Newman’s work, and there are clear affinities between his pliage and Newman’s zips. The radicality of the unfolding that reveals the white of the ground in the Tabulas can be related to the tearing away of the vertical strip of masking tape that divided Newman’s big panels into distinct chromatic sequences. For Newman, though, the point of the zip was not division but the emergence of a singular state of consciousness from the depths of the painting. The title of his first zip painting, Onement I of 1948, effectively conveys the notion of separation, loss, and unification: The painting should give man a sense of place: that he knows he’s there, so he’s aware of 112

himself. In that sense he relates to me when I made the painting because in that sense, I was there. . . . standing in front of my paintings you [have] a sense of your own scale. . . . To me, the sense of place not only has a mystery but has that sense of metaphysical fact. I have come to distrust the episodic, and I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality and [at] the same time of his connection to others, who are also separate.6 Newman thought of expanse, its interruption, and the scale of perception as the indissociable terms of his painting. He ultimately moved from a colored zip on color to a zip left in reserve, revealing the bare canvas ground. These “streaks of light,” as he called them, striated the surface of the painting with their brightness.7 With the Laissées, Hantaï returned to Matisse’s cutouts, combining them with a radical variation on Newman’s zip: he literally cut into the canvas with a box cutter, following the grid lines that had crisscrossed the Tabulas, surrounding their unfolded knots, and subdividing it into individual paintings, detached monochromes that highlight their primary or complementary colors through their intrinsic starlike spangling. The overall invasion of the optical and sensory field effected by the monumental Tabulas gives way to the random figure of a fold whose bulging scale overruns the eye and carries it toward the generic perception of an eye-body whose awareness is created in and through painting. “This is to say,” Hantaï told an interviewer, that a completely different palette comes into the field [opened up] by the work: I know that yellow works in a certain way, that it will overflow into lilacs in certain conditions, not in any old conditions. . . . Or that green will [overflow] into pinks, etc. When Matisse was asked what the

future of painting would be, he no longer said color, he said light. We must make the distinction by which the function of color is essentially linked to light, not to matter. Since this perspective struck me as quite dazzling, it’s the only thing that interests me. In the pliages, as I was painting, the white, the unpainted, appeared increasingly active—in the end, it was almost the only active element. Everything that [interests me in this respect relates] at once [to] a material history, an optical and at the same time and above all a spiritual history, to a question of soul and poetry. On the material, absolute level, light is necessarily the foundation of the world. It is, precisely, the sign and symbol of another infinity. If you get to the bottom of it, you are bound to be in a hole, which is the opening. And it is necessarily an opening onto infinity. I don’t want an answer that assures me of something, in fact I don’t want any answers; I want the absolute nonanswer—that is, infinity.8

1. Simon Hantaï: Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc, Gagosian, Madison Avenue, New York, January-March 2022. Simon Hantaï: Les noirs du blanc, les blancs du noir, Gagosian, Le Bourget, Paris, 2019–20. 2. Anne Baldassari, “Simon Hantaï,” Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2020, 124–29. 3. Rosamond Bernier, “Matisse Designs a New Church,” Vogue, February 15, 1949, 131–32. 4. See E. A. Carmean, “Les Peintures noires de Jackson Pollock et le projet d’église de Tony Smith,” in Daniel Abadie, Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1982), 54–77. 5. Henri Matisse, “Propos sur la couleur,” in Henri Matisse. Aquarelles, dessins, exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Jacques Dubourg, 1962), repr. in Matisse, Écrits et propos sur l’art, ed. Dominique Fourcade (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 207. 6. Barnett Newman, in an interview with David Sylvester, 1965, repr. in The Grove Book of Art Writing (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 537. 7. See “Interview with Emile de Antonio,” 1970, in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 306. 8. Hantaï, in an interview with Pierre Desfons for Expressions: Simon Hantaï, a program for the TF1 television channel, 1981.

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For three nights in February, 2022 the Shed in New York was transformed by an exhibition and multimedia engagement entitled HEADLESS: The Demonstration. Bringing together the vanguards of fashion, music, performance, and art under the moniker of Anonymous Club, the events collapsed the standard boundaries separating exhibition, theater, award show, rave, concert, and runway. Launched in 2017, Anonymous Club is an evolving, mutating collective that explores the intersections of creative production. Initiated by Shayne Oliver to upend tradition and infiltrate the mainstream, the multi-hyphenate team of creators and collaborators behind the collective— including LEECH, WENCH (a joint music venture by Oliver and Arca), Ian Isiah, Eartheater, TOTALFREEDOM, Izzy Spears, Deli Girls, Shannon Funchess (LIGHT ASYLUM), OMAR S (FXHE DETROIT), among many others at the Shed—takes a no-holdsbarred approach to the artistic impulse. As their manifesto reads:

ANONYMOUS CLUB Anonymous Club is about no one. It is an affiliation, a group of people that work with one another in no predetermined manner to no predetermined end. Above all else Anonymous exists to foster and sustain the space necessary for creation. Anonymous Club operates as an independent collective supporting the cultivation of talents and realizing their vision through business and product. Key to the current incarnation of Anonymous Club is the figure of LEECH; part alter ego, part phantasmic projection, LEECH is a musician, a model, and an art piece unto themselves. Unattached to any singular person, LEECH is potentially inhabitable by anyone or anything. Inspired by LEECH, and the song “Freak” in particular, the artist Lengua has created a new photo series for the pages of Gagosian Quarterly. These images took shape in partnership with stylist Taylor Thoroski, hairstylist Sara Mathiasson, creative collaborator Christian Velasquez, and the model Nadia Moussa.

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SHIRLEY CLARKE’S INDEFINITE TRUTHS Rennie McDougall traces the blurred line between truth and fiction in the cinema of Shirley Clarke, with particular attention to the 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason. From her early dance films to later featurelength movies, themes of race, performance, and the body emerge in Clarke’s examination of the real.

Shirley Clarke on the set of The Connection (1961). Photo: courtesy Milestone Films and the Shirley Clarke Estate

Like all periods of American cinema, the New Hollywood era of the 1960s and ’70s, a movement away from the major studios and toward independent filmmakers, was dominated by men. But Shirley Clarke, a New York filmmaker whose work preceded and inspired many of the New Hollywood directors, understood being a woman as an advantage as well as a hindrance: “It allowed me to do things that might not have gotten attention except that I was one of the few women who made films,” she said in an interview for Afterimage magazine in 1983. “I always knew it would be advantageous until I reached a very strange line. Everything was fine so long as I was not really going to take over.” As she did with many things, Clarke saw both perspectives. The directors of the New Hollywood era, or the American New Wave, favored intimate filmmaking. They were inspired by the cinema verité style of the French, whose films strove for realism in dialogue, setting, and acting. Because of this fascination with cinematic “truth,” verité films often revealed the processes of filmmaking as a part of their realism, confessing to their audiences that there could be no true realism in film without acknowledging its element of fabrication. Clarke was similarly obsessed with the dubious line between truth and fiction in film. She cofounded the Filmmakers Cooperative, a group that helped usher in a generation of independent filmmakers by raising funds for film distribution in New York. She made four feature films in the 1960s, one of them a 1963 documentary about the poet Robert Frost that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It is her other three films 123

Still from Shirley Clarke’s A Moment in Love (1957). Photo: courtesy Milestone Films and the Shirley Clarke Estate

of that decade, though—The Connection (1961), The Cool World (1964), and Portrait of Jason (1967)—that most keenly display the unique clarity of perspective in both her craft and her politics. Restorations of these works by Milestone Films have permitted new audiences to experience Clarke’s brilliant studies in the nature of truth (most of which can now be viewed on the Criterion Channel), and their cultural impact resonates just as strongly six decades later. Clarke, whom the critic Richard Brody called “one of the prime inventors of creative cinematic nonfiction,” began making films in the 1950s with a 16mm camera that her husband, Bert Clarke, gifted her as a wedding present. Her early films such as Bridges-Go-Round 1 and 2 (1958) were like experiments with the camera, exploring colorization, overlapping composition, and movement. She also made short dance films (she had begun her artistic career as a dancer, training with Martha Graham), featuring the choreography of her peers Anna Sokolow and Daniel Nagrin. In the short film Dance in the Sun (1953), for example, Nagrin prepares on a bare stage, warming up by using a piano as a ballet barre, removing his shirt, and preparing to perform for the empty auditorium. Intercutting Nagrin’s performance on stage with views of him dancing on a vast beach, Clarke juxtaposes the unadorned reality of the stage with what seems to be the scene he imagines as he dances. In another dance film, Bullfight (1955), still images of bullfighters in a dance with their bulls transition into shots of Sokolow, her hair pulled back into a tight bun, performing against a blank backdrop. Her movements recall the gestures of a matador, and Clarke cuts between the formally framed dancer and footage of crowds watching a 124

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bullfight. Clarke’s filmmaking sensibilities were seeded in these dance films; a person dancing for the camera is at once stylized and authentic, in a state of elevated performativity and grounded in the simplicity of their gestures, the limitations of their body in time and space, and the imagined space they conjure through their dance. The Connection, Clarke’s first full-length film, was also her first to engage directly with race, the theme that would dominate her work. It features a group of Black jazz musicians waiting in a dilapidated loft for their dealer, played by Clarke’s creative and romantic partner Carl Lee, while a director and a cameraman film them for a documentary. Adapted from a play of the same name by Jack Gelber, The Connection allowed Clarke to fictionalize her own process, with an actor playing the part of a filmmaker directing his subjects. “There is something dirty about just peeking into people’s lives,” this director (William Redfield) says. The camera also acts not as a one-way mirror between actors and audience but as a window. “What do you want to hear?” one of the junkies asks the camera directly. “That we’re a petty, miserable, self-annihilating microcosm? That’s what you want to hear.” Both The Connection and The Cool World—which presents frank depictions of police brutality against the Black community in Harlem—show Clarke’s interest in making the audience complicit with film’s power to blur truth and fiction, and in showing how that blurring is intimately linked with prejudice and racially motivated perceptions. Clarke was outspoken in her belief that racial inequality was America’s (and the world’s) most pressing 126

social issue. She felt conflicted about the fact that her films, which she hoped could change minds and inspire advocacy, only reached a small, already converted avant-garde. She insisted that her political ideals required a disregard for the kind of rote forms of cinema that might have encouraged wider viewership; it was also simply her preferred artistic sensibility. In the documentary Rome Is Burning (1970), in which Clarke is interviewed about her films, she says, “I’m sort of afraid, I think, of being superficial, of dealing in broad clichés with something. In order to avoid that, I tend to look obliquely at it.” Her last film of the ’60s, Portrait of Jason, filmed on a single night at Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, is her masterpiece. It begins with a Black man in Coke-bottle glasses staring directly into the camera, and through it at the audience. He introduces himself as Jason Holliday, repeats the introduction with a more playful tone in his voice, then introduces himself a third time as Aaron Payne. This is because he changed his name in San Francisco “to suit my personality”: “Jason Holliday was created in San Francisco, and San Francisco is a place to be created.” One of the many things that make this documentary remarkable is that it may be the first film to feature a gay Black man at its center. More than that, it allows him to present himself on his own terms. Holliday is a performer, or aspires to be one; his long-held ambition to start his own nightclub act remains a pipe dream, despite the willingness of friends to fund him. Like Clarke, Jason encourages a playful relationship between truth and fiction. As he launches into each monologue

This page: Still from Shirley Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round 1 (1958) Opposite: Still from Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967) Photos: courtesy Milestone Films and the Shirley Clarke Estate

for Clarke’s camera (stories Clarke said she’d heard Holliday perform “a hundred times before”), he stands up from a lounge chair, glass of Scotch in hand, as if taking his place on a comedy-club stage. After the elaborate choreography of the camera in The Connection and The Cool World, which Clarke referred to as a “ballet” between actors and camera, she wanted to free herself to focus on the dance of a human mind. A single camera frames Holliday, zooming into close-up, then zooming out to capture his fully embodied articulations. Clarke said the camera choices were led by her attuning to Holliday’s rhythms, “breathing with him.” He tells rambling and circular stories about his time at Rikers Island and about working as a housemaid for uptown white people. He performs impersonations of Mae West and Katharine Hepburn. His drunken turns of phrase are part ironic genius, part verbal blunder: “I have suffered expensively . . . I mean, extensively,” or “I’ve been in love once, many times.” The film unfolds this way for nearly ninety minutes, meandering and repetitive yet never less than captivating. Then Clarke and Lee, who assisted Clarke behind the camera, turn on Holliday, accusing him of falsehood and bullying him to be honest. Holliday’s response becomes increasingly compelling. Initially, he resists; then he begins to cry dramatically, as if broken. Then, when Lee again demands that he quit acting and tell the truth, the tears suddenly stop and Holliday looks at Clarke, and at the audience, through the camera, radiating defiance. For Holliday, performance is a weapon against those who perceive him as the other, and who feel that the truth of him must

meet their perception. At the film’s end, he says, “Nobody’s business now but my own. Nothing more to say.” A perfect beat to end on, yet Clarke leaves the camera rolling as Holliday performs one more about-face, resistance turning again to happy collaboration. “Oh, that was beautiful,” he says as the camera loses focus. “I’m happy about the whole thing.” Ma ny cr it ic s have asked whet her Clarke exploited Jason in the film, but the question only scratches the surface of the work’s dynamics. Clarke presents a dilemma that perfectly reveals the triangle of forces present in documentary film: the subject, with their agency; the documenter, with their agenda; and the audience, with their perception, between those other two potentially warring interests. The immediacy of the film—Holliday’s direct address of the camera, the one-night shoot, Clarke’s voice from behind the camera, the “breathing” rhythm—all enhance the sense that these foundational dynamics between director and subject and audience are living, open questions that all three parties are puzzling out in real time. “I started that evening with hatred,” Clarke said of shooting the film, having known Holliday for years and grown tired of his theatrics. “There was a part of me that was out to do him in, get back at him, kill him. But as the evening progressed I went through a change, of not wanting to kill him but wanting him to be wonderful.” Clarke also said that the ending was premeditated. “I had every intention of a climax of something taking place,” she said. “I knew that I would have to get Jason to face the truth at some point. But I wasn’t positive how.”

Clarke never thought of the film as exploiting Jason in such simple terms, however. “I will not allow people to exploit themselves if they don’t win in the end,” she said. Comparing the film’s moral gray area to the Maysles Brothers documentary Grey Gardens (1975), Clarke says of both films’ subjects, “Of course they are willing victims. They want to be stars! Everybody does. People want to be in the movies. They don’t care. They will totally exploit themselves. The moral issue for the filmmaker, therefore, becomes an interesting one.” Holliday himself, when interviewed for the Village Voice in 1967, said, “I felt I’d be put down by squares and nowhere-type people. That upset me for a few seconds. Then I said, well, fuck them anyway. I know I am a great actor and I got a chance to prove it. I am ready to take anything that comes.” On the question of the truthfulness of his depiction, Holliday said, “It’s mostly truth.” Over fifty years later, Clarke’s films (and Portrait of Jason in particular) cannot be viewed as mere period pieces. They are attempts at f inding, through film, a present made permanent. As with dance, Clarke’s films have a liveness to them, a sense that the world of the film and that of the audience are momentarily bridged and exist together, are speaking to each other. In 1970, Clarke saw this potential in film as the medium’s hopeful future. “The dream-world film days, for the most part, are over,” she said. “Now the audience is being asked to participate.” As film today has most certainly recessed back to the embrace of dream worlds, Clarke’s vision of what cinema can do and be feels more vital than ever.

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ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE’S JEWELRY: GAIA REPOSSI AND MICHAEL STOUT

As part of an ongoing collaboration, Gaia Repossi, creative director for the Paris jewelry house Repossi, has created a collection of pieces inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe’s art practice and jewelry. Speaking with Michael Ward Stout, president of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier, Repossi recounts the origins of this project and details her deep admiration for the artist’s precision and eye for composition.

WYATT ALLGEIER Gaia, I know that art and architecture

have held an important place in your life, even from a young age. You’re referencing Robert Mapplethorpe in this special collection—I’m curious when you first encountered his art and what impact it made on you. GAIA REPOSSI His early work is particularly interesting to me, but like most everyone, I knew his iconic photography first. And it was through his photography that I first engaged the Repossi house with his art. His photography, especially his later photography, made absolute sense immediately, because of the elegance, the sharpness, the detail, and the perfectionism. I found it extremely severe but at the same time elegant and young. Strong values came through its subject matter. While being formally rigorous, his later work contained these ideas of a new woman, a new era, a new femininity, a new gender. This message behind the elegance resonated deeply with what I was working toward. The first image I wanted to use for the house was a photo of a palm tree; I had purchased that work a while back, and it’s a source of continual inspiration. And since then, we’ve used a lot of Mapplethorpe’s photography in various forms, asking permission from the foundation for invitation cards, launches, beautiful images to send to clients as prints, and so forth. Beyond the photography, I learned of the jewelry and other work through the foundation. I hadn’t been aware of it, and they reached out with the idea of engaging this less-known aspect of Mapplethorpe’s creative life. WA Michael, before we speak about Gaia’s project, could you talk a little about Mapplethorpe’s jewelry? MICHAEL WARD STOUT I knew Mapplethorpe in the 1970s as an acquaintance, but I didn’t start working with him as his lawyer until probably 1980 or 1981. We became good friends, so I started to learn about his background. The first thing that was apparent was that everything in his life from a young age onward was a creative act; he was always making things, be they jewelry, photography, assemblages, interiors, and so on. His father was an engineer and had some carpentry skills, and I know together they built a box for his pet snake [laughs]. When Mapplethorpe moved to Manhattan in 1969, he began making collages and working with a Polaroid camera. He was also very interested in jewelry, which he made for himself, mostly out of found objects. The idea, later, of producing jewelry

Opposite: Robert Mapplethorpe wearing a selection of his jewelry, New York, 1971. Photo: Valerie Santagto This page: Robert Mapplethorpe, Eagle necklace, c. 1970, dice, brass eagle, and beads on cotton cord, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2011.M.20) © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: courtesy Getty Research Institute

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on a larger scale fascinated him. Because I had been Salvador Dalí’s lawyer, and Dalí had many licensing deals for watches, Mapplethorpe would show me sketches for watches in the hope that I could see this through. So it was a lifelong interest of his. WA Does the foundation have many of his pieces in its archives? MWS We have quite a few. In 2014, we completed a major gift to the Getty Research Institute and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Getty Research Institute, which Gaia knows well—she’s spent a lot of time there—was eager to acquire all of his earliest works: Polaroids, collages, what we call his unique works, and handcrafted jewelry and objects. But we held quite a bit back. WA Gaia, I’m curious about the order of operations—how you established contact with the foundation and how that collaboration developed. GR We were in touch regularly because I was using a lot of Mapplethorpe images, and I think there was a reciprocal fascination. The link between the house and the foundation makes sense in terms of independent spirit; we’re both less conventional. So three or four years ago the foundation actually reached out to me. I was extremely honored but I immediately realized I didn’t know enough about the early work, especially the jewelry. So that’s when I took the trip that Michael mentioned to the foundation in New York and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where I was given access to all the early works. I’d seen pictures of Mapplethorpe wearing the jewelry when he was young, but to have access to the actual objects, and to photographs of them, and be able to touch them was, for my profession, one of the biggest honors I could be given. The task to remake them and give them a new life with fine materials was an incredible challenge, one that I value deeply. WA Michael, on your end, did the foundation have any specific concerns or hopes when this partnership began? MWS Well, we learned about Repossi through Artestar, the foundation’s licensing representative. In the thirty-plus years since Mapplethorpe died, we’ve been very conservative and strict about licensing, mostly only licensing his works for paper products. We felt that when an artist dies, the people left behind simply don’t have the creative possibility he or she had, and if they’re creative, it’s not in the same Above: Gaia Repossi at the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, New York. Photo: Jeremy Everett Right: Jewelry by Robert Mapplethorpe spilling out of a doctor’s bag, promotional image, New York, 1971. Photo: Valerie Santagto Opposite, top: Gaia Repossi’s preparatory sketch for Repossi/Robert Mapplethorpe Bullseye ring. Photo: courtesy Repossi Opposite, bottom: Repossi/Robert Mapplethorpe Bullseye ring. Photo: courtesy Repossi

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It’s a continuation, and each comprises a variety of different types of pieces, from very straightforward to more complex, refined items. We have, for instance, a crab claw entirely sculpted by hand by Maître Cirier. We have a ring, the Mechanic Ring, inspired by a necklace made with chunky elements, like car-engine parts; we made that idea into refined small engines that move. WA Michael, do you have a favorite piece? Do you have a piece that, having known Mapplethorpe, you think he would have treasured? MWS He certainly would have liked the Flag Ring. It’s very clever. GR I remember when I presented some of the research to Michael, you and the members of the foundation said that, because you’re always so focused on the photography, you had not been as aware of some of the jewelry. I think it’s an important side that the public will now get to see. MWS I wasn’t familiar w ith most of it. W hen Mapplethorpe died, I’d never represented a photographer before, nor an estate. And then most things were packed up, the early things. An auction house came in and appraised everything and they thought that all of his Polaroids were just test shots, so they valued the total lot at some ridiculously low number. They didn’t realize, and I didn’t realize, but people who knew him through his art believed that his history with Polaroids was a very important part of his development. And as Gaia just said, when you really get to know the jewelry, you see that his entire aesthetic and development can be seen through that. GR It’s great that you’re mentioning the Polaroids, because I was fascinated by the photography that was contemporary to the jewelry, which was all Polaroids. And they’re gorgeous. The campaign images we took for this collection were really inspired by the Polaroids. MWS There are beautiful Polaroid images of objects like a striped mattress or a vacuum cleaner hose, all very formally arranged. Mapplethorpe was obsessed with formality, and particularly the formality he learned from the Catholic Church. His loft on 23rd Street had so many religious objects arranged in extremely formal tableaux. GR Yes. They look like altars, definitely. The Polaroids themselves are very pure. They’re very minimal. They’re very modern already. GR

way as the artist they represent. However, through our research, it became clear to us that Repossi’s approach to jewelry design would work well with Mapplethorpe’s works. I don’t think this arrangement would work as successfully with any of the major institutional luxury-jewelry producers. Gaia took a lot of time researching and exploring. This reassured us. Often, when people do this type of work, they work from a photograph or a JPEG or something like that. Gaia actually did this research in California and in New York, and whatever she could do in Paris and other places, to learn as much as could be learned about Mapplethorpe’s design process. WA Gaia, when you were in the archives handling the objects, was there anything specific about the jewelry pieces or other objects that really struck you in terms of his techniques or materials? GR What really struck me was the consistency of Mapplethorpe’s language, which evinces an extreme ability in terms of composition. It’s impossible not to be sensitive to this aesthetic that he has, where the symmetry is always on the side. In the objects archived and filed, you can already see all

the themes of his work across his career—they were all there, all the seeds. He was obsessed by certain themes that were probably haunting him aesthetically, visually, that really spoke to him, and you can find them in all these objects: the devil, homosexual objects, feminine things, hardware, American symbols. Beyond those themes that compose his vocabulary, you have his aesthetic. His pure capacity of composition is gorgeous. There’s also a palette that goes from dark red to black to gray—it’s very masculine, a little bit dark. There’s not a lot of softness in the objects. And in an era when everyone was a hippie, they were also prepunk. They’re piled a little bit with feathers, like hippies, but there are a lot of skeletons before they were in fashion. And the skeletons are there not just because they’re cool but because of his relationship to death, to the darker side of life. WA I understand there are different installments in this project: there was a first collection in the spring of 2021, and in 2022 you’ll be releasing a second. Are there differences between these two collections, or is it more of a continuation? 131

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Edward M. Gómez writes on the Japanese artist’s singular aesthetic, describing him as an astute observer of the culture of his time.

TETSUYA ISHIDA’S TESTIMONY

Sixteen years after the death of the Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida, his remarkable body of work is still developing an international audience. Ironically, it seems to be better known outside Japan than within the artist’s homeland; still, whenever and wherever it is shown, it tends to astound critics, curators, and general audiences alike with its virtuosity, the intensity of its social critique, and its all-around strangeness. Within Japan, Ishida’s work has come to enjoy an in-the-know, devoted following, but even today, many Japanese artists and art lovers may not be familiar with it, for it has not yet attracted the kind of broad base of admirers that has made the work of such contemporary superstars as Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami—and those artists themselves—the subjects of pop-culture fandom both at home and abroad. Ishida’s individualism within Japan’s art world might help explain the way his work has been received. In the past, many Japanese modern artists took part in “dantai” (associations or collectives), of which the Gutai group is perhaps the best known. To be sure, during that outfit’s long run, from 1954 to 1972, several of its members garnered individual attention for their unconventional creations and techniques—Kazuo Shiraga, for example, who hung from a rope to paint canvases with his feet, or Akira Kanayama, who experimented with big, inflated balloons. Recent decades have also seen the international art world’s embrace of such iconoclastic, Japanese-born modernists as Kusama and Yoko Ono, and of the strategically thinking, outward-looking, career-planning artist Murakami, all of whom developed distinctive profiles apart from artists’ groups (although, earlier in her career, Ono was closely associated with Fluxus). These strong solo acts stand out as mavericks within the broader flow of Japanese modern-art history. In this context, the trajectory of a hard-to-classify individualist such as Ishida, whose professional career lasted only about a decade, may be hard to absorb. In the United States and Europe, rugged individualism and tradition-busting originality have long been regarded as fundamental aspects of the heroic-creator profile of the classic modern artist, but in a society like Japan’s, in which personal identity is defined by ties to family, school, workplace, and hometown, an artist who dares to chart his or her own path as more of an individual, apart from an anchoring group, may be seen as something of an outsider—a category Ishida fell into without even trying. Could it be that, in addition to having died young and despite having produced an oeuvre consisting of hundreds of paintings, he has not received the attention that he and his work deserve in part because Japan’s art establishment simply has not known how to categorize such a distinctive talent? Little has been published about Ishida’s short life. He was born and brought up in a coastal town in Shizuoka Prefecture, in south-central Japan, where his father was a politician, and his mother a local-government employee. As a child, his older brother Michiaki recalls, he enjoyed reading manga (Japanese comic books) and making drawings, filling his school notebooks and even the backs of test papers with his handiwork. 1 At the age of eleven, he won a prize for his entry to a manga-art contest for young people on the theme of human rights, a subject that would become one of his abiding interests. His interest in art grew, but his parents opposed his decision to go to art 133

school. Nevertheless, he enrolled at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, where he first studied design and from which he graduated in 1996. By that time, he had become a painter. The Tokyo-based filmmaker Isamu Hirabayashi came from the same prefecture and was a student at the school at the same time as Ishida. There, the two young men met and became friends. In a recent interview with me, Hirabayashi recalled, “We shared some classes. . . . His disposition was very calm. Whenever I saw him, he seemed a bit nervous; he had a sensitive spirit. I never once said anything negative about his paintings, because I thought that might hurt his feelings.”2 Ishida’s time at Musashino coincided with a development that has affected many aspects of Japanese life over the past thirty years. At the beginning of the 1990s, the country’s long-running postwar economic boom came to a crashing halt when its late-phase “bubble,” which was fueled by high-flying real-estate speculation, finally burst. Today, Japanese economists, historians, and media pundits refer to the period from that collapse to the present as “the lost decades,” and to young Japanese like Ishida, who came of age during the early period of the downturn, as members of a “lost generation.” The bubble economy’s bounty had seemed limitless—while it lasted. In the 1980s, economists, business leaders, and policy-makers in Europe and the United States actually feared that their countries’ economies would be overtaken by Japan’s. They painstakingly studied the management and production methods of Japanese industries, from real-time manufacturing-and-delivery systems to the morale-boosting singing of company songs. Meanwhile, around Japan, new, privately funded, municipal or prefectural museums and other cultural institutions seemed to be popping up every month. The Yokohama Museum of Art, for example, opened with fanfare in 1989 in a showcase building designed by the superstar architect Kenzo Tange, and, at least for a while, embarked on an ambitious collecting spree. Department stores overflowed with innovatively styled fashions and gadgets that made contemporary Japanese design a covetable commodity around the world. Japanese corporations scooped up prime real estate overseas and 134

spent astronomical sums on investment-quality European modern art that, once purchased, disappeared into top-secret vaults. Then the bubble burst. Japanese sociologists, politicians, and pundits have spent many years in “Where-did-wego-wrong?” mode, soul-searching for an explanation of how the postwar “economic miracle” dissolved into a nightmare. Such was the weary, anxiety-filled character of the era in which Ishida spent his young adulthood. As a child, he would have had classmates whose fathers were dutiful factory workers or corporate sarariman (salary men, or office workers trained to push paper and meet sales quotas). He would have understood the effects of the wounded economy on the families of such industrial samurai. Following the crash, Japanese corporations, which had long promised secure lifetime employment, undertook painful restructurings. Masses of young people found themselves adrift, unsure of how to make use of their educations and more wary than ever of the corporate world, with its crushing workloads and oppressive hierarchies. In essays and fiction, writers such as Haruki Murakami captured the spirit of the time, especially among young urban tribes. The atmosphere only became gloomier in the aftermath of such events as the devastating Kobe earthquake of January 1995 and, just a few months later, the deadly sarin-gas attacks carried out in Tokyo’s subway by members of Aum Shinrikyo, a doomsday cult. It was against this dispiriting backdrop that Ishida quickly matured as an artist, masterfully conveying through bizarre imagery rendered in a precise, realistic manner his understanding of the values, assumptions, and dynamics of Japanese society and especially of the regimented, individuality-suppressing culture of its corporate-industrial sector. He was interested in the work of such artists as the American social-realist painter Ben Shahn, the Austrian artist/architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer. Curiously, he also admired the work of Rokuro Taniuchi, a painter and illustrator who was known for his charming covers for Japanese culture magazines.

Hirabayashi contributed recollections of his friend to the catalogue for Ishida: Self-portrait of Other, an exhibition shown in 2019 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago. “Ishida,” he wrote, “was preoccupied with originality, and for him, outsider art was truly original. Discovering outsider ar t, however, seemed to make him self-conscious of not being an outsider. From that day forward, he started to say things like, ‘There’s no creating anything original anymore,’ or ‘Ultimately, the only sense of originality [nowadays] is in mixing this and that together in a quirky mélange.’ A somewhat resigned view, yet he also seemed to idolize the aura of genius.”3 Hiyabashi also recalled that Ishida’s apartment “was a mess, so littered with paint tubes and paint-daubed palette papers that there was hardly room to walk.” Among the artist’s books, he noticed novels by such authors as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ryunosuke Akutagawa (an early-twentieth-century Japanese writer, known for his short stories, who committed suicide at the age of thirty-five), and Osamu Dazai, whose angst-filled, semiautobiographical novels, such as No Longer Human (1948), were influenced by the former two authors. Dazai and his female lover killed themselves by drowning in 1948, just before what would have been the writer’s forty-eighth birthday. In the same remarks, Hirabayashi also notes, revealingly, that Ishida had “a keen fascination” with the “art scene in the West” and wanted to travel to Europe and the United States, where, he believed, “his talent would [have been] appreciated.” Working part-time jobs to support his hardscrabble existence and living only to paint, Ishida sought something echt—and found and delivered it in his art. His creative spirit and vision share affinities with those of such postwar Japanese artists as Tetsumi Kudo, the early-career On Kawara and Shusaku Arakawa, and others who, scraping together a sense of the modern human condition or of a fractured national identity from the ashes of wartime destruction, created works that were beautifully grotesque or shot through with a suffocating air of death and alienation. Kudo was known for mixed-media creations evoking the devastation Japan faced in the nuclear age following World War II, while Kawara’s Bathroom drawings of 1953–54 feature peglike, naked humans in disorienting, cell-like, tiled rooms. Before becoming known primarily as a conceptualist painter, in the late 1950s, Arakawa made sculptures featuring corpselike cement blobs placed in elegant, fabric-lined boxes resembling coffins. If alienation was Ishida’s currency, it flowed easily from his life experience into his art. Echoing the sense of confinement in Kawara’s Bathroom images, Kino¯sei (Functionality, 1999) depicts a young man sitting on a toilet in what the Japanese call a “unit bathroom”—a prefabricated fiberglass pod that can be placed like a child’s building block right into a house, apartment, or hotel room while it is being constructed. Here, though, the small chamber’s tub and floor area are littered with the giant-size remnants of a just-eaten meal, for the lower part of this space is, in fact, a room-size plastic bento box—a Japanese take-out meal’s compartment-divided plastic container. In Nenryo¯ hokyu¯ no yo¯na shokuji (Refuel meal, 1996) Ishida captured the anomie of the lives of the sarariman, who have been known to labor faithfully (or robotically, under duress) to the point of karoshi, or death from overwork. This painting shows a row of men in suits seated at a

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Opening spread: Tetsuya Ishida, Untitled, 2004, acrylic and oil on canvas, 17 7⁄8 × 20 7⁄8 inches (45.5 × 53 cm) Previous spread, left: Tetsuya Ishida, Mebae (Awakening), 1998, acrylic on board, 57 3⁄8 × 81 1⁄8 inches (145.6 × 206 cm), Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan Previous spread, right: Tetsuya Ishida, Konbiniensu Sutoa no Boshi-zō (Convenience Store Mother and Child), 1996, acrylic on board, 57 3⁄8 × 40 ½ inches (145.6 × 103 cm), Hiratsuka Museum of Art, Japan This spread: Tetsuya Ishida, Untitled, 2004, acrylic and oil on canvas, 35 7⁄8 × 45 7⁄8 inches (91 × 116.7 cm)

lunch counter, where servers use gasoline-pump nozzles to inject food/fuel directly into their mouths. During his short career, Ishida kept up with developments in technology and their effects on everyday life. In Konbiniensu sutoa no boshi-zo¯ (Convenience store mother and child, 1996), for example, he portrays a young woman using a price-scanner on the contents of a shopping basket that doubles as a cradle, holding not only packets of junk food but also a curled-up sarariman man-child. She holds the head of her tired-looking charge with all the compassion and grace of a mourning Madonna in a Renaissance pietà. One can only imagine how Ishida might have critiqued the excesses of the Internet age, from cyber-bullying to social-media users’ shameless self-promotion. A hint may be found in Seiatsu (Conquered, 2004), a small canvas showing a close-up of a young boy’s head on a pillow with a flip-phone smashed against his bloodied face, its recharging cable still plugged in and passing through the child’s clasped, bloodstained hand. In his mature art, Ishida went on to roast the sheer mundanity of the classroom and the schoolyard, those breeding grounds of the sarariman’s mindless conformity, where “The nail that sticks out must be hammered down” is not just a familiar adage but also a common assumption of Japanese educators. In Mebae (Awakening, 1998), boys with identical faces sit in neat rows as a teacher reads aloud from a science book; some of their bodies have transformed into the metal frames of big microscopes, leaving only their faces peering out over their desks. With Shu¯jin (Prisoner, 1999), whose title removes any doubt about Ishida’s view of Japan’s educational system, a youth’s Brobdingnagian body lies helplessly at rest, trapped like a squashed bug and fused into the thick concrete walls of a boxy public school building. His big head juts out of one wall of the structure as though a corpse had busted through the end panel of a coffin; nearby, little children perform calisthenics in a playground. Ishida understood how and where the soul-crushing began in the society that had shaped him. Many of Ishida’s pictures show repeating male figures with identical, expressionless faces and matching suit-and-tie uniforms, their anonymity and zombielike aura as much the focus of such works as the peculiar actions in which their subjects are passively engaged: lying fallen on a moving escalator as other workers pick at them with hand tools; appearing as rectangular, twine-wrapped bundles to be transported on a train; or sitting with their trousers rolled down on ATM cash machines that they are using, without shame, as public toilets. The appearance of such figures in groups is a key element of the compositions in which they appear. The whiff of obsession in the precision of their repeated forms, their multilayered symbolism, and Ishida’s transgressive humor bring to mind such classic Japanese images as Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s Kiki myomyo (Strange and marvelous turtles of happiness, 1847–52), a three-panel, color woodblock print, in which almost two dozen tortoises with human heads scramble toward a large sake cup. Prevented by nineteenth-century censorship laws from portraying actors or prostitutes, the great ukiyo-e master anthropomorphized his reptilian subjects; sharp-eyed theater fans of his time, looking closely, would have recognized some of the performers he slyly depicted. Similarly, in their eeriness, their appearance in groups, and their sleepwalking air, Ishida’s anonymous man-machines resemble packs of numbed animals or swarms of big, useless, aimlessly shuffling bugs. 4 In Shingata korona wa a¯to o do¯ kaeru ka (How will the novel coronavirus change art?), a book published 137

in Japan late in 2020, Daisuke Miyatsu, the president of the Yokohama University of Art and Design and a member of the board of directors of the Mori Museum, Tokyo, considers the kinds of themes and modes of expression that might—or should— characterize contemporary art once the pandemic period ends.5 As an art educator he is aware that many artists in today’s Japan do not understand exactly how or where they fit into society. Miyatsu notes that in a relatively stable country like Japan, a lot of contemporary art is not politically motivated or charged with a sense of social urgency. Still, he predicts that, with growing recognition of the force of global climate change and in the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear-power-plant tragedy of 2011 in north-central Japan, contemporary Japanese artists may find themselves moving away from easy send-ups of the kawaiimono (cute things) seen everywhere in their media and popular culture and becoming more engaged with timely social issues. In his recent interview with me, Hirabayashi noted that to the extent that Ishida’s work has become known among artists of his generation and also by younger generations of Japanese artists, it is probably those younger art-makers who have been more influenced by his vision. He also pointed out that Ishida’s mostly solitary way of life, in which he was completely dedicated to his art, offers a model that most wannabe contemporary artists in Japan are unlikely to aspire to emulate. Hirabayashi feels that Ishida’s “genius” was something of a “mutation,” and that as a result, Japanese art historians “still have not established a position” in their narratives for his unique talent.6 For his part, it seems that Ishida knew exactly where he stood as both a product of the culture and society that had shaped him and as one of its most sensitive observers. In a 1996 personal-notebook entry, the twenty-three-year-old artist wrote, “When I think about what to paint, I close my eyes and imagine myself from birth to death. But what then appears is human beings, the pain and anguish of society, its anxiety and loneliness, things that go far beyond me. That is what I draw in my self-portraits.”7 Ishida’s work has been described as surreal and as the visual musings of a fantasist. In fact, it can be appreciated as a deeply personal, contemporary form of history painting. Ishida seems to have instinctively understood that art, however fanciful or strange it may appear, can capture the ineffable in the human spirit’s encounter with a world that is already more peculiar, intriguing, and confounding than anything any artist might conjure up. For Ishida, making art was apparently a way of bearing witness—and his pictures never lie.

1. Michiaki Ishida, Zoom interview with the author, June 8, 2021. 2. Isamu Hirabayashi, in an email interview with the author, July 2021. In Japanese; translated into English by the author. 3. Hirabayashi, “Notes by Isamu,” in Teresa Velázquez, Noi Sawaragi, Tamaki Saito, et al., Ishida: Self-portrait of Other, exh cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2019), 118–19. 4. Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s triptych woodblock print Kiki myomyo (Strange and marvelous turtles of happiness, 1847–52), can be found in the collections of the British Museum, London, and of other museums around the world. It appears in many books about Japanese art history, including, for example, Genshoku: Ukiyo-e Daihyakuka Jiten (Tokyo: Taishukan Shoten, 1982), 3:41. 5. Daisuke Miyatsu, Shingata korona wa a¯to o do¯ kaeru ka (Tokyo: Kobunsha, 2020). 6. Cited in Kuniichi Uno, “Self-portrait of Another,” in Velázquez, Sawaragi, Saito, et al., Ishida: Self-portrait of Other, 97. This passage originally appeared in Tetsuya Ishida Notebook (Tokyo: Kyuryudo, 2013), 6. 7. Hirabayashi, interview with the author.

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Tetsuya Ishida, Kinōsei (Functionality), 1999, acrylic on canvas, 17 7⁄8 × 20 7⁄8 inches (45.5 × 53 cm) Artwork © Estate of Tetsuya Ishida

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FASHION AND ART Derek Blasberg speaks with fashion designer Rick Owens, the American-born, Paris-based director of the eponymous brand, about his influences from the worlds of art and music, growing up without a television, and the sinister pleasures of the museum.

PART 9: RICK OWENS

Derek Blasberg: Hi Rick! Where am I finding you right now? Rick Owens: I’m in Italy, at the factory, but I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Los Angeles. I’m going to see [my wife] Michèle Lamy and my mom and my daughter and my granddaughters. DB: I don’t know if I was aware that Rick Owens is a grandpa. RO: I am. It’s only been a year, so everybody is letting it sink in. DB: With everything that’s going on in the world, have you met your grandkids before this trip? RO: Actually, I was there for both births. One was born in Italy, so that was easy, and then the other one was born in LA, when things had kind of opened up, so I was able to go there too. DB: I wonder if a Rick Owens Kids line is next. RO: Actually, I just finished a little coat for the one-year-old, and it’s in pearl-gray shearling with matching goat-hair fringe and silver sequined stripes on the sleeves. And the baby gets a—what do they call that? It’s like a baby bag, you know, they call it a marsupial in Italian. DB: That’s sweet. RO: It matches—pearl-gray shearling with the goat-hair fringe and the silver sequins too. DB: Put those in production, Rick! These babies have to start earning their keep. RO: I released our Geobaskets [shoes] in baby sizes a couple of months ago and they sold out. They really went fast. So, maybe! DB: We could talk about babies all day but right now I want to talk about how art and fashion intersect with what you do. RO: They press the same button sometimes, if you’re lucky. DB: I’d say your designs and certainly your shows push both buttons. RO: For our holiday party last year, the whole office took a field trip. We got in a bus playing loud disco and drove to Le Bourget airport [outside Paris] to go see the Richard Serra exhibit [at the Gagosian gallery there]. Then after that, we went to see the Alex Katz show at Thaddaeus Ropac. It was a really fun day. DB: Growing up, were you a kid who was drawn to art and artists and museums? RO: I didn’t go to museums because my parents weren’t travelers. I lived in a really small town and we didn’t circulate that much. As far as we ever got was Los Angeles, three hours away, and we must have gone to the LA County Museum or something, but that was once every five years or so. But my dad had a huge library, with books on philosophy and theology and Japanese calligraphy and architecture, and there were museum books in there too. My dad was a really weird character, very pragmatic and blunt, like a militant conservative. He had a gun collection and he was fairly racist and homophobic too. But he also had this tender side. Every evening after dinner, he’d put on a silk kimono that he’d brought back from Japan when he was there during World War II, make tea, lie down in his music room, light incense, and listen to classical music for like two hours. That’s what he did every night. DB: Really? RO: Yes! And the music filled the house. At first I used to resent it. I resented that we were forced to be part of his routine without our consent. But now classical music is a big part of my life. And, unknowingly, that’s where I learned to love opera. DB: I think all kids resent their parents to some extent.

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RO: I really resented that I didn’t get to watch TV like everybody else. We didn’t have a TV in the house. DB: No TV at all? RO: Finally, when I was sixteen, he allowed mom and me to have a TV in the garage, but we had to go out there to watch it. DB: Wow. My parents didn’t have cable when I was young, and I thought that was cruel and unusual punishment. RO: Ha! At least you had a TV. You were spoiled. DB: You once told me that when you graduated high school, you wanted to be an artist. Is that true? RO: Yeah, I did. I went to Otis-Parsons in LA, which was right next to MacArthur Park in those days, and that’s when I became exposed to art theory. It’s where I discovered Joseph Beuys, who I can look back to now and say made a huge impact on my aesthetic choices. But there were some terribly pompous classes that kind of intimidated me, and ultimately I didn’t think I could be a real artist. So I dropped out. DB: Did you want to be a painter or a sculptor or a photographer or what? RO: When I started, I thought I was going to be a painter. I was doing David Salle–influenced painting, and looking back, David Salle and Julian Schnabel were what I was aiming for—grand, gestural, heroic, monumental, reckless, drippy painting. DB: And then you abandoned it? RO: Yes. I was intimidated and I figured I needed a skill and a real job, so I decided to go to a fashion trade school where they taught you how to work in a fashion factory. To be clear, it’s not like I dreamed of one day becoming a big designer. I just thought, Here’s a school I can afford and this all makes sense to me. I learned patternmaking and how to construct clothes, and then I got a job as a pattern-maker at a couple of different factories, and I ended up doing patterns for Michèle’s company. That’s how I met Michèle. DB: When you transitioned from painting to fashion, was it a conscious decision or were you basically just looking for a job? RO: No, it was conscious. I was thinking, Art is too intellectually intimidating for me. I think I can do fashion. DB: Do you still feel like art is more intellectual than fashion? RO: Not really. I guess I changed. But with art, you get to indulge in stretching one concept out through a very long time. After all these years, I realized that fashion is actually more rigorous, because you have to constantly try to get the same aesthetic attention from people. You have to be relevant and you have to respond to the times in a very smart way. And: you have to do this four times a year. You have to keep maintaining this dialogue with your audience at a really high level, a higher level than art. You have to participate in the world and converse with people. Or do you think I’m overestimating what it takes to be in fashion? DB: Well, a fashion designer can’t just hibernate for a few years, like some artists do, and come back with a new idea when they’re ready. RO: Absolutely not. So there was something about having to be responsive continuously. At the same time, I think art can be more rigorous than fashion, more exhausting, in other ways. But all things said, I’m happy with the way it turned out. 144

Opening spread: Rick Owens. Photo: Danielle Levitt, courtesy Owenscorp Previous spread: Spring/Summer 2020 Tecuatl menswear show, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Photo: courtesy Owenscorp Above: Tyrone, Fall/Winter 2020 Performa menswear. Photo: Danielle Levitt, courtesy Owenscorp Opposite: Sanne, Fall/Winter 2020 Performa womenswear. Photo: Danielle Levitt, courtesy Owenscorp

DB: As you made this conscious shift into fashion, did you make intentional parallels between what we would consider traditional art-world stuff and what your fashion-world stuff looks like? You’ve mentioned Beuys, who is clearly an inspiration in, among other things, your store aesthetics. RO: I rarely look at contemporary art and absorb it into what I do because what I think of when I look at art is a completed cycle. Michèle always tells me I’m only interested in dead artists, and I go, Yeah, that’s true, because I want to see how they committed themselves to the same standards throughout their lives. I want to see the finished story. I want to see a legend and a full story. My touchstones have always been artists like Beuys. DB: You’re not interested in artists just starting out? RO: It’s funny, all this conversation about NFTs, which I can’t really completely grasp myself, must be similar to the conversation in the 1970s when land art was emerging: is it valid, how do you own it, what does owning it mean, is it real art? So it’s interesting to see how the NFT thing is going to turn out.

DB: Wow, I’ve never heard someone compare land art to NFTs. But I see what you mean about the idea that people are skeptical or dismissive.

RO: Yes. But there’s corruption in a museum. A museum is so much about corruption!

RO: It’s about the idea of taking art out of its usual compartment. Taking it out of the gallery and putting it into an earth piece in Nevada, like Michael Heizer does, that must have seemed ridiculous at the time, or at least hard to grasp.

DB: You mean because we’re finally wrestling with the fact that a great deal of the art that’s exhibited in museums has been pillaged or looted or—

DB: Do you own any NFTs? RO: No. I don’t own that much art. I’m not a collector at all. I have a few things that I’ve wanted since I was young, and I got them, and then I didn’t get very much more acquisitive than that. I’m not impulsive at all. I guess I’m instinctive, which most collectors are, and there are moments when I’ve made leaps of faith that seemed impulsive, but they’re so far and few between. DB: I know this is a broad question and probably an annoying one for you to answer, but I’m going to ask it anyway: would you consider yourself an artist? RO: Well, yeah, that’s a hard one to answer, because art still has a mysticism associated with it that fashion doesn’t.

RO: Yes! I’m not talking about the politics of buying art, I’m thinking about the history of the world, about how all of it has been pillaged. I actually see that now more than ever, more than even five years ago. There seems to be a vested interest in returning works of art to their rightful owners. You can’t get away with anything now. Everything is so exposed and people are so indignant about every single little thing. DB: See, now you sound like your father. Are you wearing a kimono? RO: Yes! And sipping my Japanese tea. DB: Listening to classical music and burning some incense. RO: Which I do too. I mean, that’s kind of what happened, to a certain extent. Maybe it’s true what people say and eventually we all turn into our parents.

DB: Oh, that’s a good answer. RO: It’s hard to credit yourself with having more of a shamanistic, mystical attribute than a designer would, supposedly. But after everything is over, when I look back, maybe I’ll see the arc of my work as a work of art. At that point I might consider it art, if it all comes out okay. DB: I understand. RO: I’m watching Kanye [West] now, and everything he’s doing, and it’s actually impressive: his listening parties, his personal behavior where he’s really vomiting out anything that comes to his mind—it’s kind of like he’s doing modern couture. He’s been doing his fashion lines and everything, but he’s living his life as this couture show now. I mean, those listening parties were magical huge events. They were rallies! And then he satisfies everybody’s hunger for spirituality with his Sunday services, which blend everything including aesthetics, values about connecting, spirituality. He’s putting that all together! We’re all fascinated with his personal relationship with Kim [Kardashian] and how that works. If we’re talking about who’s an artist, he’s kind of turned his life into this performance that’s really impressive. You can’t help but wonder, What’s he going to do next? One day last year he set fire to himself in a rebuild of his family home in this huge stadium, with Marilyn Manson watching. What’s next? DB: You know, I’ve conducted so many of these conversations around art’s and artists’ influence in the design space, and no one’s brought up Kanye. But you’ve made me think about it, and, totally, one could say that his whole life has become a performance. RO: And the people he’s drawn into his orbit and connected? Everything he’s interested in is pretty top notch. He’s got exquisite taste. I’m more impressed than ever! DB: Even if you’re not collecting contemporary art, do you still seek it out? Are you inspired by it? RO: Totally! I try to see everything that comes my way. It’s the best stuff in the world. I’m not a nightclub person, I’m not really a party person, but museums are my safe church. I love everything about museums. I love how sinister they are. I love how they’re built on stealing, lies, sex, war, corruption. But beauty too! I mean, I love all of that. It’s just like an orgy of salaciousness. DB: That’s humanity, I guess, everything you just said. These are all human influences. 145

wa lt o n f o r d : assu ming a n a nim a l for m

wa l t o n f o r d n a r r a t e s t h e h istor i e s a n d m y t h s be h i n d t wo o f h i s n e w e s t pa i n t i n g s .

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s tac a n a r m i n

Fifty miles from the coast of Scotland, the rocky islands of the St Kilda archipelago bristle out of the North Atlantic like a shattered spine. Stac an Armin is one of these shards of stone. Gannets, puffins, petrels, and fulmars nest on the ledges of this volcanic spike. In the mid-nineteenth century, the island people of St Kilda survived by eating eggs, chicks, and full-grown birds from the island’s cliffs. Travel to and from the mainland was dangerous and rarely attempted. Most islanders had never seen a tree, a horse, a painting, a staircase, or a book besides the Bible. They saw only St Kilda and her birds, storms, orcas, sharks, seals, and native sheep. Their preachers also taught them to see either God’s wrath or the devil’s hand manifested in the grim weather, disease, melancholy, and lusts engulfing them. Around the same time, the great auk of the north Atlantic was nearing extinction. This goose-sized bird was a cousin of the puffin. A flightless bird, the great auk resembled a penguin, having evolved to do the same job— namely, to “fly” under water and catch fish. All the great auks around St Kilda had been slaughtered for their down so many years before that the islanders had no memory of them. In July of 1840, five island men hunting birds on Stac an Armin found an auk asleep on a ledge. It was one of the last auks seen alive.

It was Malcolm McDonald who actually laid hold of the bird, and held it by the neck with his two hands, till others came up and tied its legs. It used to make a great noise, like that made by a gannet, but much louder, when shutting its mouth. It opened its mouth when any one came near it. It nearly cut the rope with its bill. A storm arose, and that, together with the size of the bird and the noise it made, caused them to think it was a witch. It was killed on the third day after it was caught, and McKinnon . . . was the most frightened of all the men, and advised the killing of it.1 I wanted to imagine what this auk/witch would be doing in the minds of those men. What would a witches’ sabbath look like in the mind’s eye of these islanders? What insular sexual tension was made sinister by shouts from the pulpit? The young Lauchlan McKinnon, “the most frightened of all the men,” saw an unknown animal. In that animal he saw a fearsome female creature, a woman assuming animal form, a lascivious witch in league with the devil and the animal world. He saw his frenzied fears made flesh to be killed and forgotten. 1. J. A. Harvie-Brown and T. E. Buckley, A Vertebrate Fauna of the Outer Hebrides (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1889), 159.

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Opening spread: Walton Ford, Stac an Armin, 2021 (detail), watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper, 89 ¼ × 60 ¼ inches (226.7 × 153 cm)

Left: Walton Ford, Cabeza de Vaca, 2021 (detail), watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper, 60 × 119 ¾ inches (152.4 × 304.2 cm)

Previous spread: Walton Ford, Stac an Armin, 2021, watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper, 89 ¼ × 60 ¼ inches (226.7 × 153 cm)

Following spread: Walton Ford, Cabeza de Vaca, 2021, watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper, 60 × 119 ¾ inches (152.4 × 304.2 cm) Artwork © Walton Ford

bl ack-ta i l e d, dusk y, pr a i r i e , ba n de d rock , a n d m a s sa sauga , a l l coi l i ng a n d s t r i k i ng a mong c ac t us a n d sage . a l l t h e way f rom f lor i da to m e x ico, speci e s a f t e r speci e s —sh a pe , pat t e r n, a n d si z e sh i f t i ng a n d ch a ngi ng.

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c a be z a de vac a

In 1528, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca got lost. He wandered, lost, for the next eight years, across what we now call the American Southwest. He was one of an expedition of over 300 Spaniards who waded behind Pánfilo de Narváez into the tangled swamps of Florida in search of golden cities. Bushwhacking away from their ships, they started to die. They built rafts and drowned. They starved and died of exposure. They were captured, killed, or enslaved by the native peoples. Cabeza de Vaca was one of only four survivors to finally stagger into Mexico. Everywhere Cabeza de Vaca walked during his trek, he would have met rattlesnakes. There are no rattlesnakes in the old world. A Spaniard could not have dreamt of such a creature. In Florida, he would have been startled by pug-faced eastern diamondbacks, seven feet long; swift, mustard and rust-colored timber rattlers; and diminutive pygmy rattlesnakes buzzing like 152

insects underfoot. Farther west, he would have confronted whiplash-angry western diamondbacks the color of dust. Black-tailed, dusky, prairie, banded rock, and massasauga, all coiling and striking among cactus and sage. All the way from Florida to Mexico, species after species—shape, pattern, and size shifting and changing. I have painted Cabeza de Vaca’s delirium—a vision of fear and enormity. Toward the end of his ordeal, Cabeza de Vaca began to see abandoned native villages, burned and looted. He knew he was nearing his Christian countrymen. By the time he finally met a mounted party of Spaniards he had become a revered healer among the native peoples, a mystic, bearded and browned. He was a shocking sight to his countrymen, who promptly enslaved his native companions. A few months later, Cabeza de Vaca was on a ship bound for Lisbon.

EXPOSITION 16.04.2022 — 01.01.2023

Pablo Picasso, Maya à la poupée et au cheval, 22 janvier 1938, Huile sur toile, Collection particulière © Collection particulière / Photo Robert McKeever

MAYA Fille de Pablo RUIZ-PICASSO

FLAGS Gillian Pistell writes on the loaded symbol of the American flag in the work of postwar and contemporary artists.

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In November of 2020, Ed Ruscha premiered a group of new paintings at Gagosian, New York, including a trio of canvases featuring the American flag. Hung together in a corner of the pristine, white-painted gallery, the paintings were as confounding for their eccentricities as they were recognizable for their patriotic iconography. Viewers could not help but associate the works with the turbulent climate that had surrounded their creation: a global pandemic, boiling racial politics, a polarizing presidential election (in which voting had ended only days before the show opened). Ruscha’s diverse renderings of the flag urged viewers to interpret the paintings’ meanings in drastically different ways. rippling flag pictures an elongated flag that billows across the canvas, its red and white bars extending beyond the right edge as if it were unending. Top of Flag exchanges the uncanny sensibility of rippling flag for concealment: this painting shows only the single, topmost red stripe, a sliver of the white stripe below it, and one row of stars emerging from a glowing halo, while the rest of the banner lurks below the canvas’s bottom edge. The last of the three paintings, an untitled work, undertakes a remarkable act of treason: the flag is rent in two. Its top section, so indicated by its starred blue canton, waves in the painting’s lower register while its bottom few stripes fill the upper. A subtle yet distinct seam floats between the two sections, as if the painting were rolling film strips. Perhaps greatest among Ruscha’s myriad talents is his ability to bluntly picture American culture

and values. His representations of gas stations have immortalized the banality of everyday American life, while his depictions of the Hollywood Sign and the 20th Century Fox logo represent the lucrative film industry that projects American culture worldwide. Ruscha’s images of the American flag can likewise be understood as metaphorical portrayals of the country. These three paintings from 2020 show literal division and lack of visibility and representation, but also, perhaps, a glimpse of optimism as the country moves into the future. The Continental Congress established the official flag of the United States on June 14, 1777, but its origins are murky; the best-known, though unconfirmed, story is that Founding Father and New Jersey Congressman Francis Hopkinson designed the first flag and that the Philadelphia upholsterer Betsy Ross sewed it. Between that initial declaration and 1960, Congress passed numerous acts to adjust the shape, design, and arrangement of the flag, and to approve the addition of stars as new states were admitted to the union. The flag therefore functions as a living document that records the nation’s past and is adaptable for its future. A potent symbol of nationalism, it spurs troops into battle, inspires songs, and often appears in art as a symbol of the country—its people, culture, and politics. Early representations of the f lag sought to incite nationalist sentiments and to solidify a land of immigrants as American citizens. Emanuel Leutze’s well-known Washington Crossing the Delaware, of 1851, a monumental history painting

that Leutze created while living in Germany, pictures Christmas night of 1776, when George Washington led the Continental Army in a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers encamped in Trenton.1 Today, Washington Crossing the Delaware holds a place of honor on the walls of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Measuring an overwhelming twelve by twenty-one feet, the painting dominates a gallery devoted to American history, landscape, and national identity from 1850 to 1875. The Civil War, running from 1861 to 1865, monopolized that period—from the tensions that led to the conflict, through the blood-soaked hostilities, to the divisions of Reconstruction and the nation’s citizens’ struggle to rediscover a united identity. Leutze’s painting, and especially the many prints made after it, became symbols used to organize the nation around the flag that waves in the center of the canvas from Washington’s boat. Depictions of American flags raised for inspiration or in celebration, as in Leutze’s patriotic painting, were intended to signify a unified populace or bring together a divided one, particularly during times of civil unrest and war. Childe Hassam’s Fourth of July, 1916 (The Greatest Display of the American Flag Ever Seen in New York, Climax of the Preparedness Parade in May) (1916), painted as the country readied itself to enter World War I, is a particularly fervent example, recording a Fourth of July parade that culminated a series of “preparedness” events. Hassam’s rendering of this nationalistic celebration shows the city’s buildings nearly lost in a sea of red, white, and blue.

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The flag remained a potent symbol of national unity after World War I, but World War II left Americans shell-shocked, whether they had experienced combat firsthand or seen it in newsreels. After the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and all the sacrifices that the war had demanded, many faced struggles in returning to everyday life, or did not see everyday life the same way. Surely in part as a result, in the late 1940s and early ’50s the flag was transformed into an emblem of the country’s social and political complexity—changing the course of American art history in the process. Jasper Johns’s Flag paintings are perhaps the best-known representations of the American flag in postwar art. Johns created his first Flag in 1954–55, when the Cold War was in full swing. Although Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against domestic Communism had effectively ended with his censure by the US Senate in December 1954, the paranoid atmosphere of that time remained in the forefront of the country’s collective memory. Fear of “un-Americanness” pervaded the cultural apparatus, and the flag was routinely employed as a symbol of national heterogeneity and loyalty. Previous spread: Ed Ruscha, RIPPLING FLAG, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 24 × 96 inches (61 × 243.8 cm) © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Rob McKeever This page, top: Childe Hassam, The Fourth of July, 1916 (The Greatest Display of the American Flag Ever Seen in New York, Climax of the Preparedness Parade in May), 1916, oil on canvas, 36 × 26 ¼ inches (91.4 × 66.7 cm). Photo: © New-York Historical Society

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This page, bottom: Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, oil on canvas, 149 × 255 inches (378.5 × 647.7 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of John Stewart Kennedy, 1897

This sentiment endured into 1958, when Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, wished to acquire Flag for the museum’s permanent collection after it debuted at Leo Castelli Gallery in the artist’s first solo exhibition. Concerned that the museum’s Acquisitions Committee would not share his enthusiasm for the painting, but rather would see the work as an unpatriotic desecration of a powerful American symbol, 2 Barr provided a sterling character reference for the artist and assured the committee that he “had only the warmest feelings towards the flag,” but to no avail.3 Unable to settle on a decision, the Acquisitions Committee passed the ruling on Flag to the Museum’s Board of Trustees, which according to one account felt it was “perhaps too cynical a portrayal of the flag” and vetoed its purchase for the collection. 4 Johns himself allowed a practical reason for his image choice, maintaining that “using the design of the American flag took care of a great deal because I didn’t have to design it.”5 Yet the work’s ambiguity lingered and lingers still, and it would be another fifteen years before Flag entered the museum’s collection.6 Opposite: Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958, encaustic on canvas, 3 panels, 30 7⁄8 × 45 ¾ inches (78.4 × 116.2 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubam, Laura-Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman, and Ed Downe in honor of the Museum's 50th Anniversary 80.32 © 2021 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The public uncertainty about artists’ use of the f lag escalated in the 1960s as politics and art merged. In tandem with the Civil R ights Movement, Black artists focusing on racial oppression set out to create art that disrupted not only the conventional forms and materials of artmaking but also the institutional frameworks within which art was made.7 Los Angeles was a hotbed for this work; Senga Nengudi, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, Charles White, and others converged in the city, particularly in the Watts neighborhood, and made art that addressed their position as Black artists in a white-dominated art world and as Black citizens in a white-dominated country. With the founding of Black-owned galleries that showed the work of Black artists, such as the Brockman Gallery, the Ankrum Gallery, Gallery 32, and the Gallery, these artists created a vibrant microcosm whose reach expanded across the United States.8 A pivotal member of the group was David Hammons, whose works using the refuse of the Black urban experience, from bottle caps to hair clippings collected from barbershop floors, continue to visualize the Black experience today.

Hammons’s Body Prints (1968–79) persist as bold representations of that experience, and many of them feature the American f lag—not waving in proud displays of patriotism but appearing instead as backdrops, shrouds, and bindings. Here the flag becomes a device of Black oppression, an emblem not of a people’s liberation but of their enslavement. The medium of these works was largely Hammons’s own body: the artist covered himself, including his hair and clothes, in grease (usually margarine) and lay down on a large support, such as paper or board, leaving an imprint behind him.9 He then sprinkled the grease-laden areas with a powdered pigment, creating a ghostly positive image. As such, the Body Prints fused Hammons’s concurrent interests in graphic art and performance. Indeed, he took on two roles at once when he lay down on his supports: himself and the collective Black-male identity that he is both a part of and embodies. In this way the Body Prints expand beyond the literal one-to-one likenesses of self-portraits to picture Black men more generally.10 In many of the most culturally and politically biting Body Prints, Hammons added the American

flag to the image, either using silk-screen or lithography techniques or collaging a real, fabric flag into the picture. Among the most visually, emotionally, and politically powerful of these works is Injustice Case (1970), which refers to the trial of the activist Bobby Seale. Cofounder of the Black Panthers, Seale was charged with incitement to riot and other charges after the Democratic National Convent ion in Chicago in 1968. (T he g roup famously brought to trial on these charges, known as the Chicago Seven, was originally the Chicago Eight and included Seale, before his case was severed from theirs.) During Seale’s trial, the judge ordered that he be gagged and bound to a chair; a drawing of him in this position was widely disseminated in the press. In Injustice Case, Hammons re-presented this drawing, taking the pose of the restrained Seale. He then affixed the print to an American flag, making the Stars and Stripes into a frame for the disturbing scene and in the process transforming it into a symbol of the state apparatus and its systemic racism. 11 This use of the flag powerfully undermines its association with the country’s founding principles of “Life, Liberty,

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and the pursuit of Happiness,” as outlined in the Declaration of Independence; rather, it is seen as a device for the continued repression of Black America at the hands of the state. As the twentieth century progressed, artists continued to employ the flag in their interrogations and critiques of the country. Cady Noland, for one, repeatedly incorporated the flag in biting installations that confront America’s long-held embrace of violence and encouragement of toxic masculinity. In the american trip of 1988, for example, a draped American flag is riddled with bullet holes. A A Bronson’s White Flag series from 2015 addresses different yet related cultural crises: for these works Bronson coated American flags with a concoction of gesso, ground chalk, and honey, covering the cloth in a ghostly layer of white. According to a press release circulated by the Esther Schipper gallery, Berlin, when it showed a selection from the series in 2015, these works are memorials to 9/11; the white coating signifies the dust that covered downtown Manhattan from the toppled Twin Towers. 12 On September 11, 2001, Bronson was stranded at the Toronto airport,

unable to board his return flight to New York. He watched on television as the landmark buildings collapsed. When he arrived home seven days later, he was greeted by a city in shock, covered in concrete and debris, but with American flags defiantly displayed amid the destruction. The whitening of the f lag, though, suggests interpretations that push beyond this meaning, and indeed are in line with Bronson’s more activist history. Along with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, he was a member of the Canadian artists’ collective General Idea, which pioneered conceptual art and mail art and published the magazine file. In the mid-1980s, General Idea became involved with aids activism and produced some seventy-five public artworks addressing the crisis—a cause that Bronson continues to champion following Partz’s and Zontal’s deaths from aids in 1994. The group’s White aids works particularly reverberate with Bronson’s White Flags, in that they likewise obscure their subject beneath a layer of white gesso in an act of mourning and reflection. Given Bronson’s activism, he was surely aware of the political implications of whitewashing a

potent symbol of American nationalism and history. Around the time he created the White Flag works, racial tensions were high in the United States: the previous year, 2014, had seen protests in Ferguson, Missouri, following a white police officer’s fatal shooting of a Black teenager; 2015 witnessed the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which nine Black churchgoers were killed. Although Bronson no longer lives in the United States—he was the director of the artists’book publisher and store Printed Matter in New York for several years, but now lives in Berlin— he would certainly have been aware of events like these, news of which, shared worldwide, has given the country an international reputation as a high-functioning racist state. The white coating on Bronson’s flags, however, can also be seen as a call for cross-cultural understanding and acceptance. Within and beyond the United States, Muslims were the targets of violence, both individual and on the scale of war, following the attacks on the Twin Towers. And white is the color Muslims wear while attending Friday prayers

[THE FLAG] CAN BE A SYMBOL OF AMERICAN STRENGTH AND UNITY; A MIRROR OF COLD WAR ANXIETY; A REPRESENTATION OF RACIAL INJUSTICE; AN AMBIGUOUS ICON OF TERROR, OPPRESSION, AND PEACE; AND AN EMBLEM OF VALUESCRUMBLING VIOLENCE.

Opposite: David Hammons, AfricanAmerican Flag, 1990, dyed cotton, 56 × 88 inches (142.2 × 223.5 cm), Gift of The Over Holland Foundation. Photo: © 2022 Museum Associates/ LACMA, licensed by Art Resource, New York

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or performing rites of pilgrimage; in Islam, it symbolizes peace and purity. Bronson’s covering of the American flag in a color with these meanings in the Islamic religion is unlikely to be chance: he holds a master of divinity degree from the Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he cofounded and was the director of the Institute of Art, Religion, and Social Justice. 13 As such, he is surely attuned to the nuanced relationships among the three forces of that institute’s name, and equally surely aware of the symbolic implications of his choice of color. The White Flag works, then, can be understood as a plea for resolution through understanding and communication rather than violence. They evoke contradictory feelings of animosity and optimism, encapsulating in a single artistic concept the full spectrum of the flag’s meaning across cultures. Formally, the White Flag works recall Johns’s White Flag of 1955, which similarly blanches the patriotic image beneath layers of white. The intervening decades between that earlier representation of the flag and Bronson’s, however, lend it yet more possible meanings—evidence that the symbolism of the American flag evolves along with the country it represents. This page: AA Bronson, White Flag #9, 2015, rabbit skin glue, champagne chalk, and raw honey on wool, cotton, and cotton rope on linen, 99 ¼ × 199 ¼ inches (252 × 506 cm). Photo: © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

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Opposite: Sean Scully, Ghost Gun, 2016, oil and oil pastel on aluminum, 75 × 85 inches (190.5 × 215.9 cm) © Sean Scully. Photo: courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery

Sean Scully has likewise engaged the American flag in a series of political works. Born in Ireland but a longtime resident of New York State, the artist holds dual citizenship between the two countries and as such enjoys both an insider’s and an outsider’s view. His art boasts similar characteristics: he understands the givens of his approach but treats them in a highly personal way, so that his grid and stripe paintings are celebrated for their nuanced combination of Minimalism and spirituality. And his focus often transfers to politics, as when he designed posters for the presidential campaigns of both Barack Obama and Joe Biden.14 America’s infatuation with guns, and what Scully calls its “affection for violence,” are perhaps his chief political concerns; his haunting series Ghost from 2016–18—surprisingly for this artist, a group of figurative works—visualizes this brutal American reality. 15 The Ghost works all feature a gesturally painted American flag in a range of color combinations, from red and pink-hued white to dark blacks and grays. The stars—symbols of unity—are piled at the bottom of the works; in the canton where they usually are set, they are replaced by a handgun.

This series reconceptualizes Scully’s iconic grids and stripes with stark political commentary and a warning on the country’s future. Scully abandons his signature abstract style only for subjects that move him to do so; his other figurative works include the Eleuthera series of 2016, which comprises paintings of his then-six-year-old son. The Ghost works can likewise be understood as inspired by parental love. Scully started painting his gun-usurped American flags after seeing a video of the fatal police shooting of a twelve-year-old boy in Cleveland. Having lost a child himself—his first son, Paul, died in 1983, as a teenager—Scully felt the pain of this child’s death intimately. Furthermore, he fears for his younger son in America’s gun-crazed society, knowing that the worst can happen. 16 Scully’s angst focuses not only on his young son’s safety and future in this gun-riddled county; he is also concerned about what this epidemic of violence means for the United States. As he said in an interview for the BBC, “I started to make a series of paintings that I call Ghost, and the reason I call them Ghost is because this little boy is now a ghost, and the principles of America

that we talk about in positive terms are also in grave danger of becoming a ghost. . . . Making America, the land of the free, a ghost of what it once promised to be.” 17 Scully’s Ghost series speaks to both the gun violence rampant in the country and the crumbling cultural and political values that allow it to continue, a devastating situation that will not change without decisive— and divisive—action. The meaning of the flag, clearly, has fluctuated through artists’ varying treatments of it over time, laying the groundwork for Ruscha’s use of it in 2020. It can be a symbol of American strength and unity; a mirror of Cold War anxiety; a representation of racial injustice; an ambiguous icon of terror, oppression, and peace; and an emblem of values-crumbling violence. Indeed, representations of the flag in paintings, photographs, and the media are thermometers for the country’s climate. An AP photographer’s image of the Minneapolis unrest following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a white police officer is a quintessential example: as he runs by a store that is burning to the ground, a protester wields an American f lag, which he holds upside down—a potent

symbol of a country and its people in distress. The American flag is among the most powerful symbols of the United States; this red-white-and-blue banner encompasses all aspects of the country’s past, present, and future—the good and the bad.

1. For a thorough history of Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware see John K. Howat, “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26, no. 7 (March 1968): 288–99. 2. See Lilian Tone, “Chronology,” in Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 128, and Lynn Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s ‘Americans,’” in John Elderfield, ed., Studies in Modern Art, vol. 4, The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 104 n. 157. 3. Johns, quoted in Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 93. 4. Orton provides the most detailed account of Johns’s relationship to the American flag, his creation of the first Flag painting, and Alfred H. Barr’s actions regarding Flag. Orton cites Acquisitions Committee meeting minutes and correspondence among Board of Trustees members that recounts their trepidation, such as that of Ralph Colin, who opposed the painting’s acquisition in 1958, and later George Heard Hamilton, who praised its eventual acquisition in 1973 and lamented its denial fifteen years earlier. See ibid., 89–146, 229 n. 19–24, and 236–37 n. 171. 5. Johns, quoted in ibid., 98.

6. In an arrangement worked out with Barr, MoMA trustee Philip Johnson purchased the work from Castelli on the understanding that he would later gift it to the Museum, which he did in 1973. 7. See Nizan Shaked, The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art, Rethinking Art’s Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 2. The antiwar, feminist, and gay-liberation movements all also influenced this political turn in art. 8. See Laura Hoptman, “An Introduction: David Hammons’s Body Prints,” in David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979 (New York: The Drawing Center, 2021), 8–9. 9. See Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 226–27. 10. See ibid., 226. 11. Shaked, The Synthetic Proposition, 43. 12. Esther Schipper, “White Flag: AA Bronson,” 2015. Available online at https://www.estherschipper.com/exhibitions/71white-flag-aa-bronson/ (accessed December 6, 2021). 13. See AA Bronson, “A Letter to Montreal: Making Love with Jesus,” Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art Canadien 33, no. 2 (2012): 199. 14. See Harriet Lloyd-Smith, “Sean Scully on Self-Belief, Election Billboards and the Perils of Rural Germany,” Wallpaper, October 21, 2020. Available online at www. wallpaper.com/art/sean-scully-interview-2020 (accessed September 22, 2021). 15. See BBC, “Guns Are Making Ghosts of Our Children,” video interview with Sean Scully, February 1, 2019. Available online at www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/guns-are-making-ghosts-of-ourchildren/p06zqq28 (accessed September 22, 2021). 16. Ibid. 17. Scully, in ibid.

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FIZZLES Nearly fifty years ago, Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns met in Paris and began a collaboration on what would become Foirades/Fizzles, a deluxe limited-edition artist’s book published by Petersburg Press in 1976. Now, on the occasion of the Jasper Johns retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Gagosian Quarterly looks back to the genesis of this project with a conversation between independent researcher Anthony Atlas and Gagosian director Bob Monk. Their discussion focuses on the creative encounter between the artist and the writer and on how the book and related works became a generative source in Johns’s art.

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ANTHONY ATLAS Let’s start with Jasper Johns recount-

ing his first meeting with Samuel Beckett, which took place in November 1973, while he was in Paris traveling with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for their performance of Un jour ou deux (set and costume design by Johns): I met Beckett through the exwife [Verá Lindsay] of an art critic. She wanted me to do illustrations to Waiting for Godot, but I said I’d like to work with Beckett on something new. She didn’t seem to understand and kept sending me other published texts. Then, when I was in Paris with Merce Cunningham and his dance company, I met Beckett. I told him I wanted to illustrate something new. He looked horrified. “A new work?” he asked me. “You mean you want to me to write another book?”1 BOB MONK Jasper’s recollection of the events is terrific. After Johns explains that he’d be happy with an unpublished fragment or unused words or phrases, Beckett realizes he has suitable material written in French, but he would first need to translate the texts into English. At that point Johns planned to incor porate whatever text Beckett sent inside his images, or, in his words, as “phrases within the picture.” Perhaps he expected much shorter works than what Beckett eventually sent him! AA I was surprised to learn that Johns chose the images he would base his work on before he knew what Beckett’s texts were going to be. This project would not be an illustrated edition or collaboration in the usual sense, but something more adventurous.

Exactly. The results are a spectacular combination of Johns’s etchings and Beckett’s unusual monologues, appearing side by side in both French and English (hence the bilingual title). Although we can say that the texts by Beckett and the images by Johns were not previously related at all, the images work beautifully with Beckett’s dark texts. AA Can you tell me about the source of the images Johns used throughout the book? BM They’re based on elements from Jasper’s painting Untitled, 1972. AA Later, in 1978, Johns told the curator Christian Geelhaar, “I didn’t know what his texts were going to be, but I just knew—what I knew of him and what I know of myself—that I wouldn’t be able to do anything better than that.”2 BM For the collaboration with Beckett, Johns used what he felt was his most successful work at the time, which he had recently completed.3 An understandable decision! But he also said that Untitled provided images that he felt he “could comfortably associate” with Beckett’s writing, which is very interesting to think about. 4 Untitled—a large painting now in Cologne’s Museum Ludwig collection— consists of four panels with three motifs, two of which had appeared in earlier works. AA These motifs are the body parts on the right panel, the flagstones in the center two panels, and the crosshatch pattern on the left panel, appearing here in Johns’s work for the first time. BM Body parts had appeared as cast objects in the early Target paintings from the mid-1950s, and then as actual physical imprints in a series of drawings from 1962, Study for Skin I–V, which relate to the print Skin with O’Hara Poem, 1963–65. Here Johns made the corporal gesture of applying graphite to his face and body, which he then BM

pressed to the paper, creating a ghostlike impression. In the Untitled of 1972, the body parts are three-dimensional plaster-and-wax casts, splintered and bolted onto pieces of wood. Each is color coded with one of seven color names stenciled on its reverse. In the book Foirades/Fizzles, the artist’s face is so deeply etched into the paper that it once again becomes absolutely corporal to the eye. The flagstone motif was introduced in Harlem Light, 1967, and would be returned to in later works. AA What was the critical response to Untitled when it was first exhibited? BM I don’t believe it was widely discussed at the time. Tom Hess is quoted as observing how Johns in this painting “seemed concerned with preserving memories and re-evoking lost experiences,” something that can certainly be said of works Johns created later in the 1980s.5 Untitled was recently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in their part of the Johns retrospective. AA Foirades/Fizzles wasn’t the first time a Johns work incorporated literary elements. You mentioned the print Skin with O’Hara Poem, 1963–65. What other works from this period interest you in relation to the later project with Beckett? BM Several works from 1961 illustrate a darker side of Jasper’s oeuvre, works with a great sadness and an accusatory tone and thrust: Liar, Disappearance II, Water Freezes, Painting Bitten by a Man, No, Good Time Charlie, and Fool’s House. I think that these paintings relate so well to the tone in Beckett’s works. There’s also In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Hara, a tribute to O’Hara’s poem by that title, and Periscope (Hart Crane), 1962. AA The titles of these paintings are striking. I’m reminded of Beckett’s great title for a collection of short prose pieces: No’s Knife [1967].

163

Previous spread, left: Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns at Atelier Commelynck in Paris, 1975. Photo: Robert Doisneau/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Previous spread, right: Jasper Johns, Foirades/ Fizzles, 1976, illustrated book with five texts by Samuel Beckett and thirty aquatints (twenty-one with etching, two with drypoint, one with screenprint), three etchings (two with drypoint), and one lithograph by Jasper Johns, 13 1⁄8 ×

164

10 1/2 × 2 3/4 inches (34.2 × 26.7 × 5.8 cm). Printer: Atelier Commelynck, Paris. Publisher: Petersburg Press, London and New York. Artwork © 2022 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever

When the project to make Foirades/Fizzles was agreed to, in 1973, and produced in 1976, artist and writer were well matched to collaborate. AA Beckett sends Johns the first three of five translated prose fragments in 1974 with a letter describing the title: “The general title would be fizzles and subtitles simply, 1, 2, and 3. The shorter Oxford Dictionary defines fizzle as follows: 1. The action of breaking wind quietly; the action of hissing or sputtering. 2: A failure or fiasco.”6 Jasper must have loved this letter. There’s the favorite word of Beckett’s—fiasco—and this emphasis on failure. Given the unfinished nature of Beckett’s texts and BM

this notion of failure, I wonder if Jasper felt liberated to really open up and experiment with new techniques and procedures. BM Petersburg Press introduced Johns to the printmaker Aldo Crommelynck in 1974. Before then, Johns had mainly worked in lithography when making prints. (He had made a few line etchings at Universal Limited Art Editions in 1967, a portfolio of six intaglios titled First Etchings.) Crommelynck had become well known as Picasso’s etcher for ten years ending in the artist’s death, in 1973. The deep impressions and intense blacks that Crommelynck was able to print were perfect for the intense drama on each page of Foirades/Fizzles. He opened up to Johns so many etching techniques, including aquatint, lift ground, open-bite, stop-out crayon, and burnishing. Johns became immersed in etching and continued to use the technique long after his collaboration with Beckett and Crommelynck. He has an etching press and a dedicated printer at his studio in Connecticut, where he continues to work in this medium. AA There were intaglios among the prints and works on paper in his recent series depicting a figure in shadow, a skeleton with a top hat—a variation on a motif in his remarkable Seasons series from the 1980s. BM If that dandy skeleton isn’t a good-time Charlie, I don’t know what is! AA How exactly did Johns incorporate imagery from Untitled in Foirades/Fizzles? BM The panels from Untitled appear there as scaled-down sketches, in repeated scrolling variations of the original sequence. There are also full-page and full-spread images focusing on specific themes from the painting. There are etchings of words, for example, that approximate the fragmented body parts from the painting: buttocks,

Opposite, top: Jasper Johns, Study for Skin I, 1962, charcoal and oil on Frederick Post Company drafting paper printed in black ink, 22 × 34 inches (55.9 × 86.4 cm) © 2022 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy The Menil Collection, Houston Opposite, below: Jasper Johns, Foirades/ Fizzles, 1976, illustrated book with five texts by Samuel Beckett and thirty

aquatints (twenty-one with etching, two with drypoint, one with screenprint), three etchings (two with drypoint), and one lithograph by Jasper Johns, 13 1⁄8 × 10 1/2 × 2 3/4 inches (34.2 × 26.7 × 5.8 cm). Printer: Atelier Commelynck, Paris. Publisher: Petersburg Press, London and New York. Artwork © 2022 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever

knee, sock, foot, hand, floor, face, torso, leg, feet. On the right side of the spread, the same words appear in French. AA In another of Beckett’s letters to Johns, we learn that he originally disliked the idea of side-by-side French and English texts: “I do not so much like the bilingual setup, but would not oppose it if pleases you.” In the same letter Beckett expresses a vivid opinion about enlarged type but ultimately encourages Johns to use as much of the book as possible for his images: “To blow up type simply in order to occupy space seems very wrong to me and literally to interfere with the reading process. This is surely the main and almost invariable defect of illustrated editions and it would be a relief if we could avoid it here, that is respect the non-image nature of the text, not ask of it what it can’t give and leave the bulk of the book as space to you.”7 BM I find this so wonderful. Ultimately Beckett encourages Johns to maximize the impression of his images in the book. And Jasper does. AA It seems Beckett did not like illustrated editions very much. BM Nope! AA Yet he agrees to similar projects with other artists, for example with Robert Ryman (Nowhow On, Limited Editions Club, 1988) and Louis le Brocquy (Stirring Still, Blue Moon Books and John Calder, 1988), though I’m not aware if he was as directly involved as he was with Johns. My sense from Beckett’s letters to Johns is that his deep respect for visual artists extended naturally to Jasper, and others. It was not just his characteristic courtesy on display here, he had a strong sympathy for painters and visual artists.

This page: Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1972, oil, encaustic, and collage on canvas with objects (four panels), 72 × 192 ¼ inches (182.9 × 488.3 cm), Museum Ludwig, Cologne; donation Ludwig, 1976. Artwork © 2022 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Following spread: Jasper Johns, Foirades/ Fizzles, 1976, illustrated book with five texts by Samuel Beckett and thirty

This is key to Foirades/Fizzles. You get a strong sense of Jasper’s range of imagery and freedom, which Beckett seems to have supported. On an aesthetic level, the book is actually more of a Johnsian object than anything else. It does not have the starkness we might associate with Beckett’s plays. AA What was happening for Johns in the art world in 1976–77, when Foirades/Fizzles was released? The release of this very special, very limited book must have been a major event, perhaps more so in the art world than in the literary world. BM It was a very heady time for Johns in New York. In the same year as the publication of Foirades/Fizzles, 1976, his crosshatch paintings were exhibited at Leo Castelli. Art-world intelligentsia were confused and abuzz. (“What in the world does the crosshatch pattern mean exactly? Are these abstract random marks?”) As the critic for New York Magazine, Tom Hess argued that the crosshatch marks were very much a system of thought-out patterns and structures.8 Things! in October 1977, a retrospective of Johns’s work, opened at the Whitney Museum. The excitement of both events was palpable. People once again poured over Jasper’s work and discourse filled the air. It was at this time that Foirades/Fizzles was introduced to the art world. In the Whitney retrospective, the book was installed on the ground floor with a catalogue of its own! At Castelli, we all loved looking through the book and we all had our favorite etchings. We also discovered upon delivery of our copies that the etchings were so dense, with such deep wells of ink printed on the surfaces of the pages, that there was a danger of off-printing (when the heavy ink from one page migrates to the opposite page and leaves a ghost image). We set out to BM

use different papers and archival materials to stop this from happening. AA The process behind the crosshatch paintings is so fascinating to learn about. BM These are elaborate works, with a complex system of mirrored sections and an implied scrolling movement of vertical sections from right to left. Various sections of marks repeat and change color. The titles are often poetic and expressive: Corpse and Mirror, 1976–77, Usuyuki, 1977–78, and Cicada, 1979. In Foirades/Fizzles, the pattern appears as a color lithograph lining the linen outer box (actually printed at ULAE on Long Island), in the front endpapers, and throughout in various permutations of the sequence of panels from Untitled. AA I love Johns’s recollection of first seeing the crosshatch pattern, apparently on a passing car: “It had all the qualities that interest me—literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of complete lack of meaning.”9 Beckett’s own experiments with repetition and obsessiveness are explored in the novels Watt [1953] and Molloy [1951]. I like thinking of the crosshatch paintings through this Beckettian lens of creating an elaborate, obsessive system with no ostensible purpose other than its own creation or expression. BM Absolutely. It’s interesting that Johns does not seem to be interested in the abstract quality of the crosshatch marks but in what he could do with them. Now, we’ve talked about the texts in the book and you’ve mentioned that at least some of the Fizzles were not exactly new when they were published. AA Each Fizzle is a prose fragment, originally written in French, that Beckett had later titled 165

Much later, after the Catenary paintings of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Johns returned to the flagstones theme again in this new series, and with that the collaboration with Beckett comes back to mind. BM Yes, and these are all such poignant works, the Catenary series and what came after. AA On the surface there’s an obvious connection to Beckett: the color gray, a major theme for both the artist and the writer. But the flagstones in Beckett are more particular, bringing to mind the story of his interactions with Beckett. BM I believe Johns had met Beckett at the Atelier Crommelynck to show him his work in progress on the book, and Beckett’s response focused on the flagstones. Both the 1976 painting End Paper and the 2005 Beckett tell that story. AA Ok, so we can end where we started, with Johns’s great account of collaborating with Beckett, since this is the subject of these paintings. BM It’s a perfect ending. The memory of Beckett’s response to the work stayed with Jasper. AA

When I showed the etchings to Beckett he held them very close to his face and scrutinized them for ages, scanning up and down (his eyesight is very bad). I was terrified he’d hate what I had done. I said, “Sam, I’ll be happy to explain—” “No, no,” he said, “It’s perfectly clear,” and he made approving noises. Then I showed him the endpapers. He said he hoped that I would place the cross-hatching design at the front of the book and the flagstones at the back. I asked him why. He said, “Here you try all these different directions but no matter which way you turn you always come up against a stone wall.”13

Foirades (“farts”) and that he translated into English for the book. Scholars date the composition of these works to 1950 to 1960, although Beckett himself dated them to the early 1960s. 10 As with many of his writings from the period, an unidentified narrator describes rudimentary or conscious events with no locating or narrative context. Around the time Jasper met Beckett, the French journal Minuit published several of the original Foirades. BM What does Beckett scholarship make of these texts? AA I’ve wondered the same thing. There is so much great shorter prose by Beckett that I think these texts may be overshadowed by contemporaneous or earlier pieces, such as those collected as Texts for Nothing [1950–52]. But rereading the Fizzles now, I can appreciate their context, presenting a type of creative impasse that has its own significance when talking about Beckett’s literary texts, which often stress the “impossibility of completion,” as Beckett scholar Mark Nixon put it.11 But even in these abandoned works we can see the meticulous structure of Beckett’s writing shine through, as well as its humor and power. BM The unidentifiable narrators in these stories resonate well with the fragmented, almost claustrophobic images in John’s etchings. There is shared humor, too—in Fizzle no. 5, for example. AA According to the letters, Beckett gave Johns 166

permission to use all or any one of the five texts he eventually provided to him, and it appears that Johns was also free to decide their order, which gives us insight into his thinking. In no. 5 (“Horn came always at night”), the beleaguered narrator is in an isolated place—a bedroom—but receives visitations from Horn, who reads to the narrator by torchlight. The narrator describes their ailing body and the difficulty of leaving their bed after so many years of sporting: “What ruined me at bottom was athletics.” What image does Johns use here? BM On the facing page is one of the Johns images perhaps more analogous to Beckett’s text: an imprint of a foot and a hand on the floor, with a sock—an interpretation of a striking detail from the fourth panel of Untitled—all in a sumptuous range of black tones. You can read the grain of the skin in this etching. Johns also adapts his numbers to function as title pages for each Fizzle. AA Do other references to Beckett appear in John’s work after the release of Foirades/Fizzles? BM The first is in End Paper of 1976, in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It’s an oil-on-canvas diptych with crosshatching on the left panel and flagstones on the right. It’s similar to the full-spread etching Hatching and Flagstones preceding Fizzle no. 3 in the book, and of course it’s a reflection on the book project itself. In 2005, Johns creates the painting Beckett, a tribute to the writer.12

1. Jasper Johns, quoted in Edmund White, “Jasper Johns and Samuel Beckett,” Christopher Street 2, no. 4 (October 1977), repr. in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 152–53. 2. Johns, quoted in Christian Geelhaar, “Erfahrungen auf ‘anderen Ebenen,’” Jasper Johns: Working Proofs, exh. cat. (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, 1979), repr. in Jasper Johns: Writings, 197. 3. Working at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, Johns had already begun a suite of prints, Four Panels from Untitled 1972 (1973–74), based on the painting when he decided to use the same imagery for the collaboration with Beckett. See ibid. 4. Johns, in Roberta Bernstein, “An Interview with Jasper Johns,” January 18, 1980, in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1981), 8–9:279–90, repr. in Jasper Johns: Writings, 200–211. 5. Thomas Hess, quoted in Fred Orton, “Present, the Scene of . . . Selves, the Occasion of . . . Ruses,” Foirades/Fizzles: Echo and Allusion in the Art of Jasper Johns, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Visual Arts, Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1987), 170. 6. Samuel Beckett, letter to Johns, February 7, 1972, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 4, 1966–1989, ed. George Craig et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 359. 7. Beckett, letter to Johns, March 31, 1974, in ibid., 363. 8. See Thomas Hess, “On the Scent of Jasper Johns,” New York, February 9, 1976, and Mark Rosenthal, Jasper Johns: Works since 1974, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988), 20. 9. Johns, quoted in Sarah Kent, “Jasper Johns: Strokes of Genius,” Time Out (London), December 5–12, 1990, repr. in Jasper Johns: Writings, 259, and in Bernstein, “Relationships of Parts and Wholes,” in Bernstein, Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture, vol. 1, Jasper Johns’s Painting and Sculpture, 1954– 2014: Redo an Eye (New York: The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 181. 10. See entry for “Foirades” in C. J. Ackerly and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2004). 11. Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Historicizing Modernism series (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 34. 12. The 2005 painting is notably elegiac in tone. Bernstein points out that Johns created a drawing based on this painting in 2006, the centenary of Beckett’s birth. See Bernstein, “Something Resembling Truth,” in Bernstein, Redo an Eye, 311 n. 60. 13 Johns, quoted in White, “Jasper Johns and Samuel Beckett,” repr. in Jasper Johns: Writings, 153. The final layout of Foirades/ Fizzles follows Beckett’s suggestion on the endpapers: hatching at the front, flagstones at the back.

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Carnegie Hall at Home Enjoy recent broadcasts and curated playlists available worldwide for streaming on demand, including programs for kids and families. carnegiehall.org/WatchAndListen

Jeff Goldberg / Esto

GAME CHANGER GLAUBER ROCHA Carlos Valladares celebrates the visionary Brazilian director. “Enough of criticizing cinema,” said Glauber Rocha in 1970. “We need to transform it.” Refusing to swallow the Enlightenment brand of reality that had been foisted on him and on Brazil, Rocha embraced his status as a Third World auteur—not an individualist loner working to hone a signature style but a dreamer of a people, of a world in a permanent state of maelstrom and trance.1 Combining Dada, surrealism, anarchy, mystical Trotskyism, candomblé, and the anthropophagic tropicalism of the modernist poet Oswald de Andrade, Rocha flummoxes, perverts, howls with freedom and despair. His major films—Barravento (The Turning Wind, 1962), Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964), 2 Terra em Transe (Entranced Earth, 1967), O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro (Antonio Das Mortes, 1969), 3 and A Idade da Terra (The Age of the Earth, 1980)— spark rebellion in the viewer, a desire to embrace the life of flux, fury, love, and unreason. The question for Rocha becomes not “What is reason?” but “Which unreason will win the war?” In 1969, Rocha premiered Antonio Das Mortes at the Cannes Film Festival and won the best-director award. Only a few months earlier, Brazil’s military regime had suspended its citizens’ personal liberties and begun a brutal censorship of anything it deemed subversive. These conditions pushed Rocha into a decade of international exile; when he returned to Brazil during the “opening” of the country after 1977, he used his newfound optimism to create the glorious A Idade da Terra. Impelled by the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975, he set out to respond to the Italian director’s masterpiece, The Gospel according to Matthew (1964), whose interpretation of Christ he praised as “the voice of the new morality: the morality of the conscious man in the developing world.”4 A Idade loosely follows the efforts of four Third World Christs (Indigenous, Black, guerrilla, and military) to stop a vulgar US industrialist from advancing into Brasília, the outsized modern capital of Brazil. Like all of Rocha’s great works, it is a total film of the future: opaque, lyrical, unstable, outrageous. Rocha was one of the most brilliant critics in the history of film, as combative and insightful as Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein. He may even have more to teach us than those four, since his frame of reference included not only Europe and the United States but also Latin America and the Third World. If critics and producers mocked him out of confusion and fear, he commanded the respect of his fellow directors. After the disastrously received premiere of A Idade da Terra at the 1980 Venice Film Festival, one of the film’s only serious defenders 186

was Michelangelo Antonioni, who wrote to Rocha, “Each scene is a lesson showing how modern cinema has to be done.”5 As a proponent of Brazil’s Cinema Novo, Rocha was determined to reflect Brazil back to itself in all its contradictions and all its capacity for crazy dreaming. “Therein lies the tragic originality of cinema novo in relation to world cinema: our originality is our hunger,” Rocha wrote, “and our greatest misery is that this hunger, while it’s felt, is not understood.”6 Since Rocha felt that Brazilians could not eat, he nourished them with his films while blocking the country’s enemies from sating their appetite for a culture that they could never understand or recolonize. He also confronted them with their own capacity for violence and brutality. And he gave the oppressed a new visual language with which to strike back, from serpentine long takes to shards of aggressive montage, all revealing how a reality that at first glance seemed coherent was illogical, intolerable, incomplete. Rocha’s work is defined by rupture. A blast to the complacent psyche, it confronts you with your own political inadequacy, your inability to hide behind a stance of neutrality. Manny Farber once wrote of Godard, “No other filmmaker has so consistently made me feel like a stupid ass.”7 I feel the same with Glauber Rocha. Beneath his audiovisual foaming-of-the-mouth seethes a passion that leads him to rhapsodies in praise of dreams, love, a commitment to life’s mess. Anyone serious about cinema will surely toast Rocha as they return to his films and writings over the course of their lives. 1. Horacio González writes that what Rocha meant by trance (transe) was “a state of convulsed wakefulness that assaulted the creative consciousness and provided its true impulse, guaranteeing that the work it produced would be independent of the spasms that originated it.” González, “Glauber Rocha’s Thinking: The Proximity of Memory,” in Glauber Rocha. Del hambre al sueño: obra, política y pensamiento/From Hunger to Dream: Work, Politics and Thought, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, 2004), 386. 2. A literal translation of Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol would be “God and the devil in the land of the sun.” The film was released in the United States as Black God, White Devil. 3. A literal translation of O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro would be “The dragon of wickedness against the holy warrior.” In most countries the film was released as Antonio Das Mortes. 4. Glauber Rocha, “The Morality of a New Christ,” in Glauber Rocha, On Cinema, ed. Ismail Xavier, trans. Stephanie Dennison and Charlotte Smith (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2019), 176. 5. Michelangelo Antonioni, in Eduardo F. Costantini Jr., “Homage to a Thought in Trance,” in Glauber Rocha: From Hunger to Dream, 281. 6. Glauber Rocha, “An Aesthetics of Hunger,” 1965, in Rocha, On Cinema, 43. 7. Manny Farber, “Jean-Luc Godard,” in Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (New York: Library of America, 2009), 633. Glauber Rocha on the set of Cabezas Cortadas (1970), 1970. Photo: Profilmes/Album/Alamy Stock Photo

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