70 Compass For the Quarterly’s 2021 fiction series, we teamed up with pen America to highlight a selection of writers from the organization’s advocacy and literary programs. Our first installment presents Writing for Justice Fellow Cleyvis Natera’s work of autofiction “Compass.”
88 Delineators: Jordan Belson and Harry Smith Raymond Foye tracks the relationship between the two visionaries, investigating their influence on one another and their enduring legacies.
108 Donald Marron
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Jacoba Urist profiles the legendary collector.
Aileen Passloff In honor of this luminous dance artist’s life and work, we share a conversation with the late Aileen Passloff from early 2020.
30 Gerhard Richter: Cage Paintings
60 A Day in the Life of The Lightning Field
Hans Ulrich Obrist traces the history behind Richter’s Cage paintings and speaks with the artist about their creation.
In the first of a two-part feature, John Elderfield describes his experience of The Lightning Field (1977), Walter De Maria’s legendary installation in New Mexico.
48 An Eye on the Market Laura Paulson speaks with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about the state of the art market in the wake of the pandemic.
57 Building a Legacy Rani Singh speaks with Annette Leddy, former collector and curator of archives at the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, about the preservation of art critics’ archives and their role in art-historical research.
68 The Bigger Picture: exalt Nathaniel Mary Quinn speaks with Gisele Castro, executive director of exalt, a New York City nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of court-involved youth by providing a path to success through effective educational engagement.
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The Art of Biography: Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, coauthors of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Willem de Kooning, speak with Michael Cary about the research and revelations that went into their forthcoming biography of Francis Bacon.
Front Cover: Gerhard Richter, Helen, 1963, oil on canvas, 43 ⅜ × 39 ⅜ inches (110 × 100 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of UBS. Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0001) Top row, left to right: Aileen Passloff, c. 1960. Photo: courtesy collection of Aileen Passloff Film still from Bill Gunn’s Personal Problems, 1980. Photo: courtesy Kino Lorber Bottom row, left to right: Francis Bacon in his early twenties. Photo: Francis Julian Gutmann, London (courtesy MB Art Collection) Cy Twombly, Grapes, Gaeta, 1997, 11 × 17 inches (27.9 × 43.1 cm) © Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio
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132 Richard Artschwager A conversation between Adam McEwen and Bob Monk.
138 Book Corner: Bibliothèque nationale de France Douglas Flamm, rarebook specialist at Gagosian, talks with Jean-Marc Chatelain, director of the Réserve des livres rares at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, and Marie Minssieux-Chamonard, curator of twentiethand twenty-first-century books at the Réserve.
Cosmic Freeze-Frames: A Poetics of Bill Gunn Carlos Valladares discusses the films of the pioneering director.
114 On Ming Smith: A Life of Magical Thinking Nicola Vassell interviews the photographer.
126 Fashion and Art, Part 5: Delphine Arnault Derek Blasberg speaks with Delphine Arnault, executive vice president of Louis Vuitton, about the company’s connection to the art world and what she’s looking for in combining contemporary art and accessories.
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After Images A poem by Jonathan Galassi inspired by the photography of Cy Twombly.
144 Dennis Hopper’s Taos Ride Douglas Dreishpoon remembers speaking with Hopper at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico, in 2009.
164 Game Changer: Thomas McEvilley David Frankel celebrates the art-historical contributions made by the scholar, poet, and critic Thomas McEvilley.
TABLE OF CONTENTS SPRING 2021
Photo Credits:
T
he early painting by Gerhard Richter that appears on our cover, now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was part of a gift from UBS to the museum that was championed by Donald B. Marron. The financier’s lifelong support of artists, cultural institutions, and philanthropic causes prepared a foundation for future generations to build upon and made him one of the best-known collectors of his time. A profile of Marron by Jacoba Urist appears in this issue. A beautifully illustrated article on Richter’s celebrated Cage paintings, and their presentation at Gagosian, Los Angeles, includes a perceptive conversation between curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the artist. We are thrilled to host a conversation between Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Gisele Castro about exalt, a New York nonprofit working to educate, protect, and create meaningful opportunities for the most marginalized of the city’s youth. For our 2021 fiction series, we are collaborating with pen America to publish short stories by authors in its advocacy and literary programs. Our first installment presents Writing for Justice Fellow Cleyvis Natera’s “Compass,” in which the women of a family troubled by domestic violence share windows into their experiences, struggles, and connections. We have eagerly anticipated the latest artist biography from Pulitzer-winning coauthors Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, who in this issue speak with Michael Cary about their research into the life of Francis Bacon. Guided by Annette Leddy and Rani Singh, we dig into the diaries, photo archives, and research papers of art critics, learning of the importance of preservation and of the fertile ground these troves offer future scholars. In this issue we are inaugurating a new interview series, “An Eye on the Market.” For our first installment, market expert Laura Paulson brings clarity to the state of the art market in the wake of the pandemic, and reminds us of historical moments of economic uncertainty, helping us to navigate next steps. Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief
Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2021
Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald
Founder Larry Gagosian
Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier
Published by Gagosian Media
Text Editor David Frankel
Publisher Jorge Garcia
Online Editor Jennifer Knox White Executive Editor Derek Blasberg
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Cover Gerhard Richter
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Contributors Delphine Arnault Derek Blasberg Michael Cary Gisele Castro Jean-Marc Chatelain Douglas Dreishpoon John Elderfield Douglas Flamm Raymond Foye David Frankel Jonathan Galassi Gillian Jakab Annette Leddy Alison McDonald Adam McEwen Marie Minssieux-Chamonard Bob Monk Cleyvis Natera Hans Ulrich Obrist Laura Paulson Nathaniel Mary Quinn Rani Singh Ming Smith Mark Stevens Annalyn Swan Jacoba Urist Carlos Valladares Nicola Vassell
Thanks Richard Alwyn Fisher Jennifer Belt Mollie Bernstein Priya Bhatnagar Serena Cattaneo Adorno Benjamin Cercio Elizabeth Childress Annie Cicco Nicola Del Roscio Bill Dilworth Tatiana Dubin Viviane Eng Andrew Fabricant Kate Fernandez-Lupino Emily Florido Mark Francis Nicole Fromer Brett Garde Nicole Gervasio Darlina Goldak Megan Goldman Erinn Hartman Charlotte Hendrickson Delphine Huisinga Marshall “Tres” Johnson Sarah Jones Lauren Mahony Brice Marden William Marron Rob McKeever Caits Meissner Adele Minardi
Lily Mortimer Olivia Mull Johan Nauckhoff Louise Neri Hana Ostan Ožbolt Demetris Papadimitropoulos Stefan Ratibor Gerhard Richter Christopher Santacroce Antwaun Sargent Isabel Shorney Ashley Stewart Andie Trainer Louis Vaccara Kara Vander Weg Shelley Wanger Nina Westervelt Emily White Eva Wildes Hanako Williams Millicent Wilner Sarah Womble Kelso Wyeth
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CONTRIBUTORS Annette Leddy
John Elderfield
Annette Leddy is an art critic and fiction writer who has worked as a processor, collector, and curator of archives at the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
John Elderfield is chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and was formerly the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum. He joined Gagosian in 2012 as a senior curator for special exhibitions.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn In his composite portraits derived from sources both personal and found, Nathaniel Mary Quinn probes the relationship between visual memory and perception. Fragments of images taken from online sources, fashion magazines, and family photographs come together to form hybrid faces and figures that are at once Dadaesque and adamantly realist, evoking the intimacy and intensity of a face-to-face encounter. Photo: Kyle Dorosz
Rani Singh Rani Singh is director of special projects at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. Her work focuses on strategic planning and legacy management for artists, exhibitions development, museum outreach, and programming. Singh initiated the Building a Legacy project for Gagosian, which has been active since 2018.
Gisele Castro Gisele Castro has dedicated her career to creating and leading organizations that focus on ensuring equity in justice for court-involved youth. She is the executive director of the New York City–based nonprofit exalt.
Jacoba Urist Jacoba Urist is an art journalist living in New York. She has regularly written about art and architecture for the Atlantic, New York Magazine, the New York Times, and Smithsonian Magazine, and has covered the art market and art news for the Art Newspaper. Urist is a contributing editor for Cultured Magazine, where she profiles contemporary artists.
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D I O R .CO M
Adam McEwen Artist Adam McEwen was born in 1965 in London, England. He received his BA in 1987 from Christ Church, Oxford, and then received his BFA in 1991 from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. He lives and works in New York.
Bob Monk Bob Monk has been a director at Gagosian, New York, for over twenty years, working closely with Ed Ruscha and Richard Artschwager. He has curated numerous Gagosian exhibitions, including the multivenue Ed Ruscha: Books & Co.
Ming Smith Ming Smith is a New York–based photographer whose evocative pictures summon up dreamlike states, teasing out complex emotions and ideas deeply embedded in the places and consciousness of her subjects. Smith’s lyrical narratives, woven out of blurred silhouettes and dynamic street scenes, reflect her devotion to other art forms and artists. In engaging the world around her, she makes perceptible not only what has been obscured but the complex psychological and social factors that lurk beneath it. Her work illuminates African Americans’ struggle for visibility in the wider cultural landscape. Photo: Brandon Thomas Brown
Gillian Jakab Gillian Jakab is an editor of the Gagosian Quarterly and the dance editor of the Brooklyn Rail.
Nicola Vassell Nicola Vassell is an art dealer, curator, and the founder of Concept NV, a curatorial agency dedicated to exhibitions and discourse on cultural phenomena. Books she has edited include Jean-Michel Basquiat 1981: The Studio of the Streets and Francesco Clemente: Works 1971–1979. A former director at Deitch Projects and Pace Gallery, Vassell will inaugurate an eponymous gallery in New York this year. She is a visiting lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Photo: Ming Smith
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Raymond Foye Raymond Foye is a writer, publisher, and curator currently based in Woodstock, New York. In 2020 he received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for his editing of The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman (2019, City Lights). He is presently editing The Golden Dot: Last Poems 1980–2000, by Gregory Corso, for New Directions. Photo: Amy Grantham
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan Mark Stevens is the former art critic of New York magazine. He has been the art critic for the New Republic and Newsweek and has also written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times. Annalyn Swan is the former arts editor of Newsweek and an awardwinning music critic. She teaches biography at the Graduate Center of CUNY as well as at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. Stevens and Swan won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for their biography de Kooning: An American Master. They live in New York.
Michael Cary Michael Cary organizes exhibitions for Gagosian, including eight Picasso exhibitions in collaboration with John Richardson and members of the Picasso family. He joined Gagosian in 2008 after working for six years with the late Kynaston McShine, then chief curator at large at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Clive Smith
Hans Ulrich Obrist Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. He was previously the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in 1991, he has curated more than 300 exhibitions.
David Frankel David Frankel is the former editorial director in the publications department of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was an editor at Artforum in the 1980s and ’90s and remains a contributing editor there.
Cleyvis Natera Cleyvis Natera is a Dominican immigrant who grew up in Harlem, New York. She holds a BA from Skidmore College and an MFA in fiction from New York University. A pen America Writing for Justice Fellow, she is the author of the forthcoming debut novel Neruda on the Park (Ballantine, 2022).
Douglas Dreishpoon Douglas Dreishpoon, chief curator emeritus at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, is currently director of the catalogue raisonné project at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York, and consulting editor at the Brooklyn Rail. His book What Is Modern Sculpture?, part of the Documents of Twentieth-Century Art series, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
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Jean-Marc Chatelain Born in 1964, Jean-Marc Chatelain became a library curator after completing his studies at the École nationale des chartes, Paris. He has worked at the Réserve des livres rares at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) since 1994, first as supervisor of the seventeenth-century collections, then, since 2014, as director of the department. Among the exhibitions he has curated are Éloge de la rareté: Cent trésors de la Réserve des livres rares (BnF, Paris, 2014); Pascal: Le Cœur et la raison (BnF, Paris, 2017). He is currently preparing an exhibition on Charles Baudelaire that will open at the BnF in November 2021.
Marie MinssieuxChamonard Marie Minssieux-Chamonard is curator of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury books at the Réserve des livres rares at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Born in 1974, she is a graduate of the École nationale des chartes, Paris, and began working at the BnF in 2004.
Laura Paulson Laura Paulson is an art advisor and appraiser who has built her career on establishing longstanding relationships with clients and collectors, helping them to preserve their and their families’ art legacies. During her twenty-eightyear career at Christie’s, she was instrumental in driving the auction house’s success across numerous departments, including Post-War and Contemporary Art, Impressionist and Modern Art, Old Masters, American Paintings, and Decorative Arts. She also developed long-term relationships with museums and institutions worldwide and continues to cultivate and support partnerships for their curatorial and development projects. A significant amount of her extensive expertise in the field has been devoted to appraisals and evaluations for estates, institutions, and private collections.
Douglas Flamm Douglas Flamm has over twenty years of experience in the field of rare books and began working as Gagosian’s rare book specialist in 2016. He works closely with collectors, helping them to enhance their book collections by sourcing scarce and important material. Photo: Carey MacArthur
Jonathan Galassi Jonathan Galassi’s most recent publication is a translation of Eugenio Montale’s Selected Poems (Everyman, 2020).
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
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GERHARD RICHTER Hans Ulrich Obrist traces the history behind Richter’s Cage paintings, and speaks with the artist about their creation.
From October to early December 2006, Gerhard Richter’s studio in Cologne was the site of an intense painting process that led to Cage 1–6, a cycle of six large abstractions—a highly important group in the artist’s oeuvre. In early 2007, I visited Gerhard Richter during the filming of Corinna Belz’s Gerhard Richter Painting (2011) and we talked at length about his Kölner Domfenster (Cologne Cathedral Window, 2007), a seventy-five-foot-high stained glass window that fills the cathedral’s south transept. It comprises 11,000 hand-blown squares of glass in seventy-two colors derived from the palette of the original medieval glazing, which was destroyed during World War II. Half of the squares were sequenced by a random process, a ceding of control that suggests Richter’s interest in chance and in the submission of one’s will to forces beyond one’s control. His design takes its lead from his 4096 Farben (4,096 Colors, 1974), a square painting consisting of 4,096 small, different-colored squares. That work was itself the culmination of a visual inquiry begun with Zehn Farben (Ten Colors) of 1966, and continuing with a series of works based on the principle of the color chart. After our interview, I asked Richter if he could show me his most recent work and we went to his studio, where I was lucky enough to be among the first to see the extraordinary Cage paintings. They were being readied for shipment to the 52nd Venice Biennale, curated by Robert Storr, where they were to be shown for the first time. Seeing them was an overwhelming experience: I was looking at one of the great cycles of paintings not only in Richter’s career but in the early twenty-first century. As we were looking at the paintings, Richter explained that he did not yet have a title for them. Years earlier, I’d learned about his method for finding a title: choosing one significant word as a title is a repeated practice, often offering an initial explanation of the work. When we were organizing our first exhibition together, at the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria, Engadin, Switzerland, in 1992, I suggested titles like Nietzsche and the Circulus Vitiosus Pictus. Richter’s method was more laconic: he asked me, “Where is the exhibition taking place?” I replied, “Sils Maria.” He said, “Too long.” So the title of the exhibition became Sils. During the studio visit in Cologne, when Richter wondered what he should call the new paintings, I asked him what music he had been listening to when he made them. His answer was “Cage.” There was a silence, and then he said, “That’s their title.” 31
This concise title could be unfolded into an extensive interpretation of these abstract paintings, but everything is already there in the short form. Like an explanation of a phenomenon, it unlocks the works, describing their relation to John Cage, one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century, and one who shared with Richter an interest in the great themes of chance and uncertainty. The title Cage can also be considered a visual association, since the six paintings have a hermetic, almost impermeable appearance. The title points to different layers of meaning and further speaks to their multidimensionality. There are many relations between Richter’s work and Cage’s. Storr has traced them from Richter’s attendance of a Cage performance at the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus in Düsseldorf in 1963 to similarities in their artistic processes. Like Richter, Cage often applied chance procedures in composing, in his case notably through use of the I Ching. But there was nothing random about the chance events produced in this way; as Richter has pointed out, Cage made sure to set up his chance events in a way that would produce something worthwhile: “One can see, or rather hear, a great example in Cage’s work of how extensively, cleverly, and sensitively he treats chance in order to make music out of it.” Of his own work he told me, “These chance results are only useful because they’ve been worked out—that means either eliminated or allowed or emphasized; in short, brought into a particular form that’s skillful and artistic.” In their large scale (over nine feet square) and dense materiality, the Cage paintings feature a variety of blocks and patches of color, lines, and areas of white, all fading into each other. To me these demand an infinite process of looking, since one can always discover new and different elements in them on each viewing. This process has a certain sense of slowness. It is as if Richter’s working process were reflected—continued, almost—in one’s repeated encounter with his works. Richter has compared his process to music, where notes are combined in such a way as to sound good or right or comprehensible, communicating something different from a verbal account. This is perhaps why the Cage paintings are beyond our comprehension, leading us to look at them again and again. The thick layers of paint and the dense texture derive partly from Richter’s own technical invention: the use of a squeegee. By moving squeegees of different sizes (in this case a large one) over the canvas, sometimes slowly and carefully, sometimes more forcefully, he adds and subtracts colors and reveals the painting’s many layers, unveiling its multidimensionality. He chooses the colors on the squeegee but the trace that the paint leaves on the canvas is to a large extent the result of chance. “One doesn’t find many brush marks” in the Cage paintings, Storr remarks, “the squeegee is the main protagonist.” The result then forms the basis for decisions about how to continue with the next layer. As Richter says, painting happens. He seizes on these moments revealed by chance in a tension between composition and accident—a controlled chance, so to speak, like that found in Cage’s work. Analogies with Cage also appear in other Richter works. Patterns: Divided Mirrored Repeated, for example, his extraordinary artist’s book of 2011, shows his experiment of taking a reproduction of his Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting, 1990, cat. rais. no. 724-4) and dividing it vertically into strips: first 2, then 4, then 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, and 2,048, up to 8,192 strips. The strips get thinner 32
and thinner throughout the process. The experiment then leads to the strips being mirrored and repeated, which results in a diversity of patterns. The outcome is 221 patterns published on 246 double-page spreads. Here Richter set the rules but didn’t manipulate the outcome, so that the pictures are again an interaction between a defined system and chance. Other outstanding artist’s books of Richter’s include Wald (Forest, 2008) and Eis (Ice, 1981), which contains his stunning photos of a trip he made to Greenland. The layout of these books is sometimes interrupted by blank spaces, like pauses. Richter told me that his layouts have to do with music and silence, again recalling Cage. A performance of Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP (1987) is currently taking place in Halberstadt, Germany. “ASLSP” stands for “as slow as possible”; Cage offered no further instructions, so that each performance of the score is different. The actual performance will take 639 years to complete. The slowness of Cage’s piece is an essential quality for our time, in which, with globalization and the Internet, all processes are accelerated to a speed at which no time remains for critical reflection. ASLSP thus argues for the importance of liberating time. Richter once told me that “picture-making consists of a multitude of yes/no decisions.” He finished the Cage paintings when there was nothing left to be added and nothing left to be destroyed/subtracted. The works’ seemingly never-ending process was suddenly finished “with a yes to end it all.” Like all of his most important works, the Cage paintings are heterogeneous models; combining observation, improvisation and memory, they allow—even demand—perpetual change and mutation. The presentation of Richter’s Cage paintings at the Gagosian galleries in New York and Los Angeles marks a particularly important moment, since Richter’s work has never really been exhibited in Los Angeles. The galleries will also show eight extraordinary recent drawings that further connect Richter with Cage. Drawings have accompanied Richter’s work as a painter from the beginning, an early example being his Elbe cycle of monotypes made with a roller from 1957. Later, in 1978, when he was on the threshold of beginning the abstract paintings, he made a cycle of important drawings in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Another intense drawing cycle took place in 1999, at the time of his first retrospective, at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur. A more recent group is November (2008), where the seepage of ink through the paper makes each work viewable on both sides. Painting has certainly lain at the center of Richter’s practice, but as Dieter Schwarz pointed out on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition of drawings at the Louvre, Paris, in 2012, his drawings were never studies or sketches for paintings but independent autonomous works, produced in very concentrated working phases. Since 2017, drawing has for the first time moved to the forefront of his activity. His critical and self-reflexive practice in the medium includes the use of an eraser, perhaps in echo of his employment of a squeegee to remove pigment in his paintings. What follows is an edit/collage of two conversations I had with Richter about the Cage paintings, one of which has never been published before. Here Richter himself makes a connection between his drawings and the Cage paintings when he says that early on, he “thought the paintings would have to be completely white, with very little adumbration—like large drawings in oil on canvas.”
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Opening spread: Gerhard Richter working on one of his Cage paintings, Cologne, Germany, 2006. Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2020 (05102020). Photo: © Hubert Becker Previous spread: Installation view, Gerhard Richter: Cage Paintings, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, December 3, 2020–April 3, 2021. Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2020 (70122020). Photo: Jeff McLane This spread: Gerhard Richter working on one of his Cage paintings, Cologne, Germany, 2006. Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2020 (05102020). Photo: © Hubert Becker
HANS ULRICH OBRIST Can we talk about the new Cage
paintings? This is the first time this new cycle has been shown. GERHARD RICHTER It’s a series of six large paintings, and they have a special significance for me insofar as I still don’t fully understand them. They were planned completely differently: I wanted to paint them from photos that I’d prepared two years ago, photos of various atomic structures comparable to the Silikat [Silicate] series of 2003 or the Strontium picture from 2004. These six photos promised beautiful, serious, somewhat disturbing paintings. And then when I’d begun the first painting, in late August, I suddenly lost the desire to work on it and proceeded to destroy what I’d already painted, to paint it over without being conscious of what I wanted and where I wanted to go. And I just kept on painting like this somehow. This peculiar state of hopelessness, perplexity, and high spirits kept on long enough for me to finish all six paintings. From time to time during the work, of course, I had fantasies about how the paintings could finally look. At one point, for example, I thought they would have to be completely white, with very little adumbration—like large drawings in oil on canvas. HUO Something like the large white paintings that were exhibited in Japan? GR Yes, something like that. These ideas always get me very excited, but usually they disappear the next day, or the next week. And then I’ll start up again, nonsensically. In this way they’re definitely my freest paintings. And I never, ever thought it possible they’d be finished; I had no concept of final results. But then they were finished, after three months, which meant there was nothing more I could do with them. I was almost upset. HUO A sudden emptiness? GR Yes, that too. That’s often the case when something is finished, one feels superfluous and useless. HUO How do you know when a painting is finished? GR When I have no more ideas about how to change it. When I can’t think of anything else to add, or even whether or not to throw it away. That also happens; it’s okay, and healthy, to throw things away. You have to get angry when you see the nonsense you’re making. And it will always be destroyed until you reach a situation when you can’t complain anymore, and then it just stays like that. But in this case, that finished state of the paintings came quite unexpectedly, in fact almost disappointingly. I think I’d felt I’d be able to—or would have to—paint them forever. In any case, they were done, and the next problem was that I didn’t know what the paintings showed, and how I could title them. And then you helped me with a question: you asked me what music I’d been listening to during that period, and I answered: Cage! HUO And with that you’d found your title. GR In hindsight, I have to say rightly. Because just then I’d discovered, or rediscovered, Cage’s Complete Piano Music, and I’d been listening to it almost exclusively for a while. I still enjoy it today— around eighteen CDs, all of them with Steffen Schleiermacher—wonderful. Of course a title like that is only indirectly linked to the paintings; it doesn’t actually describe anything, it just guides one’s perspective in a certain direction, toward certain connections and similarities. But it’s also more than just a name. In any case, the title is meant to honor and express admiration for the music. HUO Cage has made an enduring mark on you. You once said that you were impressed by his “Lecture on Nothing”: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” 35
Yes, that’s true. Oddly enough, another connection just occurred to me, a visual similarity: yesterday I saw a postcard of this beautiful [Francesco] Guardi painting, Laguna grigia [1765], a wonderful little picture I’d seen once in Milan. I enjoy these kind of connections. HUO And that brings us back to Venice. GR Into the gray lagoon of John Cage. HUO Wonderful! Perhaps we can speak a bit more about Cage and chance. You’ve spoken often about the idea of chance in Cage’s work and in your own, and it seems to be the case that chance again plays a role in these unplanned paintings. GR Yes, a definitive role, even in the abstract paintings. Despite all my technical experience, I can’t always exactly foresee what will happen when I apply or remove large amounts of paint with the scraper. Surprises always emerge, whether disappointing or pleasant, in either case representing changes to the painting—changes that I have to process mentally before I can continue. One can see, or rather hear, a great example in Cage’s work of how extensively, cleverly, and sensitively he treats chance in order to make music out of it. HUO You’ve also spoken of Cage’s discipline. You were interested in the notion that chance is only possible with a great deal of discipline. The same applies to these paintings. GR Yes, otherwise they’d just be smears of paint. Even with the Farbtafel [Color Charts, 1966–1974] and now with the cathedral window, these chance results are only useful because they’ve been worked out—that means either eliminated or permitted or emphasized; in short, brought into a particular form that’s skillful and artistic. HUO Can I ask how the window began? GR There were ideas, such as depicting six modern saints—Edith Stein, for example, and others. I tried to put together a couple of little designs, only to realize that this wouldn’t work at all. And then, when I’d already mentally turned the project down, I found that this picture [4096 Farben] fitted the template so well that it really shook me, and I thought, yes, that’s it, I can offer them this. After that it took another two years for the cathedral’s chapter to agree to try it. That’s how everything came about. HUO The color charts started in 1966 and ran up to 1974. Can you maybe tell me something about how this series started? Was there a trigger? GR Well, it had to do with the spirit of the time, the zeitgeist of Pop art, when these banal motifs were discovered—newspaper or advertising photographs, commercials. In my case it was the color charts in painting-supply shops: they were so perfect, all I had to do was copy them and there was my painting. The benefit was that it wasn’t as holy—I’m saying this a bit polemically—as those devotional pictures people used to believe in, something I always found highly disagreeable: this is a [Josef] Albers, and this is a certain play of color shades, this is an [Antonio] Calderara, and so on. To rebel against things like this is very important at that age [laughs]. Anyway, I just developed this further and systemized it. At first, each color was separated from the others by a bar, because I said to myself, You can’t let them touch, that looks just horrible. It was a step—today you can’t see anymore that this was supposed to be a step, but it was a step, and one that showed that it worked: you can put each color next to any other and it fits in almost all cases. And isn’t that truly anarchic? HUO You’ve said that your starting point was four rows of colors, red, yellow, green, and blue, and that GR
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Previous spread: Installation view, Gerhard Richter: Cage Paintings, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, December 3, 2020–April 3, 2021. Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2020 (70122020). Photo: Jeff McLane This spread: Gerhard Richter working on one of his Cage paintings, Cologne, Germany, 2006. Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2020 (05102020). Photo: © Hubert Becker Following spread: Installation view, Gerhard Richter: Cage Paintings, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, December 3, 2020–April 3, 2021. Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2020 (70122020). Photo: Jeff McLane
their respective shades and degrees of lightness resulted in the color charts. Can you tell us a little more about this systematic scheme, and how you arrived at 4,096 colors starting with just four? GR The color charts in the shops were pleasant images—six nice shades of yellow, or a color scale for garden furniture—whatever. And then, because there are three basic colors, red, yellow, and blue, I started mixing them, three by three by three, divided into dark and light and into the next color shade. This produced paintings with 180 colors. For my taste, though, they all had too much of a red-bluish tint, and then I read somewhere that [Arthur] Schopenhauer had said that there were four basic colors—that green was one too, because it was so natural, or something like that. With that I was out of the woods! Now I had an alibi, and I simply took green into the basic color line. [Both laugh]. And so the other paintings developed. It is actually very easy to do—four by four, by four, by four, and so on. And that’s why we end up with weird numbers like 1,024. HUO You bring up the realism that penetrates even into abstraction as such—you say that a certain part of it is always a narrative. This seems interesting in the context of the color charts, at least as a possibility. GR Yes, the eye always searches for “something” in abstract paintings, some similarity with real objects—that’s what creates the effect of abstract paintings. That’s why we can understand them. This kind of realism is always part of the color charts. With billions of sorting possibilities, an image will appear at some point—probably all images conceivable will appear. But the probability that I—or we—will produce an image is close to zero. They all look alike, always, one like the other, diffuse, not like an object. Everything is in there. HUO As a possibility. GR Yes, as a possibility. HUO The window project was a presence in the studio over the past few years, and a lot of other work developed in parallel with it—an entire series of abstract paintings, complete exhibitions. Were there overlaps, or are we looking at parallel universes here? GR I think parallel, because the window project has a different origin, dating back forty years now. So it’s a field plowed “on the side,” which is no problem. HUO In earlier statements you often talked about atheism. Religion often turns up in the idea of art being a substitute for religion. Do you still think that? GR Yes, absolutely. We look at art with so much faith. In fact what resembles art the most is religion and faith. Nothing works without faith. HUO When I saw the Cage paintings in your studio for the first time, you weren’t yet certain whether the cycle would have five paintings or six. It was as if the five paintings belonged together, but the sixth was a part of the series, yet also not. Can you say something about that? I believe all six are being shown in Venice. GR Yes, that question was solved in time, because the first painting quite obviously belongs to the series, even if its appearance is somewhat different, somewhat softer than the following five. It now has the sense of being an introduction. These new paintings are more spontaneous, more free, unplanned. HUO Something quite new is happening with the Cage paintings that wasn’t there before. Can we possibly encapsulate what it is? 39
GR That’s hard for me to say. I’m glad that I’m gradually able to recognize what the paintings show, that something is being conveyed, that they actually depict something, something quasi-real. But it will take some time before I can describe what it is. HUO You once said that in your abstract paintings there’s a search for a likeness, which is always there. GR Yes, it’s always there. I think all abstract paintings function that way. We aren’t capable of viewing paintings without searching for their inherent similarity to what we’ve experienced and what we know. We want to see what they offer us, whether they threaten us or whether they’re nice to us, or whatever it might be. HUO It’s very interesting that this cycle began, like many of your abstract paintings, with an image that was then destroyed. And there are several phases of images that you’ve documented photographically, so that we can see all the painted-over images that no longer exist. It’s actually a rather destructive act, and you agreed as we looked at them that this destruction is there, but that alongside it there’s the desire to create a well-built, constructive painting. GR Yes, it’s quite exciting to work that way, with destroying, building up, wrecking again, and so on. That’s effectively a prerequisite—otherwise nothing will result. It’s different in figurative paintings; the destruction and construction aren’t as obvious there. HUO Do you think these are optimistic paintings? GR I’m beginning to. HUO I thought the gray paintings in your New York exhibition were much darker by comparison. GR The ones I showed in 2001 with Marian Goodman? They were actually a light gray, like bright dust and fog, but rather melancholic. HUO Somehow the Cage paintings have a more optimistic quality . . . something of the principle of hope. GR That may lie in a certain aggression and unpredictability they have, which makes them more optimistic than the gray New York paintings. HUO We haven’t yet spoken about the light in these paintings—about cold light, warm light, southern light, northern light. How would you describe their light? GR [laughs] Now that I’ve mentioned the Guardi, with its gentle southern light from the lagoon, I think I have to describe it as northern light. HUO Perhaps that’s the paradox of the light in Engadin, where south and north collide, like Finland and Italy. GR Wonderful! Yes, Nietzsche described that so well. That’s exactly what it is: the light of Sils Maria. HUO Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a wonderful set of letters as “advice to a young poet,” and I’d like to ask you what your advice is to young painters? GR [laughs] Don’t be easily led astray, and don’t give up believing in art. That’s all. HUO And a question that I always ask when I do an interview: are there any unrealized projects? GR Very few. When I have an idea, I start it. And when I have no idea, no one is the wiser.
After Gagosian’s exhibitions of the Cage paintings in Los Angeles and New York, the series will return to the Tate, London, where the canvases are on longterm view, loaned from a private collector and philanthropist who has long been one of the most ardent supporters of the artist. 40
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THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY: MARK STEVENS & ANNALYN SWAN
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, coauthors of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Willem de Kooning, speak with Michael Cary about the research and revelations that went into their forthcoming biography of Francis Bacon. MICHAEL CARY Let’s start with how the project came
about.
After our de Kooning biography was published, we were approached by several estates with proposals for artists we might like to write about. Bacon won out for two reasons. John Eastman, who is a copresident of the de Kooning Foundation, was collaborating at that point with the Bacon estate on various legal matters. One thing led to another and Brian Clarke, the head of the Bacon estate, signed off on the idea and has been very helpful to us ever since. So that’s technically how it came about. But from the point of view of why it was interesting for us: there was no comprehensive, thoroughly researched biography of Bacon. Nobody had actually done the boots-on-the-ground work, and there was nothing from twenty-five years ago until now, so it looked like a great opportunity to write about a remarkable artist, many of whose dimensions had not been explored. MARK STEVENS Also, both Bacon and de Kooning had a kind of emblematic importance—extending beyond the paint. Bacon is arguably the darkest artist of an often dark century, and that’s immediately interesting. He set the outer edge, in a way, for twentieth-century art. He also matters as an unashamed homosexual before gay liberation. And he had a powerful philosophical aura in that existential period; there are echoes of Samuel Beckett and other existential playmakers of the time. Plus, he created a celebrated persona in an age of celebrity. All interesting for a biographer. MC Since much of the existing biographical writing on Bacon was written by friends and intimates, it inevitably contains elements of memoir; you end up with very, very subjective portrayals of Bacon in the literature. AS Exactly. We’re very grateful to Dan Farson [The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, 1993] and Michael Peppiatt [Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, 1996] because both of them knew Bacon personally. But having said that, there are also limitations in that their books are based on the personality and the interaction and don’t necessarily take a dispassionate look at Bacon. Who is this man really? That’s what we were trying to come in and do. MS Bacon circulated in many different milieus, so people knew him in different ways and he could be a different person in different places. It’s too bad that we didn’t know him personally, that we could not call on that kind of visceral knowledge. At the same time, we could hope to navigate his life with some objectivity. AS That whole “Bacon, the great legend of Soho” narrative narrows him. There’s so much more to Bacon than that. ANNALYN SWAN
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I love Farson’s book because it’s outrageous, but both of those books prop up the Bacon persona, right? Bacon’s persona has a huge presence in the popular imagination. So the subtitle of your book, Revelations—one of the revelations is that Bacon was a whole person. MS There’s a well-known observation by E. M. Forster about the importance of both flat and round characters in a novel. Bacon has been presented in an interesting but flat way, and what we wanted was to draw him in the round. MC It struck me when I got to your chapter “Performance Artist” that you very much deal with the Bacon “persona” in that chapter. It comes quite late in the book, so we’ve had 500 or so pages of Bacon as a person before you address the persona in a direct way. It’s remarkable: you’ve arranged for us to be able to see the performance and the persona more clearly because you’ve given us the material to know him more intimately as a person. AS That chapter comes toward the end because as he grew older, the performance became more important to him. He had so many physical issues, emotional issues, anxieties. He was struggling. He maintained that indomitable facade at huge cost into even his later years. MS Structuring the book that way lets you experience the evolution of a life. Bacon never wanted to appear vulnerable or weak, probably a consequence of his difficult childhood. So he developed a very powerful persona over time, with the help of David Sylvester and others. He was already beginning to do that in the ’60s, when the press started to approach him and people wanted to know more about his life. He was well-known then, but it wasn’t until the ’80s that his myth really began to inflate. So the “performance artist” in that chapter feels contemporaneous—it’s happening at that time, while having earlier roots. And as Annalyn says, it’s poignant because he’s painting himself up and performing and being outrageous in a way that also reveals weakness and vulnerability. The persona is never fake news. It’s a vital part of Bacon, and we think it helped him make his art, it helped him get through the world. It’s intrinsic. It’s just that there’s much else. MC You never met Bacon, which seems an advantage—but would you have wanted to meet him? Would you have enjoyed going out to dinner with him . . . besides the champagne and the caviar? MC
Well, other than the fact that he could be immensely dangerous . . . shall we start with that? He could absolutely eviscerate his friends, so it was always a gamble to go to dinner with Francis Bacon. If he got too drunk, he could get mean and vicious. But when he wasn’t too drunk—and he often wasn’t too drunk—he could be the most marvelous, charming, entertaining presence. That was his best stage. MS He had exquisite manners, unlike many artists and unlike many people. That’s one thing that he took from the privileged circumstances of his birth. The manners are wired into the sensibility. AS Bacon’s sister, Ianthe, told us that at one point Bacon said to her, “I’m so glad that I know where the silver is on the dinner table and that I learned manners.” Then Ianthe paused and said, “Not that he always used them, of course” [laughs]. MS Dav id Sylve s ter sa id , “ He wa s never rude unintentionally.” MC You said Bacon was perhaps the darkest artist of a dark century. Was it depressing at all to spend ten years of your life with this artist? AS I have to say, we had such fun. Bacon had been kind of trapped in this myth as a so-called monster, and very English, but this was also a man who loved France and had many close friends there: he adored French intellectuals. His AngloIrish background was a whole new world and no biographer before us had actually crossed the Irish Sea and gone to Ireland, which is so revealing about his youth. We went to Dublin and visited all of these grand houses in the Pale, we learned everything we could about the horse-racing country and about the big-house traditions. It was wonderful. And we spent some time in Tangier . . . that was really tough [laughter]! MS It wasn’t depressing because Bacon wasn’t depressing. The reason he was so good at darkness was that he was full of light. You need light to make a shadow. He loved gambling, he loved conversation, he loved wine, and he was funny. One time in the 1970s he was gambling at the Playboy Club in London, playing roulette and losing badly, so he’s bitching and cursing and carrying on. One of the bunnies asks him to please behave. Bacon mutters, “Bunnies! What they need around here is more buck rabbits” [laughter]. AS There’s a sort of a playfulness that just doesn’t translate into what most people think about Bacon. AS
Previous spread: Francis Bacon in his studio in Battersea, London. Photo: © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s This page: Francis Bacon in Ostia, near Rome. Photo: © Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (Reg. No. RM98F12:17:12) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved.
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He didn’t take himself too seriously. It’s kind of unimaginable, the way he just f lung money across the table, but it speaks to how wonderfully high-spirited he was, that he would just go for the gold, just go for whatever, just fling it all out there. Isn’t that an interesting character to pursue? MS Bacon thought most people were being cagey and holding back. He didn’t keep that kind of savings account. Most serious players of roulette develop these obsessive systems, but Bacon had no interest in that sort of safety. He had a kind of ancient Greek feeling for fate: he didn’t mind being struck down, he didn’t mind losing. At least then something was happening. MC And he gambled with his work? MS Yes, he depended on chance in his work— gambling in the studio much as he did at roulette. He would take a chance and very often would ruin a portrait, for example, or upset an almost finished picture. He didn’t care, he would relish slashing it up and getting rid of it. You don’t always hit the jackpot when you put all your money on twenty-eight, you know? It doesn’t happen that often. It’s important to judge Bacon not by the lesser bets that escaped the studio but by his best work, which is like nothing else—and does hit the jackpot. AS Bacon was so judg menta l of his work, so prone to de st r uc t ion. Va ler ie Be ston of Marlborough—“Valerie from the gallery”—her primary job was to intuit when Bacon had finished a painting so she could somehow coax it out of his Reece Mews studio and have it whisked off to the gallery in the van. And they would have to hide the paintings so when Bacon came into Marlborough he wouldn’t see them. He was so self-critical, he probably would have destroyed half of the surviving paintings had he had a chance. MS Remember, Bacon was largely self-taught. An artist who has formally trained in a school is not going to screw up to the same extent that a self-taught artist might, especially in the treatment of the figure. Matisse and Picasso, both such fluently trained artists, they’re never going to make a really bad picture because they don’t know how to make a bad picture. Bacon is different. The selftaught aspect of his sensibility helps explain why he became a great original, but you can also sometimes see related weaknesses. John Richardson and David Sylvester and others, for example, have complained about the sometimes awkward
fashion world at that period. In a book Garland wrote later, she mentioned a room that Bacon had designed—a room for her, actually—but no writers had discovered this connection to Garland before. We asked John Richardson if he knew whether Bacon knew Madge, and he gasped, “Madge Garland!” and of course he was off to the races. “Yes, he knew Madge.” John described her—one of my favorite lines—“Madge Garland is the kind of woman who would move in next door to you if she thought you would be useful.” She was a connector [laughter]. MS And Bacon wanted to be connected. The remarkable thing about this, from a biographical standpoint, is that Bacon, at only eighteen years old, is already setting out on a very ambitious design career. Madge knew Virginia Woolf, she was very much interested in modernism and in bringing modernism to London. And she fastened on Bacon and Bacon accepted her as a mentor. So this is not a young and dissolute wastrel killing time, as Bacon would have you believe, but a determined young man looking for helpers and mentors, first in Madge Garland and then, back in London, in one of the chief modernist designers at the time, Arundell Clarke. MC We knew that Bacon designed a bit of furniture here and there, but it always seemed strange, because how does an eighteen-year-old manufacture furniture? It was never really elaborated. MS And how does an eighteen-year-old get to painting without any training? It would have been intimidating, almost absurd, for an eighteen-yearold Englishman in Paris to start painting serious pictures in Montparnasse while Picasso was just down the block. What’s he going to do instead? He moves into the very powerful design world in Paris, which has English, Irish, and American figures. It becomes a natural segue. Once you gain some fluency in design and you get to know people, well, it then becomes easier to take a chance at painting to see what happens. The design is not just an interlude; it helps make possible the move into more serious painting. MC Design is also a profession, it’s a job. And a young man on his own who’s been cast out from the family has to figure out a way to make a life. AS He probably loved making money on his own. But he was also never abandoned by his family. Being “cast out from the family” seems to be relationship between the figure and the ground in a Bacon painting. People with an eye know that the ground is almost as important as the figure, the negative space about as important as the positive space. Bacon struggled with that. And the struggle sometimes led to terrific solutions, poignant and powerful and steeped in a sense of the terror of blank space. But not always. AS There was another advantage to being selftaught, which was that he experimented until he got things right. We write about his time in the village of Steep, in 1941 and ’42 during the war, when he takes himself away from London for two years. It turned out nobody had really looked into that period very much, for one reason: Bacon completely hid it. But it was the rough experimentation that he did hidden away in Steep that led to Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion [1944], his breakout painting. So there are periods in there when he just took the time to teach himself to go to the next level. MS He was certainly what we would now call a controlling person—and that extended to his past.
There are two periods in his life that he essentially erased. One of them is Steep and the other is when he was in Paris as a very young man. He was in Montparnasse in the late ’20s, surely the art mecca of the twentieth century. He never talked about it! It’s erased. He’s in Paris for a year and a half then and he says almost nothing about it? Why? AS His time in Paris is fascinating because it was the beginning of his short-lived design career, which he completely buried later. He did everything he could to dynamite it out of people’s memory, but in fact he was very much plugged in to the design world then, on both sides of the Channel. It had been a mystery where Bacon’s very modernist design aesthetic came from, but it clearly came from seeing Eileen Gray’s Jean Désert showroom in Paris. He would have had exposure to Gray through a woman named Madge Garland, who was best friends with that whole group of designers in Paris. Madge was the fashion editor of British Vogue for four years in the 1920s while her lesbian partner Dorothy Todd was the top editor, and the two of them were the queen bees in the design and
This page: Francis Bacon at his last gallery show in Paris, 1987. Photo: © Michel Nguyen (MB Art Collection)
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another myth more than anything else. Decades later, Bacon’s sister Ianthe said, “Our mother never knew he was homosexual. She always said, ‘Oh, I hope Francis settles down and gets married.’ And our parents never threw him out.” And Ianthe would have known, there would have been something in the family legend. So again, Bacon is not the most reliable narrator. MC The relationship with Ianthe in Bacon’s later years really surprised me, and another of the revelations in your book is the extent to which a series of women played important roles in Bacon’s life. AS It goes all the way back to his grandmother, Granny Supple, the one he lived with in Ireland. She was the first woman to take up Francis apart from his nanny, who lived with him until her death, in 1951. MS He didn’t know other little boys when he was a child. He knew little girls. And then he moved on to women who were somewhat older than he was, who liked to help this charming boy. AS He had t his abilit y to be close f r iends with women that gets overlooked in the Soho sacred-monster legend, which is ver y much a male narrative. But Madge Garland, Isabel Rawsthorne, Sonia Orwell, Janetta Parladé, Valerie Beston, Nadine Haim, and other lesser-known figures were powerful characters who were of enormous help to Bacon. And when you include them, another dimension of Bacon starts unfolding before your eyes. Generally he liked strong, tough women. MS Valerie Beston, for example, had that sort of no-nonsense “I’m not going to pity myself” English character. A bit Miss Marple. Stocky and sensible shoes. Bacon could be a bitchy gossip about his friends, including Miss Beston, but he also liked to keep his friends. One important revelation in the book is that he remained so interested, not just in rough trade and being a sexual alley cat, but in serious long-term relationships. He didn’t usually give up friends, and he didn’t give up lovers; he was even a bit clingy. AS Companionship and wanting companionship, that was really true throughout his life. And you see it particularly toward the end, with John Edwards and José Capelo. Both of them were sympathetic characters who were very helpful to Bacon in his waning years. So there was a cozy side too.
Bacon really wanted the companionship, not just the S&M sex. MS Peter Lacy never spoke publicly about Bacon, but we found two of Lacy’s nephews who knew him well and they were aghast at the traditional and caricatural portrait of him as a sadistic fighter pilot. They told us that he’d never been a fighter pilot. They presented him in the round. If you actually look at Bacon’s letters to his various friends and see his anxiety about Lacy, you can begin to piece together, almost forensically, that these two men simply never got over each other. Their relationship was tortured and sometimes violent, but also revelatory for each man. It’s nonsense to portray Bacon as a little vulnerable masochist and Lacy as a powerfully sadistic fighter pilot. They were together for ten years, on and off. That’s something. MC There’s a device you use throughout the book, where you punctuate the end of several chapters with a brief essay on a single significant work. How and why did you develop and deploy this device? MS There are a couple of reasons. One, if you’ve read a lot of biographies of serious artists or imaginative people, very often descriptions of their work—and their work is after all the reason the biography is ultimately being written—the descriptions of the novel, the symphony, or the ballet interrupt the narrative in a kind of gloppily glutinous way. You’re reading about something exciting in the artist’s life, maybe even his love life, and then suddenly you have to shift gears to read about the choreography of some ballet that you can’t see. And you just want to get back to the narrative. That’s unfortunate, because the ballet is actually more important than the sex life. So you’re sort of screwing things up in a fundamental way. We do discuss works of art within the text, but usually quickly, and these longer breakouts are a way to put some space between the life and the art. The device suggests that you must not reduce the art to the life or the life to the art—they can live together, but with some space, some oxygen, between them. It represents a kind of modesty about what one can and cannot finally know. AS I teach biography- and memoir-writing at the Graduate Center in New York, and the first class starts with “Show, don’t tell.” Convey the character through anecdotes, through other people’s
observations, and make the tough decisions to keep the narrative zipping along. One reviewer wrote that there’s a slightly picaresque quality to our book, which absolutely thrills us. We love that sense that you’re in an adventure, it’s almost like an early novel. When Bacon is young and at the threshold of his life, instead of just saying “Now he’s going off to London, he’s leaving home,” we ended the chapter by saying “He set out.” MC So what are some of your favorite biographies? MS Biographies haven’t been very important to me, actually. Nineteenth-century novels are more the model, or that’s what I often want to take from a biography—that sense of a large, encompassing social landscape, with a flawed hero, intriguing secondary figures, and a strong narrative line. Working on Bacon was sometimes like walking into a Dickens novel. These characters! People don’t write nineteenth-century novels anymore, of course, but biographies can do something related in our world—be long, expansive, a little discursive. There’s such pleasure to be found in an immersive reading of a vital person’s life, from birth until death. AS For me, one of the best biographies has a truly original narrative style, The Quest for Corvo [1934], in which A. J. A. Symons went on a sort of detective mission to find out about this man named Baron Corvo. But then you can also write brilliantly, as Richard Ellmann did in his Oscar Wilde [1969], where everything sparkles and is witty in the way that he describes his character. He writes in the same spirit that Wilde wrote and lived. So I look at how you can make biography not boring; you have to find a way to reveal the character by degrees. By the end of the book, what you hope is that the reader has been fascinated, loved the story, and then has a real sense of the character. And so many biographies don’t do that. MS Biography is portrait painting. It’s not only an earnest accumulation of facts, a piece of heavy baggage, an attic, a storeroom, an archive; it’s a reflection. And that means you leave some things out, put other things in, juxtapose magically. You work with figure and ground. There can be different kinds of portraits, but the good ones come alive, in the book and on the wall.
Francis Bacon with his mother and sister Ianthe in South Africa, 1967. Photo: courtesy The Estate of Francis Bacon
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ALISON MCDONALD Last year we all faced unprecedented challenges. What effect did the pressures of 2020 have on the art market? Is it fair to say that in 2019 the market was robust and on an upward trajectory? Did that position of relative stability prove meaningful when faced with the economic struggles of 2020? LAURA PAULSON Well, it’s certainly true that the market was robust and on an upward trajectory in 2019, with an expanding group of both American and international collectors that cre-
an eye on the market
and preparators, photographers, graphic designers, registrars, framer s , se c u r it y pe ople , c u rator s , researchers, event planners, and caterers, to name a few. While there were cost-cutting measures in the previous market downturns, the doors remained open and the revenue stream continued. The covid-19 crisis has been quite different. Not only did the onset of covid require closing and postponing every aspect of the art industry on an epic scale, it also required an investment in safety
bounce back differently on those occasions? LP Well, in the fall of 1991 it felt like the art world had come to a complete stop. During the late 1980s until approximately 1990, the art market had become very speculative. A generation of artists emerging from the 1980s had become wellknown and were actively and competitively collected and “flipped,” for decent profits at the time. In addition, international collectors were witnessing the potential of the over-
offered, and the sales were controversial because the works were initially purchased with the intention of being included in his museum. However, the sales also presented collectors not necessarily affected by the market downturn with opportunities to buy both historical masterpieces and contemporary works that would otherwise have been unavailable. At this time several, primarily American, collectors intelligently acquired works from the Saatchi Collection that ultimately became the core of their per-
Laura Paulson, former global chairman of Christie’s and current chief operating officer for Gagosian Art Advisory, speaks with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about the state of the art market in the wake of the pandemic. ated a stable base for the market when fa c e d w it h t he c h a l lenge s t h at resulted from the global pandemic. However, while previous market downturns certainly impacted the financial stability and momentum of the overall art industry, museums and cultural institutions, galleries, auction houses, and art fairs continued to function. This also included the many layers of the art industry that support the presentation of art in these various venues: art transport and packing companies, art ha nd lers
protocols and procedures in order for galleries and museums to open to the public. The economic impact on these institutions has been devastating and revealed the fragility of the art-world ecosystem, which depends on so many essential workers to allow the engine of the industry to function. AMCD This crisis is unique in a lot of ways, but during your career you have navigated the art-market downturn of the 1990s and the financial crisis of 2008. How was each of those moments different from our current situation? Did the market
all return on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and began borrowing money using their art as collateral. That reached a peak in 1990, and then, suddenly, the market stopped, and like musical chairs, those who had expected consistent returns were left with their art and their debt. It created a vacuum and a depression in the market for nearly four years. During the late 1980s, Charles Saatchi emerged as one of the most formidable and ambitious collectors, often demanding to acquire the majority of an artist’s exhibition because he was planning to build an extraordinary museum in London. In anticipation of this project he published a series of catalogues, Art of Our Time, to showcase the depth and breadth of the art he intended to include in his museum. Saatchi was affected by the market downturn and in 1991 he sold a substantial part of his collection over a few seasons at Sotheby’s. Extraordinary works were
sonal collections going forward. They were a minority, however; very few people were collecting at this level. It was a long and bleak period between 1991 and 1994; it felt like an eternity and it was a very difficult time for galleries and artists. The late and highly esteemed New York gallerist Pat Hearn coined a mantra for the time: “Stay alive until ’95.” A sign of recovery revealed itself in 1994 with the sale of Shot Red Marilyn [1964]. It was an interesting story: in May of 1989, the highly acclaimed Los Angeles collector Max Palevsky, an early computer-chip pioneer, sold this iconic work for $4.07 million at Christie’s. It was acquired by a fa mous Japa nese col lec tor named Wanibuchi, also known as the Ginza Tailor. Five years later, in November of 1994, Wanibuchi was in financial distress and sold Shot Red Marilyn at Christie’s. The estimate was $2.5 to $3 million and it sold for $3.6 million, which was seen as a
an eye on the market
watershed moment for the market’s recovery. There was great competition for the work, and it was widely heralded in the press as a sign that the art market was on a rebound. The next point of recovery was in 1997, with the sale of the collection of Victor and Sally Ganz, highly focused and knowledgeable collectors who had extraordinary relationships with the artists they collected, including Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Eva Hesse, Frank Stella, and Mel Bochner. The collection included Picasso’s Le Rêve [1932], which sold for $48 million and was the highest-priced work in the collection. The sale totaled $206.5 million. It was an exciting moment in the market and one began to feel the arrival of new collectors and of a competitive quest for masterpieces. The following May, the Stroher family, of Wella hair-care fame, sold their Orange Marilyn [1964], which came from the same series as the Shot Red Marilyn that had sold four years prior. Orange Marilyn sold for $17 million from an estimate of $4 to $6 million. The Orange Marilyn sold for more than four times what the Shot Red Marilyn had sold for in 1994—that shocked the market. It was an interesting indication of the trajectory of masterpiece buying that would come to define the future art market. The shift was driven by wealthy Americans and Europeans who had been on the edge of collecting and began to see the opportunities for acquisitions that they previously could never have acquired. In 2008, the downturn was actually short-lived. By then we had
seen new wealth arrive into the art world from so-called emerging markets, which introduced a new class of international art collectors to t he pr imar y and secondary markets. They were competitive buyers and highly focused on blue-chip twentieth-century artists with name and market recognition. There were some very strong sales in 2007, and the market felt effortlessly robust, not unlike the financial markets at that time. There was a feeling, not unlike in the late 1980s, that this market activity would go on forever, with the auctions in particular. But the quality began to slip while the prices remained high, and one could see there was going to be an impasse in the market, which coincided, when it came, with the crash of the financial markets in the fall of 2008. Consequently, the November 2008 sales were very difficult for the auction houses, as I experienced personally. Three months later, though, in February 2009, I was at Christie’s and we had the extraordinary sale of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent, which was an unparalleled success. There were masterpieces, both works of art and decorative objects, at every price point, and the sale generated extraordinary participation from an international collecting community of people who understood the unique oppor tunity to acquire rare and important works from an esteemed provenance that would otherwise have been unavailable. In January 2009, Betty Freeman, an esteemed collector and a supporter of contemporary music, passed away. Her collection was anchored by the iconic Beverly Hills Housewife, a portrait of Betty painted by her dear friend David Hockney in 1966–67. The collection also included works by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Ken Price, Sam Francis, Alexander Calder, and others. I had the privilege of handling the sale,
which was exciting because the market had not been tested since the crash of 2008 for a collection of this diversity and caliber: a rich representation of postwar American art. The sale did brilliantly well, the market breathed a sigh of relief, and it was a further testament to the fact that when great quality comes forward, collectors will compete. It was a remarkable rebound from November 2008. AMCD It’s interesting to me that you mentioned the Saatchi sale and then the Yves Saint Laurent and Betty Freeman sales as events that helped stabilize the art market after those moments of crisis. It seems that when exemplary works became available, it may not have been exactly the right time, but it actually helped secure the future by bringing people out. Is that fair to say? LP Oh, absolutely. In the early 1990s, not that many people were in a position to spend large amounts of money on art. But Charles Saatchi had caref ul ly assembled a phenomenal collection, and the sales, both at auction and privately, were an oppor tunity for many collectors to acquire definitive works by impor ta nt inter nat iona l ar t ists. Many of these collectors had had to wait in line behind Saatchi when he was at h is buy ing peak, a nd these sales provided access to these great works. Yves Saint Laurent and Betty Freeman were estate sales, and while there had been discussions about timing, estates don’t usually have the ability to wait, due to estate-tax concerns. In the end, these two sales, at a fragile time in the global economy, were both extraordinarily successful, which was a testament to the depth of the market: each sale represented a broad range of tastes in art and decorative art, and, most important, a spectrum of values with impeccable provenance. AMCD What are the market trends you f ind sig n i f ic a nt r ight now? Is it a moment to offer only works of the highest quality for sale? Is it a moment to buy st rateg ic a l ly?
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What opportunities have been presented and what hazards should collectors avoid? LP During this moment we have continued to manage consignments for clients, considering the most appropriate sale venue, auction or private sale. We had time-sensitive consignments that were slated for the May sales, and when the May sales were canceled, we had to think carefully about what to recommend to our clients. Ultimately we decided to proceed with the scheduled auctions in their new configurations, which were very creative in deference to the new covid protocols. We presented works at all price points across many different categories, from decorative arts, tribal arts, and Impressionism to modern and contemporary art. Most of these works came from collections that had been in place for a long time and were fresh to the market. We were very pleased with the sale results, especially in a time of such uncertainty. There are opportunities in this moment, as there is a level of distraction due to covid, economic, and political issues that can result in opportunities to acquire with less competition than in more ordinary times. In addition, the shift to online auctions, viewing rooms, and art fairs has produced an enormous amount of information and art to absorb on these digital platforms, so much that it can actually be overwhelming: it’s a moment to buy strategically and thoughtfully and to continue to focus on quality. Another positive aspect to the digital platforms is that they offer a nonhierarchal experience; everyone has the opportunity to see what a gallery has available without having to travel, or to contend with the feeling of intimidation that big galleries can have for new collectors. I personally believe nothing replaces the experience of seeing art in person, but this moment has opened doors for a lot of people who earlier might not have considered collecting art or having art in their lives. AMCD You ment ioned t hat it’s a good moment to buy something
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at a level of quality, even if it’s at a low price point. How do new collectors know when they’re buying the “best” example of an artist’s work at that level? Are there general guiding principles that you could share with people who are new to collecting—things they should know about or be thinking about when making an acquisition? LP Collecting art is a very personal experience. I really enjoy watching collectors develop a passion for an artist, a particular genre of work, or a particular medium with confidence in their pursuit and patience to acquire works of quality regardless of value. Of course, when making an acquisition, it is important to confirm condition and provenance as well as its value in the context of the overall market. AMCD When you’re advising someone, what type of research do you bring to them? LP Collectors definitely want to feel confidence in the price of a work,
an eye on the market
especially appraisals and advisory, despite the pandemic. Appraisals are a lways in dema nd, par t ic ularly as collectors use this moment to reevaluate their art collections, whether for insurance, financial and estate planning, or possible sale. As I mentioned, we have utilized technology to facilitate this work with great results. AMCD You recently had your team c e r t i f ie d a s a ppr a i s e r s b y t he Appraisers Association of America. Why is that official training an important step to take? LP T he Unifor m Standards of P rofe s s ion a l Ap p ra i s a l P rac t ic e [USPAP] is generally recognized as the performance standards for appraisals, and it’s been cited by Congress as such—and is required by the IRS panel committee, insurance companies, and banks. We have deep knowledge and experience in providing appraisals, so the USPAP certification confirms our profe ssiona l exper t ise t hat
widest possible audience, providing heirs and decision makers with the assurance that every possible opportunity has been utilized to generate the highest prices. When we handle collections, we consider the best process for the sale as it pertains to the needs of our clients. This includes the state of the market, the artists in the collection, and the needs of the family, collector, or estate. Sometimes there’s a preference for discretion and we recommend private sale. Gagosian Art Advisory represents estates and private collections and requests competitive proposals on behalf of our clients for optimum marketing, promotion, and financial terms and selects the proposal that best meets our clients’ needs. AMCD What role do art fairs play in the current market landscape? LP Art fairs can be a great venue for new discoveries and can give collectors the chance to be introduced to a global network of art galleries and
innovative ideas have also been presented to continue creating revenue through online exhibitions, viewing rooms, and art fairs. Despite the innovation, collectors are looking forward to returning to a traditional calendar of gallery and museum exhibitions, biennials, art fairs, and auctions, which always generate excitement in anticipation of the cultural seasons in the fall, winter, spring, and early summer. I think this sentiment applies across everything we’re feeling in our lives at this time. Our cultural experiences have become very isolated, if not nonexistent. All cultural institutions have made Herculean gestures to continuing their programming online and in person if possible, which has been inspirational. AMCD Do you think the election of Joe Biden as US president will have a positive impact on the art market? LP Yes, I think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will have a positive impact on nearly every aspect of our lives because they are leaders who
The pillars of civic and cultural strength rely on the health of our cultural institutions and the opportunity for personal discovery and enlightenment for everyone. — Laura Paulson so we always review exhibition catalogues and provide information from both the primary and the secondary market to help them understand value. We also provide context for each artist, so that our clients can understand the place of the work in the artist’s career. AMCD In 2019 you launched a new business, Gagosian Art Advisory. It must have been a complicated moment to start a new project. How has this moment shifted the course of your own business development? LP Well, like everyone else, we’re working remotely now, which is challenging. For me, nothing replaces sitting with colleagues and sharing ideas. Much of our work—appraisals, pricing artworks, proposals—is project oriented, and we rely heavily on our library for research. We usually have the firsthand experience of seeing art in clients’ homes or in storage; we can manage that over Zoom, but it doesn’t replace the experience of seeing the art in person. We have been fortunate to be able to maintain a steady stream of business,
is recognized universally in the art market. AMCD In regards to the IRS component, does your certification offer some benefit or insight? Is any tax knowledge gained? LP There’s an IRS art panel that reviews all estate-tax appraisals, charitable-donation appraisals, and gift-tax appraisals, and they bring a level of expertise to judge your justifications of value. They review and decide whether your arguments are valid or if you’ve valued a work too low or too high. Therefore, being USPAP compliant is critical. We cannot submit our appraisal without the certification. AMCD In terms of entire collections, not just individual buying but building or selling a collection at this moment, how is that different from before the pandemic? LP Well, it really depends on the situation. With estates, selling a collection is often a tax-driven decision. Estates tend to be sold publicly for reasons of transparency and timing and to allow for global exposure to the
to establish enduring relationships. In general the art fairs focus on the primary artist market, but recently, with the addition of Frieze Masters and tefaf, there is also an opportunity to experience a range of collecting opportunities, from antiquities to contemporary art. AMCD What online sales campaigns or auction setups most surprised you last year? Do you feel that any of these initiatives will qualitatively affect the reach of the art market or the way we do business in the next five years? Are there new expectations from clients that we’ll need to build on going forward, or will this pressure recede as we return to some sense of normalcy with our physical events in the future? LP Overall, the online sales campaigns and auction setups have been really well done, as an attempt to maintain a level of normalcy. The shifting of the auction calendar and the frequency of auctions, however, have been challenging for many collectors, leading to feelings of saturation and dislocation. Great and
will create stability. Their commitment to conquering the pandemic with leadership, a strategy, and a plan will help our economy recover and hopefully allow the delicate art ecosystem of museums, galleries, and cultural institutions to open their doors again soon. The inaugural events were inspirational and revealed a new administration committed to the arts and diverse voices from the past and present. First Lady Jill Biden chose the luminous and symbolic Landscape with Rainbow from 1859 by Robert S. Duncanson, an internationally renowned Black la ndsc ape a r t ist f rom t he Civ i l War era, as the inaugural painting. The First Lady also chose Amanda Gorman as the National Youth Poet Laureate to read her powerful and poignant work, “The Hill We Climb,” for the Inauguration. These are hopeful examples of cultural leadership and a sign this new administration recognizes the importance of the arts in our lives as an opportunity for personal discovery and enlightenment for everyone.
Building a Legacy In this ongoing series we speak with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship to offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staffs, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. For this installment Rani Singh speaks with Annette Leddy, former collector and curator of archives at the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, about the preservation of art critics’ archives and their role in art-historical research.
RANI SINGH Annette, you’ve worked with archives in
various capacities. Can you tell us a bit about your various positions? ANNETTE LEDDY I began by processing the Italian Futurist collections at the Getty Research Institute, which turned into arranging and writing the finding aids that describe the scope and content of the archives for the user. I also wrote essays and curated exhibitions around the collections I had worked on. Finally I became a collector, the person who visits artists or critics to assess whether their papers have historical significance. If they did, I would negotiate the terms of their acquisition for the institution. I did this first at the Getty Research Institute, then for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. RS I’m particularly interested in the art critics’ archives you acquired or worked on—the archives of Clement Greenberg, Irving Sandler, Lawrence Alloway, Dore Ashton, Eleanor Munro, and Robert Pincus-Witten, to name a few. Art criticism occupies such an important place in the ecosystem of the art world, in the sense that it’s one of the first responses to new art; especially when there are trends and major shifts, we look to critics to help us interpret the work, evaluate it, and understand the context. Still, it might be surprising to some that institutions and repositories collect critics’ archives. So maybe you can give us an overview of their significance and importance generally? AL Critics not only write about art and contextualize it for us, but in many cases, as the archives reveal, they are deeply connected to certain artists. They have relationships that extend beyond their writing and are often very deep, and sustained over a number of years. An archive gives
you insight into a level of the critic’s relationship to the art world that wouldn’t be evident from their published writing. RS T hat backg rou nd is c ompel l i ng i n so many ways. AL Yes, it fills out the story. I always feel that there’s something missing if you don’t know about that. Just to give a couple of examples: Robert Pincus-Witten had a very long relationship with David Salle. He was also close to Dorothea Rockburne and Mel Bochner when they were together. And Greenberg and Helen Frankenthaler, of course, were romantically involved. He didn’t review her work publicly but he did critique it a great deal privately, and she valued his feedback. RS Could you tell us what sorts of materials constitute an art critic’s archive? AL Most include correspondence, and that can vary a great deal. Lawrence Alloway’s papers [at the Getty Research Institute], for example, include intimate correspondence with his wife before he married her, when she was married to somebody else. They wrote letters back and forth constantly, and he tells her what he’s working on, his ideas, and so on. Other correspondence is of a professional nature. RS Contracts, and— AL Things to do with editorial issues, because usually an art critic is involved with a periodical—at least they were in the past. Or if they’re publishing a book, letters with those editors. And sometimes if they’re also curating, there’ll be the usual institutional correspondence. Then there are almost always diaries and journals. Most critics are primarily writers, and they spend a huge amount of time documenting
their thoughts and their relationships and analyzing them, either in their diaries and journals or in their letters. With many, you get almost daily accounts of who they lunched with and what they talked about, and their feelings about it—just working through the stress of the daily art-world life. Often that stress derives from the conflict between the personal and the professional in a single relationship, specifically, the artist’s expectation that the critic will write about him or her and, if that does happen, how the artist reacts to that public appraisal. Journals can be extremely personal, but not always. Greenberg broke down his journals into different compartments: some are very rudimentary, recording exactly what he ate and drank and at what time, and then who he saw—but not details about what happened. For the details you have to go to a separate journal, where there are fuller descriptions of social encounters—you know, trysts, or what happened when he went to a gallery that day, and so on. And then there’ll be another journal about his psychoanalysis, and another journal containing ideas about art. RS So he had multiple journals and diaries covering the same time period? AL The same day. My observation has been that artists tend not to write down every single thing that happens each day. If they keep journals, it’s usually ideas for work, even ideas from dreams. Actually, the dream journal was something special I came across when I was working on the Feminist Collecting Initiative for the Archives of American Art. I collected the archives of a number of artists and critics who emerged together in the 1970s. Many of them had the practice of 57
I would think if somebody wants to be an art critic, they should look at these archives, because they really show you how to do it—which is pretty much: read everything, write down everything, and have a lot of relationships with different people in the art world. — Annette Leddy
writing down their dreams, and—amazingly—they dreamed about one another. Eleanor Munro’s journals record dreams about the artists she’s writing about—there is one about running into Mary Frank at a party, for example. And then you read Mary Frank’s journal, and she’s dreaming about Hayden Herrera living in a room of portraits. The archives revealed a collective unconscious. RS That’s one of the benefits of having archives housed together in one repository: you can see the connections across archives, which allows scholars to compare and contrast subjective events and ideas from various perspectives and then draw their own conclusions. But to go back, the distinction you make between an artist’s archive and a critic’s archive is an interesting one. AL The only artist’s archive I’ve ever seen that really has that daily recording of detail and analysis of relationships is Richard Tuttle’s [at the Archives of American Art]. His art tends to be small in size, but he produces a staggering amount of writing every day—letters and e-mails and journals. We downloaded around 20,000 e-mails from his server onto the Archives’ server when we acquired his archive. Most people want to go through their e-mails and edit them, but he didn’t want to do that. He said to take it all. RS What is the usual process for preparing and transferring e-mail correspondence when it’s acquired? AL Typically, e-mails are already printed out and form part of correspondence. As you know, archives are arranged according to library standards into series—Correspondence, Writings, Photographs, and so on. The institution prepares a guide, or finding aid, to the collection. The finding 58
aid is digitized and appears online. In some cases the entire archive may be digitized and made available to the general public. Oftentimes this decision is made based on the anticipation of scholarly demand and interest, financial resources, available staff, or any number of disparate factors. The Archives of American Art, for example, sees that kind of broad access as part of its mission. RS So much scholarly attention has focused on Greenberg and his role in shaping the concepts of Abstract Expressionism. His archive is housed at both the Getty and the Archives of American Art. I always recommend that people keep their papers together, if possible, rather than break them up. Could you tell us more about his archive and the ways scholars have used it? AL Typically, scholars go for the artist f iles in critics’ archives. These can include correspondence, clippings about the artist, interview transcripts, and so on. That’s very typical, and Greenberg’s papers have that. But I think his archive is unique in that people want to know more about him as a figure in the art world in his own right—so much so that the letters he wrote to his close friend Harold Lazarus were published as a book, The Harold Letters, 1928–1943: The Making of an American Intellectual. These letters show the typical way Greenberg interfaced personal detail from his life with art-related insight. And when he stopped writing to Lazarus—they had a falling out at a certain point—I think some of that daily, detailed, personal/professional process thinking went into the journals. But people also look at the drafts of essays like “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” He went through numerous drafts, and you can see the editor’s
comments and so on. Researchers are curious to know how this landmark essay came to be, what were the sources— RS And how the ideas developed. AL How they developed, who had input. You learn a lot about a critic’s formation from journals as well, because critics often reflect on what they’re reading. Greenberg was a German-literature major in college, and the journals show how he transitioned from literary critic to art critic. At first he would often compare a painting to a short story or a novel; that’s how he gained access to the art. After a while, he didn’t need that framework anymore and stopped doing it. RS That’s fascinating. AL I think it’s the same with Pincus-Witten, you find out what he was reading and what formed his mind. A lot of it was literature: Henry James, Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde. The critics we’re discussing all have a foundation in literature. The exception to that rule may have been Irving Sandler, who was an American-history scholar. He is a documenter, and isn’t as confessional as the others. And yet at the end of his life he wrote a novel about the art world. RS Could you talk about Dore Ashton’s collection at the Archives of American Art? There’s so much material: writing projects, book projects . . . She was also a teacher, so there are a lot of teaching files and artwork and sketchbooks and photographs. AL Yes, she was amazing, right? When I went to see her to look at her archive—I should say the second installment of her archive, because the Archives of American Art had acquired at least half of it fifteen years earlier—she greeted me from her bed, where she was chain-smoking and reading a
For students and future critics who are developing their own eye and their own thoughts, it’s important to understand how art critics develop their sense of observation and apply critical thinking to a body of work. Studying professional art critics’ approach to criticism can provide a lot of fodder for teaching and learning about art in secondary education. — Rani Singh
thick biography of Tolstoy. She wrote about literature almost as much as she wrote about art. She had personal relationships with Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz. She spoke Spanish. She wrote a lot to Gunther Gerzso and had letters from him. She had very close relationships with Philip Guston, with Robert Motherwell, with Mark Rothko, and she wrote about that in her journals. All her initial impressions, her unfiltered feelings about artists and their art, became the foundation of her essays. Every review and every essay was grounded in that personal connection. RS You see that in her books—each of her books reflects her particular relationship with each artist. AL And she makes these great connections, too, between artists, and between artists and writers. Perhaps that was possible because the New York art scene in the decades after the war was such a small world. There were just a few critics and just a few artists, and they all saw each other every night, it seems. RS I think it’s important to mention the role critics’ archives can play in higher education. For students and future critics who are developing their own eye and their own thoughts, it’s important to understand how art critics develop their sense of observation and apply critical thinking to a body of work. Studying professional art critics’ approach to criticism can provide a lot of fodder for teaching and learning about art in secondary education. AL Oh, totally. I would think if somebody wants to be an art critic, they should look at these archives, because they really show you how to do it—which is pretty much: read everything, write down everything, and have a lot of relationships with different people in the art world. And not just
artists—a lot of these critics were very close to dealers. Greenberg saw André Emmerich frequently; Pincus-Witten hung out with Ileana Sonnabend for years. RS I’d love to talk about Pincus-Witten in more detail, because he’s kind of the other side of the coin when we’re talking about Greenberg. He challenged so much of what Greenberg represented, and his style of writing was so different—although it was scholarly, it was much looser, less academic. AL He really worked at that, too. A lot of his early journals are about his time at Artforum and all the arguments and debates they’d have about how art criticism should be written—in terms of style and politics. He details all of this. RS Robert worked at Gagosian for a number of years, from 1990 to 1996, curating exhibitions and writing for the gallery’s publications. It seems to me that this was one of the first times a critic was hired to work for a major commercial art gallery. How was the transition? AL He seemed to really like it. He had taught for more than twenty years and he was eager for new experiences. He always had great relationships with artists and dealers and other art critics. RS How does it work when a collection is deposited in an institution—is anyone allowed access, or can you stipulate that the records are sealed for a specific amount of time? Why are certain archives sealed or restricted? AL It’s all part of the negotiation when the archive is acquired. With Greenberg, all the journals were initially sealed. They were divided into categories of privacy—which had the most potentially libelous statements in them, or constituted the greatest invasion of privacy—so there were
some that were sealed for five years, then ten years, then twenty years, then thirty years. Now they’re all unsealed, except for the Helen Frankenthaler material—there are journals they wrote together when they were traveling in Europe and vacationing in Nova Scotia. Those journals are sealed until 2030. The Pincus-Witten papers are restricted, which is different from sealed. People can access them, scholars can quote from them, but in order to do that, they have to get permission from Pincus-Witten’s husband, Leon Hecht. There’s an extra layer of permission because there’s very personal material in there about certain artists and critics. RS Scholars and writers have used art critics’ archives to move art history forward and give us a deeper understanding of the past. Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women, for example, does a marvelous job by taking a deep dive into so many critics’ archives. Her book really shows what can be done by going directly to the sources—the archives, the oral histories. AL I agree with you completely. Just a glance at her notes shows that she referenced Frank O’Hara’s papers at the New York Public Library, Barbara Rose’s papers at the Getty Research Institute, Greenberg’s, and many, many others. It’s a perfect example of how archives can lead to a masterful book, filling in a known narrative with so much previously unknown information and detail.
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A DAY IN THE LIFE OF
THE LIGHTNING FIELD In the first of a two-part feature, John Elderfield recounts his experiences at The Lightning Field (1977), Walter De Maria’s legendary installation in New Mexico. Elderfield considers how this work requires our constantly finding and losing a sense of symmetry and order in shifting perceptions of space, scale, and distance, as the light changes throughout the day.
The uses of light are infinite in enabling us to walk, to ply our arts, to read, to recognize one another—and nevertheless the very beholding of the light is itself a more excellent and a fairer thing than all the uses of it. —Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620, Book 1, CXXIX
T
h e t i n y f o u r- b l o c k-l o n g t o w n o f Quemado—population 228 in the 2010 census—lies on sleepy US Route 60 in Catron County, New Mexico, halfway between Pie Town and the Arizona border and about 150 miles southwest of Albuquerque. A small two-story white building across from the post off ice houses a branch of Dia Art Foundation, which commissioned and maintains Walter De Maria’s work The Lightning Field (1977) and arranges visits to it. Having made a reservation to do so, you will have been instructed to be at that building by no later than two in the afternoon on the day of your visit, as will all others of the maximum of six who are allowed to make appointments for the same viewing. From there, a usually muddy Dia Yukon truck will take you the forty-five-minute drive from paved to unpaved roads, across a scrubby, almost featureless landscape, and will drop you off behind the tiny log cabin there that preexisted the Field and at which you have committed to stay until noon the following day.1 “You may not take your own vehicle,” the Dia website informs you, as well as telling you that pets cannot accompany you, electronic devices must be left behind, photography is prohibited, and you must let them know if you have the temerity to be planning to bring young children along with you— all in keeping with the artist’s wishes.2 From this you will have learned that De Maria was a very controlling artist; he in fact sanctioned only six photographs to be published of The Lightning Field and kept secret its precise location.3 But you will not yet have learned that De Maria was also a very astute artist in making you wait for an unmediated experience of what the critic Kenneth Baker described in 1988 as “the closest thing to a masterpiece to come out of Minimalism.”4 I don’t think he needed the qualification. The Lightning Field is commonly described as an example of land art, which, in turn, is commonly described as a movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. Land art is commonly understood as created in protest against the perceived artificiality and commercialism of gallery and museum art; Wikipedia, as usual a font of knowledge on such things, has laconically observed, “Often earth moving equipment is involved.” In this case it wasn’t, although a lot of post-hole digging was; and anyway, none of this is of much help when you get out of the truck shortly before three in the afternoon. Ever since one of the most breathtaking of John Cliett’s photographs of the work with bolts of lightning in the sky above or beyond it appeared on the front cover of the Artforum of April 1980, that is what it has commonly been thought to look like; and while you hardly expect that scene to be awaiting you when arriving on a relatively calm day, you may well have seen on the Dia website other Cliett photographs showing panoramas of the Field bathed in dramatic light.5 But at first you may not see anything at all. As you walk up to the cabin, however, trying to hold back your disappointment, a small number of poles slowly become visible beyond it. Only a small number, though. While the sun has already 62
moved west, it is still high enough in the sky—and the daylight over the open desert landscape is still sufficiently dazzling—that, in the absence of shadows, it is all but impossible to register the highly polished stainless steel poles, except those near to you. De Maria anticipated this, writing in 1980, “During the mid-portion of the day, seventy to ninety percent of the poles become virtually invisible due to the high angle of the sun.”6 This was the first lesson he arranged for visitors: that vision is inhibited not only by an increase in the density of darkness, but also by an increase in the intensity of light.7 And conversely, that, if you wait, the invisible will become increasingly visible as the angle of the sun decreases. There has to be a reason why De Maria sanctioned photographs of the site in a lightning storm while knowing that visitors upon arrival would not see anything spectacular. I think it was that he wanted to show drama in the views of the site mediated by photography, then cancel such spectacle in the initial unmediated experience of the work, one that reveals less before it reveals more.8 For what he has created is an experience that unfolds over time; a narrative for us to follow so that we become agents or catalysts in the work’s realization.9 The narrative has three parts, which we explore by looking while walking around the Field; and within it; and from a more or less fixed position outside it. I shall address these in turn.
Walking the Boundary “A simple walk around the perimeter of the poles takes approximately two hours,” De Maria wrote in 1980, advocating it.10 To take that walk is akin to the old ceremony of walking the boundary, or beating the bounds, of a parish, showing what is outside it as well as what is within. Outside the Field is, well, nothing much. Undeveloped grasslands with patches of wildflowers surrounding it reach into the distance; hardly any built thing is to be seen—the close-to cabin, of course, but otherwise only a distant windmill or two, some barbed-wire fencing, perhaps a far-off road. This is a bare landscape, 11 1/2 miles east of the Continental Divide and 7,200 feet above sea level; at roughly the same latitude as Los Angeles and Tangier; and as bright as the latter, with as much as 14 1/2 hours of sunlight in the massive blue sky at the summer solstice. Further south of the site, mountains on the horizon are as difficult to see as the array of the poles, one of the ways in which the “outside” of the Field speaks to its “inside.”11 Another is that, walking the perimeter, you are conscious that the broken terrain, scrappy vegetation, and wide sky are no different to either side of the outermost rows of poles. And yet you know that a single step will take you within a space that is as unlike what is outside as like it. To enter that space is not like entering architecture, and not quite like walking into a forest— more like taking a step into a maze, except that you can see what awaits you inside. The poles themselves are two inches in diameter, with precisely milled solid pointed tips that define a horizontal plane. In other words, although the ground on which they are sited is far from flat, their heights have been adjusted so that, as De Maria put it, the tops form a plane that theoretically could “support an imaginary sheet of glass.” 1 2 The average height of the poles is 20 feet 7 1/2 inches; the shortest pole is 15 feet tall and the longest is 26 feet 9 inches. This huge
variance will be unmistakable and vivid when you walk within the field, but is clear enough from the eighty-two poles that constitute the four outermost rows of the rectangular Field, and from those you can see immediately behind them. It is impossible to count all of the poles, but walking the boundary we will be conscious of their multitude, spacing, and orientation. Dia does tell us that the Field comprises 400 poles spaced 220 feet apart from each other, which is getting on toward 2 1/2 times the length of a basketball court and just some forty feet short of a typical north-to-south New York City block. They are arranged in the form of an orthogonal grid aligned to the points of the compass: the rows running from east to west are twenty-five poles long, cumulatively measuring 5,280 feet, or one mile; those running from north to south are sixteen poles long, measuring 3,300 feet, or as close to one kilometer as is possible in combining the two systems of measurement. We notice, even from the outside, what critic John Beardsley calls “the inference of infinity.” He observes that “the poles stand in stately succession, uniform in height and in the distance between them. As they diminish in the distance, they create the illusion— like telephone poles or railroad tracks—of endless progression.”13 However, even from the outside this phenomenon is not simply seen but enacted. As another writer, Christopher D. Campbell, put it, we participate in “an exercise in movement and cessation”: One moves to a vantage point and admires the perfect symmetry of the view down a single row, where as many as twenty-five poles stretching a mile into the distance are so perfectly aligned that twenty-four disappear behind the nearest one. One moves again to a midpoint between two rows to admire the diminishing perspective of the poles’ recession to the distance. Again, one moves to a point where diagonals intersect and both foregoing views are afforded with no more movement than a turn of the head.14 The poles are the material supports for the perceptual—and complementary corporeal—activities that De Maria programmed. The intrinsic meaning of this extraordinary work lies in the qualities of the experiences that we can derive from these activities while we look and walk within, even more than around, the Field in changing light and across rough and irregular terrain.
Within the Field “The primary experience takes place within The Lightning Field,” De Maria wrote in 1980.15 The “primary experience” is the one first in importance, but is not a single most-important experience; in fact it is an accumulation of experiences large and small. These are at once visual and bodily, more evidently so within the Field than from outside it, because walking within it will involve the more complex variations in movement and cessation and, therefore, in the sights and accompanying, palpable sensations that they provide. The shining poles are of a small, two-inch diameter—tiny in the context of the landscape, but their graspable size, viewed close up, provides a human dimension that grounds their more-than-human height. And if we do touch them—which we can, because we’re not looking at art in a museum—we will register the sliding precision of their surfaces,
Previous spread: Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977. Entire field from northwest exterior looking southeast, summer 1979 This page: Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977. Sunset from southwest exterior looking northeast, July 1979
their changes in temperature throughout the day, and, if it is windy, a vibration faintly heard as well as felt. Moreover, the poles are effectively convex mirrors that close up produce a plausible, albeit distorted image of you while miniaturizing more distant features, making surrounding poles seem tiny and even further away than they actually are. Judging their actual size and relative proximity, however, is often not easy. Their full height is perceptible by sight at a distance; less easily so the nearer we get to them and the lower our angle of view. To complicate matters, that full height is reduced proportionally when we view them from afar. They shrink in girth as well, reading as increasingly thin lines as they recede. We expect distant things to be smaller, so it is not a surprise to see the poles increasing or decreasing in height and girth in response to our moving toward or away from them. The photographs De Maria sanctioned were all taken from outside the Field, and therefore all show the poles only at reduced heights and girths, a reduction increasing as the camera moves away. He appears to have left it for us to discover the poles also enlarging with our proximity to them within the work, where, as he said, “the primary experience takes place.” An additional factor, mentioned earlier, complicates our perception of the relationship between height and distance in our experience of the poles. In order to make their tips define a horizontal
plane—as if they could “support an imaginary sheet of glass”—the literal heights of the poles had to be adjusted to compensate for the irregularity of the ground on which they were sited. The experience of walking within the Field includes consciousness of these literal variances, as well as of those virtual ones produced by seeing them receding in the distance. In fact, while looking down the length of a row of poles, you are very aware of their virtual changes in height; whereas when you approach them individually or in small groups, you are more conscious of their literal differences in height. This is because looking down a row of poles virtually condenses the spaces between them, making you more conscious of the imaginary sheet of glass joining their tips. Conversely, as you approach a pole close-up, you see it 220 feet apart from its neighbor, separately from the row; and the low angle of your view prevents you seeing its tip clearly. Both of these factors make you less conscious of it supporting an imaginary horizontal plane. De Maria said that the idea for The Lightning Field came from sketches he made around 1960 of groupings of poles—in other words, from drawing.16 I said that the poles read as increasingly thin lines as they recede; and lines are fundamental to the practice of drawing, to which this work of De Maria’s may be said to belong. In drawing there are two basic forms of delineation, lines and borderlines. A line is a path, road, or river that runs across, 63
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Opposite: Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977. Pole base detail from southeast interior looking northwest, summer 1978 Following spread: Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977. Sunset from western exterior looking north, September 1978 Artwork © Estate of Walter De Maria Photos: John Cliett, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York, and © Estate of Walter De Maria
into, over, or around something; a borderline is a contour, an occluding edge, a division between things or parts of things.17 Since nearly all of Cliett’s photographs of The Lightning Field are panoramas taken from “outside,” at a distance, we see the poles there as akin to spaced parallel lines drawn on a scroll reaching across the landscape. In the “primary experience” of walking “inside” the Field, we also see the poles isolated as individual lines, but not only so. They also form borderlines. Campbell observed that it is possible to see a single row of twenty-five poles so perfectly aligned that twenty-four disappear behind the nearest one—until we move even slightly, when they spread into an aggregated band, then pull apart. Smaller numbers of poles too can be seen as overlapping. This is to say, we can see the poles both separately and clustered, as lines and as bunched borderlines. But there is a more important way in which we recognize borderlines in The Lightning Field: as Michael Baxandall explained, “the most basic and important operation in the act of visual perception is to locate the edges of things”—that is to say, to locate borderlines. 18 The Field invites us to do so when the individual poles cluster virtually. It also, and more importantly, invites us to see the individual poles as borderlines marking the edges not of things, but of the putatively empty spaces between them and in the entirety around them, dividing spaces “inside” and “outside,” and beneath and above the invisible plane of glass. This is perhaps what De Maria meant when he said “the invisible is real.”19 The ground below you at The Lightning Field is visible and real, rough and irregular, teeming with life and with evidence of time past. You walk over clumps of grass and patches of clay; stretches of wildflowers; around animal holes and anthills
some two feet high; through snail shells and occasional fossils, reminding you that you are walking on an ancient seabed. You may even see arrowheads and shards of pottery, reminding you that indigenous people inhabited these plains. 20 And there are mounds and hollows, including a particularly large, deep, oval-shaped concavity in the southwestern corner of the field, distant from the cabin and easily missed if you don’t go carefully through the entire site. Picking your way through—for you do have to go slowly—you are aware of both the unruly layering of a Darwinian entangled bank, beneath your feet, and, in front of your eyes, a modern geometric order, industrially made. The experience is corporeal as well as optical, with the graspable size of the poles giving them something of a handstaff association as you move along. As you do so, additional virtual phenomena complicate your journey. Within any square, the surrounding four poles seem close enough to mark limits and situate you.21 If you follow from one to the next down an avenue of poles, that holding experience is repeated and reinforced. It is a curious sensation, finding oneself locked within the space and the experience, freely so yet in a controlled manner. The 220-foot distance between poles and adjacent rows of them, however, is great enough to be difficult to distinguish from the larger intervals between them diagonally, so it is easy to stray outside an avenue. And when—not if—you do so, the grid warps out of its regular alignment into disorder: what appeared to be a centering, supporting experience is lost. The warp is enhanced by parallax, namely, the apparent lateral displacement in space of an observed object according to the observer’s position, proximate objects appearing to shift in position more quickly than distant
ones. Therefore, as you move forward in the field, you initiate movement in the location of the poles, and variation in their height and girth at the same time. This virtual mobility is at its most active deep within the Field, and especially so when you stray from the straight and narrow, finding it discomforting. But finding and losing a sense of symmetry and order within the work’s symmetry and order is integral to the narrative designed by De Maria for experience of The Lightning Field.22
Looking at the Field Upon arrival at the site, we noticed that vision far into the Field was inhibited by the intensity of the light, and assumed, correctly, that features then invisible would become increasingly visible as the angle of the sun decreased. But perhaps we did not notice that the bright light inhibited perception of the color in the scene. Back in 1916, T. E. Lawrence—popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia—on entering the Red Sea port of Jeddah, at a similar latitude to The Lightning Field, wrote of how “the heat of Arabia came down like a drawn sword and struck us speechless. . . . The noon sun had, like moonlight, put to sleep the colors. There were only lights and shadow.”23 This is also true of The Lightning Field. Conversely, color is awakened as the angle of the sun decreases. This begins to be apparent the longer you spend within the Field after your midafternoon arrival: by late afternoon, the western edges of the poles are becoming animated by warm light—starting to colorize, and shimmering as they do so. Within the Field, this further complicates the virtual mobility around you. The tips catch the light first, and sparkle; the poles develop shadows 65
IF YOU ARE LUCKY WITH A SUNSET, YOU WILL SEE … THE TOTALITY OF THE FIELD APPEARING MIRACULOUSLY TO SHARPEN IN DEFINITION AS THE MOVEMENT OF THE LIGHT DOWN THE POLES GAINS MOMENTUM AND THEY BLAZE WITH COLOR. of increasing length; more of them become visible, and if you have not walked the boundary and seen the length of the work’s avenues, their number is a surprise. Overall, the more of them to be seen, and the more vividly light reaches them, the more complex and alive the Field becomes. Baker speaks of how the poles “turn from solid objects into beams of dazzling light that pierce the air like tones. The change suggests such an increase in energy around me that I can hardly believe it doesn’t disturb the wide silence of the plain.”24 The artist Terry Winters, one of those who aided De Maria in the work’s construction, experienced the Field as “a rich psychic territory . . . a space where the pulse of energy and electricity is felt.”25 Energy thus being made visible, the greater the temptation to go “outside” the Field again and look at it as a whole. The cabin where you will stay the night is located some 600 feet outside the northern edge of the grid and centered between its tenth and eleventh rows from the east; that is to say, just left of center. As a result, looking south at the Field from the porch of the cabin at the end of the day, there is a larger stretch of it at the west in front of you as, at dusk, the light of the setting sun gradually—and then more quickly, it seems—retreats in that direction. The distant mountains, not clearly visible in bright sunlight, pop into view as the light fades. If you are lucky with a sunset, you will see this dramatically reenacted immediately in front of you, the totality of the Field appearing miraculously to sharpen in definition as the movement of the light down the poles gains momentum and they blaze with color. The Lightning Field becomes visible as a panoramic whole for the first time, showing the mile-wide, kilometer-deep field in its totality, every single pole sharply defined and appearing to glow from within. You cannot help but realize how far you have traveled perceptually from your arrival, with most of the poles virtually invisible, to this utterly spectacular display of them all at the end of the day. 66
If you are especially lucky, there could be one more thing: as the sun drops to the horizon and the color becomes more intense, something utterly unexpected might happen and truly strike you speechless. Staring at the orange-red array, your vision can suddenly produce a complementary afterimage, the whole field switching at a blink to an equally vivid, shining green flash of light. It lasts only a second or two, then dusk puts the color to sleep.26 The fading of light on The Lightning Field would seem an appropriate ending for the narrative that De Maria has arranged for us. But there is a final chapter if we are wise enough to ask: if sunset is like this, what about sunrise? That question can only be answered by getting up in the dark, finding your way beyond the eastern perimeter of the Field, and waiting. It is not true, as is commonly said, that it is darkest just before dawn. It is certainly coldest just before dawn, because the landscape has been cooling throughout the hours of darkness while the sun is below the horizon; but because the sun is furthest below the horizon midway between sunset and sunrise, midnight is the darkest hour. As dawn approaches, the acute night vision that our evolution provided for our survival allows us to experience quickly every faint change in the sky’s color within night’s darkness; more so than when the sky darkens in twilight and dusk, because our eyes have adapted to the daylight they’ve been in all day. 27 We are therefore aware of the gradual lightening of the sky while the sun is still invisible below the horizon behind us, but are forced to wait before we see its effect on the poles. Because the tips of the poles are tapered, when the sun does begin to appear above the horizon, their small, upward-facing portions catch the light first. Suddenly it switches on a straight line of shining dots on top of the closest, almost kilometer-long row of sixteen poles. (We see all sixteen dots of light at once, which we might not if there
were twenty-five; this may be why De Maria set the shorter length of the Field in this orientation.) Then, as light begins to move down the eastern surface of this first set of poles, the tips of the next row of poles jump out of the darkness to form a second, parallel line of dots of light. This repeats, and continues to repeat, until the effect of the sun is indistinguishable from light reflecting from the already illuminated poles. But well before this happens, the low sun behind us casts our own shadows onto the Field, but strangely elongated, almost as tall as the poles themselves, as if we were on stilts—not only viewers of The Lightning Field, but within it.28 Enough time will remain before the truck arrives to return you to Quemado for you to walk fully around the Field, or to explore within it—the poles eventually becoming almost as invisible as they had been the previous early afternoon. A famous poem tells us, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time.”29 Yes, but we know that we do not know it fully. One day of your life spent at The Lightning Field is only one day in the life of The Lightning Field; and the next one will not be precisely the same.
1. One room with a double bed, two rooms with twin beds; a maximum of six people. Beware: when my wife and I first visited, our fellow guests were a group of initially boisterous old friends on a reunion. 2. See www.diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/walter-demaria-the-lightning-field (accessed November 30, 2020). 3. Photography of this work is the principal subject of Jessica Morgan, “The Field of Representation,” in Walter De Maria: The Lightning Field (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2017), 11–15, an indispensable publication that reproduces forty-two of John Cliett’s many hundreds of photographs of the work, 23–107. Elizabeth Childress, director of the Walter De Maria Archives, informs me that she and Michael Childress, archivist there, made the preliminary selection for this publication, which Dia finalized. I am indebted to both for information used in the present essay. While De Maria authorized Dia to release only six of Cliett’s photographs, he himself included eight (not six, as Morgan writes
in ibid., 13) in his “Some Facts, Notes, Data, Information, Statistics, and Statements,” Artforum 18, no. 8 (April 1980): 52–59, which is reprinted in ibid., 17–19 (the version cited in the notes below), albeit separated from its illustrations, which appear instead among the volume’s plates. These plates are followed by technical information on the creation of The Lightning Field, Cliett’s description of his photographic project, and a valuable chronology and bibliography. The latter comprises well over 100 items, too many of which offer an account of visiting The Lightning Field for me to begin to make reference to them. I have therefore referred to as few as possible. Neither have I made reference to the wider issues raised by The Lightning Field discussed in many publications upon it, but I will refer to some of these in the second part of this essay, to follow in the Summer issue. Kathleen Shields’s book An Essential Solitude: Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field Revisited (New York: SNAP, 2020), an important volume, appeared after I had completed the present text, and I was only able to refer to it on three occasions, indicated in notes 5, 8, and 16 below. 4. Kenneth Baker, Minimalism: Art of Circumstance (New York: Abbeville, 1988), 125. 5. The first published photographs of the Field, chosen by De Maria for the Artforum issue cited above, comprised four (including the magazine’s cover) that show lightning, four that do not. The one-page article in small type that accompanied them contains ten statements that refer to lightning, thereby drawing attention to it (see De Maria, “Some Facts,” 19). Five of them do speak of its infrequency, most specifically remarking that lightning activity can be witnessed from the Field—i.e., often miles away—on sixty days a year and observed actually passing over the Field on approximately three of thirty days during the three-month period of primary lightning activity. This is a brilliant example of how statistical truth does not always give you a straightforward answer, as I have to presume De Maria knew, and those who skipped the small type and only studied the photographs were left assuming erroneously that lightning activity could be observed 50 percent of the time. The six photographs that De Maria approved for release by Dia include two that show lightning—still an optimistic lightning/not-lightning ratio—while the release he also approved, which may be found on the diaart.org page for The Lightning Field, skipped the statistics but included the disclaimer, “A full experience of The Lightning Field does not depend upon the occurrence of lightning.” (My emphasis.) Since writing this, I have learned that Dia’s addition of this statement to its published materials was controversial within the De Maria circle because it was so explicit. However, both Dia and De Maria were sufficiently concerned by the idea that many visitors would go to the Field expecting to see lightning, or would feel disappointed not to, that they replaced the website images of the work with lightning with ones without it. See Shields, An Essential Solitude, 86, 162 n. 40. I am unaware of any record of how often lightning strikes the poles themselves. I return to the subject of light versus lightning in the second part of this essay. 6. De Maria, “Some Facts,” 18. 7. This phenomenon has been noticed often, for example in Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757, reprint ed. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1883), 102: “Extreme light, by overcoming the organs of sight, obliterates all objects, so as in its effect exactly to
resemble darknesss.” 8. De Maria said, “No photograph, group of photographs or other recorded images can completely represent The Lightning Field.” De Maria, “Some Facts,” 19. As noted above, he selected eight of Cliett’s photographs to represent the work in Artforum in 1980. Since these are certainly dramatic, following the tradition of nature photography begun by National Geographic in the 1930s, it is worth noting that they could have been still more so: as Morgan notes, De Maria at one point imagined a big billboard in New York’s Grand Central Terminal, but it went unrealized. And the Artforum article, which contained what Cliett would remember in 2001 as “second-choice pictures,” came after De Maria canceled a deal with Life because, according to Cliett, he feared that that magazine’s presentation, which was to include what Cliett said were “even better pictures” and on which discussion had begun in 1978, would sensationalize the project. See Morgan, “The Field of Representation,” 13, citing Cliett in Jeffrey Kastner, “The God Effect: An Interview with John Cliett,” Cabinet, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 91. Elizabeth Childress, however, who worked as Cliett’s assistant, remembers differently, believing that a specific selection of images for Life was never made. (In any event, Life was struggling and that year went from weekly to monthly.) De Maria also rejected Cliett’s proposal of recording images of the individual poles over a long time period. “Such a project,” Cliett wrote in 1978, “would be oriented toward a series of photographs, each of which served as a portrait of an individual pole.” Ibid., citing Cliett, “Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field Image Recording Project Report,” November 6, 1978, Dia Foundation Archives. “Sadly, this endeavor never came to pass,” writes Morgan. Those who think otherwise would note that, if completed, this project would have produced dramatic views of the site not only unavailable to the first encounter with it but impossible to any visit except one in which a visitor stood before each of the 400 poles. Since I wrote this essay, a new, fine discussion of the problem of photographic representation of the Field has appeared in Shields, An Essential Solitude, 82–96. 9. In 1968, the critic David Bourdon wrote presciently that “De Maria is after a deeper commitment on the part of the spectator, who is asked to become an agent or catalyst in the fulfillment of the work,” only to add, “the burden of response is placed not on the sculpture but on the spectator.” “Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience,” Art International, December 1968: 40. Better, I think, placed by the sculptor on the spectator. 10. De Maria, “Some Facts,” 18. 11. The mountains’ reduced visibility, while comparable to that produced by intense downward light, is caused by the bluish haze that so-called airlight produces with distance; during sunset they pop into view. See David K. Lynch and William Livingston, Color and Light in Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2nd ed. 2001), 28–29. 12. De Maria, “Some Facts,” 18. 13. John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (New York: Abbeville, 1984), 63. Whether knowingly or not, in speaking of infinity Beardsley notes what Burke identified as having “a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime.” Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, II, IX, 92. Beardsley also follows Burke’s understanding of the effect of extended succession: “a colonnade of uniform pillars planted in
a right line,” where the image of each round pillar “increases . . . renews and enforces the impression” of the preceding one, “until the eye, long exercised in one particular way, cannot lose that object immediately; and being violently roused by this continued agitation, it presents the mind with a grand or sublime conception.” Ibid., IV, XIII, 175–76. There will be more on the sublime in the second part of this essay. 14. Christopher D. Campbell, “Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field and McCarthy’s Enigmatic Epilogue: ‘Y que clase de lugar es este?,’” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 2, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 52. Available online at www.cormacmccarthy.com/journal/PDFs/ Campbell.pdf (accessed November 30, 2020). 15. De Maria, “Some Facts,” 18. 16. I learned of these sketches, and added this sentence to my essay after completing it, from Shields, An Essential Solitude, 34–36, which illustrates one such work of c. 1961. 17. I borrow here from my discussion of lines and borderlines in “Happenings (In the Silent World of the Painter),” in Mary Weatherford: I’ve Seen Gray Whales Go By, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian, 2020), 32. 18. Michael Baxandall, “The Perception of Riemenschneider,” in Julien Chapuis, Tilman Riemenschneider: Master Sculptor of the Late Middle Ages, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2000), 86. He continues, “Our eyes register an array of light values and discontinuities, and our minds interpret these as the surfaces and edges of objects.” The literature on visual perception is enormous; a useful introduction to the subject is Irving Rock, Perception (New York: Scientific American Library, 1984). It has an extensive bibliography, as has Baxandall’s Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), which, while concentrating on the role of shadows in our visual experience, has a lot to say about the fall of light itself. 19. De Maria, “Some Facts,” 19. 20. Terry Winters makes this point in “Field Work (for Hayden),” in Katherine Atkins and Kelly Kivland, eds., Artists on Walter De Maria (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2017), 78. 21. See Kenneth Baker, The Lightning Field (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 16. 22. In this respect, The Lightning Field constitutes what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls a “transformational object.” See his The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 14–29. I have drawn from his discussion with reference to aesthetic objects, 30–39. 23. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926, reprint ed. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2018), 45. 24. Baker, The Lightning Field, 17. 25. Winters, “Field Work,” 74. 26. On the green flash see Lynch and Livingston, Color and Light in Nature, 49–52. 27. See ibid., 43–44. 28. See ibid., 7–10. 29. T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets: Little Gidding” V:27–29 (1942), a poem that begins with “A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon” (I:8).
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THE BIGGER PICTURE
EXALT As 2020 came to a close, Nathaniel Mary Quinn spoke with Gisele Castro, executive director of exalt, a New York City nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of courtinvolved youth by providing a path to success through effective educational engagement. Quinn is a former educator at exalt and now serves as a member of the organization’s board. NATHANIEL MARY QUINN What a year, huh?
GISELE CASTRO What a year, that’s for sure.
How’ve you been doing, Gisele? You know, I’m going to say great. We were recently selected as a finalist for the Nonprofit Excellence Award, presented by Nonprofit New York. There are more than 45,000 nonprofits in New York City, 20,000 in Manhattan, and exalt made it to number two, all the way up. NMQ That’s great. GC We were also just selected as one of seven organizations in the United States to receive an inaugural grant from the new NBA Foundation, and in October we were chosen as a service provider for New York City’s Alternative to Incarceration prog ra m by t he Mayor’s Of f ice of Cr im ina l Justice. Governor Andrew Cuomo has slated us as an organization best positioned to serve in the NMQ GC
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implementation of New York State’s Raise the Age legislation too. But we should start by going back to our foundation and when we got into it. NMQ Okay, let’s see. You and I first met at cases, t he Center for A lter nat ive Sentenc i ng a nd Employment Services, when you were part of that program’s leadership. After some years you left to join exalt, and you played a pivotal role in putting together a team of teachers and others who would serve these young people from dire conditions and rough neighborhoods throughout New York City. That’s when I started at exalt. That was around 2010, right? GC Yes. NMQ Our primary goal was to find ways to help these young people to stop interfacing with the criminal-justice system, and we thought, Well, let’s definitely have an educational component, based on a curriculum that we developed. That was number one. Second, let’s help them to deal with their personal issues and family histories and try to unearth any hidden problems that they have yet to confront. And third, let’s put them in internship programs so they can make money working in legitimate industries that are anticrime, to help open their minds to other possibilities and so that they can feel empowered. You taught me everything about how to navigate the courts. We would try to negotiate with the judge: “Sir, we understand that this young man or young woman broke the law. We get that. We just don’t think that the punishment that you want to levy against this young person is commensurate with the crime. Give this young person to us. We’ll work with them. We think we can help this person get on a different track in life. They don’t have to go to Rikers Island. Instead, we can really help to encourage them to transform their lives so that they can go on and do something else instead of doing six months to a year for jumping a turnstile.” GC We work with young people ages fifteen to nineteen, and we hold ourselves accountable to three big pillars: education, employability, and criminal-justice avoidance. The program starts with a six-week preinternship class—we’re preparing these teenagers for the world of work, but the first session is about the school-to-prison pipeline, the second is about mass incarceration, and
so on. We’re teaching these young people about systemic challenges and asking them key questions. What we do with our young people is activate them. It’s about creating a vision, a pathway, a road map. And your classes, Quinn, were phenomenal. Having a group of young people who read at a sixth-grade level—these are sixteen-year-olds—and to have them bounce back and become exceptional scholars is substantial. It’s not that they’re not capable or don’t love learning when they enter the program, it’s that our school systems have failed them over and over. NMQ We’ve learned, of course, that there’s a strong correlation between illiteracy and criminal behavior. Most people who go to jail have difficulty with reading and writing. That’s important to note, because in order to succeed in the mainstream world, you have to be able to decode the language of the mainstream world. GC You do. NMQ I’m going to tell you something: I can’t think of anything else that has given me the kind of fulfillment that I experienced in helping a young person to read and write. There was one young man who couldn’t read— GC I remember. I remember. NMQ And when he read his first two or three sentences, I cried. He cried. And I said, Now listen to me: someone can take your sneakers, someone can rob your house, but no one can take your education from you. No one can steal that from you. That’s yours forever. That was at cases and the class was called “Literacy Lab.” Years later I made a work called Literacy Lab [2019]. Just days ago that work was gifted to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. But it was made in direct response to my experience working with kids at cases and exalt. That experience had a major impact on me. GC The first thing that would always happen in your class, and still in any of our classes, was the burst of laughter. The first point of joy. A lot of us don’t have joy, right? I think we hold on to so much burden. But we used to walk in and there’d be laughter bursting out of the classes. I have to mention some of the young people you worked with at exalt. These are young men and women who once upon a time were profiled as people who couldn’t succeed. One young woman, Ayanna Fox, from exalt’s cycle 40 in 2012, graduated from high school, then from college, and now she has her master’s degree and is working full-time for New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services. She just bought her first home, during the covid crisis. NMQ She bought a house?! GC Another student graduated with her GED in 2017, and now she’s at college. We were able to get her a $20,000 scholarship. You know, we understand that our young people are the first in their families to break these multiple barriers. And many of your kids had their cases reduced, vacated, and then many years later they’re so successful. NMQ These were students who didn’t believe in the prospect of going to college. They didn’t even think that was available to them. Where I live, in Brooklyn, I see some of my students now in the neighborhood. “What’s up, Mr. Quinn, how are you doing?” They recognize me. Of course they’re older now, twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. I say, “What are you doing now?” “Oh man, I got a job. I work in my uncle’s business.” Or “I’m a record
Opposite: Gisele Castro and Nathaniel Mary Quinn, New York, 2017 This page: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Literacy Lab, 2019, black charcoal, gouache, soft pastel, and oil pastel on Coventry vellum paper, 50 × 38 inches (127 × 96.5 cm) © Nathaniel Mary Quinn
producer.” Or “I’m in school to study law.” They’re doing all these great things. When I met those kids they were facing jail time. GC Absolutely. When we look at the data for New York State, a young person who has been arrested or convicted of a crime has a 40 to 60 percent chance of recidivating within two years. Our data shows that two years out, 95 percent of our young people are not reconvicted of a crime. Our model is very robust. We ask our young people early on, Where do you see yourself in five years? They often say, Not here in this world or incarcerated. Then at the tail end of the class, when we’re prepping them for their alumni phase, we ask them, What is your fear for yourself and your hope for yourself? No longer being here, or incarcerated, that’s their fear. This is a four-and-a-half-month model. When I give people this overview, they typically say, What’s the magic? There’s no magic but there’s rigor. We have an organization that’s 90 percent led by people of color. I’m still one of the few Latinas running an organization that’s dealing with young people involved with the justice system. In terms of the long-term impact, we’re seeing that our young people’s cases are closed, they’re safe, and then in turn they’re keeping New York safe, because the number-one referral is a young person who’s graduated from the program; they’re referring their friends. It costs $236,000 a year to incarcerate a young person. The cost for our organization to provide services to a young person is $10,000 a year. Quinn, you would always say to me, Gisele, do you know that this is a soulful work? This is a work for the soul. NMQ It’s spiritual work. GC Yeah, beyond cerebral. That’s true.
I love reaching young people and encouraging them to believe in something they did not believe in before. That’s the job of a teacher working with so-called at-risk youth: you need to make the classroom experience more alluring and more appealing than the communities from which they come, to compete against their surrounding environment and whatever dark cloud may exist. In order to attack that, you have to operate from a spiritual place. You can’t just be guided by what’s in your head, you’ve got to believe it. Because if you believe it, that makes it more likely that they will believe it. GC What you’re highlighting is the reason I said you had to be the team leader, the heart of the organization: when we brought in teachers, we were asking people who, mostly, had just come out of universities, You can’t be so cerebral, you need to connect. For so many of the young people we serve, the systems have failed them since they were a tender age. Then they come into our organization and see all this thriving energy and movement toward life. When they walk in, the first thing is there are no metal detectors. NMQ No metal detectors, that’s right. GC In 2017 I launched a strategic plan to scale up, to saturate the five boroughs. My goal was to triple the previous budget, triple the number of youth served, moving out of Brooklyn to 17 Battery Place in Manhattan. We hired graduates of ours who were interns to work with DBI Projects to design the new space. It’s beautiful and it’s a thriving learning environment. The classrooms are named after Angela Davis, bell hooks, Michelle Alexander, Bryan Stevenson, Julia de Burgos—all of a sudden, it’s like this space is being claimed for them and they can move around. There are beautiful lush plants. And you think about a young person who probably just NMQ
left public housing walking into a building overlooking the Statue of Liberty, which is symbolic of freedom. This year we launched seventeen virtual classes, and I will invite anyone to our graduations; they’re just so moving. I would say they give anyone life. NMQ You did seventeen virtual classes this year? GC Seventeen. We pivoted on March 9, even before New York State was put on pause. The situation around covid is dire. The courts aren’t designed for a global pandemic; a lot of cases were suspended. And a young person who feels confined is prone to so much. Court involved or not court involved, many of our teenagers during the covid pandemic are disengaged. A young person with the burden of “I may be facing time” could easily give up and slip. So this is what we decided to do: we were able to get not just laptops but also data plans for our young people. For forty-five families, we were able to secure $500 each in cash assistance. Then we brought in the Black Googler Network to make sure they understood how to navigate and use the digital tools for virtual engagement. We also asked all of our intern providers—at this point we have over 100—“Can you create research projects?” To stimulate the mind. And we’ve kept our young people going and thriving and continuing to meet with great success. We also understand that we have to go deeper; it’s our moral imperative. We know—we have all the data—that communities of color have been the most impacted by covid. I think we have an opportunity to change that, and if we do it with young people who are court involved, we’ll be doing it for so many more. When young people face potential incarceration, there are so many others—their mothers, fathers, grandparents—who have that burden as well. Quinn, when young people would come to us through a referral, you would meet them and give them an acceptance letter and it would say, “Congratulations, you have been accepted to exalt.” At the end, the same thing: “Congratulations, you have just graduated from this organization.” And as you would say, those were the first certificates of any kind that they had ever received. Now whose problem is that? It’s all of ours. It’s not just for exalt to address, it really is a call for everyone to say, That should never happen. Not on our watch, not in New York City. NMQ As a board member, I will say as clear as day: my fantasy is always for exalt to have more money, because with that money we could do more of the things we do for our youth. Simple as that. So if you really speak with conviction about helping those who are less fortunate, then take out your checkbook, write a check, send it to exalt, and exalt will take it from there. The money will be used responsibly and in accordance with the needs of exalt in its outreach and its work with young people. This organization requires money to survive. And exalt is saving lives. GC My big ask is for people to understand that supporting young people in internships, giving them access, is important. We have a lot of work to do but we’re excited, we’ve geared up, and we have more to come. We’re closing up 2020 by launching a new strategic plan, and we have a tagline for our end-of-year campaign: “Youth justice can’t stop. exalt won’t stop.” To learn more about exalt and how to support exalt’s programs, please visit exaltyouth.org 69
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LO BUENO Y LO MALO Mami, sometimes I wonder who will translate me for you. After decades of silence, I sat before you, asked your permission to write this thing. You agreed so suddenly I grew certain you misunderstood my intentions. “Lo bueno y lo malo,” I clarified, because you had to understand. I would not hold back. A bit of plaster fell from the ceiling, descended toward the floor. You reached out and caught it, held it in your hand. A week ago, a leak from the upstairs neighbor’s apartment had formed a balloon above the dining room table, you said. Now, it had exploded silently above us. On your lap, the plaster resembled an orchid. You closed your fingers over it. You jutted your chin out toward the food on my plate, urging me to eat. Were you ignoring what I said? Acting as if you didn’t understand? Didn’t hear? On the table between us, the birthday feast you’d made for me—a peace offering because you’d never apologize using actual words, even after all these years. Oxtail stewed in tomato sauce, coconut-drenched moro—the rice and black beans fragrant and intoxicating—and that salad with the thinnest sliced cabbage, a bed for tomatoes whose skin you’d removed with the care of a plastic surgeon. This is an illusion, I reminded myself, even as comfort and love filled my body with that first spoonful. It should have been warmer on that early June day. The windows in the apartment fogged. Downstairs, outside, the world was quiet in a way it’d never been before, you said, not for the three decades you’d lived at 1459. I became aware of the silence. No neighbors played merengue or bachata; no cars honked at the jaywalking teenagers who lifted middle fingers of one hand and picked up sagging pants with the other; not even a heavy step from the upstairs neighbor, who broke into dance in the middle of the day, who habitually opened the window of her apartment to yell “¡Fragancia!” into your open window, “¿tienes café?” A perfectly still day. The apartment has remained the same for the three decades you’ve lived in it. There’s the skinny hallway with the three bedrooms on the right side, each growing bigger than the last, like nesting dolls in reverse, and the bathroom and kitchen on the left side. The kitchen—a closet, really, with tiny cabinets. Two people could fit in the rectangle of floor, back to back. The living room, stuffed with furniture and spicy green and red pepper plants, overlooks Amsterdam Avenue. What had I hoped for, coming here, after twenty years of silence between us? I’d asked Choni and Paloma to come too—they’d agreed, not asking why now. They’d taken turns over the years, advocating for you, saying how much you’d changed. Even Lindo, deported back in the Dominican Republic, had made peace with your mistakes, your choices, your husband: Julio. You caught my eye. “Lo bueno y lo malo?” you asked. I nodded. You said, “I want you to tell all of it. But let me tell you how to start.”
RAPE (Mami’s words in translation) When I told you I planned to kill Julio twenty years ago, I meant it. You’d come home from college for Thanksgiving break, thin and exhausted, spending days in bed. You hadn’t slept in weeks because of papers, presentations, tests, or eaten well in months, because the school only served American food. What kind of college was this? I asked your sisters, but they were just as confused. I wasn’t ready, that November morning, for what you wrote out in cursive in a notebook and handed to me: rape. I was still half asleep. Cleyvis! At Skidmore? I asked. You shook your head, putting out the last cigarette. Not me, Mami, you said. Julio raped Paloma.
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I pushed the notebook away, to you. You pushed it back, to me. Suddenly I understood: You’d translated Paloma’s words, from English to Spanish, so I could read them. Your eyes were bloodshot. I tasted morning breath inside my mouth. I knew I might throw up. You explained that you’d found Paloma’s school notebook the night before. I tried to ignore how your voice kept breaking as you spoke, how thick and hoarse it sounded. It wasn’t until you hiccupped that I looked up at you. You hiccupped a second time, like you had as a little kid. In my hand, the notebook was as heavy as a million buckets of water, and my eyes stung from the smoke. When had you started smoking cigarettes? Did you sleep at all, I think I asked. You shook your head. There were so many books you’d brought from Skidmore. You were going to try to get ahead, you’d said on your first day back. College gave everybody enough work to drown. I stood there in a cotton nightgown, trying to read the entire letter. Did someone at Skidmore rape you, I asked myself, then said it aloud to you. Not wanting to accept what you said. Not me, you repeated, sounding older, tired. This happened to Paloma. Julio raped her. Not me. Julio? My husband? I wanted to run away to before you came back home. Or maybe to last night, before Paloma asked if she could spend the night over at Choni’s. I should have insisted you should go along too. You stood up and took the notebook, held it close to your chest. What are you going to do about it? you asked me. I told you don’t worry, I’ll deal with it. How? You insisted. I’m going to kill him, I said. Satisfied, you laid down on the bed, and when I went back in to check on you after my shower, you were sleeping soundly. Back in my own bedroom, as I got ready for work, I avoided looking at Julio, asleep on the bed. I thought instead of your father, of how different all would have turned out if he’d come with us to America. You don’t have to make that face. I’m not blaming your father for what happened. I’m trying to explain to you that on that day, I thought life could have been different. I remembered Paloma at eight years old. Chubby. But tiny. Julio had only ever been brutal to me, I had thought. I started getting ready for work. If I didn’t go to work, I didn’t get paid. Of all things, I remembered the house we lived in when I first married your dad, when he took me away from Mamá’s house. From the backyard, there was a view of the ocean crashing into rocks in the distance. The rocks were sharp, and always shiny and black in the sunlight. I put on my coat. And then, on the way out the door, I doubled back, suddenly doubtful. I shook you awake. How could he have done this to Paloma, and nothing to you? I never said he did nothing, you said. Then, blinking hard at me, you said—Did you really forget? You turned your back on me and went back into your own deep sleep, or pretended to—I couldn’t tell the difference. I went downstairs. The icy ground crunched under my feet. I waited for the M11 bus. In front of me was a building eight stories high, pale brown. The road sloped downward to 125th Street, then up a sharp incline as steep as the path I traveled as a kid, barefoot, back and forth to the well. At the other end of the hill was the hospital I’d visited so many times, and across from it, Columbia University. My eyes swept back and forth on the hill, waiting for that bus. Five minutes went, then ten, then twenty, then a day, a lifetime, it all went, and I stood there, waiting for that damn bus. By the time I came home from work that day you were gone with all your things. Went to stay at Choni’s, you wrote on a piece of paper torn out of that same notebook. Though I knew you had probably taken the notebook with you, I still got down on my knees, searching for it, wanting to read it for myself.
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You told me it snowed a lot upstate that winter. When you got back to campus there were several feet of snow, and unlike the little bit that had fallen here in the city, crusted with dirt, I imagined that the snow at your college always stayed pristine. In my mind, I saw you sitting at the window seat in your dorm room, staring out at the hundreds of trees, each branch black inside clear ice, like those paintings I’d put up in the bathroom. You called them tacky. Two weeks had gone by, and each day I felt you four hours away, waiting: would I go through with it? Choni came to get Paloma’s things. Choni, who didn’t so much as speak to me when she came upstairs carrying her six-month son, whose skinny left leg kept jerking out of his blanket. How did she manage to pack up all of Paloma’s things so quickly? I offered to help take some things down the stairs. I got it, she said. She left Paloma’s notebook behind, right above the dining room table. Where had it been? Finally, at the end of the third week, you called. You were due back for the Christmas holiday any day. I asked about the weather and you told me about the snow. Then you stopped talking, abruptly. Your silence made the static connection loud, unbearable. Then I asked: If something terrible happened to your sister, wouldn’t she have told me, so I could stop it? Why had she written it in a language I didn’t speak? When I’d confronted Julio, he asked me that. He also asked if I thought he would be capable of something like that. He said, Could I have chosen someone capable of that? Mami, you said over the static, seven years ago, I told you what happened to me. Not as terrible as what he did to Paloma, just, you know, feeling my chest under my shirt, on a day when I stayed home sick from school. I ran away from him, Mami. I was scared. You kept talking, even when I tried to interrupt you. Even when I begged you to stop talking. You reminded me that Julio made you promise not to tell me. At first, you’d agreed. But you told Choni the next day. Choni told me. And when I’d asked you, you told me the truth. I don’t remember any of that, I said. You started talking so fast. You reminded me that I had spoken to him, that he had managed to convince me you were a liar with a grudge, that Choni was putting you up to it. So I would kick him out and so she could come back in. I searched and searched in my mind and I had no memory of any of that. I still don’t. “You think we’re liars now? Again?” Your voice had a coldness to it. I imagined your real voice as something warm, still, inside that colder voice. “What about the pills you drank after? You remember trying to kill yourself ?” The pills, I remembered. Then you said something garbled. I imagined the warm and the cold in your throat, fighting to come out at the same time. If he’s in your life, we won’t be? Unless you kick him out, we won’t come back? Something like that you said. You hung up the phone. It would be twenty years before I heard your voice again, with a baby in the background. My granddaughter, I thought. A brand new one of us.
FALSE START Me, a spit of you, people used to say. But we don’t look alike anymore. The years have done such a number on your face. The bone structure we used to share has now been buried by fat and sadness, old injuries that never healed quite right. The plaster in your palm no longer curved. It was flat, in pieces. I took it from you, walked the short distance, threw it in the trash. “I don’t think that’s how this starts,” I told you when I sat back down, the plate of food by now only bones sucked clean. “Tell me again,” I said, “about that day, on the mountain of Los Guzmanes, when you went to get water out of a well.” At first you resisted, saying only you had the right to say how this started. And I told you no, you lost the right to decide long ago.
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THE HURRICANE (Mami’s words in translation) The two-mile walk to get water out of the well was the best part of my day. And the worst part of my day. For a skinny ten-year-old, it was a hard walk up a steep incline. It reminded me how hungry I was, how tired. But I didn’t care. Not on those walks. The bright sun charged my skin. Being outside spelled freedom I never had in Mamá’s house. The farms at the bottom of the mountain were all green. Even from a distance I knew who was who. Juanito hitting the asses of horses. Margarita with empty buckets heading to milk cows, her head odd shaped from the time one kicked her. Neither ever bothered to look up. Back at home, I didn’t spend much time looking up either. It was head down to bathe and feed siblings; head down to peel vegetables and fruit, cut off excess fat, prepare, serve. Head down to do dishes, wash clothes, listen to Mamá’s commands. It was a disrespect to make direct eye contact, to do anything except listen and follow. But on that walk to the well? All sky. My favorite part? How quiet it was. On those walks, I didn’t have to yell at the small army of kids I was in charge of to stop fighting each other, or, worse, to soothe with kisses over another bruise. The way down? Big difference. One day in particular, as I strained under the weight of a bucket full of water on top of my head, and two buckets in each hand, I was startled by thunder. Looked up. The bucket on top of my head slipped. I had to go back to the well. On the way home that second time, it got dark. As I passed by the neighbor’s house again, the woman called me to the porch. You can’t keep going, she said. It might be a hurricane. We both looked down the road, at the falling thick dark. I said no, had to get home, but she insisted. Someone will come to get you, she said. A hurricane never came that night. But the downpour was so loud, I had a hard time falling asleep. Despite the dread in my belly, I loved the walk back. I couldn’t help but notice how many rainbows quivered in puddles, how much of the sky was reflected on those tiny mirrors. When I got home, Mamá didn’t waste time asking what had happened, or where I’d spent the night, didn’t attempt to explain why, with a house full of family, no one had come looking for me. Weren’t they worried? I asked. The response: she beat me to the ground. It started with a chancletazo down my back. I crouched to shield my face and waited for Mamá to wear herself out. When it was all over, I went to the backyard and carried on. It was the first time I told myself that as soon as I was old enough, I’d get the hell out of that house. I’d make my own house, my own family. I quieted the rage. There was breakfast to be made, a bunch of mocosos who needed their faces washed, and a walk back up the mountain for water.
BEARABLE PLACE Your face says: if suffering is noble, then I am queen. That royal pride was something I’d seen on you before, on a day when your nose had been broken, lip split. On my birthday, as you guided me on where you wanted this story to start, I wanted you to see clearly how your early life led to that man you brought into our house. “Aren’t you mad at Abuelita?” I asked. “Imagínate,” you said, “es una hija de puta, pero es mi hija de puta.” “Abuelita is not just your asshole,” Choni said, “she’s everybody’s asshole.” Choni and Paloma had arrived during your recounting. Both of them big women, like you. They’d already served themselves food, joined us at the dining room table. Choni tilted her head while she drank her beer and rested her eyes on the ceiling, as another bit of plaster fell. This time you didn’t reach for it, but I did: not an orchid but the trumpet shape of a calla lily.
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On the wall beside the table, the crooked painting of Jesus surrounded by the apostles, a traitor among them. Since we moved to Harlem, every time someone fixed that crooked painting, within moments it slid back sideways. Choni and Paloma made peace with you long before I did. You laughed. “No faltes respeto.” “Thought this was a peace thing,” Paloma said. “What’s with the trip down depression lane?” I explained what I wanted to do. I asked their permission to write about our lives. They both got animated, agreed immediately. Was I the only one who remembered the worst? Meanwhile, they wanted to talk about the memoir. What did I mean, essays instead of chapters? Separating the entire thing by each of them? Would anybody care to read what we’d been through? “It’s a memoir about our family, so the family is the main through line. People will care as long as the writing is good.” They looked at their phones, bored. Then Paloma looked up. Would I use real names? “I want you to use my own name,” Paloma said. Paloma is not her real name. Choni was thoughtful, then turned to you. “I want my name to be Maria La Rompe Olas.” Mary the Wave Breaker. I told her I’d think about it. But for the rest of my birthday dinner, we indulged her: “Maria La Rompe Olas, please bring me some water.” “Maria La Rompe Olas, show Mami that video of the old woman dancing reggaetón.” “Esa vieja si es sinvergüenza,” you said, while you stood and mimicked the old woman’s gyrations. Paloma took out her phone to record you while Choni held the video of the old woman within the frame—the bonus video to go along with any full-price purchase of our book. I remembered then. This is how. How we made our world a bearable place.
OUR SOB I learned to be tough by studying your face. The last time Julio had beaten you seriously (meaning loud enough, bad enough, someone had to call the cops; hard enough, bad enough, you had to go to a hospital), I came out of the room I shared with Paloma, then twelve, to find myself between your broken face and the man who broke it. You had just walked out of the bathroom. Julio stood behind me. You faced him and looked through me as if I weren’t there. Your left eye had started to swell, and blood streamed from the cuts in your mouth and your cheeks, a huge tear in your eyelid. The bridge of your nose curved in an unusual way. “Are you happy now?” you asked him. He pushed me out of the way, pushed you out of the way, and left. Maybe you liked that he was big, and the darkest shade of Dominican Black; that he wore all those gold rings shaped like lions, that he yelled and hit and never flushed the toilet, no matter what he’d done in there. You looked at me as blood streamed down your face, spotting the wooden parquet floor. Your stance was defiant. “Why are you crying?” you said. I went back into my bedroom, put my nose in Island of the Blue Dolphins, and pretended nothing was out of the ordinary, even as the police later entered my bedroom without knocking, a white boy asking who else had been hurt. “I’m not hurt.” I tried to remove my accent, to make sure he understood that I wasn’t really of this place. He was young, maybe nineteen, and under different circumstances I would have rushed to school the next day to tell my best friends how much he looked like Zack Morris in Saved by the Bell. But I wouldn’t be talking about this. He took a look at the top bunk, where Paloma pretended sleep. His eyes swept the mess of our bedroom. There were clothes strewn everywhere, a mountain behind the closet door that was always off the hinges, no matter how many times the super repaired it. The mess had a function: in the closet wall were huge holes Julio had made so that he could peep into our bedroom. Our drawers remained empty in the service of concealment.
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The officer gave me a kind, pity-filled look, then quietly closed the door. Julio knew better than to come back. After a while, a second cop, who spoke Spanish, asked if you were going to press charges. Why did you say no? He told you he was calling an ambulance but you said, “No, ninguna ambulancia, yo me voy en taxi.” Just like that, the cops left. Nobody went with you to the emergency room. I read my book, knowing it was my way out. Karana, the young protagonist of Island of the Blue Dolphins, had been stranded on an island and managed to survive. I walked out of the bedroom, got water and a mop to clean your blood. And then, shaking my head, I poured the water in the toilet, put the mop away, still dry. I’m getting the hell out of this house, out of this family, away from you, I thought. The puddles of blood on the floor reflected light. And I left it there. Left it for you to clean.
HERE COMES THE INFANTRY! A few days later, your brothers and in-laws, serious men, came to talk to Julio. You’d gone back to work, cleaning homes, a job that kept you away from home at least fourteen hours a day. We children were dismissed to bedrooms. This was adult-talk time. I kept my door open, just enough. The men stood while Julio sat down on the couch, legs spread wide. “Things got out of hand,” he said, “because Fragancia doesn’t know respect. She doesn’t know when to shut up.” The men of our family stood shoulder to shoulder, fidgeting, shuffling feet, looking around the room. “This behavior won’t be tolerated again,” one them said. “She’s free to leave me,” Julio said, then stood up. Time stopped. Each of the men took a wider stance. They unfurled their folded arms and seemed to multiply. The energy in the room changed, violence at the ready. Finally, men strong enough, big enough, to punch him back. “I have no intention of ever putting a hand on her again,” he said. Through the slit of my door I saw each of the men of your family shake hands with him, a kind of truce. I told myself, This is my family. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Choni left shortly after, that she ended up living with friends because no one from our family opened a door. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Julio kicked out his oldest daughter, too, as soon as she started talking about the strange virginity bare-hand tests he performed on her. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that useless gesture of shaking hands. But I was. As the men left our apartment, one of them saw my eye through the slit of that door and gave me a nod, as if to say, Everything will be good, all the horrors are now behind you. But the horrors didn’t stop. The horrors only got worse. What did stop was us going to Abuelita’s house on Sundays, just a half-mile away. They stopped coming here, no matter the injury, no matter how much of your fucking blood ended up on the floor. On rare occasions or holidays, when we did go to visit family, you told us that whatever happened in our house was our business. I agreed. Fuck them. Because “our business” may have been embarrassing, shameful, and pretty terrible, but it was ours.
JUST US, NOW With a wilting plaster flower on my palm, I stare at you. You stare at Paloma. Paloma stares at Choni. Choni stands, nodding hard. They leave silently, without kissing either one of us goodbye, without finishing their meals. “Should we stop?” you ask. At my silence, you push forward. Just us, now. Trying to start, push through, finish.
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FLIGHT I (Mami’s words in translation) I left Mamá’s house months before I turned nineteen. Your father was so respected. He was twenty years older, sure, but was handsome, had been relentless in his pursuit. I kept wondering why he picked me. I was grateful. I was ready for my own family. The first house we lived in was in Imbert de Saballo, on the tippy toe of a hill overlooking the ocean. Do you remember it? Of course you don’t. It was a small, one-room wood house, with a zinc roof and mango trees lining the backyard. The house had electricity—no matter that power outages meant there wasn’t electricity that much of the time—and running water. Under this new sky, a one-room house became my palace, with a husband who provided, who worked hard, never mind the wandering eye. Mamá always said each person fulfills her destiny. She thought mine was to serve, sometimes suffer. And at first I thought so too. When I first gave birth, the baby was stillborn. I thought it was punishment for leaving my responsibilities, a reminder of my purpose on earth. But quickly after, I was pregnant again, with Choni. Less than two years later, Lindo. Two years after that, you. Two years later, Paloma. Only after I had you four did I know it wasn’t true: I wasn’t put on earth to serve or to suffer. It was to survive. No matter what. At one point you were so small I held your entire body with both my hands. One palm cupping the back of your head, the other your diapered butt. I used to stare at each of your faces and the hours fell away. Each perfect face offered a feeling like a prayer. You were all mine.
FLIGHT II You tried to convince me not to go away to college, Mami. Abuelita had filled up your head: the only reason young, single women go away from home before marriage is to be a bunch of sucias, putas. But I convinced you: if I wanted to be a puta, I didn’t need college for that. I could have done it while you were gone fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. My girlfriends got pregnant in high school. Choni got pregnant at thirteen. I’d been clear with you and with myself: I’d stay away from men—I wanted a life as far removed from yours as possible. I said it to you often. You agreed. I spent the summer before my freshman year at Skidmore, on campus. Those four weeks in July and August were meant to bridge a gap for those of us who’d gotten in through an opportunity program—mostly immigrants or children of immigrants. The college administration knew that despite our grades and our egos, we hadn’t been taught how to study in our public schools. We hadn’t been taught to thrive in any environment. “What do you mean, you don’t know how to study?” you asked. I’d been a straight A student in high school. I tried to explain but it was too hard, so I told you instead I’d be OK. I’d learned to be tough, to be focused and push through whatever came, by studying your face. But no one had prepared me for what it meant to be eighteen, living in a dorm, with six hours of school a day. I called you often that first week, told you about the quick friendships I made with the three other girls in my suite. Of course you warned me about these friendships, said be careful of girls who want to move too fast, push me to do things I wasn’t ready to do. “Whatever group you’re in, make sure you’re the worst,” you said. You were right. I still live by that sentiment to this day, making sure I’m the one who sets my boundaries, breaks them when I choose. That first night in the dorm, we were supposed to play icebreaker games, but someone brought out cards and we began to play spades. There was joke-making and flirting and peace. The campus was quiet. Whatever summer programs took place had ended by then, and for days the whole place was ours. Saratoga Springs is a lush green town, quaint and tiny compared to New York City. There my world expanded, took on sparkle. I only had to curve my neck back a bit to see all sky.
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“Mami,” I said to you once, over the phone, “this place is like living in el campo, on that mountain where you grew up.”
BROKEN LEGACIES Abuelita became a mother when she was twelve years old. Abuelita became a grandmother when she was thirty-two years old. Mami became a mother when she was twenty years old. Mami became a grandmother when she was thirty-four years old. My sister Choni became a mother when she was thirteen years old. Choni became a grandmother when she was thirty-nine years old. Paloma became a mother when she was nineteen years old. Paloma became a grandmother when she was thirty-nine years old. I became a mother when I was thirty-five. I’m the only woman in generations of my family who wasn’t a grandmother at forty.
COMPASS When I showed you pictures of your grandchildren, you stared at the phone for a long time. Maybe next time you come, bring them, you said. I shrugged. Outside, darkness fell. I took a deep breath, maybe so sated by the meal it seemed unnecessary to say the things I’d rehearsed saying. Instead I write them here, and wonder if I’ll ever be courageous enough to translate myself to you. Because this motherhood thing is so complicated. As much as you threatened to leave, you never did. I’ve thought about leaving mine, too. How I’d rather write books and travel the world. But just like you, I have stayed. I quieted my tongue just as I was prepared to tell you the main reason I’d come back into your life—to tell you I didn’t forgive you. That I don’t think I ever will, especially now that I have a daughter, a brand new one of us. But looking at how changed you are, how sad you are, I let it go. Instead I stare at the crooked painting on the wall, and glance up at the now darker patterns in the ceiling from the missing plaster. It really does look like flowers up there, ready to bloom. The one in my hand, that lily, I hold it gently, then extend it to you, a gift. I tell you I gotta go. I tell you, Yes, I’ll bring them to meet you the next time. I tell myself, Maybe each time I see you, I’ll get closer to figuring out what it is I need to say, what I must hold back. The next time I come, you’ll tell me that when I closed the door you went into our old bedroom, rummaged through old boxes until you found that old notebook. You will tell me that you hold it often, outlining that word with the tip of your index, the letter Paloma wrote on the following page, then the page after that, where I’d translated it for you. You will tell me that during all those years that have passed between us, the absence that remains most notable to you is the absence between the words, the white space a universe that punches, pulses, pulls.
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For the 2021 fiction section of the Gagosian Quarterly, we have teamed up with pen America to highlight a selection of writers from pen’s advocacy and literary programs. Founded in 1922, pen America is part of an international network dedicated to fostering freedom of expression through numerous initiatives at the intersection of literature and human rights. Our first installment presents Writing for Justice Fellow Cleyvis Natera. pen America’s Writing for Justice Fellowship commissions writers to create written works of lasting merit that illuminate critical issues related to mass incarceration and catalyze public debate. Natera’s project for the Prison and Justice Writing Program explores the painful impact of mass incarceration on members of an Afro-Dominican immigrant family and their community through a nonfiction account of her own brother’s arrest for minor offenses and his subsequent deportation. To learn more about the Prison and Justice Writing Program and the rest of visit pen.org.
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pen’s
work, please
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A F TER IM AGES A poem by Jonathan Galassi inspired by the photography of Cy Twombly
lemons are hands lemons are fingers scrofulous pungent lemonskin bludgeons lemons are sex and cancer cabbages are biscuit lemons are peonies heat they float in bathe in wilt in heat or memory the syrup the blur
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haze of bouquets cemetery glare viscous backlight burned skies tulips lying single on stone light flowers copied saved lemon hand shadows marble curls peonies on their way out rotting petticoats shaved butter mounds deliquescing light mounds evanescing gold detritus copied and saved
tulips prepuce glans lip vein Treviso milk and memory corolla simple syrup strawberries on marble melancholy cakes and leaves figs garlic plated grapes and beans incumbent seaside aura fish flesh evanescing marble frosting what got copied what gets lifted more and more of less and less
marble drape patina marble frosting painted blossoms greased lens cataract rust brushes copied roses copied and saved copy save erase and save on the retina what acid didn’t etch the less and less of more and more residue thumbprint smudge the blur that is here
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Opening spread: Cy Twombly, Tulips, Rome, 1985 (detail), color dry-print, 17 × 11 inches (43.1 × 27.9 cm), edition 4/6 Second spread, left: Cy Twombly, Lemon, Gaeta, 2006, 17 × 11 inches (43.1 × 27.9 cm), edition 4/6 Second spread, right: Cy Twombly, Tulips, Rome, 1985, color dry-print, 17 × 11 inches (43.1 × 27.9 cm), edition 4/6
Opposite: Cy Twombly, Grapes, Gaeta, 1997, 11 × 17 inches (27.9 × 43.1 cm) Above: Cy Twombly, Grapes, Gaeta, 1997, 11 × 17 inches (27.9 × 43.1 cm) All photographs by Cy Twombly © Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio. Text © Jonathan Galassi. Featured on the occasion of a forthcoming exhibition of Cy Twombly’s photographs.
DELINE JORDAN BELSON AND HARRY SMITH
ATORS RAYMOND FOYE TRACKS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TWO MAVERICKS, INVESTIGATING THEIR INFLUENCE ON ONE ANOTHER AND THEIR ENDURING LEGACIES.
Previous spread, left: Jordan Belson, Berkeley, California, c. 1946. Photo: courtesy Estate of Jordan Belson Previous spread, right: Harry Smith (front) and Lionel Ziprin, New York City, c. 1952. Photo: Joanne Ziprin, courtesy Lionel Ziprin Archives Below: Harry Smith, Homage to Oskar Fischinger, c. 1950. Work destroyed. Photo: courtesy Estate of Jordan Belson Opposite: Jordan Belson, Target (Purple), c. 1953, casein on panel, 12 × 12 inches (31 × 31 cm). Photo: courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
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rt history can be a capricious affair: a complex chronicle constantly written and rewritten, based on changes in style, fashion, and collective consciousness. One of the more pronounced shifts in the cultural zeitgeist of recent years has been an attraction to works g rounded in occult or esoteric traditions. Not so long ago, such concerns were quite simply the death knell for an artist. As recently as 2019, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, unexpectedly saw its exhibition of Hilma af Klint—a recondite spiritualist—attract 600,000 visitors, becoming the best-attended show in the museum’s history. Two of the foremost pioneers of the occult aesthetic in America, Harry Smith and Jordan Belson, are currently enjoying long-overdue recognition. Since Smith’s death, in 1991, his reputation has exploded, with each year bringing new exhibitions, books, box sets of music, and restorations of films. The Getty Research Institute has devoted not one but two symposia to his work, and acquired his archives in 2013. This year, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will be publishing a full-length biography of Smith by John Szwed, who has written acclaimed biographies of Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Alan Lomax, and Billie Holiday. Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways Records, 1952) was rereleased on CD to great acclaim by the Smithsonian in 1997, and in 2020 Atlanta’s Dust to Digital label issued a companion box set of the B sides of the 78-rpm records on the Anthology—as if that artifact could not be more fully excavated. Currently in preparation are recordings of over one hundred songs and chants of the legendary kabbalist Rabbi Naftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia, made by Smith on the Lower East Side in 1953–54, as well as his 1982 Naropa Institute lectures on Native American cosmology, “The Rationality of Namelessness.” Smith has become a one-man culture industry, astonishing for someone who spent his final years shuffling between homeless shelters on the Bowery before dying penniless in a small room in the Chelsea Hotel. Because Belson was extremely reclusive in the later part of his life, his career has lagged behind Smith’s by about two decades, but that has also begun to change. In Dark Star: Abstraction and Cosmos, an exhibition at the Planthouse gallery, New York, in 2016, Belson’s work was shown
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alongside that of Smith, Tamara Gonzales, Philip Taaffe, and others. Cosmic Communities: Coming Out Into Outer Space—Homofuturism, Applied Psychedelia & Magic Connectivity, at the Galerie Buchholz, New York, in 2017–18, set Belson alongside Tony Conrad, Jutta Koether, Sigmar Polke, Sun Ra, and more. These shows were followed in 2019 by a major solo exhibition of paintings at the Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, and by important European museum exhibitions in Barcelona, Geneva, and London. Brooklyn-based Zap Cassettes is bringing out a release of Belson’s home-recorded autoharp music this year, and experimental musician Henry Kaiser is collaborating with the Belson estate on a series of releases of Belson’s tape compositions from the 1970s and ’80s. What many people are not aware of is the close relationship between these two artists at the outset of their careers. For eight years, from 1946 to ’53, they were friendly rivals—the Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque of nonobjective art on the West Coast, promoting each other’s work and sharing enthusiasms, discoveries, and occasionally studio space and art supplies. They also shared a mutual patron in the legendary Hilla Rebay, cofounder of the Guggenheim Museum. Indeed, Smith’s letters from that time to Rebay, preserved in the museum’s archives, reveal a side that those who knew him later in his life might find hard to imagine: a highly organized self-promoter. Although Belson and Smith would eventually stray from the aesthetic orthodoxy imposed by Rebay and her personal mentor, the painter Rudolf Bauer, their fealty to the philosophy of nonobjectivism would never waver. In fact their elaborations on that aesthetic—testing and stressing the ideas of Bauer and Vasily Kandinsky, applying them to the mediums of light and sound while engaging with such disparate concerns as yoga, psychedelics, the kabbalah, and nasa space
exploration—would lend continuing relevance to its principles and would have an enduring legacy in the popular imagination that continues to engage viewers today. Belson was born in Chicago in 1926, but his family moved to New York when he was an infant; a decade later they departed for San Francisco, where his mother’s relations had settled. Raised in that city, Belson attended Lincoln High and took weekend life-drawing classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. Like Smith, he excelled at all things precise and mechanical, and while still a high school student he was highly valued at his father’s home-improvement business for his skill at measuring, cutting, and laying intricate linoleum designs. Belson earned his AB in studio art from the University of California, Berkeley, and he established a studio in Berkeley shortly after graduation. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923, Smith too gravitated to Berkeley. His arrival there, like most
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aspects of his life, is shrouded in myth, but he himself told me that he first visited the town on a weekend trip to see Woody Guthrie perform at a union rally for the Industrial Workers of the World, taking a few days off from his job at the Boeing factory in Washington state. (Because of a curvature of the spine that stunted his growth, he was ineligible for the draft during World War II, but contributed to the war effort by doing electrical wiring in airplanes. His small size allowed him to crawl into tight spaces and his mechanical-mindedness was perfect for following electrical schemata.) It was at this same rally that he smoked marijuana for the first time, accepting a joint from Guthrie himself— or so he told me; he is also on the record saying that his benefactor was the legendary Berkeley bohemian Griff Borgeson. Once the war ended, Smith returned to Berkeley and found a small studio in a garage off Telegraph Avenue. Although San Francisco would become the symbol of so much of the counterculture of the ’50s and ’60s, it was in Berkeley in the late ’40s that the seeds of that revolution were planted. The town was still quite small and rural in character; there were lodges for theosophy and the Vedanta, and many Native American traditions were still extant. Smith felt at home among the redwoods, which reminded him of his native Pacific Northwest. The presence of an advanced university meant uncommon access to medievalists, anthropologists, and folklorists. For the poet Robert Duncan during these same years, studies with the medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz proved a def ining encounter, as evidenced in two of Duncan’s earliest books, Heavenly City Earthly City (1947) and Medieval Studies (1950). While not formally a student at the university, Smith was in contact with anthropologists Jaime de Angulo and Paul Radin and with English professor and ethnomusicologist Bertrand H. Bronson, providing him with very different inspirations from anything he would have encountered almost anywhere else. While still a high school student, Smith had begun recording the music and dances of the local Lummi and Salish tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and by the time he moved to Berkeley his collection 92
of 78’s numbered in the hundreds and included blues, jazz, folk, and world music. These ethnographic interests persisted throughout his career, not only in terms of fieldwork but as generative patterns that informed and inspired all his visual art. For Smith, folkways—music, dance, weaving, basketry, quilting, etc.—were the antidote to the modern tendency toward mechanization. Even in those early days, Belson would recall, Smith had a pronounced antagonism toward the Western canon: he approved of no Europe-centric art, including that of the Renaissance, and he avoided traditional materials such as oils and canvas. In signing his works “delt,” short for the Latin delineavit, he even signaled his rejection of the designation “artist” in favor of the medieval-Latin term “delineator,” one who draws lines between one thing and another. “He always had a rather scornful attitude towards artists,” Belson once said. “He didn’t like to be thought of as one. He thought of himself as some sort of anthropologist or something of that sort. I can understand why he didn’t want to be identified with artists: from his point of view they were just pathetic misfits. Intellectually they didn’t interest him at all.”1 Belson delightfully recalled his first encounter with Smith in an interview with Paola Igliori: I met Harry in Berkeley about 1946 and I think I was still a student there at the university, my last year. I had a coterie of friends that were all artists and a generally bohemian group, and one of them went for a walk in the hills. . . . It’s a university town, a lot of trees; it’s built on a hillside and it’s got a lot of beautiful redwood homes, and he went for a walk up there around the fraternity houses and he looked. There was one window that was at eye level so he had no problem looking in—not intentionally—but the interior of the room was so striking that he peeked in the window and looked it over and then came back and mentioned this to me, and maybe another person or two, and we went up to take a look ourselves. It was like a little museum gallery in there. It was all very neat, lit romantically, with lights right over some
Above: Jordan Belson, Untitled 10/13/52, from the Peacock Book, 1952–53, ink and pastel on paper, 5 ¾ × 12 7⁄8 inches (15 × 33 cm). Photo: courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York Opposite: Harry Smith, untitled drawing, October 19, 1951, ink, watercolor, and tempera on paper, 34 × 27 ½ inches (86 × 70 cm), Private collection. Photo: courtesy Harry Smith Archives
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artwork on the wall, and he had a Kachina doll, and a few mysterious paintings, and nothing much more than that. He had a very tidy bunk, a cot in one corner, and a rather large desk, and it was a nice little room. And as we were looking through the window he came out and invited us in . . . for tea—peppermint tea. He was so odd and strange—you know, gnomelike, intense creature, that I don’t think any of us knew quite what to make of him. . . . He just seems so strange and we were all fairly naïve—never met anybody quite like Harry. He was extremely ingratiating, charming and dressed in a sort of shabby professorial manner with a tie and a dress shirt and a regular jacket—none of us were like that. We were all very sloppy, paint-smeared art students. He had a few strange phonograph records around—he played for us jazz, very antique jazz recordings. He didn’t have very many records around—he had a huge collection somewhere but I never saw it. They were old and scratchy, a lot of hillbilly music, and his own paintings were sort of like . . . Paul Klee I guess would be the nearest thing. . . . He was a very mysterious but intriguing character.2 Over the next few years, Belson began making regular visits to Smith in the Berkeley studio. During this period, circa 1946–49—dates where Sm it h i s c onc er ne d a lways i nvolve
guesswork—Smith had begun to make his first films, later collected as “Early Abstractions.” These were made by highly intricate hand-painting with colored inks directly on 35mm film stock. A three-minute film could take more than a year to make. These are foundational works of the psychedelic aesthetic. Although Smith, being three years older than Belson, was in some ways more advanced in his artistic development, Belson had an impressive career at an early age—to say the least. His artworld debut came when he was nineteen, in the First Pasadena National exhibition at the Pasadena Art Institute (later renamed the Norton Simon Museum) in the spring of 1946. This was a large and important show that included artists from all forty-eight states, and Belson represented California along with Charles Houghton Howard, an exponent of biomorphic abstraction and Surrealism, who had a retrospective at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor that same year. Later that fall, at the age of twenty, Belson was included in the Sixty-Sixth Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, curated by Douglas MacAg y and David Park, which also included the painters Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. In 1946, Smith and Belson began attending the inaugural screenings of the Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Art (the word
“Modern” had not yet been added to the name). Originating as a touring program of experimental films circulated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art in Cinema series expanded under the direction of Frank Stauffacher and Richard Foster to include work by Maya Deren, James and John Whitney, Oskar Fischinger, Mary Ellen Bute, Hans Richter, and Viking Eggeling. Smith and Belson attended Art in Cinema programs religiously for the next four years, and Smith became Stauffacher’s unpaid assistant.3 Smith was especially attracted to the films of Fischinger and in the summer of 1947 traveled to Los Angeles to meet him. He would end up meeting John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and many figures of the Los Angeles avant-garde at Fischinger’s house. A network between the experimental filmmakers of San Francisco and Los Angeles was established. And it was Fischinger who made the important introduction to Smith and Belson’s future patron, the Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen. Rebay believed passionately in the cause of nonobjective painting. The three corresponded, and Rebay sent her translations of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) and Point and Line to Plane (1926), both recently published by the Guggenheim Foundation and both formative texts for Smith and Belson. Rebay was particularly devoted to the work of Bauer, whom she’d rescued to the United States, literally buying his way out This page: Harry Smith, untitled study for Inkweed Studios greeting card, 1953, india ink on scratchboard, 8 × 6 inches (20 × 15 cm), Private collection Opposite: Jordan Belson at Inkweed Studios, 128 Lexington Avenue, New York, 1953. Photo: courtesy Estate of Jordan Belson
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of a Gestapo prison. When Rebay visited the Bay Area in 1948, Belson and Smith picked her up in Belson’s Ford Model T and they drove to Belson’s studio in North Beach and then to Smith’s studio on Buchanan Street in the Fillmore district, where he kept a shabby room above a small jazz club called Jackson’s Nook. (Jimbo’s Bop City, the legendary bebop club where he later lived and painted murals, was two blocks away.) The visit resulted in stipends and small acts of generosity over the next few years—with the explicit understanding that the two men were to promote the agenda of nonobjective art. And although in time both Smith and Belson defected from Rebay’s camp, their fealty to nonobjectivism would never waver; it merely took other forms, including animated film and various protopsychedelic multimedia works leading directly to the light shows of the ’60s. Belson’s letters to Rebay from this period reflect his personality: cordial, reserved, diffident. Smith’s, on the other hand, are downright effusive, and constitute an important chronicle of this crucial period in his development as he became increasingly engaged with film and its potential for interaction with jazz musicians, whom he considered the truly advanced artists of the time. His letters contained abundant discussions of artistic matters, interspersed with pleas for money: I will make prints of any of the color [films] you want a little later, but right now I can not do so, as I must live totally on the 65 dollars a month I get from you, as time is short and I can’t waste it bothering with trying to get money. I eat only two meals a day now, but drink lots of water and eat nothing with white flour or sugar in it, so I save money and I hope improve my health at the same time. . . . Since I showed my films at the museum here using live musicians improvising from the images rather than from a score, the musicians who gather nightly in the back room of a cafe near here, to play for their
own amusement, after they have their regular jobs, have asked me to bring my projector to their “Jam Session” several times, because now everyone wants to try playing while looking at the film. . . . Last month I luckily borrowed a tape recorder and made records of about thirty different performances of musicians following the films. By comparing these tapes with each other and with the films it has been possible to make a start toward an investigation of intuitive creation. 4 This last sentence shows Smith the great systematizer, continually trying to apply an analytic framework to matters of the imagination, a hopeless task to which he would brilliantly devote the rest of his life. The years from 1947 until the end of 1951 were a period of prodigious experiment for both artists. Light proved an irresistible medium, and the addition of jazz soundtracks made for an entirely new filmic experience. Belson responded to Smith’s hand-painted films with a technique of his own: having exquisitely hand-painted paper scrolls in watercolor and gouache, he would then photograph each painted frame to create animated sequences. (After his death these scrolls were discovered carefully rolled in a closet, where they’d been stored for almost sixty years.) A home movie from 1951 called Autobiography, shot by Belson and Smith in Belson’s North Beach apartment, depicts the classic Beat pad with Smith and Belson’s paintings on the wall, a 16mm projector, and appearances by filmmakers Hy Hirsh and Chris Maclaine and poets Philip Lamantia, Weldon Kees, and Gerd Stern. Both Belson and Smith had become bebop fanatics by now. “It was simply the most radical thing at the time,” Belson told me. They used jazz recordings as film soundtracks, and circa 1948–50 Smith also created a series of three-dimensional abstract paintings, inspired by Rebay’s works from the same period, which in turn were based on Kandinsky’s
seminal Improvisations (1909–13). In Smith’s “jazz” paintings each stroke corresponds to a solo (or entire record) by Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, or Charlie Parker. These paintings are now lost, and exist only on color slides that Belson had the foresight to purchase from Smith and preserve. (In his home studio fifty years later, Belson played me Gillespie’s “Manteca” while tracing with his finger the visual equivalents in Smith’s painting—and the correspondence was exact.) Belson and Smith created several closely related groups of work in 1951–53. Together they devised the idea of “Brain Drawings,” depictions of pure consciousness as glyphic mind-maps; they explored the kaballah in many works (Belson was Jewish, Smith was not), a subject that would deeply preoccupy Smith; and they developed their respective calligraphic styles, influenced by Chinese painting (Belson’s Peacock Book, forty-four drawings from 1952–53) and Tibetan mandalas (Smith’s Untitled Drawing, October 19, 1951). In a letter to Smith scholar Rani Singh in 2002, Belson described the latter as “a painting Smith made in my studio one afternoon in 1951, using paint and inks I had mixed for my own scroll films. The words partially concealed were probably extracted from our conversation.” By late November of 1951, Smith was in New York, as we know from a letter from Rebay that included a cash enclosure for a Thanksgiving dinner.5 He had moved here sometime in the late fall of 1951 to fulfill two burning desires: to meet Marcel Duchamp and to hear Monk live. Monk could not leave New York because of a drug arrest and subsequent revocation of his cabaret card. Smith sought him out in the city’s clubs and became a regular at his shows for the next ten years. About Duchamp, sadly, we do not know. Smith also had an introduction to Lionel Ziprin, artist, poet, and kabbalist. (Rabbi Abulafia, whose liturgical chants Smith would later record, was Ziprin’s grandfather.) Ziprin and his wife, Joanne, had just established a greeting-card and design 95
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Opposite: Jordan Belson, Scroll Paintings, c. 1950, ink and gouache on rice paper, each: 5 ¾ × 8 ¼ inches (15 × 21 cm). Photos: courtesy Estate of Jordan Belson This page: Film stills from Jordan Belson’s Autobiography, 1951. Top to bottom: Christopher Maclaine, Philip Lamantia, Harry Smith, Jordan Belson, Jane Belson, and Hy Hirsh
firm, Inkweed Studios, in their kitchen, at 128 Lexington Avenue, and Smith was enlisted. Within the year, Belson had moved to New York to work at Inkweed. Incredibly, they were joined shortly thereafter by Bruce Conner, and the three artists spent many evenings in the Ziprin kitchen designing greeting cards. By this point Smith’s and Belson’s style had become so closely entwined, it is often a challenge to make accurate attributions between the two in the Inkweed archives (now managed by Ziprin’s daughter Zia Ziprin and artist Carol Bove). It was at Inkweed that Smith created perhaps his most famous artwork, The Tree of Life in the Four Worlds (1953), printed in an edition of 500 copies from collotype plates—executed by Jordan Belson. For a time, both Belson and Smith shuttled between coasts, but after 1953 Smith was settled in New York and Belson returned to San Francisco. Although the personal friendship ended, they continued to follow each other’s work. In the late ’50s Belson and Henry Jacobs launched the influential Vortex concerts, multimedia shows with films, lasers, visual projections, and experimental music, which ran for two years at the Morrison Planetarium in Golden Gate Park, attracting the “heads” of San Francisco and leading directly to the light shows of the 1960s. Smith pursued his own highly elaborate multimedia presentations at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York, albeit on a more personal scale. In 1964, Belson received a Ford Foundation Fellowship and the next day got a call from Smith requesting half of the money. They had not spoken in ten years. “On what basis am I supposed to give you half the money?” Belson asked. “On the basis that I turned you on to marijuana,” Smith replied. How did you feel about that, I once asked Belson. “I was glad he was on another coast,” he answered. In 1970 Belson traveled back east to work with the Egyptologist André VandenBroeck on a film soundtrack, and although he flew into and out of New York, he drove directly upstate to VandenBroeck’s house and did not visit Manhattan. In the ensuing decades Smith continued to paint, make films, and issue recordings before
accepting a position as shaman-in-residence at Naropa Institute in Boulder. In 1991, a few months after receiving a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award, he died in the Chelsea Hotel, where his rent was being paid by the Grateful Dead’s Rex Foundation. He was sixty-eight years old. Belson outlived him by twenty years, no doubt the result of a more sedate lifestyle of vegetarianism and yoga. He completed his thirty-fifth and final film in 2005 and devoted his final years to a stunning body of pastels depicting his enduring subject: the intersection of inner and outer space. “I think Belson is unique in that he’s an artist who moves back and forth between filmmaking and painting, in discrete groups of four or five years spaced apart, and he creates masterpieces in both those realms,” Gerd Stern told The Brooklyn Rail in 2019. “I don’t know any other artist in the 20th century who does that. He was unique because the characteristics of his personality and his reclusiveness are part of what made him into a brilliant artist/technologist, so that’s an unusual combination.” It is ironic that in many instances we know more about what took place in ancient Egypt than about what took place seventy-five years ago on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley or Grant Avenue in San Francisco. The radical changes that Harry Smith and Jordan Belson instigated together are still being excavated—works that in many ways remain as radical as the day they were created.
1. Jordan Belson, in telephone interviews with Scott MacDonald made between 1992 and 1994. I am quoting from the unpublished original transcripts made available to me by the author, who later edited and published them in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 2. Belson, quoted in Paola Igliori, American Magus: Harry Smith, A Modern Alchemist (New York: Inanout Press, 1996), 19. 3. I am indebted here to Harry Smith biographer John Szwed for access to his unpublished research. 4. Smith, letter to Hilla Rebay, June 17, 1950. Guggenheim Museum Archives. 5. Rebay, letter to Smith, November 17, 1951. Guggenheim Museum Archives.
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Text by Carlos Valladares There are times when the white critic must sit down and listen. If he cannot listen and learn, then he must not concern himself with black creativity. —Bill Gunn, “To Be a Black Artist,” 1973 I think our artists have got to stop being so damned clear. But “clear” is not the word; it’s unjust to destroy “clear”: clear is good. “Flat” is what I’m trying to say. I want hallways, crevices, ditches, hills, and valleys. So I don’t expect you to go and understand it instantly. Just let yourself be taken on this artist’s trip. They’ll take you all sorts of places. —Bill Gunn, interviewed by Clyde Taylor, 1982 The world still hasn’t caught up with Bill Gunn. Throughout his life (1934–1989), he railed against and within institutions that rarely accorded him the respect or the space needed by this searing, maximalist visionary. But he never ceased to strive. Gunn built networks of solidarity, political and artistic (the two can never be separated).1 Today we have the proof in a body of work with which critics and public are still coming to grips: unpublished poems and short stories, novels, plays such as The Black Picture Show, an Emmy Award–winning teleplay, a subtly developed turn as the artist/husband in Kathleen Collins’s 1982 film Losing Ground, the scripts for two of the most audacious Hollywood films ever greenlit (The Angel Levine and The Landlord, both 1970), and three self-directed masterpieces (the never released Stop!, 1970, the classic Ganja & Hess, 1973, and the mammoth Personal Problems, 1980), toward which these notes on a Gunn poetics are aimed.2 Before continuing, we must reckon with that beastly process known as canonization. We must come to terms with the unseen violence of the process of posthumous recognition, especially as it pertains to women, nonbinary people, and artists of color. Although certain key allies, collaborators, and friends of Gunn are still alive to see the larger, too-belated recognition of his genius (runs in repertory cinemas, shiny home-video releases, lauds in major newspapers and magazines), Gunn himself is not. He died in 1989, at the age of fifty-four, of encephalitis and aids-related complications in a hospital in Nyack, New York, the day before his play The Forbidden City opened at the Public Theater in New York City.3 He lived to see neither the acclaimed restorations of his work nor the audiences flocking to see Collins’s Losing Ground, not to mention his own Ganja & Hess and his and Ishmael Reed’s Personal Problems (restored through the joint efforts of Jake Perlin and Kino Lorber). 4 Nicholas Forster, a lecturer in African American and Film & Media Studies at Yale University, is currently writing a biography of Gunn. For all these milestones (pluses for us now), we must never forget that racist establishment types stonewalled Gunn throughout his entire life, and that he did not live to flourish in the current culture, which fetes him both for better (the restorations of his work) and for worse (a feckless push for diversity that neoliberally acknowledges his existence at the expense of serious engagement with his work). On October 27, 2020, Ephraim Asili—the director of one of the best films of 2020, The Inheritance—posted on Instagram that he was listening to Carman Moore’s soundtrack LP of Personal Problems: “So glad that Bill Gunns soundtracks are finally getting pressed to vinyl and that his films are getting way overdue recognition (they love it when we die first [Black man shrugging emoji]).”5 100
COSMIC FREEZE FRAMES: A POETICS OF BILL GUNN
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Previous spread: Bill Gunn, 1982. Photo: © Marshall “Tres” Johnson This page: Sam Waymon in rehearsal for Bill Gunn’s Personal Problems, 1980. Photo: © Marshall “Tres” Johnson Opposite: Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor in Bill Gunn’s Personal Problems, 1980. Photo: courtesy Kino Lorber
What happens when words like “rediscovered” are unhesitatingly applied to the work of Gunn, who was never gone to those who knew or saw or were there since day one? Where is the place of the Black artist who lives for the art of film but gets no love back from the cultural and industry gatekeepers who own the means of motionpicture production? 6 It’s with these questions in mind that I use the fragment to absorb, breathe, glide across and within Gunn’s work. Why the fragment? In part, it’s due to a necessary push against grand narratives or moral meanings—against totalizing, against seeing one’s self mirrored and being content with the surface, against learning about where Gunn came from and whom he desired as a key to unlock the work. Such methods only serve to comfort the viewer with a false sense of wisdom, appeasing her desire to use the artist to “solve” the work. By contrast, the fragmentary look—which we can also call a poetic turn—evades such bland approaches to the work. Gunn himself: “Even though [what I do] is political I would like for it to be looked at as a true poem about me.”7 I am guided by Alexander G. Weheliye’s Black feminist complication of our understanding of race’s central role in “bare life” through his idea of “habeas viscus,” which “insists on the importance of miniscule movements, glimmers of hope, scraps of food, the interrupted dreams of freedom found in those spaces deemed devoid of human life.”8 These scraps and shivers of life can, indeed must, be gleaned within such dehumanizing
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spaces as the plantation, the ghetto, the camp. The cancellations that take place in such spaces are extended, as Gunn soon understood in the 1950s, into the Hollywood movie industry, where images of a knotty Black subjectivity are policed, watered down, or outright denied. In the world of film, I can think of no other work that pays closer, more careful attention to Weheliye’s glimmers than Personal Problems—shot for shot, a masterpiece of dazzling proportions. As I’ve written before, this 165-minute, two-part film was originally broadcast as a late-night program on WNYC in New York and KQED in San Francisco, then requisitioned and rejected by PBS.9 Reed, its cowriter and executive producer, was hardly fazed: “We knew that we’d made a mark when, after a showing on WNYC TV, Vertamae Grosvenor boarded a bus and the driver greeted her by her character’s name, Johnnie Mae.”10 The film, which has sometimes been referred to as a “Black meta soap opera,” is a collaboration among a host of beautiful Black minds: the director Gunn, the writer Reed, the poet/producer Steve Cannon, and a cross-generational cast with deep roots in Black film history (headlined by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor).11 Scenes are glimpsed in the life of Johnnie Mae (Smart-Grosvenor), a weary Harlem Hospital nurse who’s sick and tired of her long shifts, her cheating husband, her infrequent lover, her father-in-law, and the freeloading brother who crashes at her place in order to avoid a jail charge. Finding love in the city while bearing the omnipresent load of US racism, trying to
ease the bitter tensions that divide precariously middle-class families over generations—seldom have such themes been lent so cool yet sweeping a treatment as in Personal Problems. It’s a work lined with fragments as diverse as daytime soap opera, New Orleans jazz, race films, Chicago blues, and the cathartic, funereal rawness of John Cassavetes (Husbands, 1970, Love Streams, 1984), individual shards that must be both dwelled in and read shot by shot—as in a poem where you may dwell upon one unstable word or rush madly across entire fields of action. One such fragment: the performance of “Down on Me” for Johnnie Mae by her lover, the pianist Raymon (Sam Waymon, who wrote the song as well as performing it). 12 Even as Raymon sits down, her hands prop up his back, as if to massage the voice radiating these tender notes. The Sony video camera eerily slows down the movement of her head as she bobs it to the side and weeps silently with Waymon’s divine delivery. As a result, we can see the traces of where she was before she moved, and of where she’s going after she’s already started to move. “Come crashing down,” he sings, “come crashing down.” For me, it’s the definitive filmic scene when you want to know what it’s like to be surgingly overcome with emotion in real time. For Gunn as for the Cassavetes of Love Streams, the only thing interesting is love, its irresistible call. The loveliest touch in the scene, its button, is the length of a muscle spasm. It occurs when Waymon sustains the “me” in “down on me” for ages; all we
see is Smart-Grosvenor’s face as she waits, along with us, for the natural end of the note. But it keeps going. And going. And still going. Once it does end, Waymon garnishes the note with a subtle melisma. At that, her eyebrow raises in surprise. In that one involuntary twitch, her body acts out the poetry she recited to Waymon a few scenes earlier: “They say if you are a true believer—that is, if the faith runs river deep in your heart—it’s possible, in the instant before the yucca-colored night gives way to dawn, to witness a cosmic freeze-frame.” In one twitch, Smart-Grosvenor avoids the “loss of the human” that occurs when somebody is “captured” by the too-perfect, too-neat image, instead existing in a choppy film flow. 13 We can pause that twitch with a DVD player, rewind it and live it again and again, yet it will always escape the paltry explanations we fling at it. It would be remiss to call what Gunn f ilms “reality,” passive and generic. Reality in Gunn is not the mythic filming of life as capital-L “Life” lusted after by André Bazin—some kind of objective truth of cinema, the trace made into a monument of itself. Rather, the truth seen by Gunn and company appears to its audience in blips: precious as pearl daggers, or as the chipped ebony keys on which “sepia sambas” are composed. 14 The fragments—the eyebrow twitch, a champagne glass at brunch lifted to underline a bit of gossip—cannot be assimilated into a straight plot, yet they are painstakingly toiled over. The fragments record skins and shades that weren’t envisioned as worth noticing
with any delicacy by the makers of the Hollywood camera apparatus (Gunn: “We’re photographed like the side of a fence—we’re photographed so hard”). 15 Twenty-nine-year-old white cinematographer Robert Polidori wields the camera with the intent of twisting the glamour apparatus against its racist origins.16 Polidori and Gunn reject a top-down approach to cinematic-image construction, following wherever the actors want to take the piece. As Polidori told Reed, The way Hollywood works, they don’t like improvisations. They want the movie to follow a map. They get everything preplanned and precut so they can shoot with one kind of camera. You’re not jamming anymore. You’re playing the preset song, so the actors don’t get to take off. They have to mimic, so it’s robotic. But I was filming Personal Problems like improvisational jazz. 17 Such a highly unorthodox method of filming bolsters (what else?) poetry, that incommunicable domain of the quotidian that swerves to avoid crashing into institutions of power and fixed meaning. Recall the shot in Personal Problems when Gunn pans down to Waymon’s shiny black spats tapping out the pulse to his “One to One.” A crazy, inspired pan! All the singer’s sighs, all the love of the sight of blue lilies, all the lusciousness and the longing for Johnnie Mae that fills Raymon’s stage on this night (for only a night?), all the Black voices building toward the climax together: they all crystallize
into this one shot, the feet that scaffold and feed a roomful of crying faces. 18 The shot cuts to the heart of the film’s notion of a human as unrepresentable yet defiantly present; in a state of restless, blurry forming; engaged in a film act rather than ending as a filmed thing. 19 Such ontologies of process go beyond the concept of the totalized Man in art, that imaginary figure toward whom all creation tends, lazily, to be pitched. The struggle Gunn faced to communicate his Black aesthete’s vision of the world was one in which he tried neither to placate the white establishment’s notion of universality nor to buy into an AfricanAmerican establishment notion of what Sylvia Wynter calls an “ethno-aesthetics,” a reinforcing of the cultural Imaginary (a white-inclined separatism, binary prone, and uninterested in mélange, the poetics of relation, or frisson and fracture). Where is the place of pleasure, of the unrationalizable punctums of life? Gunn had been intrigued by such excess since childhood. He loved Oscar Wilde, man of the epigram, and Alexander the Great spoke to him more than such staid historical figures as George Washington Carver: “Not only did they say that [what Alexander the Great did] was real, but it was fantastical too.”20 It’s not a big leap to connect Gunn’s acceptance of childhood phantasy to his adult hatred of an essentialized Man who denies that very same phantasy, the Black Man or Woman artist who must “speak to their race,” who must engage “the race question” and thus is refused the right to obfuscation. Gunn and company instead are
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invested in sonic textures, shattered scenes, errant colors, poetry, what the autonomist philosopher Franco Berardi calls “the excess of sensuousness exploding into the circuitry of social communication and opening again the dynamic of the infinite game of interpretation: desire.”21 Ganja & Hess and Stop! queer and trouble desire, returning it to the quarrelsome erotic sketched out by figures such as Audre Lorde and Jean Cocteau. It happens, again, through the fragment: the ring-finger glinting on Ganja’s toe as she gives in to the death drive, a glacial, bewitching shot that adds yet another dimension to a body falsely presumed to be understood. Or the moment when the blood-addicted anthropologist Hess (Duane Jones) squeezes a cherry open and the widow Ganja (Marlene Clark) dips her red fingernail into the vampiric ooze, sucking the nail, licking the lip, baring her sharp canines. What clinches the scene is the glockenspiel of the film’s main theme, “You’ve Got to Learn to Let It Go,” a demented lullaby sound like the la-la’s in Krzysztof Komeda’s score to Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Here Gunn takes us into the realm of the erotic, whose most precise definition comes to us from Lorde, cited by Marlo D. David in her wonderful explication of desire in Gunn’s Stop! and Ganja & Hess: “The erotic is the measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”22 Where begins the ego, where the void? Partial answer: in between both gulfs, in a terrifying nowhere land where the rules of signification break down. This is what guides Gunn. He can never take an assignment at face value. Given the signifier of vampirism (= Blacula, = cheap blaxploitation hit that bolsters the Hollywood regime, = business as usual), he breaks the contract that would only hire him out as a rhinestone sharecropper to unseen masters of mediocrity. It is the ultimate act of eroticization. As if playing with a Russian doll, he unnests the metaphors folded into vampirism: addiction to one’s own blood, addiction to capital, addiction to sex. Each is given a galaxy of moments, places, sensations: the Black church where a preacher’s hand against an addict’s forehead is the pathway toward a long-needed reckoning between body and soul; the coagulated blood pooling onto white tiles from a suicided Black assistant’s neck, lapped up by Hess as if parched at the end of a long exodus—only to start his longer death march into insanity. What lingers in Stop!, a neo–Pier Paolo Pasolini psychosexual thriller on the basic mistrust that forms any one-to-one human equation (what Gunn films barely counts as “relation”-ships), is Gunn’s wild approach to space. Rooms are claustrophobic, bulging; the white lovers walk in and out of sight in ugly wide-angle views, while plan-séquences of their fights stretch on for merciless minutes without a cut. Gunn nails the irritable, lost quality of the main toxic relationship, its endlessness, which becomes the allegorical starting-point for the film’s journey: two straight white squares are set loose in Puerto Rico, meet a mixed Black/Puerto Rican swinger couple (the better half is Marlene Clark), and lose all sense of patriarchal ego in drug-fueled orgies that make Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice look like Full House. Outrageously, this movie has never been officially released. This major achievement of 1960s studio filmmaking has not been given the light of day by Warner Bros. Studios, despite the large following Gunn has commanded over the years. Waymon believes that an original print of Stop! is stored in the Warner Bros. archives, and a good print of the film played in 1989 at a posthumous retrospective
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of Gunn’s work at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Perhaps readers might help in contacting Warner Bros. and asking them to release Stop! from the jail of obscurity in which this frightening, dense, sexy film has wallowed for now more than fifty years. 23 The longtime disrespect accorded Gunn’s legacy is not simply a matter of distribution. When Personal Problems was rereleased in 2018, the New York Times naturally decided to review it for the first time. It was a Critics’ Pick. It was lauded for its “vitality” and “integrity” (despite “all its rough edges”—words to unpack). But out of this curiously distant appraisal, a telltale line slipped through: “Personal Problems contains not a single shot that can be called beautiful.”24 One would laugh if one were not so horrified by the casual racism here, masked under an identity-based appreciation begrudgingly, correctly doled out. By whose standards is it not beautiful? Whose beauty is even under consideration? What’s the standard: Quentin Tarantino? Marriage Story (2019)? For all my contempt for such a line, I refuse the balm of surprise. After all, it was in the Times that Gunn himself had to read a review of Ganja & Hess in which the reviewer left twenty minutes after the film started because he couldn’t understand what was happening, then decided to publish a full review anyway. In response, Gunn wrote “To Be a Black Artist,” an excoriating cri de coeur published in the Times as a letter to the editor that still speaks to us today. Gunn takes the paper and other likeminded publications to task for unchecked racist standards: “Another critic wondered where was the race problem. If he looks closely, he will find it in his own review.”25 Through language, Gunn’s lifelong medium, he exposes the annihilations and dehumanizations wielded by a petty-minded, misogynist critical establishment: “When I first came into the ‘theatre,’ black women who were actresses were referred to as ‘great gals’ by white directors
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and critics. Marlene Clark, one of the most beautiful women and actresses I have ever known, was referred to as a ‘brownskinned looker’ (New York Post). That kind of disrespect could not have been cultivated in 110 minutes. It must have taken at least a good 250 years.”26 So when I read a regular Times reviewer in 2018 still finding himself falling into the easy traps of the racist unconscious of US culture, we can only say that such disrespect extends a good 400 years more. It’s the kind of slip explained best by Diana Sands’s unforgettable line in Gunn’s Landlord script. When asked what she plans to do with her mixed-race son (the father is Beau Bridges), Sands gives voice to the fury of Bill Gunn: “I want him to be adopted white so he can grow up casual. Like his daddy.” Why Gunn now? What do these ghostly video images of Black love, these grainy bootlegs of ’60s orgies, tell us about where we are going in the realms of love, politics, and art in these times of pandemic, acceleration, depression, state violence? In his seminal book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (2012), Berardi provides the start of an answer: “Since the 1980s, precarity has provoked a process of desolidarization and disaggregation of the social composition of work. Virtualization has been a complementary cause of desolidarization: precarization makes the social body frail at the level of work, while virtualization makes the social body frail at the level of affection.”27 Gunn’s films— whether he is in front of or behind the camera— restore the passion of the body tenfold. Bill Gunn, Black artist, transforms the symbols and the language that spurn us into action. It is the individual’s choice to listen. Whatever she does, with or without her, Gunn’s poetry continues to slide on, soaking in blue lilies and wet cherries, rambling ever forward.
For Moira Fradinger, Pamela Lee, and Kobena Mercer.
1. As regards this notion, I think in particular of Clyde Taylor’s essay “We Don’t Need Another Hero: Anti-Theses on Aesthetics” (1988) and its critique of the late-1960s Black Arts Movement in the United States: “The Black Aesthetic sprang from the Black Arts Movement and largely follows the description set out by Larry Neal: ‘The Black Arts Movement is the cultural arm of the Black revolution.’ The misleading influence of aesthetics is visible in this semi-autonomous conception of cultural production apart from social and material production. This self-concept of the Black Arts Movement, which reproduces the separate aesthetic realms of firstworld institutions, surrendered vital dimensions of economics and politics to others.” In Mbye B. Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins, eds., Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 81. 2. In 2020, the Criterion Channel highlighted three films in which Bill Gunn was involved. I’d already seen and loved Ganja & Hess and Personal Problems, so the biggest revelation for me was The Angel Levine, directed by Ján Kadár, scripted by Gunn, and based on a story by Bernard Malamud. Harry Belafonte, Zero Mostel, and Ida Kamińska all appear at the peak of their careers. Mostel is an aging mensch on welfare, whose wife (Kamińska, a Polish theater star, Oscar nominated as the Jewish widow in Kadár’s equally powerful Holocaust melodrama The Shop on Main Street, 1965) suffers a possibly fatal heart attack. God sends Mostel a Black Jewish guardian angel (Belafonte) to guide Kamińska to health and Mostel toward a miracle—that is, if Mostel chooses to believe in Belafonte’s gift. It’s a film about being pushed past belief in love, charity, and brotherhood when faced with the racist, classist, ageist big city. Would that all guardian-angel films were as tenderly textured as this, as sentimental without treacle. 3. See Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell, “Gunn, Bill (William Harrison Gunn),” in Davis and Mitchell, eds., Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 149. 4. “The assignment of authorship to a single director has always been an illusion. To call this Gunn’s movie would be a misnomer that imposes the same language that has historically devalued the work of black artists. The dictatorial regime of the television writers room or the power granted by the director’s chair was dispersed among a group of artists that ranged from actors, poets, and writers to anthropologists, experimental filmmakers, jazz musicians, and models. As [actor Mizan] Nunes recalled, the project was the work of ‘outlaw artists’ and the cast and crew made their own rules. This is apparent in the concluding credits. Though the lead actors and director are delineated and there is a note that the project began with ‘an original idea by Ishmael Reed,’ other roles were fluid and less clear. Throughout the production actors served as editors and producers when needed just as writers became assistants when necessary.” Nicholas Forster, “Improvisational Jamming: The Process and Production of Personal Problems,” Metrograph. Available online at https://metrograph.com/improvisationaljamming-the-process-and-production-of-personal-problems/ (accessed December 10, 2020). 5. Ephraim Asili, Instagram post, October 27, 2020. Available online at https://www.instagram.com/p/CG2YdSIlE4w/ (accessed December 10, 2020).
Previous spread: Marlene Clark in Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess, 1973. Photo: courtesy Kino Lorber Opposite: Marlene Clark and Duane Jones in Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess, 1973. Photo: courtesy Kino Lorber This page: Dr. Alan Beckles, Sam Waymon, Niamani Mutima, Lamaris Moses, and Bill Gunn. Photo: © Marshall “Tres” Johnson
6. With The Inheritance—much like Garrett Bradley with Time (2020) and RaMell Ross with Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)—Asili extends the tradition forged by Gunn and other Black artists of his generation (St. Clair Bourne, Kathleen Collins, Ivan Dixon, Melvin Van Peebles): a fantastic reveal of the gaps in language, the thrill of grainy and knotty texts, le gai savoir. 7. Gunn, in Hector Lino, Jr., “Black Picture Show,” interview, in Impressions: A Black Arts and Culture Magazine 1, no. 2 (Spring 1975), 8. Available online at www.graffitiverite.com/Bill_Gunn_ Interview.htm (accessed December 10, 2020). 8. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 12. Weheliye critiques what the philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben theorized as “bare life”—life before it is integrated into “good life,” into a sociable, political order—by centering our understanding of the biopolitical within race and Blackness. “Bare life” is an exclusionary category whose explicit and eventual goal is an eventual inclusion in the biopolitical order—one based upon death and destruction—that governs how modern neoliberal capitalistic society is organized. Agamben pays attention to the deleterious effects of establishing a bare life in contrast with a “good” (complete) life: “The realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.” He warns that “until a completely new politics—that is, a politics no longer founded on the exceptio of bare life—is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile.” Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995, Eng. trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 12, 13. In striving for that same “completely new politics,” Weheliye’s nuanced critique of Foucault and Agamben points out the totalizing theorization of a capital-M “Man” that lurks beneath their formulations. The latter two take, as their ubiquitous modern example, the Nazi concentration-camp victim, labeling the degradation of subjecthood and individuality within the space of the camp an “exception” to the polis, and in the process taking for granted the quotidian existence of the Black subject as always already within a state of exceptio in otherwise “ordinary” circumstances (living within policed neighborhoods, with higher and earlier mortality rates, etc.). It is with this in mind that Weheliye turns to Black feminist theorists such as Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, as well as to the literature of Toni Morrison—whose thinking I, too, keep in mind in the course of this essay. 9. Carlos Valladares, “Personal Problems,” Film Comment 55, no. 1 (January–February 2019): 46–47. 10. Ishmael Reed, “The Black Artist Hollywood Couldn’t Buy,” Criterion.com, August 27, 2020. Available online at criterion.com/ current/posts/7073-the-black-artist-hollywood-couldn-t-buy (accessed December 14, 2020). 11. In addition to her starring turn in Personal Problems and other film appearances including Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Jonathan Demme’s and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1998), Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor is perhaps best known for her
revolutionary work in food writing and culinary anthropology. She was born into a Gullah family in South Carolina, was active in the Black Arts Movement alongside Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni, and wrote the classic cookbook/memoir Vibration Cooking: or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970). Dash is currently directing a documentary on Smart-Grosvenor’s book and her legacy. Says chef Thérèse Nelson, the founder of the Black Culinary History project: Smart-Grosvenor “showed us that when you break down a culture through its food, you cut through a lot of nonsense and get to the truth much more clearly than any other medium. The book starts from a space of fullness and asks that we see the genius in this culture in a world that is built to diminish and marginalize it. Her work wasn’t about acceptance or translation for the mainstream as much as it was about killing the myth that we were less than. Her work blew my mind because it was so rooted and so specific, and didn’t need to qualify itself.” Quoted in Mayukh Sen, “Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor Is the Unsung Godmother of American Food Writing,” Vice, February 20, 2018. Available online at www.vice. com/en/article/evmbwj/vertamae-smart-grosvenor-vibrationcooking-profile (accessed December 10, 2020). 12. Sam Waymon, the brother of Nina Simone, composed the score to Gunn’s Ganja & Hess and played a supporting role in the film as the Preacher, who doubles as narrator. 13. Judith Butler, “Precarious Life,” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), 145. 14. “Pearl daggers” is a reference to Ganja & Hess, where Dr. Hess is infected with a thirst for blood from a stab wound he receives from an ancient dagger. “Sepia sambas” comes from a poem that Johnnie Mae recites to Raymon in a garden, which was Gunn’s own: “They say that ebony rumbas, sepia sambas. The dance of the colors is so splendid that even the lemon-colored sun is dazzled, laid back, waits her turn. And baby blue and apple green have no shame jitterbugging on the clouds. And when quiet gray shakes her magenta, even the wind won’t behave.” Later, Johnnie Mae is interviewed by an offscreen voice (Gunn) who asks her to recite the poem she has been composing. She complies, then begins reciting the first words of the poem above: “They say if you are a true believer—that is, if the faith runs river deep in your heart.” She then goes on, however, to recite a completely different set of lines: “it’s possible, in the eyelids of one of these mornings, that you, too, will witness this exotic vision. And the wind, heady with the perfume of the colors, will tickle you. Do not laugh, weep, for, from dawn to dusk, anything can happen.” Gunn lets both poems stand as definitive works-in-progress. 15. Gunn, in Taylor, “Bill Gunn: Climbing the Seven Monied Media,” interview, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 10, no. 2–3 (Fall/Winter 2010): 102. The original interview was conducted in the summer of 1982. 16. For more on racial biases in film-camera stock see Ann Hornaday, “‘12 Years a Slave,’ ‘Mother of George,’ and the aesthetic politics of filming black skin,” Washington Post, October 17, 2013, available online at www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/ movies/12-years-a-slave-mother-of-george-and-the-aestheticpolitics-of-filming-black-skin/2013/10/17/282af868-35cd-11e380c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html (accessed December 10, 2020),
and Rosie Cima, “How Photography Was Optimized for White Skin Color,” Priceonomics, April 24, 2015, available online at https:// priceonomics.com/how-photography-was-optimized-for-whiteskin (accessed December 10, 2020). Hornaday writes, “Filmmakers working with celluloid also need to take into account that most American film stocks weren’t manufactured with a sensitive enough dynamic range to capture a variety of dark skin tones. Even the female models whose images are used as reference points for color balance and tonal density during film processing—commonly called ‘China Girls’—were, until the mid-1990s, historically white.” 17. Robert Polidori, quoted in Reed, “The Black Artist Hollywood Couldn’t Buy.” 18. I centralize the face, then flit away from its explicitness, in the manner of Butler: “To respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life, or, rather, the precariousness of life itself. This cannot be an awakeness, to use [Emmanuel Levinas’s] word, to my own life, and then an extrapolation from an understanding of my own precariousness to an understanding of another’s precarious life. It has to be an understanding of the precariousness of the Other. This is what makes the face belong to the sphere of ethics.” Italics mine. In Butler, “Precarious Life,” 134. With Personal Problems, Gunn films a plentitude of Black faces, which neither the big nor the small screen had ever tried to meet head-on before, whilst going beyond the face, locating Butler’s and Levinas’s face in feet, in the soft undulating waves of the upper Hudson River, in the kicking legs of a waiter (Marshall M. Johnson III) who practices his aikido moves while working, in clouds clearing over the sharp wake of a Black funeral: i.e., in all the shards, human and nonhuman, that make movies move. Butler, again: “The face, if we are to put words to its meaning, will be that for which no words really work; the face seems to be a kind of sound, the sound of language evacuating its sense” (134). 19. For more on the film act and the open-ended film that is formed as much by what’s traditionally constituted as “the viewer” as by “the author,” see Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema,” Cinéaste 4, no. 3 (Winter 1970–71): 1–10. 20. Gunn, in Lino, “Black Picture Show,” 2. 21. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, intervention series 14 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 21. 22. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” in Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984). Quoted here from Marlo D. David, “‘Let It Go Black’: Desire and the Erotic Subject in the Films of Bill Gunn,” Black Camera 2, no. 2 (Spring 2011). Available online at www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/ blackcamera.2.2.26 (accessed November 11, 2020). 23. I was able to see Stop! through a bootleg leaked in the spring of 2020 by an ardent cinephile, apparently from the VHS copy that was screened during a Bill Gunn retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2010. 24. Glenn Kenny, “‘Personal Problems,’ a Look at African-American Life in 1980 New York,” New York Times, March 29, 2018. 25. Gunn, “To Be a Black Artist,” New York Times, May 13, 1973. 26. Ibid. 27. Berardi, The Uprising, 128.
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It’s been said that serious art collectors tend to fall into four tribes: the enterpriser, with roots in the Medici tradition of patronage; the connoisseur, the market’s intellectual buyers; the trophy hunter, for whom acquisition is an end in itself; and the aesthete, for whom art is an emotional extension of their being.1 Ask Artnews-top-200 collectors about their motivations and methods, and their tribe is often immediately apparent. But through a series of phone conversations, interview transcripts, and essays, the late financier/philanthropist Donald Marron—who assembled a museum-caliber collection of postwar art over six decades—emerges as a collector from a lost era, possessing an almost boyish devotion, an inveterate openness, and a democratic ethos. Everyone’s opinion resonates, no matter what background they come from. As Marron’s private curator Matthew Armstrong said last August, in addition to talking with expert curator-friends such as John Elderfield, Robert Storr, Ann Temkin, and Kirk Varnedoe, Marron would often ask nonart people, like folks at his office, what they thought of a piece, interested not so much in scholarship as in talking with those who could “see a little beyond the frame . . . [and] compelled you to think more dramatically.”2 Marron put together an unparalleled private collection of twentieth- and twenty-f irst-century paintings, drawings, and prints. The roster of nearly 300 works is a veritable tour of the Western canon, ranging from major works by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso on through Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Ellsworth Kelly, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Gerhard Richter, and Mark Grotjahn. This spring Phaidon will publish Don Marron: Chronicle of Collecting, a book surveying not only a far-ranging passion but a courageous and lifelong evolution of taste. Yet even within New York’s art bubble, Marron remains enigmatic, a cognoscente of fairly humble origins who rose to champion future marquee artists before they were household names and to head the board of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), donating some 500 artworks to the institution, assisting it in multiple expansion projects,
and becoming a trusted confidant for its curators. What kind of collector was this visionary, who left an indelible cultural mark on the city he credited for his success? “There was an innate respect and love and appreciation of the art, but at the same time, art wasn’t placed in a situation where we revered it or understood its significance,” Don’s son William Marron tells me of the childhood he shared with his sister, Serena Marron. While certain works stayed with them throughout their lives, walls in their apartment were rarely static; “Growing up,” he says, “this allowed you to have your own individual reactions to the different works, rather than to be drowned in the history and the value of them.”3 William recalls his parents encouraging a warm, boisterous home, with plenty of roughhousing and antics, often in uncomfortable proximity to irreplaceable masters, flirting with catastrophe. He, Serena, and their friends would ride Razor scooters through the rooms and hallways and he spent
endless hours bouncing a tennis ball, an easy ricochet into a painting. He remembers one close call when, carrying a snack from the kitchen back to his bedroom, he tripped and a dab of ketchup landed on an artwork. “I grabbed my dad from his room,” he says with a chuckle. “He was very reassuring and relaxed. It constantly seemed like we were having these little misses, and they always worked out fine from a preservation perspective. My father trusted us, but I also think he trusted the art.”4 Despite Don Marron’s depth of knowledge about art, he wasn’t a scholar by trade; his joy came from the natural reflex to a captivating work, the visceral connection to beauty—the hardest reaction to achieve. Marron considered art one of the most visible aspects of genius, though he increasingly felt that painting was moving away from aesthetic beauty toward an agony of emotion.5 Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher tells the story of Marron’s Cézanne watercolors, studiously protected from light in a folio that he occasionally removed to “share their beauty” with a friend: Don always knew that he was only the custodian of these treasures for a limited time, remembers Glimcher.6 “Every time we left a gallery, or a new museum, or someone’s house, or a fair, he’d always try to talk about our reactions, how I felt about the artwork,” explains William Marron. “We wouldn’t necessarily get into too much intellectual detail.”7 In this way the collection emotionally bound Marron to his offspring—which is not to say that every piece that circulated through the family’s life elicited a sanguine response from the children, or that his father expected one. As a kid, William was unsettled by a certain Roy Lichtenstein; something about a particular canvas the family owned—mainly, the exaggerated teardrop in the woman’s eye—unnerved the young boy in a way he couldn’t quite articulate. In contrast, he found himself intimately drawn to Mark Rothko’s No. 22 (Reds) (1957), and credits his father’s patience with guiding him to see Abstract Expressionism. Serena Marron for her part was inspired one year to celebrate their father’s birthday by painting a book of meticulous miniature
Jacoba Urist profiles the legendary collector.
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Top to bottom: Ed Ruscha, Smash, 1963, oil on canvas, 71¾ × 67¼ inches (182.2 × 170.8 cm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Gift of Helen and Charles Schwab through The Art Supporting Foundation. Artwork © 2021 Ed Ruscha. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel Gerhard Richter, Helen, 1963, oil on canvas, 43 3⁄8 × 39 3⁄8 inches (110 × 100 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of UBS. Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0001) Roy Lichtenstein, Mirror #10, 1970, oil and Magna on canvas, diameter: 24 inches (61 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of UBS. Artwork © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photo: courtesy Estate of Roy Lichtenstein
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copies of all the works of art in the house, and she has spent several afternoons since his unexpected death creating her own versions of some of the masterpieces.8 “Don understands the value of art,” emphasizes Larry Gagosian: “that it makes kids dream, that chasing it quickens your pulse, that its presence nourishes a community.”9 Reflecting on how his affaire de coeur with modern art began, Marron confessed to a MoMA oral historian, Sharon Zane, that he hadn’t been an especially visual child, but felt that after decades of collecting he had developed an unusual memory for images. “I think many collectors have this,” Marron explained. “They’ll show me a picture and I’ll say, ‘I know I’ve seen that somewhere before.’ And sure enough, I’ll go back and there it is.”10 A consummate New Yorker, he remembered that the first time he was overtaken by an artwork was as a teenager in what he dubbed the “1911” room” at MoMA, a Cubist gallery of Picassos and Georges Braques. “I couldn’t stay very long,” he reminisced. “It just made me so excited to be there and to see those pictures.”11 Marron elaborated on that formative visit in conversation with Michael Shnayerson: “It was the power of the composition, and the feeling that you were seeing something that hadn’t existed before.”12 Marron’s next crucial encounter would come years later, when, newly married to his first wife and in need of art for his apartment, he discovered Hudson River School painting from the mid-nineteenth century. The period certainly appealed to him but also had a great benefit for a first-time buyer: relative affordability. “In a very modest way that was my first collection,” he would remember. “We bought a marvelous, little, teeny [Albert] Bierstadt of a boat on the water—a very small Bierstadt, maybe 6 by 9.”13 From there, an exhibition of monochromatic prints in East Hampton’s Guild Hall ignited a serious interest in lithography, which eventually led to a visit to the Los Angeles print workshop Gemini G.E.L., on a day when they were making Frank Stella’s River of Ponds series (1971). “I knew nothing about contemporary art at that time, and I was just stunned by how great they were,” explained Marron, who eschewed popular
criticism of lithography’s overcommerciality and believed that the more you understood the technique of contemporary printmaking, the more you appreciated the art form.14 After becoming fascinated by prints, Marron gradually earned an invitation behind Leo Castelli’s velvet rope, a literal as well as metaphorical hurdle to a space reserved for the legendary dealer’s favorite collectors and latest offerings. Even as PaineWebber CEO from 1980 to 2000, Marron spent countless Saturday afternoons in Manhattan galleries, perennially on the hunt. MoMA director Glenn Lowry reflects on his visual methods in Chronicle of Collecting: “Don never rushed to judgment and would return often to a painting or drawing that appealed to him, questioning its qualities over and over again . . . he had the rare ability to be comfortable in his uncertainty, to not feel that he had to make a firm decision before he was ready to do so.”15 Works of art, Marron well understood, often reveal themselves slowly, through patience and discipline. In Lowry’s view, it was an uncanny ability to examine art in a dispassionate way that distinguished Marron as a collector, testing the confines of his own taste time and again. And “when Don married Catie, she quickly became an important part of the decision-making process in their collection,” recalls Bill Acquavella. “There was not a painting in their apartment that both of them did not want to be there. The combination of Don’s and Catie’s eye helped to create one of the great collections.”16 In fact, without Marron’s eye, MoMA would look quite different from the way it does today: appointed to the museum’s board of trustees in 1975 and becoming president of it a decade later, he oversaw its third expansion project. In 1984, the Modern more than doubled its gallery space and added an auditorium, two restaurants, and a bookstore in an expansion designed by landmark architect César Pelli. “You had to persuade the city, the state, you had to raise the private money to handle our share of financing, you had to work closely with the curators and staff of the museum to make sure that what you wanted was possible,” Marron told Zane. “And you had to do all of that with the serious limitation that you
didn’t have any more space, that you had to do this on the existing footprint of the museum. And there was one absolute rule for us, which was, we could not touch the [sculpture] garden.”17 So began an odyssey for Marron and the board, as they navigated architectural, financial, and zoning hurdles to reimagine not only a museum but a cityscape central to his identity. “My view is that New York City is heavily dependent, for its success and leadership, on tourism,” Marron said in 1994, words that echo more powerfully post-covid. “Expanding a great museum is important,” he added, because New York is “considered not only the financial capital of the world, but one of the two or three arts capitals of the world.”18 Central to Marron’s vision was the idea that art belonged not only in homes for a family to savor, or in museums to arouse a wide public, but in corporate settings too. An early, fierce champion of art in the workplace, Marron perceived the power of visual experience in reception areas, hallways, and conference rooms to ignite his employees’ imagination, even in the numbers-oriented finance industry. “We all spend probably a third of our lives in our offices,” Marron remarked in 2005. “Therefore, if you can expose us to another aspect of creativity in our time, it’s a good thing, particularly in the securities business.”19 As PaineWebber’s chairman in the 1980s and ’90s, Marron built a widely admired corporate collection—“formidable,” according to New York Times arts reporter Carol Vogel. 20 Under his leadership, PaineWebber amassed hundreds (and, later, thousands) of works by the likes of Richter, Lucian Freud, Philip Guston, Jenny Holzer, and Elizabeth Murray, as well as commissioning new art. In an especially notable instance, Susan Rothenberg, in her Sag Harbor studio over the summer of 1988, created a suite of six paintings—twirling figures on wood panels, together seeming to form “a ring of dancers around the room”—for the executive dining space of PaineWebber’s midtown headquarters. 21 UBS acquired PaineWebber in 2000, naming Marron chairman of UBS America. Two decades later, the aim of the UBS collection is still to capture the most significant artists of its time;
Previous spread, left: Donald Marron, c. 1984. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY Previous spread, right: The Marron family’s apartment, New York. Photo: © Ngoc Minh Ngo This page: Left to right: Don Marron, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller, and Richard Oldenburg, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984. Digital image: © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Photo: Evelyn Hofer, Photographic Archive
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recent site-specific installations include Cerith Wyn Evans’s More Light Research (2019), a monumental suspension of white neon and glass that dominates the entrance lobby of UBS’s offices in London. As the firm’s collection grew, Marron realized that it required serious, dedicated oversight, from the selection of new artwork to the conservation of what had become a major asset. In 1984, he hired MoMA curator Monique Beudert, followed by Armstrong in 1995, who remained an indelible fixture of Marron’s collecting even after they both left UBS, advising Marron in his personal realm until his death. “While the term ‘corporate collection’ often conjures images of sterile offices lined with prints of well-known images, the UBS PaineWebber collection is different largely because Mr. Marron has overseen so many of the acquisitions,” wrote Vogel for the New York Times in 2002, when UBS PaineWebber promised thirty-seven important works to MoMA. 22 Discussing the gift, Lowry credited Marron’s boldness: “Don was quite courageous. It’s not the kind of safe collection most corporations build.”23 As of Marron’s death, more than 30,000 artworks resided in over 700 offices worldwide, spanning painting, photography, drawing, and—unlike his personal collection— sculpture and time-based art. To honor the UBS Art Collection’s founder after his death, the bank purchased Choctaw-Cherokee painter and sculptor Jeffrey Gibson’s you have set my soul on fire (2019), a dazzling acrylic-and-glass-bead work that bridges indigenous craft and geometric abstraction.24 Indeed, art and finance have been strange and symbiotic bedfellows for centuries, if not millennia. Marron’s thinking went like this: “Wall Street anticipates the future. Why limit yourself to financial ways of doing it? Good contemporary art reflects the society, and great contemporary art anticipates [it].”25 He also argued that “contemporary art reflects the society that creates it, and Wall Street is certainly a part of that [culture].”26 Marron had his own voracious style of looking for new acquisitions. “We never stayed too long on one work and sometimes even our friends who came with us thought it was a little funny how quickly we
went through,” William Marron remarked of their time at British and Swiss art fairs, “but the pace never took away our reactions to it.”27 He recalls one of his first studio visits, as an eleven-year-old, with his father to see Ed Ruscha in Los Angeles. His father provided no fanfare or preamble, letting him judge the master’s work on its merit. “I do remember feeling like I saw something special,” he says fondly. 28 On a 2015 studio visit, Don Marron and Mark Bradford famously bonded as soon as Bradford’s door swung open: six-foot-six Marron met the notoriously tall artist eye to eye, and both men burst out laughing. 29 Despite the pleasure of occasions like this, studio visits offended Marron’s intrinsic sense of fairness, asking the collector or curator, as they do, to appraise a year or two of a person’s life and work in just a few moments. Yet Brice Marden told me, reflecting on his friendship and studio time with Marron, “They know what they’re doing, these collectors. They’re all doing different things. But I liked what he was doing. I always felt very comfortable with him. You didn’t have to worry about what he was going to do with your work. He got a couple of very good pictures and he did good things with them, giving a big six-panel painting of mine to the Modern.” At the end of his life, Marron leased space in Manhattan’s Fuller Building to showcase his personal trove of modern classics, but included younger names like Jonas Wood and Christian Marclay as well. Marron was busy meeting with museum curators and other collectors there, tireless in his pursuit of art.30 Armstrong tells the story of a Brice Marden show at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue location in the fall of 2019. “There was one work in particular—rich in glowing, glowering garnet red—that was phenomenal,” recounts Armstrong. He immediately called Marron, who left a meeting and came straight to the gallery, buying the work on paper on the spot. Marron passed away while the deal was in process and the artwork arrived shortly after his death. “I unpacked it myself and looked at it alone,” recalls Armstrong. “There it was: a glowing triumph, a tempest of flame and energy, his valediction.”31
1. See Evan Beard, “The Four Tribes of Art Collectors,” Artsy, January 22, 2018. Available online at www.artsy.net/article/evanbeard-four-tribes-art-collectors (accessed January 27, 2021). 2. Matthew Armstrong, in Anna Dickie, “Conversation|Curator: Matthew Armstrong on Collector Donald B. Marron,” Ocula Magazine, August 14, 2020, available online at https://ocula.com/ magazine/conversations/matthew-armstrong-on-collector-donaldmarron/ (accessed January 27, 2021). 3. William Marron, conversation with the author, December 16, 2020 . 4. Ibid. 5. See Michael Shnayerson, “Remembering Donald Marron: The Art Collector in His Own Words,” Artnews, December 30, 2019, available online at www.artnews.com/art-news/news/donaldmarron-art-collector-interview-1202673926/ (accessed January 27, 2021). 6. Arne Glimcher, “Recollection,” in Don Marron: Chronicle of Collecting (London and New York: Phaidon, forthcoming spring 2021), 12. 7. William Marron, conversation with the author. 8. See William Marron, “Remembrance (II),” in Chronicle of Collecting, 107. 9. Larry Gagosian, “Remembrance (III),” in ibid., 188. 10. Donald Marron, in Sharon Zane, “Interview with Donald B. Marron, New York City, 13 September 1994,” The Museum of Modern Art Oral History Program 1–2, available online at https:// www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/learn/archives/ marron_final_access_web.pdf (accessed January 31, 2021). 11. Ibid., 1. 12. Donald Marron, quoted in Shnayerson, “Remembering Donald Marron.” 13. Donald Marron, in Zane, “Interview with Donald B. Marron,” 2. 14. Ibid., 5. 15. Glenn D. Lowry, “Remembrance (I),” in Chronicle of Collecting, 21. 16. Bill Acquavella, “Remembrance (IV),” in ibid., 189. 17. Donald Marron, in Zane, “Interview with Donald B. Marron,” 17. 18. Ibid., 23. 19 Donald Marron, quoted in Jane L. Levere, “Openers: Suits; Art and Mammon,” New York Times, January 30, 2005. 20. Carol Vogel, “The Modern Gets a Trove from Corporate Collection,” April 11, 2002, available online at https://www.nytimes. com/2002/04/11/arts/the-modern-gets-a-trove-from-corporatecollection.html (accessed January 27, 2021). 21. Michael Brenson, “Gallery View; In This Painter’s World, Everything Is Several Things,” New York Times, May 6, 1990. 22 Vogel, “The Modern Gets a Trove.” 23. Lowry, quoted in ibid. 24. See “Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Donald B Marron,” UBS Contemporary Art website, available online at www.ubs.com/ global/en/our-firm/art/2020/life-and-legacy.html (accessed January 27, 2021). 25. Donald Marron, quoted in Shnayerson, “Remembering Donald Marron.” 26. Donald Marron, quoted in Vogel, “The Modern Gets a Trove.” 27. William Marron, conversation with the author. 28. Ibid. 29. See Shnayerson, “Remembering Donald Marron.” 30. Ibid. 31. Armstrong, in Dickie, “Conversation|Curator: Matthew Armstrong on Collector Donald B. Marron.”
Left to right: Don Marron, Kynaston McShine, Marshall S. Cogan, and Richard Oldenburg at the opening of the exhibition Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 1, 1989. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Photo: Star Black
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Top to bottom: Lee Krasner, Bird Talk, 1955, oil, paper, photographs, and collage on canvas, 58 × 56 inches (147.3 × 142.2 cm) © 2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © Christie’s Images/ Bridgeman Images Roy Lichtenstein, Post Visual, 1993, oil and Magna on canvas, 96 × 80 inches (243.8 × 203.2 cm), UBS Art Collection. Artwork: © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photo: courtesy Estate of Roy Lichtenstein Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent, 1999, C-print mounted on Diasec in artist’s frame, 81½ × 132 5⁄8 inches (207 × 336.9 cm), printed 2016, UBS Art Collection. Artwork © 2021 Andreas Gursky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, Germany
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ON MING SMITH a life of magical thinking
An interview by Nicola Vassell
Opening spread: Ming Smith, Self-Portrait as Josephine, New York, 1986 Above: Ming Smith, Ever-So-Hip Kiddies, Setúbal, Portugal, 1979
Ming Smith, Curiosities, Brooklyn, 1976, from the series Coney Island
It is what happens between here and there and time. I deal with the blackness of blackness, the darkness, the mystery of it all. —Ming Smith Ming Smith will tell you that the essence of her great ability is instinct. That great ability—photography—is also a calling and, by most visible accounts, cosmic work. Smith was born in Detroit and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. She tethered herself to photography at an early age and swiftly exhibited an aptitude for it. After studying at Howard University and moving to New York to work as a model, Smith became the first and only female member of Kamoinge, a collective of Black photographers founded by Roy DeCarava, and the first Black woman photographer whose work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her practice is a tale of four decades spent examining transitory occurrence—intervals at which figures blur, atmospheres alter, light shadows, vistas haunt, souls whir, and opposites engage in allied work. This is the domain of the mystical, the oblique, the seen and unseen. Smith’s approach is both scientific and celestial, and experimentation and adventure mark her fascination with detail as it stretches across form and mood. Lessons from her early life bear continually on her being, and her dedication to music, dance, and theater underlines the synergistic excellence that characterizes her secondary, if metaphoric, occupations as anthropologist, historian, and poet. Fundamentally, she employs the inexhaustible property of energy to cradle her work. It is a pact with the universe that guides her wittingly, in the same way that genius acknowledges a greater, infinite force as its wellspring. On the occasion of her recent monograph Ming Smith, published by Aperture, and the exhibitions Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, I am delighted to conduct this interview as a prelude to my gallery’s inaugural exhibition with the artist. NICOLA VASSELL I’d
like to mark this point in time, because we’re going to travel. Let’s discuss how you feel about being an artist right now. What does it mean to be Ming Smith in 2021? MING SMITH That’s the heaviest question up front. There’s conflict in the world and conflict within ourselves. We’re in lockdown and cooped up, so it’s given us time to reflect. I’m continuing to do my work under dire circumstances, but it’s been that way from the beginning. I’ve always worked in solitude, it’s nothing new. Everyone around me is in solitude as well, so people are living in enforced isolation rather than choosing to withdraw, and that friction is real. NV You were born in Detroit and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. Talk about your Midwestern upbringing. MS The main lesson I learned growing up was hard work. Hard work and being a good person. We had Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and segregation, but we took every circumstance and made the best of it. We never talked about the ills, only about moving forward with positivity and love. NV Your first official photograph is Fifth Grade Friends [c. 1957]. You took it when you were of single-digit age. Even at that early point, it shows your facility for capturing the liminal, the crux of a serendipitous moment. How did it happen? MS My father was a photographer, he had an Argus C3. My mother had a camera also; it was a Brownie and hung in the living room coat closet. She never used it, so there was always fresh film. I went on an elementary-school outing and took photographs of my friends in class. We went to see a big public sculpture of Christopher Columbus that had been newly gifted from Italy, so that was the setting. NV You moved to New York in the early 1970s after studying microbiology at Howard. You did some modeling, then joined Kamoinge, a collective of Black photographers founded by Roy DeCarava. What was it like making your way through the rough streets of New York? MS Well, I could hide out. I could hide out before going on modeling assignments by putting on an old raincoat and hat. That way I wouldn’t be harassed going onto the 2/3 subway downtown from Harlem. But really, when I came to New York, it was pure magic. My first agency, Black Beauty, gave me a list of photographers to visit. If the photographers liked your look, they would take your picture and use it in their portfolios. It was an exchange. Other models did the same thing. We’d go to a cheap store, buy clothes, take photographs in them, and then return them. That was how we did things. Mainly I loved going to different studios. There were about fifty. I met with James
Moore and Arthur Elgort, who were top photographers then. I’d see Black photographers here and there, but none of them survived, even though they worked for Richard Avedon and Hiro. I used to go to dance studios too, like Henry LeTang. I loved visiting jewelry stores, shopping on Allen Street, and going to the Italian bodegas and pizza parlors on Carmine Street. New York building heights astonished me also—they were quite a sight to behold relative to the flatness of Columbus. NV That paints a beautiful picture and comes into step with your own curiosities. Tell me about Kamoinge—what’s your favorite memory of the group? MS I was on a go-see and heard two photographers talking. They debated whether photography was an art form or an artifact of nostalgia and finally agreed that it wasn’t nostalgia. Once I was in Kamoinge, I learned about photography as an art form. It was profound for me. There was a language, a history, there was composition and tone, and they had favorite photographers. I took that information and went to do my own searching. NV Arthur Jafa said in your recent Aperture monograph, “Ming’s capacity to control the dual technical strategies, the abnormality, of slow shutter speed and flattened tonal range—to erase the typical relationships between figure and background, foreground and background—are unparalleled.” This approach could be read as not only technical but scientific. Does your understanding of microbiology and microscopic organisms inform your photography? MS That’s interesting. The most evident thing when observing microorganisms is balance. There’s movement too, but the real enchantment is harmony. It was beautiful to witness, regardless of the organism. When I was young, I liked leaves and looked at them obsessively. I could identify which trees they came from— oak, walnut, elm, or Juniperus pfitzeriana, a bush my grandfather had. My grandmother grew morning glories and I was fascinated by them. I must have been four or five and would wake up early to see them in full bloom; then at sunset, like clockwork, they’d close. It was unbelievable. In microbiology I experienced a deeper layer of that movement and balance, it was shockingly visual. When I photograph, I use that sense of harmony to find what looks good in the lens. I go where my instincts lead me and it either works or it doesn’t. NV Staying on the topic of harmony, I’ve heard you say that you photograph like a painter and use light to paint. How so? MS I’m aware of how things look in light, but it all happens in one moment. That’s the gift, the photographer’s talent: the capacity to compose by following one’s instincts. Also, the power of
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anticipation and the patience to wait for what’s coming. It’s like a basketball player hitting three-pointers: practice, repeat, practice, repeat. You get better, and still you’ll miss a few. In photography, you have to nail it the moment it’s in the lens. Take the shot when you see it. NV Music plays an important role in your work. Why is it so central to your practice? MS I’ve always been deeply affected by music. For me, it’s the highest art form. I remember hearing Puccini’s La Bohème as a child and crying. I felt moved, and it somehow reflected what was going on in me. I saw a lot of pain up close. My youngest, closest sister had asthma and could barely breathe. It was upsetting, so opera always affected me. On the other hand, we weren’t supposed to listen to R&B music. My father thought it meant dancing, frivolity, and being fast. It was the music of love songs, so I’d want to think about love and being with boys, which was an absolute no. I used to sneak a transistor radio under my pillow and listen, because they had R&B only early in the morning and evening. Otherwise there was no Black music. When I work now, I listen to jazz, which makes me feel relaxed and uninhibited. NV Your husband was a jazz musician and you were on the road a lot. Talk about that period. MS When I was on the road, I’d explore. It wasn’t only about the music; I’d take my son, Mingus, and my camera and head out while my ex was asleep. I immersed myself in the sights and sounds and realized people lived differently outside the United States. They related to jazz based on their own cultural frameworks. Like the three boys I shot in Portugal, in Ever-So-HipKiddies, Setúbal, Portugal, 1979. They had cigarettes and soda and carried on like Dexter Gordon. But they were only seven years old! They thought it was cool to pretend because they were listening to jazz. I learned about the world and came to understand what the music meant to different people in different places. NV What is your favorite jazz album of all time? MS I like Miles Davis’s “Flamenco Sketches” [1959]. I play it all the time. Also Alice Coltrane’s Reflection on Creation and Space [1973]. NV Let’s talk about energy, which is central to your work. Energy is imperceptible and infinite yet subtle and surreal. How do you locate it? When do you know you’re holding court with something energetically worthy of capture? MS You could call energy abstract, but it’s very obvious. It’s in everything, including the soul. Energy feeds you. When you look after yourself and the world and approach circumstance with a sense of care, you attract certain energies. The opposite is also true: when I photograph, the energy that I’m looking for finds me, not wholly do I find it. I suppose that’s synchronicity and photography is a two-way street. I feel very humble because for me, photography has been a spiritual journey and a calling. It presents itself and I’m a soldier in a cosmic army doing exactly what I’m supposed to do by taking that photograph. It’s my responsibility and not about ego at all. It’s really God’s work. NV You’ve talked about Alice Coltrane’s going deep into silence. What do you think silence can teach us? MS To listen. To listen to one’s self. Silence can bring you closer to the information you really need. NV I know dance is one of your cardinal joys, we’ve done samba and sabar together. Those sessions are ceaseless in their instruction. There’s the physical phrase—the choreography, its interpretation, its performativity and repetition. Let’s talk about the relationship between photography and dance. MS Katherine Dunham and her legacy brought me to dance. I started the technique in 1974, ’75, and didn’t stop dancing.
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Photography and dance are kindred because they both have rhythm and timing. Visually, there’s a way to paint space with body movement. It’s about lines and shapes. Like choreography, a photograph makes your intentions clear. Dance is a moving picture. NV Besides Dunham, which other artists inspire you? MS There are many, but I love Brassaï. He’s my favorite. Imogen Cunningham was wonderful, she was Diane Arbus’s teacher. I loved her as a person, though I didn’t know her work very well. We both lived in the Village and would eat at cheap Greek diners with her husband. We talked about life and love and she’d bring up “Dee-on, Dee-on.” I didn’t realize that Diane Arbus was “Dee-on” until someone said, “You pronounce her name Dee-on.” I thought, “Oh boy, Imogen and Lisette Model have been talking about Diane Arbus all this time!” Romare Bearden will always be a top pick, also Gordon Parks and his great essays for Life. Another genius is André Kertész. Then there’s Eugene Smith, whose photographs I adore. Also the sculptor Elizabeth Catlett. NV In the ’30s, Henry Miller called Brassaï the “eye of Paris.” You too chronicle the mood of your complicated city. What draws you to his work? MS I have to tell you a story first. After Brassaï passed, I went to see Henry & June [1990], a movie about Henry Miller. As I watched, I thought “This seems so familiar”—not just the storyline but the visuals. I realized that what I was watching was Brassaï’s photographs reenacted as moving images—it was stunning. I’m fascinated by the connection between artists and what they leave behind as legacy. I hope something similar happens with my work: maybe an artist will see a connection between me and another artist, then create something bigger than the two of us. NV Your photograph of Brassaï really resounds. What was it like to take his picture? MS J. Fredrick Smith had a show of his on 57th Street and it was a big deal. Brassaï himself was going to be there. I walked up and asked if I could take his photograph. He said yes. There was an umbrella nearby and he tried to help me by putting it in the frame. He moved it around because he wanted me to make a good picture. I understood what he was doing and will never forget it. One thing I notice about older photographers, which was true of Brassaï, is how much larger one eye becomes. Their eyes take on quite a personality. It must be the evolution of the tool. NV I want to talk about August Moon [1991], the series of photographs you developed as an homage to the great American playwright August Wilson. MS August Wilson’s characters are the famous and the not so famous. The people at the heart of Black community. Many of his stories resonate with me because I grew up in a similar body politic. A great many of those monologues and characters touched me—like Aunt Ester [in Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, 2003], the mystic who is basically the personification of progress, rooted in an Afro-centric rather than Euro-centric past. I got on a Greyhound bus to Pittsburgh’s Hill District and took photographs with his characters in mind. I found the pool players, the dishwasher, the waitress at Memphis Lee’s diner, the barbershop, the steel mill, and his dreaming place. I just wanted the feeling of Black folks as a truly American experience. August Wilson used words and I used photographs. NV What’s the single best piece of advice you’ve ever received as an artist and would give to one? MS Don’t use someone else’s work to judge your own. Be honest and project your authentic self.
Ming Smith, Sun Ra Space I, New York, 1978
Ming Smith, Brassaï, New York, 1979 Artworks: courtesy the artist
AILEEN PASSLOFF
Previous spread: Aileen Passloff dancing in April and December, choreographed by Remy Charlip, 1964. Photo: Robert Farren This page: Aileen Passloff in rehearsal for Stepping Forward: One foot (in front of the other) at the 92Y, New York, 2019. Photo: Nina Westervelt Opposite: Aileen Passloff and Vincent Warren dancing in Cypher, choreographed by Passloff, 1960. Photo: V. Sladon Following spread, left: Aileen Passloff and Charlotte Hendrickson in rehearsal for Stepping Forward: One foot (in front of the other) at the 92Y, New York, 2019. Photo: Nina Westervelt Following spread, right: Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Judith Dunn, Aileen Passloff, and Sally Gross. Date and photographer unknown
A
ileen Passlof f ’s journey through dance was uncommonly long and wide-ranging. A choreographer and educator as well as a dancer, she maintained a career spanning seventy-five years and the genres of ballet, modern, and postmodern dance. Her joy in movement lit up the lives of countless colleagues, students, and audiences. Passloff ’s passing in November, at the age of eighty-nine, drew an outpouring of tributes from around the world. Passloff ’s work flowed with the artistic currents of New York. Born in the Bronx in 1931 and raised in Queens, she studied as a girl at the School of American Ballet, expanded her interest to modern dance at Bennington College, and then, after graduating, flourished in New York’s avant-garde scene of the 1950s and ’60s, for part of that time as a member of the pioneering postmodern collective Judson Dance Theater. Passloff reveled in these radical communities, but unlike her more renegade peers, she also revered the traditions from which they broke. Dance critic and historian Sally Banes writes of her, “Some of her dances are . . . nostalgic tributes to great memories of ballet, or folk dance. Others were resolutely modernist.”1 There was no containing Passloff ’s artistic curiosity. She studied flamenco in Spain, winning a Fulbright to research there. Her love of the stage extended to the theater, where she acted in plays by the Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés, an Obie-winning production of Gertrude Stein’s What Happened, and others, and even to film, where she made an appearance as a dancer 122
in Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955). Passloff ran her own company for a decade before she became the L. May Hawver and Wallace Benjamin Flint Professor of Dance at Bard College. She taught there for over forty years, inspiring generations of students, many of whom would become lasting friends and collaborators. One, Charlotte Hendrickson, recalled Passloff choreographing for her up until her last days: “the creativity and love of life just burst out of her,” Hendrickson told me in a recent phone call. In early 2020, before the covid pandemic struck the city and made such moments impossible, I visited Passloff one morning in her Upper West Side apartment. Surrounded by the Abstract Expressionist paintings of her sister Pat Passlof and brother-in-law Milton Resnick, we flipped through binders of photos and program notes, chatting about her lifelong love affair with dance. —Gillian Jakab GILLIAN JAKAB When did you begin dancing?
AILEEN PASSLOFF Well, I’ve danced forever. There isn’t a time that I can remember when I didn’t dance, from before school, before kindergarten. Dancing’s like breathing: it’s as much a part of being a person as laughing and crying and screaming and the rest of the things we do. But I began studying formally at the School of American Ballet [SAB] when I was thirteen. GJ You’re a fellow native New Yorker. AP I am. Where is your family from originally? GJ My father was born in Hungary and his family escaped to the States when he was young. My
mother’s side came over from Russia but have been here a couple more generations. AP My ancestors are Russian-Polish and Polish. My grandmother on my mother’s side came over when she was eleven, and she was the oldest of her siblings. I always wanted to get stories from her. She was so glad to be in this country; she only spoke in English even though her English was poor. She went to work when she was eleven so that the younger siblings could go to school. And then she became a peddler, selling woolen goods and threads and things like that, because in those days women made their own clothes. And she traveled down south to Georgia by herself, and put six kids through college, without ever having been to school a day in her life. GJ What a strong and giving person. AP She loved life. She’d get a kick out of taking a walk and seeing grass and bugs and birds and all this stuff, and we’d giggle and laugh together. I loved her a lot. GJ Finding joy in the everyday! It’s inspiring to look back at our ancestors and all they’ve given us. You came from a classical-ballet training, uptown at SAB, and then became known in the experimental downtown dance scene. When did you discover these different forms? AP My background was very strictly Russian classical ballet. I had never seen modern dance before I went to college [in 1949] and I thought it was weird. I thought, What are they doing sitting on the floor and wiggling? The teacher would say, “Revolve around your soul and get into your groin,” and it was [Martha] Graham stuff. I didn’t even know what Graham was. I just picked Bennington
College because it was the best for dancing, but I was a fish out of water when I arrived. GJ Were there particular dance artists who inspired you along the way? AP Jimmy [James Waring] was so instrumental throughout my life. We were both at the School of American Ballet, along with David Vaughan and Vincent Warren. Jimmy did everything—he taught and made costumes and collages. Jimmy was about opening doors. At the time, modern dancers and ballet dancers sniffed at each other. Jimmy and David were very close friends for many, many years, friends at SAB and maybe before that. Together they made a group called Dance Associates [in 1951]. I remember the meeting of that group, and that Edwin Denby was there, Tanaquil Le Clercq was there, Paul Taylor was there, Marian Sarach was there, and Alec Rubin was there. GJ Major figures in both classical and modern dance, writers— AP There were musicians there also, so it wasn’t that separate thing, “I’m ballet, I’m modern, I’m a painter, I’m a poet, I’m a whatever.” It was just about making stuff that was worth looking at—that meant something, you know? And it wasn’t for success, and it wasn’t for popularity—it was for the deep satisfaction of making something new. We all gathered in Jimmy’s apartment, 131 Avenue A. He lived in a little house that was behind the regular house. It didn’t even have pictures of radiators [laughter]. It had a shallow fireplace, and there was a plank that we kept pushing into this shallow fireplace—we all sat there with our coats and our mufflers and our hats. It was the richness
of extraordinary people, extraordinary minds. It was so exciting to be in those moments. GJ I bet! AP In those days, that was remarkable: to be friends with people who were in different boxes. We got rid of the boxes, so there were collaborations between people, and not for money and not for fame—just to make something that was worth looking at or listening to. GJ Jimmy Waring’s mentorship and friendship spanned from the very beginning of your dancing days, to your Bennington years, back to New York, and beyond. AP The first piece of Jimmy’s I ever worked on was called The Wanderers. It’s about a circus family and is performed by a mix of actors and dancers. That was at the 92nd Street Y when I was thirteen. A program of my dances was presented at the Y just last year. To be dancing at eighty-eight is another thing, but it’s nifty. Nowadays I can’t get up and show too much— I mean, I have to use words in a way I never did. GJ T h a t ’s a m a z i n g . I l o v e t h a t y o u ’ r e still performing. AP That’s gone on and on, because dancing is forever. I talk about Jimmy because he was so important in my mind—he deeply changed how I thought and still think about dancing and many other things. It was Jimmy who taught me about electronic music. I didn’t know my ass from my elbow when I met Jimmy. It’s the truth; I didn’t know anything. I mean, I loved dancing with my whole life, my whole everything—that I knew, but everything
else I didn’t know. I was really a newbie. But he took me to listen to the music of Richard Maxfield, a wonderful electronic composer. Richard would edit the performance tapes of Merce Cunningham, so he would cut out the rustling of the paper, whatever sounds didn’t have to do with the music. When he’d finished doing that, all the coughs and the sneezes and the paper rattlings would be on the floor, so he picked them up and made a piece called Cough Music, which I choreographed Cypher [1960] to. I began to hear things in a way I hadn’t before because of Richard. We worked with wonderful composers, wonderful musicians—Philip Corner, John Herbert McDowell, just super, super people. GJ What did it feel like in New York then? AP It was an extraordinary time. I don’t think I’m exaggerating. There was no money around, so there wasn’t any kind of competition, because you never got paid anyway, and you even helped to make the costumes or you found them in your auntie’s closet or in a garbage can. When money got into the picture, things changed. The first time I noticed this turning point was a big concert at the Armory. I went, and the person taking tickets said, “Oh, are you here to steal?” Meaning not to steal money but to steal ideas. I was so shocked; I couldn’t believe it. It had always been about working together. I was going to see my friends’ works, which I still loved, it was Yvonne [Rainer] who was doing stuff, as well as other people I knew and had worked with and cared about. I have to say, it was as if I had been hit in the stomach or something. I realized that things had changed radically. It began to matter if you got paid for a job or if you didn’t get paid for a job. But 123
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luckily there were still some people who remembered why we did what we did. GJ Before being a member of Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s, you were involved with the Living Theatre in the ’50s, where you acted and directed plays. That was another hub where writers, poets, painters, and dancers mixed. Like the relationship between your fellow SAB dancer Vincent Warren and Frank O’Hara— AP Vincent had a very quiet presence, and so did Frank. He was so unobtrusive, Frank. I can’t remember whether I directed a play of his for Living Theatre, or if I was in the play, but it had something to do with Nick Cernovich, a brilliant writer and lighting designer who married a dancer. He was full of ideas and was friends with Frank. It was at the Living Theatre that I met Larry Kornfeld, too. The first thing I did with him was Leonce and Lena, by [Georg] Büchner. He also did a [William Butler] Yeats play there, Full Moon in March. And he directed What Happened, the Gertrude Stein play. It was such an interesting time for painters as well. There was 10th Street, you know, Bill de Kooning was there, Elaine de Kooning, all those people, Milton Resnick was there, my sister Pat [Passlof] was there. Black Mountain was so important to those people. It was also about collaboration. I wasn’t at Black Mountain, but it seemed to me, from the outside, people just had fun together. You want to make a play? Okay, so somebody who wasn’t used to acting would be acting, somebody not used to designing would be designing, you know—whether we’re talking about Judson or Black Mountain, it’s just the freedom to experiment, to dare to do things. Black Mountain included Buckminster Fuller and my sister and Merce and Katie [Katherine] Litz. Do you know her? GJ Not too well. AP I have to tell you a tiny story about Katie Litz. She came up to Bennington for one semester, and I was working, trying to make a dance, and at that time I thought making a dance had to do with suffering and going into your soul and all this shit. So, I was busy suffering. GJ [Laughs] AP In the room where Martha Graham made Lamentations [1930], which is a round room overlooking a sunken garden, there I am by myself. And I’d been in there for hours, you know, pinching out one movement, and Katie must have heard me suffering loudly. She knocked on the door and she said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Trying to make a dance,” in a real snotty voice. GJ [Laughs] AP And she said, “What’s the first movement?” I said, “Well, that’s the first movement.” She said, “And what comes next?” And I didn’t have an answer. She said, “Well, it’s just putting one movement after the other.” And it blew my mind away, because that’s when I learned what choreography was: putting one thing next to the other. GJ [Laughs] So simple. AP It’s more than that, in truth. GJ But her point was to not overthink it. AP Yes, and that was—thunder, lightning, earth-shaking to me. Katie choreographed a version of the Dracula story in which Dracula was played by Charles Weidman and Remy Charlip was the doctor—hot stuff all the way through. I was playing the maid and Katie was showing me what to do. Her studio was in Brooklyn, and I didn’t know Brooklyn at that time from a hole in a wall. I once asked her,
“What dances are you going to give in this concert that you’re getting ready for?” She said, “Depends on my elbow.” She believed in that kind of physical memory. And of course I got it, but it took me a while to register what she was talking about. It wasn’t that her elbow hurt, it was that sensation guided her: an indication of where she was coming from. I was lucky enough to have learned from her and to have had that experience dancing for her company. GJ And you, in turn, have taught and inspired generations of dancers in your company, at Bard College, and elsewhere. What have you tried to teach them? AP When I teach, I ask students, “What does that feel like?” Because they may be extremely technically skilled people but they haven’t been taught to listen to their instrument [gestures to her body]— what they use to communicate something. My job as a teacher is putting different people back into themselves, so they can feel where this hand is in relation to this knee, so they know that there’s a little draft coming from there, that there’s a smell in their kitchen. I remind them to use their antennae. It’s natural for us to have antennae; dogs and cats have them too. But we get a little caught up in the visual appeal of dancing and we forget to trust our own sensation. Dancing doesn’t have to be about notions of success. It has to go back to what you’re thinking about, what you’re feeling—your relation to the world and the people you live with and the animals around you and the flowers you look at. It’s so much more human.
1. Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 8.
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FASHION AND ART
Louis Vuitton has a long history with contemporary artists. Stephen Sprouse, who graffitied the brand’s iconic monogram in 2001, kicked off two decades of partnerships with the likes of Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and more. In 2019, the brand introduced the Artycapucines, giving artists such as Sam Falls, Urs Fischer, Nicholas Hlobo, Alex Israel, Tschabalala Self, and Jonas Wood carte blanche to rework its Capucines handbag. (The name comes from the rue Neuve des Capucines, the Paris street where the house opened its first store, in 1854.) This year, Delphine Arnault, the executive vice president of Louis Vuitton, announced the second Artycapucines series, inviting Liu Wei, Beatriz Milhazes, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Josh Smith, Henry Taylor, and Zhao Zhao to design their own version of the iconic handbag. Derek Blasberg spoke to Arnault about Louis Vuitton’s connection to the art world, and what she’s looking for in collecting contemporary art and accessories.
PART 5: DELPHINE ARNAULT
Derek Blasberg: My first question is a practical one: These bags are works of art. Do people actually use them? Delphine Arnault: Yes! But I imagine they use them very . . . cautiously. And like a work of art, over time they will become more precious. We only produce 200 of each bag, and they’re all numbered, so there’s a rarity to each one. I love seeing a woman carrying one of the bags; it’s incredible to see them in the real world. DB: If there are six artists and 200 of each are made, there are only 1,200 bags in each series. DA: Yes, and they were nearly all sold out before they even hit the stores. Many collectors know Louis Vuitton regularly works with amazing contemporary artists. Some will buy bags by all six artists, or maybe they’re a collector of one of the artists and want to be able to have their work in their daily lives, as opposed to just in their homes. DB: Of course this isn’t the first time Vuitton has collaborated in the contemporary art space. Was Stephen Sprouse the first artist collaboration? DA: Actually, Vuitton’s history with art goes back much farther. The first person who started working with artists was Gaston-Louis Vuitton, who was the grandson of Louis Vuitton. He began in the first part of the twentieth century by working with different artists on perfume bottles, advertising campaigns, and window displays. In many ways he was ahead of his time. Many years later, Marc Jacobs had a huge influence on bringing contemporary artists to Vuitton, including Sprouse, Prince, Murakami, Kusama, and others. Marc is an important collector and has an amazing eye, which he brought to Vuitton, creating an incredible new link to the world of contemporary art. DB: Have any of the collaborations surprised you? Has anyone done something that made you think, Wow, I did not see that coming? DA: I remember the first time I saw the Sprouse graffiti, the monogrammed luggage with the scribbling on it, I thought, Wow! I hadn’t known what to expect and it was very striking. DB: Were you shocked that the monogram had been defaced, or did you think it was cool? Previous spread: Delphine Arnault. Photo: Jean-François Robert Above: Jonas Wood Artycapucines. Photo: Paul Wetherell Below: Henry Taylor and his Artycapucines. Photo: Paul Wetherell Opposite: Urs Fischer Artycapucines. Photo: Paul Wetherell
DA: I thought it was super cool. I also thought that it was so new and so different from what I’d seen before. It was a big surprise. I also remember how hard it was to get the bags when they came out. DB: Even for you? DA: Actually, yes! At the time, I was working at Dior, and I remember the day John Galliano came in with one of the Sprouse bags and we all thought it was such a cool product. DB: The other iconic collaboration we saw a lot of in 2020, as masks became a required fashion accessory and health-care workers became such heroes, was Marc’s nurses collection, done in collaboration with Richard Prince for Spring/Summer 2008. DA: I thought that was amazing too. I remember sitting in the audience at that show and thinking we were witnessing a special moment. DB: I still have one of Prince’s Louis Vuitton bags from that show. I never used it, though, because I thought it was too special. I know I’m not as cautious as I should be with these bags. DA: It’s good that you kept it because it’s very much a collector’s item now. DB: How do you select the artists for the Artycapucines collaborations? DA: The House is constantly in ongoing conversation with people in the art world, including artists, advisors, and other people who inform our process. We try to find artists who represent the art world today and have a strong point of view. Another key factor is that they’re from all over the world. In this second wave we have artists from France, America, Brazil, and two artists from China. DB: Do you impose any limits on the artists? I remember in the first series, Urs Fischer had a small banana that hung from the bottom of the bag. 128
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DA: Urs came up with an apple, a banana, and a strawberry, which I thought was fun and fantastic. We give the artists carte blanche. They can do whatever they want, which is important for us because we like to see an artist’s entire interpretation. Even if that means adding a banana. DB: What’s the design process? Do they submit a sketch? Do they come to Paris and meet with the team? DA: It’s different for every artist and it becomes an ongoing creative process. Our designers can go see artists in their studios or artists can come see us in Paris. The artists send us drawings and then we work in our atelier to execute them. We send samples and we modify colors, textures, all the elements that make the bag unique. As you know, artists like to be very precise. This project really helped us to push our boundaries further and challenge ourselves, as we had to find new ways to master new techniques and materials. The Artycapucines collaborations are the encounter between the artistic vision of the talents we work with and the expert savoir faire of the Louis Vuitton craftsmen. DB: How long from start to finish does it take to create a bag? DA: Approximately from three to six months. DB: Your family are huge patrons of the arts. Look no further than the Fondation Louis Vuitton. When you’re looking at artists, is your process similar for both your collecting and these collaborations? DA: We try to work with artists who are attracted to the product and have an affinity for the brand. Cindy Sherman, for example, has always been attracted to fashion, and style is an important element in her work. We were excited to work with her because we felt that she would enjoy the process.
Opposite: Alex Israel Artycapucines. Photo: Paul Wetherell Below: Jonas Wood, Delphine Arnault, and Alex Israel. Photo: PFA All images courtesy Louis Vuitton
When you pick art for Vuitton, you try to find a good match between the artist and the heritage of the brand. I think it’s interesting to work with contemporary artists who are of this generation, and to get their view. They come from all over the globe and I appreciate having their view on what’s happening in the world and how it relates to their work. —Delphine Arnault DB: I know that the Fondation had an incredible retrospective of Cindy’s, which I was so sad to miss due to covid restrictions. DA: The show was incredible, especially for someone like you, who works in the fashion world. Many artists are interested in fashion, by the way. Frank Gehry, for example, is very interested in fashion, and working with him was incredible. DB: I remember his bag! It was a twisted shape. DA: Exactly. He said, “Okay, I want to do a bag but it can only have one straight line.” And we thought, Well, that’ll be a challenge. But the craftsmen did it and it was an incredible final design. A big component in this process is to have a lot of imagination. DB: I know this will be a hard question for you to answer: What’s your favorite bag? DA: Oh, no, I can’t answer that. But I can tell you which one is the favorite of my son. DB: OK! DA: He’s four years old and when I go out he will often say to me, “Wait, let me choose your bag.” And each time he comes up with the Alex Israel bag, from the first Artycapucines series. He loves that one the most. DB: Of course he does! It has a comb in the shape of a shark fin. DA: Each time, he says, “Mommy, you can’t leave without that bag.” And I say OK, even if it doesn’t go with what I’m wearing that day. DB: Which bag from the second series is your son’s favorite? DA: The one by Jean-Michel Othoniel, which has these large black-glass pearls. DB: Is there a different process between picking art for your wall and picking art for your collaborations? DA: It’s very different. When you pick art for Vuitton, you try to find a good match between the artist and the heritage of the brand. I think it’s interesting to work with contemporary artists who are of this generation, and to get their view. They come from all over the globe and I appreciate having their view on what’s happening in the world and how it relates to their work. DB: What will the next series of Artycapucines look like? DA: After the moment of a pandemic, or a war, or other difficult moments, creativity always comes in high. I’m very interested to see what’s going to come after this and how artists are going to relate to it in their work. Look at Christian Dior: he created his brand and the New Look in 1947, just after World War II. There are always a lot of creative things happening after very difficult moments. DB: My last question for you: If we have an artist who wants to collaborate with Louis Vuitton, who would they call? You? DA: Larry [Gagosian] has so many amazing artists and I admire Larry a lot. He has such a vision and the artists he works with are some of the best artists alive. DB: So if any of the artists want a bag, I’ll tell him to call you. DA: Did I ever tell you that the only person who ever made me a job offer was Larry? So, yes, he knows how to get hold of me. 131
RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN ADAM MCEWEN AND BOB MONK
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bob monk In 1983, Richard was around the age you are now, in the mid-50s-to-60-ish range. I started looking at some of his work from that year; it was an interesting time for him, just as I think it’s an interesting time for you. adam mcewen Yes. He is unusual in that he started late, but he really kept digging and finding new seams for such a long time and to such an unusually extended degree. It gives one hope. bm As you mentioned the other day, it was in that period in the early 1980s that he made Tower III (Confessional) [1980]; that remains one of my favorite sculptures. It’s this beautiful structure like a Catholic confessional, but instead of the red-leather part on which you would kneel in a church, it’s red Formica with this beautiful wood latticework. By that point, in the early and mid-1980s, he was reinventing the whole meaning of what he was after. amce Yeah—I don’t know exactly when I first saw that, but I very clearly remember seeing the show at the Saatchi Collection in London in 1991. It really stuck in my mind, that particular piece—maybe because I was brought up Catholic and it was very easy for me to relate to it, but it just seems, as a sculpture, directly to the point. And yet it’s also extremely personal for him, clearly. It’s that kind of sweet spot he finds. It’s funny that he depicts an object that’s made of wood in real life—and maybe leather or velvet, as you say—but he decides to make only the soft parts in Formica. By that point he’d made many representations of wooden objects using Formica to mimic wood. So it’s clever that, with that piece, he decides he doesn’t need to use Formica for the wood. He keeps the real wood. bm He used his brilliant woodworking skills, which was how he supported his family before he began to exhibit his art. In a profound way, once you really start thinking about it, this sculpture riffs on Minimalism. Yet that personal aspect of a tower confessional really brings you back to the object. amce There’s a strange, maybe not humor, but a sort of wry questioning: he doesn’t make an object that aspires to meaning, or to being art with a capital A. Which, in the end, a lot of Previous spread: Richard Artschwager, New York, 1991. Photo: Chris Felver/Getty Images Opposite: Richard Artschwager, Tower III (Confessional), 1980, Formica and oak, 60 × 47 × 32 inches (152.4 × 112.4 × 81.3 cm). Photo: Glenn Steigelman; Leo Castelli Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Minimalism does. I think Minimalist works are often simply objects, but there’s this caveat that they are going to cleanse you in some heightened way. That little block of Formica [Corner, 1967, affectionately known as Corner Alveryd] that has a chopped corner, revealing a flat pale color of the material, is a plain art object that looks like Minimalism and yet takes a 180-degree turn. Although it looks like a sculpture, it absorbs everything about what a sculpture is meant to be and then questions it in this very calm, low-key way, which is, I find, not what Minimalism tends to do. And you get the same sense with the confessional. It asks, Where does he really stand on the import of this object? And the fact that he doesn’t answer the question means that you’re able to be sent somewhere else. It’s great because it means that it’s constantly walking ahead of you or sending you on. An amazing quality—it’s a slow burn. bm I think even before the Pictures generation, Richard was looking for a way out of that whole Minimalist stricture and was so interested in so many different things that he put them all together. His work is unique because of the way it fits into the art field but questions it at the same time. amce His work seems to f it so easily, and again and again, into these pigeonholes. People tried to typecast it as a Pop art thing or a Minimalism thing, but it’s always sliding out. It’s never really quite what you think it is. I think he writes somewhere that it’s the kiss of death for an artist to be “school of” anything, and it’s amazing how nimble he is at avoiding that. That means there’s always this cloud of mystery following the work, and that gives it legs for me. It’s crazy how those early Celotex paintings make you think of Gerhard Richter, and then there’s the kind of classic Minimal pieces that seem to be in the same land as Donald Judd. But actually he’s always sidestepping what you want to push on him. bm The other day, you and I were discussing the painting Tract Home [1964], which we both said we were really attracted to. amce Yes, it’s great. bm It’s painted from an advertisement for one of those homes that GIs could buy for like
$12,000. In the ad it looked like an idyllic cottage, but I’m sure this was a totally prefabricated kind of dream. Then he made out of it this beautiful painting with a giant Formica frame. Different people see it in different ways, which I think is one of the things every artist wishes for. Of course many of Richard’s objects, in painting especially, come from images in the New York Times, which he read every day. amce I think it’s very different from Pop art: he’s not pointing to the ordinary and reveling in its banality. It’s more that he takes the ordinary and peels away a layer from around it, and thereby releases the ordinary. So the ordinary becomes something much more loaded than you were able to sense at first sight. He said he liked Giorgio Morandi for showing him that everything is important, nothing is unimportant. I think basically all artists relate to that, because you walk around and you look at stuf f and you see, if you’re lucky, a kind of meaning in anything. So when Artschwager makes a sculpture of a table, it’s very different from Roy Lichtenstein, for instance. He shows you that a table is kind of levitating, you know—it’s miraculous, and once you start looking at the world like that, then everything is amazing.
This page, top: Richard Artschwager, Untitled, 1967 /1984, Formica on wood, 26 7⁄8 × 19 3⁄4 × 10 3⁄4 inches (68.2 × 50.3 × 27.3 cm) This page, bottom: Richard Artschwager, Corner, 1967, Formica on wood, 4 3⁄8 × 12 5⁄8 × 14 7⁄8 inches (11 × 32 × 38 cm)
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The other thing about Tract Home is the frame you mentioned. I think we should talk about frames—how Artschwager deals with frames is genius and revealing. bm It is, from those beautiful big heav y frames to the really thin aluminum frames that shine and, as you look at the painting, have a movement to their reflections. They’re really activated, his frames, whether visually or if they do something to the world around the painting, or bring the world into the painting. amce That’s right. Those Celotex paintings with those shiny metal frames around them— they negotiate the boundary between the work and the world. bm They’re not passive. With the whole second generation of AbEx, there was no frame and you hung it on the wall and you know, had Frank Stella’s “It is what it is” kind of thing. By making these incredible frames as part of the work, Artschwager was moving on to something new. He wasn’t going to paint on Celotex, which is a commercial fiberboard, and just hang it on the wall like you would a Helen Frankenthaler painting. And then when he got older, he began to work again with woodwork frames. He started painting his frames with some of the most beautiful colors, and he’d really revel in mixing the color. His romance with frames lasted his entire career. amce I think it’s the same thing as questioning what an object is, or even what “ordinary” is. There are also frames that are painted quite loosely by hand to look like wood grain. bm That was an incredible body of work, right before the crates. amce I think the wood grain is like another tool. It makes me think of late René Magritte, when he knows he can do this style of painting that only needs to be good enough. Obviously there’s very tight Magritte, but it’s like this dry humor about virtuosity. It’s both being funny about genius and being generous, because it allows the viewer in. It’s very welcoming; it wants the viewer to be able to participate.
bm What are you thinking about right now as far as the work that you’re making? amce I don’t find it an inspiring time. But the ground is so fluid, and in that sense it’s a really incredible time to be alive. Things are shifting so deeply—not just the lockdown but a cultural shift, the way America’s looking at itself and the kind of agony that entails. But to think one could say something about that feels to me, at this point, ludicrous. So I’m just trying to work out how you speak in a time like this: what you want to say, not to the world, but really to yourself. And you look at Richard’s work and you really get the sense that he’s making art for himself. He’s trying to work out where he’s coming from, his German background and his New Mexico desert background. And it’s quite humble and honest in that sense. He’s really not sure of anything except that this is what he’s got. A sculpture like the confessional, or a painting of a Southwestern landscape—it’s from his childhood. So I feel like that’s what I’m trying to work out. I think it’s more important than ever at the moment. And it’s not easy, at least not for me. bm No, I can imagine. Did you ever meet Richard? amce Yeah, I did. I met him quite a few times in the last few years before he passed away. I didn’t know him well, but he always seemed very open and amused. bm Yeah, that was Richard at the end. He was a delight. And we at the gallery all appreciated working with him, installing exhibitions. He was really brilliant. The other thing about him was that he had this whole musical background. amce Yeah, he played piano, didn’t he? bm He was actually quite good and never showed off. I think it’s interesting because his art, in a funny way, is so radical and his piano playing was so classical. I don’t like using the word “genius,” but I always thought he was such a multitalented artist and person, and I always appreciated that about him.
As you said, he was very modest and he did the work for himself. As Dieter Schwarz has written, the whole idea was just to look at things and experience them and not have to have the caption or the explanation for everything one sees in this specialized art world. He wanted people to experience the joy of looking, I would say. amce I think he says somewhere that art is not an object, it’s an event. It’s the transaction or the translation that goes back and forth between the viewer and the work. I don’t mean in a kind of poststructuralist way, but rather, every time it happens with good artworks, an engine starts and a motor runs. A lot of that process includes language, to express how you think. And he kind of says, through his work, “Yeah, but the language is really just one part of it. It’s really not that interesting.” He’s so funny about it: he makes a sculpture of a door and there are huge wooden parentheses stuck on the wall around the door, or there’s a doorway with two inverted commas on each side of it. It’s kind of silly, but it’s also deep: he’s amused by the way we function. He’s saying, Language is just a poor cousin to sensation. You can say to that poor little cousin, Come in, you’re part of the party and we love you and here you are. But actually what’s going on is much bigger than that. And I used to not like those exclamation points of his because I was like, well, this seems so literal. Then, over the years, I’ve found that I admire works like that more and more, because they’re doing something ambitious but in a deadpan way. I find he gets more interesting to me over time and I wasn’t really expecting that. And other art that I was expecting to be on the mountain of Parnassus—expecting that I’d always look up at it—I’m actually beginning to think it’s less interesting, which is not a feeling I want. You want your heroes of artworks to be there forever, but not that many are. With Richard, it’s amazing, because this stuff is still going and it continues to be weird, which is a big compliment.
Richard Artschwager, Tract Home, 1964, acrylic on Celotex, in Formica and wood artist’s frame, 48 1⁄4 × 68 1⁄2 × 5 1⁄2 inches (122.6 × 174 × 14 cm)
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Richard Artschwager, AT&T Building in the Year 2000, 1978, acrylic on Celotex, in painted wood artist’s frame, 54 5⁄8 × 43 3⁄4 inches (138.7 × 111 cm) Artwork © Richard Artschwager/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
bm There’s a ver y famous A r tschwager pa i nti ng of the i nter ior of F r a n k L loyd Wright’s Johnson Wax building where you see all those beautiful architectural details, and the grisaille Celotex makes you appreciate that building more than anything else I’ve ever seen. The way Artschwager renders it is neutral, but there are all those beautiful lilyshaped columns— amce The Celotex has that effect—it’s like a vortex, and anything you place in it is seen under a completely dif ferent set of r ules. Whether it’s a tract house, which is very still and ordinary, or a big building being blown up, which is much more Warholian, it doesn’t really matter. Somehow he managed to make a context and then he could put anything he wanted into that context. That’s enviable, I think, to have found that little machine that’s his, that he can then just put things inside. bm I agree. You know that toward the end of his life, he received a letter from the Celotex company saying “Dear Mr. Artschwager, we have really great news. Through our research, we are now able to make Celotex panels with no texture.” Celotex was used in homes as a fire
retardant; at one point people liked the pattern and texture. It was like the beautiful tin ceilings on the Lower East Side. But then people outgrew that completely. So Artschwager began to make his own supports, with sugarcane bagasse, water, and cotton fibers. He used the same materials the Celotex company was using, but because he was doing it in the studio with an assistant, using a screen with water and stuff, you would actually see the filaments of the sugar cane. It became a funny struggle for him because there was no more Celotex, except for scraps he had around in the studio. amce It worked all the better for Richard, the ugly materials. He found ways for those materials to open doors so that you can get somewhere else. You suddenly forget about the ugliness. Formica, or Celotex, or rubberized horsehair—these materials initially trigger a feeling of disgust, and then amazement. He gets you in an uncomfortable place in order to then do something else to you.
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BOOK CORNER
BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE
A discussion among the director of the Réserve des livres rares at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Jean-Marc Chatelain; one of its curators, Marie Minssieux-Chamonard; and Douglas Flamm, rare book specialist at Gagosian. 138
DOUGLAS FLAMM Jean-Marc, how long have you been
the director, and Marie, the curator of twentiethand twenty-first-century books, at the rare-book reserve of the Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF]? What’s your background with rare books and art in general? JEAN-MARC CHATELAIN I’ve been director of the Réserve since the fall of 2014, but I’ve been a curator in the department for much longer: I arrived here in 1994, initially to oversee seventeenth-century books. MARIE MINSSIEUX-CHAMONARD As for me, I discovered artist’s books as a student at the École nationale des chartes, where I wrote my dissertation on the artist’s books of the poet and essayist Michel Butor, a key writer of the Nouveau R om a n move me nt . I joi ne d t he r a re -b o ok reserve as a curator of the twentieth- and twentyfirst-century collections in 2004. DF The library has vast holdings—most would say it has the best collection of artist’s and illustrated books in the world. How do you see your director and curator roles in both looking after the collection and guiding its growth? JMC As director of the Réserve, I attend to the enrichment of the rare-book collection, which is already excellent. The goal is to offer ever more complete resources. In the particular field of artist’s books from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we focus on continuing to enrich the collection with the most significant and exceptional works of the avant-gardes. We collect across national borders—a “national library” is also an international library, open to all the winds of creation from wherever they blow. DF When I visited you at the BnF, you were gracious enough to show me a small selection of extraordinary books. One that stood out for me was Pablo Picasso’s very own copy of his 1942 edition of the Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle [1749– 1804], in which he drew over most of the pages in pen and ink to create a love letter, if you will, to his mistress Dora Maar. How did that book come to the library, and how do you see it in the context of the collection? MMC That book is certainly extraordinary. Each copy in the edition already contains thirty-one sugarlift aquatints by Picasso. For Dora, Picasso covered Opposite: Artwork: Sonia Delaunay; text: Blaise Cendrars, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the transSiberian and of little Joan of France), 1913, illustrated book with pochoir and hand-painted parchment wrapper, 7 ¼ x 4 1⁄8 inches (18.4 x 10.5 cm) © Pracusa 20200927/Succession Miriam Cendrars for the work of Blaise Cendrars. Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France
Above and left: Pablo Picasso, pen and ink inscription and drawing, 1943, in Histoire naturelle by Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, 1942 © 2020 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France
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the margins and blank pages in his own copy with forty-four pen-and-ink and ink-wash drawings; thirty-five are full page. They transform the initial bestiary into an extraordinary gallery of portraits. At the front, there’s an ambiguous portrait of Dora Maar, depicted as a fearsome bird-woman, at once harpy and mermaid, with a face recalling the “pythiaharpy” who appears in an engraving of Picasso’s from the Vollard Suite some ten years earlier. The painter gave the book to Maar on January 17, 1943, a few months before they separated. She kept it until her death, in 1997, and it entered the BnF collection in 1999. The drawings Picasso added to his engravings make this volume one of the major pieces in our very rich collection of twentieth-century artist’s books. We actually printed a facsimile edition in 2015. DF The library has done extensive research into Sonia Delaunay’s pochoir illustrations for Blaise Cendrars’s Prose du Transsibérien [et de la petite Jehanne de France, 1913]. Visually this book is extraordinary! I’m wondering if you could briefly comment on its significance in terms of both its technique and the emergence of a woman artist at that time. Remarkably, the book is small and portable— you could carry it across Siberia in your pocket—but unfolds to over six feet long. JMC La Prose du Transsibérien is of key importance in the history of artist’s books because it’s radically innovative. Not only does it break from traditional ideas of illustration, favoring instead what Delaunay called “représentation synchrome,” but its vertical folding form turns it into a book that is almost not a book: it replaces the law of succession inherent in sequential pages with the idea of simultaneity. In this way it pushes the book form to the limits of its material grammar, just as a musician or an avantgarde painter might explore the limits of musical or pictorial language. The Réserve des livres rares has two copies of this masterpiece. One is particularly remarkable because it belonged to Guillaume Apollinaire and is kept in a binding painted by Sonia Delaunay herself.
DF
Anselm Kiefer has lived in France for many years now, but he is German by birth and his work deals with issues of his German heritage: guilt, loss, the Holocaust, and World War II, to name a few. He also uses materials and scale in his books in a way no one else does. How have Kiefer’s books added to the collection? And do they present a unique challenge to store, handle, and display compared to more traditionally printed and bound books? MMC You’re alluding to the BnF exhibition Anselm Kiefer: L’Alchimie du livre, which I curated in the winter of 2015–16. It was a unique experience and a true challenge in terms of presenting books so unusual in their facture and weight—unique-copy books incorporating all kinds of materials, such as sand, chalk, clay, ash, wood, straw, and of course lead, Kiefer’s signature medium. Our collection of Kiefer’s books contains, for example, Das Lied von der Zeder [The song of the cedar], from 2005, a magnificent book paying homage to the poet Paul Celan. Its cover includes precariously glued pieces of wooden branches. This volume, stored in a metal box created by the artist, is subject to strict temperature and humidity controls, as is our entire collection of rare books. I can therefore say that Kiefer’s books pose no particular problem in terms of conservation, but they do have to be handled with great care, like most of our artist’s books. DF How does Das Lied von der Zeder contribute to the library’s collection, both conceptually and in its nontraditional format and materials? JMC Das Lied von der Zeder, which came to the Réserve as a gift, was the first of Kiefer’s great unique-copy books to enter the collection. In its large size and its media—original photographs enhanced with acrylic and graphite, but also raw materials such as branches—it erases the usual boundaries between artistic practices: sculpture, painting, the art of the book. Kiefer has abandoned the classic language of art in order to express the indescribable, has gone beyond representation to talk about what escapes representation: the book is about the Shoah, the event at the heart of Paul Celan’s poem
“Schwarze Flocken” [Black snowflakes, 1943], a large part of which Kiefer hand copied in the book. DF In 2011 the BnF mounted an exhibition by Richard Prince, concentrating on his books—works that ignore the rules of the kind of artist’s book that Ambroise Vollard made so popular in the twentieth century, the mode of delicate etchings on fine papers. Could you speak about how Richard’s books helped usher the collection into a new decade? Did it help to attract a different audience to the institution? MMC The Prince exhibition, which I curated with Robert Rubin, was a great experience. Richard is a collector of popular images and literature. In working with him I discovered that the BnF has a rich and little-known collection of underground-press publications from 1960–70, documents of and influenced by the English and American free press—magazines like Oz and the San Francisco Oracle. While the Réserve has always been interested in the twentieth-century aesthetic avant-gardes, it is also interested in the antiestablishment movements that constitute social avant-gardes, and whose publications often show a great deal of graphic inventiveness. The Prince exhibition helped to focus our attention on that vein of production, the opposite of the luxurious livres d’artiste we were just talking about. DF You also showed me a number of maquettes for printed books, including one, I remember, by Henri Matisse. JMC We archive not only rare books but also the most significant material supports involved in their production: preliminary works, maquettes, layouts, proofs, etcetera. That’s how Madame Jean Matisse, the wife of the painter’s older son, came to donate to the BnF the notebook of Matisse’s that served as the basis for the maquettes for his Florilège des Amours de Ronsard, published by Skira in 1948, as well as another small notebook in which he sketched the layout of the forthcoming book. And in 2019 we were very pleased to have been able to acquire, with backing from patrons, the corrected proofs that constituted the final stage of the book’s development. Complementing what we already have, these Left: Artwork: Henri Matisse; text: Pierre de Ronsard, first maquette for Florilège des Amours de Ronsard, 1941, pp. 45–46 © 2020 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France Opposite: Installation view, Anselm Kiefer: L’Alchimie du livre, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, 2015–16. Artwork © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: David Paul Carr/BnF
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include some hundred original drawings showing the artist’s last revisions, a few months before the final version of the book. DF And how could I not mention Yves Klein’s Yves Peintures, of 1954! Can you talk a bit about what makes this book so special and significant, both to the collection and to the larger arc of twentieth-century illustrated books? I would even venture that this is the start of the twentieth-century artist’s book as we know it—might you agree? MMC That Yves Klein book serves as the catalogue of the paintings Klein made between 1951 and 1954, in Tokyo, Nice, Paris, London, and Madrid. The preface, by “Pascal Claude” [Klein had a friend named Claude Pascal], consists of three pages of “abstract text”—horizontal lines printed without words. This booklet is really Klein’s first gesture as an artist, because when it was published, none of the paintings in it existed yet! Klein’s first exhibition would not take place until the following year, at the Club des Solitaires in Paris. Whether Yves Peintures might be considered the first artist’s book of the twentieth century is the subject of heated debate among specialists. One thing is certain, and that is that it is a very rare book: only twelve copies are known in the world. The one in the Réserve was sent by Klein to the sculptor Hansjörg Gisiger, along with a small orange monochrome. DF Around the world in the last year, we’ve seen intense discussions of social problems such as systemic racism, gender inequality and sexual abuse, humanitarian issues relating to refugees and political asylum. How is the BnF addressing these issues, both in its acquisitions and in the structure of the library itself? How will it document and support this moment? JMC These movements only play a role in the collections of the Réserve to the extent that they take shape in books, and specifically in books whose novelty lies not only in the discourse they contain but in their visual or graphic form. Within those conditions we are certainly interested in evolutions in contemporary society and culture, whether manifested in specialist or popular publications. In recent
years, for example, we have acquired several books of protest from Japan of the 1960s, not because they disseminate protest but because, in line with their confrontational nature, they invented new forms of publication that broke away from conventional or “bourgeois” book forms. DF Does the library work directly with artists on current projects? Might you be able to give us a window into its future plans and perhaps its exhibition schedule? MMC The Réserve has worked for a long time with renowned binders of artist’s books, both in France and abroad, and commissions them every year. We’ve given several assignments, for example, to Monique Mathieu and Jean de Gonet. We recently entrusted certain rare catalogues of the Impressionist painters to the Japanese bookbinder Nobuko Kiyomiya, who lives in Paris; she created for them a magnificent set of very delicate bindings in calfskin with hammered decorative stamps. There is a play of subtle variations from one volume to the next, which also involves differences in light. Then I’m preparing an exhibition on Giuseppe Penone for fall 2021, working with a colleague from the department of prints and photographs. Books, sculptures, and works from the collection will be presented in response to a piece that Penone has made specially for the BnF. DF I wonder whether you’d like to highlight other books (two each, maybe, if that’s not asking too much?) that you think are not only important in the context of the collection but reflective of the world and time in which they were made. Perhaps this might give you the opportunity to discuss some ideas that I haven’t raised. MMC Because you raised the question of the twentieth-century artist’s book and its origins, I will speak first about a book that is also considered a precursor: Marcel Broodthaers’s Pense-bête, published in 1964. It’s his last collection of poetry, but in some copies he glued in bits of paper, glazed with color, that disturb the poems’ legibility. This iconoclastic gesture transformed Broodthaers the poet into Broodthaers the visual artist; his last collection of
poems became his first artist’s book. In 2018, we acquired a wonderful copy, uniquely signed with eight of Broodthaers’s fingerprints. Another artist’s book that seems particularly resonant with our times is a sixteen-page one that Penone published with the Yvon Lambert gallery in 2011. This is a leporello illustrated with imprints of the body mixed with imprints of leaves—a powerful and poetic investigation of the relationship between humanity and nature. JMC I’d mention two recent artist’s books from Germany. One is Kalumet, by the Hamburg artist Clemens Tobias Lange, a book published in twentyeight copies in 2015. It pairs text by the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti with large aerial maps of the world, continent by continent, that reveal the very unequal density of nighttime air traffic. It’s a striking view of the globalized world of exchange, the inequality of the distribution of riches, the current state of the planet. In short, it’s a critical reflection on our contemporary world that is all the more effective and troublesome for being almost voiceless, punctuated only by a few poems every now and then. The other book is Weiße Verben [White verbs], by Veronika Schäpers, an artist currently based in Karlsruhe after living for some fifteen years in Japan. Her work on paper reflects her time there: it deals with the effects of transparency and opacity, and with the revelation and camouflage they can entail. Weiße Verben is the title of a poem by Durs Grünbein in which he evokes his impressions of Kazimir Malevich’s famous Suprematist Composition: White on White when he first saw it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The book, published in an edition of forty-six in 2017, places the poem in space: the text disappears in the thickness of the paper only to appear in ghostly form as an inscription showing just beneath the surface. How better to reorient us toward a contemporary investigation of what art does (as opposed to what it is or might be in itself), and into the particular mode of presence that it establishes in surpassing the old regime of representation?
Opposite: Installation view, Richard Prince: American Prayer, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, 2011. Artwork © Richard Prince. Photo: Todd Eberle Right: Yves Klein, Yves Peintures: 10 planches en couleurs, 1954, p. 12 © Succession Yves Klein c/o Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris 2020. Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France
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dennis hopper s taos ride Douglas Dreishpoon reflects on speaking with Hopper at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico, in 2009.
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No one looked more surprised than Dennis Hopper on the morning of May 6, 2009, as he was appointed honorary mayor of Taos and presented with a key to the city. Forty-one years earlier, when the long-haired first-time director stormed the town to film Easy Rider and cruised through a deserted Taos Pueblo with Peter Fonda on a pair of choppers, such a tribute would have been unthinkable—akin to handing over Gotham City to the Joker. To local Taoseños, Hopper and his crew appeared like an alien invasion, a perception amplified by his countercultural encampment a few years later at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House during postproduction on The Last Movie (1970–71). But on that calm spring day in 2009, a jubilant assembly of artists, reporters, politicians, and supporters packed the Harwood Museum of Art to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the release of Easy Rider and to preview the exhibition that Hopper had organized around the work of his longtime friends and fellow Taos settlers Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Ronald Davis, Ken Price, and Dean Stockwell.1 The scene was surely surreal. If you live long enough, most of your detractors disappear and most of your notorious deeds are forgotten. Surrounded by well-wishers, Hopper seemed to relish the moment as an auspicious gift. “I’ve never had a lot of direction in my life,” the spry seventy-three-year-old admitted with a laugh during our interview at the Harwood three days before the celebration. “I sort of follow the bee, you know, to the honey. It’s not like my life is some miraculous thing, I just leave myself open. The trail may not be going that way.”2 The many trails that Hopper blazed during the course of his remarkable life didn’t always lead to a pot of honey. Some were as focused as the relentless interstate highway that crosses his native state of Kansas; others were as unpredictable as the path of a skittish horse. Leaving himself open became a survivalist’s credo: a way to rebound and reinvent himself, time and time again, by simply rewriting the rules of his own game. If life’s dice had landed differently, the restless youth from Dodge City might have become an artist instead of an actor. Introduced to art by “a Rocky Mountain watercolorist,” the rambunctious farm boy naturally gravitated to it, learning to sketch from life in art classes at the Kansas City Art Institute. But he also got into acting, watching westerns in the town’s silver-screen movie theaters and, during his high school years, taking drama classes in La Mesa,
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outside San Diego. And early on, he realized that acting, besides being a golden egg, could be the vehicle through which everything else—filmmaking, photography, art collecting—would become possible. Hollywood’s dream machine is amoebalike in its ability to absorb the creative energies of anyone willing to enter its cinematic cloud. The culture it spawned during the late ’50s and ’60s exploded as a constellation of crossovers and cross-fertilizations, actors commingling with artists, performers, poets, writers, and experimental filmmakers. James Dean’s method-driven performances in Rebel without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956) deeply impressed the nineteen-year-old Hollywood hopeful who cut his teeth on the same sets. Hopper idolized Dean, who taught him how “to trick the imaginary line” between one’s actions on and off camera and encouraged him to pursue photography. Dean also advised him to get to know artists in his spare time, which he did through Stockwell, another actor and close friend, who, along with Dean, introduced him to the Stone Brothers print shop in West Los Angeles. Everyone he met there—the print shop’s founders, Walter Hopps (who, soon after, with Ed Kienholz, started the Ferus Gallery), Wallace Berman, and Robert Alexander; as well as Kienholz and George Herms—sharpened his aesthetic consciousness and in the years that followed became subjects of his photographs. More than painting and sculpture, it was a portable Nikon—a present to Hopper from his first wife, Brooke Hayward—that best suited his quicksilver sensibility. Loaded with black-and-white Tri-X film, it allowed him to seize decisive cultural moments with an uncanny sense of timing. “Where did Dennis Hopper come from?” mused Herms. “How many times was he on the scene . . . on the spot . . . in the world of art, Hollywood, the civil rights movement? This gift of being almost prescient is rare.”3 In the half-dozen years leading up to the production of Easy Rider, Hopper clicked off an astonishing stream of images. “In a curious way,” Hopps recalled in 1986, “what seems special about Hopper’s photographs now is that they seem to resemble still shots from movies. Not so much frames from films but still photographs made on the sets and locations of imagined films in progress . . . wonderful ones.”4 The sets of these imagined films are populated in the main by an expanding circle of art-world friends and musicians, sometimes photographed in public settings but more often in studios, galleries, and private homes. Other images, of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, document a tumultuous arena far from Tinseltown. The quest for equality against a rising tide of bigotry inevitably bled into the script for Easy Rider, Hopper’s directorial debut and, regrettably, the end of his photographic roll. Hopper’s Saturnian temperament may explain why he trusted kindred artists, whose dedicated patron he became. The art of others sustained him through highs and lows, multiple divorces, and rehabilitations. He plainly liked having art around him and acquired it with a vengeance from 1961, when he was living with Hayward in New York, until his death. If art offered some kind of solace, so did the small tribe of artists who followed him to Taos in the ’70s and in whose company he rose. That’s what I observed on the afternoon of May 4, 2009, when Dennis joined Bell, Cooper, and Stockwell at the Harwood to reminisce. Their brief reunion, coupled with my one-on-one conversation with Hopper the day before (excerpts below), now seems like a reprieve as the actor neared the end of his life’s trail. Dennis Hopper died on May 29, 2010, and is buried in a small cemetery in Ranchos de Taos.
Previous spread: Dennis Hopper, 1969. Photo: Columbia Pictures/Album/ Alamy Stock Photo This page: Dennis Hopper, Drugstore Camera—Cross, c. 1969–73 Opposite, top: Dennis Hopper, Drugstore Camera—Rocks, c. 1969–73 Opposite, bottom: Dennis Hopper, Drugstore Camera—Works of Art, c. 1969–73
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Opposite, top: Dennis Hopper, Biker Couple, 1961 Opposite, bottom: Dennis Hopper, Double Standard, 1961
We’re at the Harwood Museum in Taos. This month [May 2009] marks the fortieth anniversary of Easy Rider. With that cinematic milestone came the invitation to curate an exhibition around the work of your Los Angeles friends Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Ron Davis, Ken Price, and Dean Stockwell. How did you discover Taos? DENNIS HOPPER Paul Lewis, production manager on Easy Rider, and I were driving cross-country scouting locations. We were coming down from Farmington, New Mexico. We’d gone through Dulce, across the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, and down through Coyote and Abiquiú. When we got to Española, Paul said, “Well, if we turn right, we’ll go to Taos, an art colony. If we turn left, we’ll go to Santa Fe.” I said, “Well, I don’t want to go to any fuckin’ art colony. We’re making Easy Rider here, man!” But we went the wrong way and ended up in Taos. That’s how I first got here, and, as a location, it worked. I shot at the town jailhouse, the Indian pueblo [Taos Pueblo], and Manby Hot Springs. DD Was it difficult getting access to certain sites? DH The pueblo was problematic because they didn’t want a movie being shot there, particularly with motorcycles. It was also a time of ceremonial kivas. So we offered to shoot without anyone around. The elders agreed to that. DD I’m interested in the film’s storyboard, how the script got written by you, Peter Fonda, and Terry Southern. Who came up with the hippie-commune scene? DH Well, it wasn’t cowritten. Peter and I talked through a lot of ideas. He didn’t want any farmers, he wasn’t sure about the hippies, but we got through the process and had an outline. The year before, I spent almost every weekend hanging out in San Francisco, around Haight-Ashbury and Berkeley. I knew what was happening and what the film needed. Peter and Terry went off to New York City to write the screenplay while I scouted locations with Paul. When we got to New Orleans, I called and asked, “How’s it going?” We already had a complete outline; all they had to do was fill it in. Peter said they hadn’t written anything. I freaked out, got on a plane, went to New York, kicked everyone out, and in ten days wrote the script.5 There was a lot of improvisation on set but I knew where the film was going. DD Talk to me about acts of improvisation. DH Practically the whole fuckin’ thing was improvised. Except for certain scenes that were written, but even some of those were improvised. Like when Jack [Nicholson] gets turned on for the first time and sees flying saucer people in space. DD That scene reveals extreme character differences. Fonda’s character, Wyatt, tends to be taciturn and introverted. Billy is far more loquacious, animated. DH I do what Steve McQueen said an actor should never do: I explain everything. DD How did you sign on Nicholson?6 DH Bert Schneider [one of the film’s producers] wanted Nicholson. I knew Jack, because we’d both been in AIP [American International Pictures]. He’d written the script for The Trip [1967], which Peter and I had been in, along with Bruce Dern and Susan Strasberg (Lee Strasberg’s daughter). He also appeared in Hell’s Angels on Wheels [1967] and cowrote, with Bob Rafelson, Head [1968], starring the Monkees, with an appearance by yours truly. Easy Rider was essentially a countercultural motorcycle movie. Jack was originally from New Jersey. He was a damn good actor; I just couldn’t see him as the alcoholic country-bumpkin lawyer. But I was wrong, he was brilliant. He also convinced Bob Rafelson and DOUGLAS DREISHPOON
his associate Schneider that they should let me direct and act in the film. DD Where was postproduction done? DH At Columbia Pictures, where I was banned at the age of eighteen for telling [cofounder, president, and production director] Harry Cohn to go fuck himself after he criticized my doing Shakespeare at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. He kicked me (and my agent) out of the studio. Fifteen years later I returned to edit Easy Rider. Columbia distributed the film. DD You eventually returned to Taos and purchased the Mabel Dodge Luhan House. DH I fell in love with Taos and thought, If I ever get any money, I’m going to come back here to live. After Easy Rider came out and was a runaway success, I shot The Last Movie in Peru and sent all the footage to my younger brother, David. We needed a place to edit. When I came back to Taos, the Mabel Dodge House was available, including the original furniture, for $140,000. DD Did you know much about Dodge’s life story? DH Not a lot. I knew that [D. H.] Lawrence had been there, that Dodge had written some books, and that Tony Luhan was the son of the chief of the pueblo. I’ve never had a lot of direction in my life—I sort of follow the bee, you know, to the honey. It’s not like my life is some miraculous thing, I just leave myself open. The trail may not be going that way. I edited The Last Movie at the Mabel Dodge House and ended up staying in Taos on and off for about nine years. DD Some folks say your time in Taos was mostly spent defending yourself against ghosts while trying to finish the film. But there were sideline interests, too. You got involved with progressive politics—the Black Mesa Defense Fund. DH Yeah, the Peabody Coal Company was illegally destroying the sacred lands of the Hopi. We organized a group to stop the trucks. I was arrested for wearing sacred eagle feathers in my hat. Paul Bernal, governor of the pueblo, made my brother and me Buffalo brothers in the Buffalo clan. He told the Feds that he’d given me the eagle feathers as part of a ceremony. They stopped hassling me. DD What was your relationship with the Native Americans at the pueblo? DH I always had a good relationship with them. Many helped me restore the House; they originally built it. There were definitely clashes between Native Americans and hippies when I first arrived, but some of that got resolved over time. DD Let’s talk about your involvement with visual art. You had some arts education early on. DH I did. My first teacher, when I was about five, was a Rocky Mountain watercolorist who lived in Dodge City. After we moved to Kansas City, I’d go to the Kansas City Art Institute for kids’ programs on Saturdays from ten until five in the afternoon. We’d do art things all day, lots of life drawing. There were movie theaters in both places; I ended up going a lot. DD You’ve talked about film being the great consciousness-changer. Still, you always gravitated to visual art and artists. DH I met Walter Hopps and Wallace Berman, George Herms, Bob Alexander, and Ed Kienholz around 1955 at Hopp’s place on Sawtelle Boulevard, where Stone Brothers Printing set up shop. There was this actor, an older man living above the Greyhound station in Hollywood, who dressed in a Confederate Army general’s outfit and recited Shakespeare with a heavy accent [laughs]. James Dean thought he was the greatest. He had a poetry reading at Stone Brothers so I went there with Dean. That’s how I first met the group. Dean died shortly thereafter. DD You started painting around this time. Most of 149
This page: Dennis Hopper, Ed Ruscha, Printing, 1964 Opposite, top: Dennis Hopper, Wallace Berman, 1964 Opposite, bottom: Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney, and Jeff Goodman, 1963 Artwork © Dennis Hopper, courtesy Hopper Art Trust
the early work, gestural abstractions, was destroyed in the Bel Air fire, but painting remained an integral part of your creative stream. DH Contracting with Warner Brothers at the age of eighteen allowed me to live a cultural life. Acting was sort of a free ride to be able to paint, write poetry, and be what a middle-class farm boy from Kansas thinks is an artist. Marlon Brando, one of our greatest actors, said acting is a craft. To me it’s more than that; it’s another form of art. DD You took up photography in the early ’60s during your stint in New York City. With a 35mm Nikon, you covered the scene, on assignment or independently, taking memorable portraits of artists, musicians, and civil rights activists. What does acting have in common with photography and painting? DH [Lee] Strasberg, my teacher in New York, said “Acting engages all of the senses: smell, taste, sight, sound, touch.” His “Method” involved using the senses to activate emotional memories. Painting, photography, and acting are all an extension of the senses. This applies to all art, not just to acting. Painting solo is obviously different from being an actor on set. Directing a movie may be the highest art form because it encompasses all the arts: music, photography, acting, storytelling, visual sets. Whether it’s acting, painting, or taking a photograph, keeping yourself open without preconceived ideas is the best way to create. DD Tell me about the show. How did it come together? DH The Harwood has been asking me to do something. With the fortieth anniversary of Easy Rider, the time seemed right. I thought about doing a historical show, you know, with works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Dorothy Brett, and Andrew Dasburg, but decided to focus on five LA artists who also came to Taos and have been my friends for more than forty years. DD Dave Hickey wrote in the show’s catalogue that Taos is “one of the most beautiful and chastening places in the world.” DH Taos is a special place. It’s the second highest plateau in the world. The pueblo is one of the oldest Native American villages. And the Sangre de Cristo Mountains are one of the seven sacred mountains of the Tibetans. But it’s a tough place to live; it’s vast and violent, sometimes cruel. Some people can’t get out of here quick enough. 150
You’re seventy-three. What’s gained with age? New anxieties. But you get rid of a lot of old ones, too. There’s comfort in what you’ve learned. You don’t have to answer to anybody; there’s nothing to prove. You also know that time is limited. You start thinking about all the things you haven’t done. I haven’t had alcohol or hard narcotics in twenty-five years. A major accomplishment. I smoke grass occasionally but I went ten years without anything. I’m much clearer now, more peaceful. There was a time when everyone wanted me to be the characters I played. I was never any of those. I wasn’t Billy in Easy Rider or the photojournalist in Apocalypse Now. And yet people sort of expected that behavior. When I drank, I gave it to them [laughs]. They just needed to get out of the way. It was a drag. DD What if you hadn’t been in the movie industry, where one’s identity is a moving target? DH How would I have made a living? What would I have done? Sell pencils? Dig ditches? Fry hamburgers? We wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t been an actor. I’ve directed a few films but I’ve made my living as an actor in more than 150. That’s the way I did it. There were times when I couldn’t get work. That’s when I painted and took photographs. After I made Easy Rider I decided to direct movies and stopped taking stills. That was a mistake. But it all worked out. DD
DH
The introduction to this interview appeared in Art in America in September 2010, and is reprinted with minor additions by the author. 1. The exhibition was Hopper at the Harwood, L.A. to Taos: 40 Years of Friendship. It ran from May 8 to September 20, 2009, and is documented by a modest catalogue with an essay by Dave Hickey. 2. Douglas Dreishpoon and Dennis Hopper at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico, May 3, 2009. Heartfelt thanks to Alexandra Benjamin, my touchstone in Taos between 2000 and 2009, when we conducted the forty-four interviews that now, videotaped and transcribed, constitute the Oral History Project at the Beatrice Mandelman and Louis Ribak Collection (MSS 1002), Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, University of New Mexico Libraries, Albuquerque, New Mexico. 3. George Herms, “Twine,” in Dennis Hopper: A System of Moments (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 131. 4. Walter Hopps, “Out of the Sixties,” in Dennis Hopper: Out of the Sixties (Pasadena: Twelvetrees Press, 1988), n.p. 5. Questions remain about the extent of Terry Southern’s contribution to Easy Rider. He apparently wrote several early drafts of the screenplay, but during the film’s production and postproduction, many of his ideas, particularly for the New Orleans sequences, were cut. 6. The character of Jack Nicholson’s small-town lawyer was originally written for Southern’s friend Rip Torn, who purportedly dropped out of the project after an altercation with Hopper in a New York restaurant.
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© 2021 Carnegie Hall. Photos: Carnegie Hall by by Jeff Goldberg/Esto, James P. Gorman by Larry Lettera / Camera 1.
The Carnegie Hall Medal of Excellence is emblematic of the business community’s commitment to philanthropy, with an emphasis on access to the arts and humanities. Since 2006, the Medal of Excellence has recognized a leader whose accomplishments complement Carnegie Hall’s stature as one of the premier performance venues in the world.
CARNEGIE HALL MEDAL OF EXCELLENCE GAL A
May 6, 2021 A Virtual Benefit Evening Honoring
James P. Gorman Chairman and CEO, Morgan Stanley Carnegie Hall is proud to award its 11th Medal of Excellence to James P. Gorman, Chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley. Under his leadership, Morgan Stanley has remained steadfast in philanthropic support of the arts, culture, and the health and education of children. Morgan Stanley has supported Carnegie Hall for more than 40 years, maintaining a relationship that is among the longest-running corporate partnerships in the Hall’s history and helping to bring the transformative power of music around the globe. As Chairman and CEO, Mr. Gorman has been a loyal advocate in advancing this valued relationship. Join us as the business and philanthropic communities come together for this very special celebration. The evening will consist of a private virtual reception and award ceremony followed by a musical performance featuring an exciting guest artist. For more information about this special event, visit carnegiehall.org/MedalOfExcellence2021.
Mary Weatherford:
Aspen Art Museum 637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, CO 81611 aspenartmuseum.org | 970.925.8050 Hours: 10 AM–6 PM, Closed Mondays Admission to the AAM is free courtesy of Amy and John Phelan AAM exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Further support is provided by the AAM National Council. Additional support for Mary Weatherford’s exhibition is provided by Gagosian and David Kordansky Gallery. Installation view: Mary Weatherford, Neon Paintings, 2020. Photo: Carter Seddon
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80 ARTISTS 80 DISHES Have you ever watched Douglas Gordon cook? Do you know Harun Farocki’s favorite dal? How about hovering over the pot and scooping out the leftovers with Keren Cytter? And could you be tempted to try out Agnieszka Polska’s pierogis with trumpets of death? Cookbooks are a dime a dozen. Artists’ cookbooks have a tradition of their own. But there is only the one Videoart at Midnight Artists’ Cookbook: eighty of the most respected video artists of our time reveal their favorite recipes. Each recipe is ready to cook. Some are simple, others elaborate, and all have a personal story to tell. All the artists share a passion for cooking and their love of eating with friends. They came to Berlin from all over the world to live and work and exchange ideas here—and they have all been guests at Videoart at Midnight.
With recipes by: Monira Al Qadiri Ulf Aminde Julieta Aranda Marc Aschenbrenner Ed Atkins Yael Bartana Lucy Beech Bigert & Bergström John Bock Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz Martin Brand Ulu Braun Klaus vom Bruch Erik Bünger Filipa César Chto Delat Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann Keren Cytter Christoph Draeger Antje Engelmann Shahram Entekhabi Köken Ergun Theo Eshetu Simon Faithfull Christian Falsnaes Harun Farocki Omer Fast Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani Dani Gal Delia Gonzalez Douglas Gordon Andy Graydon Assaf Gruber Mathilde ter Heijne Isabell Heimerdinger Benjamin Heisenberg Kerstin Honeit Christian Jankowski Anja Kirschner Knut Klaßen Korpys/Löffler Zhenhua Li Joep van Liefland Melissa Logan Dafna Maimon Antje Majewski Melanie Manchot Lynne Marsh Bjørn Melhus Almagul Menlibayeva Ari Benjamin Meyers Eléonore de Montesquiou Matthias Müller Bettina Nürnberg & Dirk Peuker Marcel Odenbach Stefan Panhans Mario Pfeifer Agnieszka Polska Ulrich Polster Mario Rizzi Willem de Rooij Julian Rosefeldt Anri Sala Sandra Schäfer Erik Schmidt Amie Siegel Pola Sieverding Martin Skauen Safy Sniper Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag Vibeke Tandberg Rebecca Ann Tess Guido van der Werve Gernot Wieland Ming Wong Ina Wudtke Shingo Yoshida Katarina Zdjelar Stefan Zeyen Tobias Zielony
available at GAGOSIAN SHOP 22 × 26 cm, 256 pp., 48 b&w and 247 col. ills., Hardcover ISBN 978-3-7356-0725-6 gagosianshop.com videoart-at-midnight.de
GAME CHANGER: THOMAS MCEVILLEY David Frankel celebrates the art-historical contributions made by the scholar, poet, and critic Thomas McEvilley. What Thomas McEvilley will surely go down in art history for is a series of writings in Artforum in 1984–85 that deeply altered the public perception of museum practices and of museums themselves. What should be equally admired, though, and what I myself still find startling almost forty years after I first met him, was the quality of his knowledge, wide, deep, and esoteric. Here he is in 1982 on a work by Eric Orr, a member of California’s Light and Space movement like Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and others, but in Tom’s eyes different: Blood Shadow was a ritual involving sympathetic magic, mingling the stream of Orr’s art with the ancient past. With this piece Orr began layering his work into a complex cultural archeology which, designed to free him from European art history, would ultimately restore him to it. Hereafter the Egyptian stratum of this archeology would surface frequently. Egyptian art, after all, was both eerily “Modern” and deeply concerned with the sense of negative presence, of the transition to the bodiless Prior which is, in the language of an Egyptian coffin text, “the universal primordial form of life.” That Orr’s eye was focused on ancient Egypt was basic information: Blood Shadow, after all, a work in glass and human blood (Orr’s), was ultimately buried in the sand at Giza, near the pyramid of the pharaoh Menkaure, culminating a series of moonlit ceremonies on two continents. (Back then, every issue of Artforum, where Tom’s essay was published and I had recently begun work as an editor, was vetted by libel lawyers before publication; their comment here was something on the lines of “Please confirm that this bizarre ritual actually took place.”) But Tom wouldn’t have needed Orr to fill him in on the ancient world—his PhD was
in classical philology (he had mastered Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit), and as a professor at Rice, in Houston, he taught on the history of religion among much else. Those introductions of “negative presence,” the “bodiless Prior,” and the Egyptian coffin are pure Tom. In January 1982, a few months before the Orr piece, Artforum had published an essay of his on Yves Klein in which Rosicrucianism, self-described as a distant descendant of Egyptian mysteries among others, had played a big role; Klein’s famous IKB (International Klein Blue), a paint color the artist custom-mixed and filed papers to patent, Tom read as incarnating the Rosicrucian principle of “Spirit-that-holds-all-things-dissolved-in-itself.” Klein had previously been seen in the United States as something of a clown—a “vaudevillian,” according to John Canaday in the New York Times in 1967, whose art was a form of “stuntsmanship.” His reframing in this country owes a good deal to Tom. A classicist, a historian, a philosopher, an art critic, a mystic—when I was trying to schedule a phone call with Tom once, he told me he wouldn’t be able to talk to me in a given week because he’d have taken a vow of silence. I thought he was joking; he wasn’t. So that was his demonstrated scope, but I wonder whether William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe had much sense of the writer they were dealing with when, in November of 1984, they read his evisceration of their lavish exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. They were proud of their show, understandably so: with a checklist of around 350 works, it compared modern and contemporary painting and sculpture with tribal objects from Africa, Oceania, and North America, an idea that others had pursued previously but never on so grand a scale. Attempting to demonstrate what they called “affinities” between modern and tribal
object-makers, Rubin, the head of MoMA’s painting and sculpture department, and Varnedoe, a professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts (and later Rubin’s successor at MoMA), had assembled a fabulous group of loans and a two-volume catalogue crammed with detailed scholarship. So when Tom wrote a feature-length pan that Ingrid Sischy, then Artforum’s editor, smartly put on the issue’s cover, they decided to take him on. The result was a protracted series of exchanges on the letters page of Artforum in February and May of 1985, in which first Rubin and Varnedoe, then Rubin alone, took issue with Tom’s essay on both intellectual and factual grounds and Tom replied. A couple of years later, when Janet Malcolm profiled Ingrid in The New Yorker, she called part of this exchange—a dispute about the number of objects shown in a pair of vitrines at the Pompidou, Paris, between 1977 and around 1982—“one of the most excruciatingly particularized squabbles about a matter of doubtful significance ever published.” Malcolm’s knowledge of such squabbles being no doubt wider than mine, I can only defer; but that description underplays the drama of the letters, the repeated Gotcha’s! and No-you-don’t’s! that riveted Artforum’s readers and were, I suspect, a good part of what attracted the attention of The New Yorker. More important, though, was the simple spectacle of a critic standing up so publicly to Rubin and to MoMA, formidable embodiments of both personal and institutional authority; and more important still was the substance of Tom’s argument, which the need to restate three times— once in the review and twice later in the letters— only gave him the opportunity to clarify and refine. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art seems to have seemed within MoMA like a corrective to art history, an acknowledgment of the quality of the objects produced by tribal cultures. Tom saw it the other way around: modernism remained central in the exhibition while tribal objects orbited around it. He faulted MoMA deeply for its lack of interest in the context from which the tribal objects had emerged and the functions to which they had been put, with the result that they seemed to matter only for their relation to modern and contemporary art. By the time of his third essay, Tom was able to write, prophetically I think, “Our tribal view of art history as primarily or exclusively European or Eurocentric will become increasingly harmful as it cuts us off from the emerging Third World and isolates us from the global culture which already is in its early stages. We must have values that can include the rest of the world when the moment comes—and the moment is upon us.” If MoMA and museums generally are today attempting to become more ecumenical, the “Primitivism” debate was a crucial step on the way. Left to right: Thomas McEvilley, Ulay (hiding behind a slab of wood), Eric Orr, and James Lee Byars, c. 1995 © Ulay, courtesy ULAY Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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