Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2021 by Gagosian Quarterly

40 Doris Ammann

102 Cecilia Pavón

Larry Gagosian reflects on the incredible life and career of his friend Doris Ammann.

Pavón speaks with Fiona Alison Duncan about the art of translation, the costs of consumerism, and the importance of writing beyond the self.

94 New York Public Library: Picture Collection Joshua Chuang discusses the institution’s singular Picture Collection, the artist Taryn Simon’s engagement with it, and four proofs of its importance to art history.

114 Helen Frankenthaler: A Painter’s Sculptures We present primary texts by Helen Frankenthaler and Anthony Caro, with an introduction by Lauren Mahony.

Social Works Antwaun Sargent presents a collection of dialogues around Black space and community.

120 An Eye on the Market Nick Simunovic, director of Gagosian, Hong Kong, speaks with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about his fourteen years in Hong Kong, the shifting business developments there and across Asia, and the role of art fairs and auctions in recent years.

124 Gregory Corso: A Most Dangerous Art Raymond Foye explores the legendary poet’s final poems.

148

A Body in Fukushima Ten years after Fukushima’s nuclear meltdown of 2011, movement-based artist Eiko Otake and historian/photographer William Johnston discuss their visits to that irradiated landscape. The forthcoming book A Body in Fukushima documents their ongoing performance project.

132 Building a Legacy Delphine Huisinga joins scholar Charles Stuckey in conversation about their respective experiences in researching and compiling chronologies.

136 Say Goodbye, Catullus, To the Shores Of Asia Minor Thierry Greub tracks the literary references in Cy Twombly’s epic painting of 1994.

142 Fashion and Art, Part 6: Stella McCartney Derek Blasberg speaks with the designer about her recent artist collaborations.

For the second installment of our collaboration with pen America, we are delighted to publish a short story by Libby Flores.

162 Adriana Varejão: For a Poetics of Difference Luisa Duarte considers the artist’s newest paintings, discussing their engagement with colonialism, radical difference, and the ruins of the past.

168 Sky High Farm Dan Colen speaks to Derek Blasberg about the evolution of his Sky High Farm project and its new collaborations with Dover Street Market to raise funds for community outreach.

174 Light & Lightning: WonderReactions at Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field In this second installment of a two-part essay, John Elderfield resumes his investigation of Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field (1977), focusing this time on how the hope to see lightning there has led to the work’s association with the Romantic conception of the sublime.

Photo credits: Top row, left to right: Installation view, Lauren Halsey, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, January 25–March 14, 2020. Artwork © Lauren Halsey. Photo: Jeff McLane, courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles Film still from Kevin Jerome Everson’s Old Cat (2009) © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures Bottom row, left to right: Eiko Otake, A Body in Places, Moran Plant, Burlington, VT, 28 May 2016, No. 858. Photo: William Johnston Albert Oehlen’s studio, Ispaster, Spain, 2020. Photo: Esther Freund Front cover: Carrie Mae Weems, The Louvre, 2006 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

106

Overtime: On Kevin Jerome Everson Carlos Valladares writes on the filmmaker’s expansive body of work, exploring themes of identity, time, and reality.

184 Jean Pigozzi: An Interview with Rachel Feinstein Jean Pigozzi chats with artist Rachel Feinstein about the publication of his new book, The 213 Most Important Men in My Life.

202 Game Changer: Dr. David Driskell Taylor Aldridge reflects on the enduring legacy of the artist, educator, curator, and scholar.

Albert Oehlen: Terrifying Sunset The artist speaks with Mark Godfrey about his new paintings, touching on their relationship with John Graham, the Rothko Chapel, and Leigh Bowery.

TABLE OF CONTENTS SUMMER 2021

156 Mercury Was There

ur cover image is from Carrie Mae Weems’s Museums Series, which she began in 2006. Her back to the camera, the artist stands silhouetted in a black dress in front of I. M. Pei’s iconic pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre. The potent immediacy of a photograph made fifteen years ago resonates powerfully with questions at the forefront of our conversations today. We are honored that Antwaun Sargent has guest-edited a special section of this issue, “Social Works.” The writings and conversations he has brought together look closely at Black artists and innovators who have focused on the creation of Black spaces. Theaster Gates, for one, has worked to preserve the archives of Frankie Knuckles, the DJ prominent in Chicago’s house-music scene of the 1980s. Rick Lowe and Walter Hood discuss their recent work and how embracing the weight of history can help create momentum for change. Lauren Halsey and Mabel O. Wilson talk about the foundations of their practice, their engagement with architecture, and the way power relationships are embedded in space. Linda Goode Bryant and DeVonn Francis discuss their involvement in community-building projects based around food and farming. We look at new work from Zalika Azim and Allana Clarke, both former fellows of nxthvn, the New Haven–based arts model initiated by Titus Kaphar, Jason Price, and Jonathan Brand to empower emerging artists and curators of color through education and access that in the past were out of reach. William Johnston’s photographs of the dance artist Eiko Otake moving in the irradiated landscape of Fukushima, Japan, are haunting, and we are proud to present a selection from their forthcoming book A Body in Fukushima. Our ongoing collaboration with pen America brings us a new short story by Libby Flores, an account of a complex romantic relationship interwoven with the recent actions of America itself. For the second iteration of our Eye on the Market series, Nick Simunovic shares his insights into the Asian art market, particularly focusing on Hong Kong. In this issue’s Building a Legacy article, Charles Stuckey and Delphine Huisinga take a deep dive into the historically underrated merits of chronologies—fact-based accounts providing both storytelling structures and building blocks for future scholarship. In a personal remembrance, Larry Gagosian reflects on the recent loss of his friend Doris Ammann. Finally we reflect on the life and work of Dr. David Driskell, the artist, teacher, and curator famous for establishing a history of African American art stretching back to the eighteenth century. Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

With art and artists, writers and musicians, ideas and conversations, this new video series gives audiences a backstage pass to celebrate exhibitions and performances, even while physically distanced. gagosian.com/premieres

GAGOSIAN PREMIERES

RACHEL WHITEREAD On the occasion of Rachel Whiteread: Interior Objects at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, the artist speaks with art critic and curator Iwona Blazwick in her studio, and composer Max Richter performs inside the exhibition in response to the works.

ANSELM KIEFER We mark the opening of Anselm Kiefer: Field of the Cloth of Gold at Gagosian, Le Bourget, with a conversation between the artist and art historian James Cuno and a debut ballet performance by Hugo Marchand and Hannah O’Neill, choreographed by Florent Melac and set to music composed by Steve Reich.

JENNY SAVILLE In this episode Jenny Saville celebrates her exhibition Elpis at Gagosian New York with painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn and historian Simon Schama, with a performance by the Aaron Diehl Trio, who play music by Philip Glass as well as a new composition inspired by the work on view.

CHANEL CELEBRATES N°5 In 1921, Gabrielle Chanel has an idea for a perfume which she calls N°5, her lucky number. This vision of creation owes its singularity to the permanence of one perspective: the idea above all else. In 2021, a High Jewellery collection celebrates the House’s emblematic number with a creative act that combines the audacity of a technical challenge with the freedom of an original approach. CHANEL High Jewellery creates the N°5 Collection, with a centrepiece that reveals a unique geometric virtuosity: a necklace whose design reflects all the defining features of the N°5 perfume bottle, composed of more than 700 diamonds set around a diamond specially cut to weigh 55.55 carats. The perfection of the idea has determined the weight in carats. This is an unprecedented approach: to start with a rough diamond, aiming not for the greatest weight but for the perfection of the stone, cut to the exact dimensions of an idea. Diamonds are eternal. To CHANEL, éternité, the French word for “eternity,” is first and foremost an anagram of étreinte, the word for “embrace.” As such, this is how the House defines creation: an embrace between matter and spirit, which alone can give birth to a style. CHANEL reaffirms it today: creation is eternal.

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Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 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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For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries Advertising@gagosian.com

Online Layouts Andie Trainer

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Distributed by Pineapple Media Ltd

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Prepress DL Imaging Printed by Pureprint Group

Cover Carrie Mae Weems 20

Contributors Sir David Adjaye OBE Taylor Aldridge Fiona Alison Duncan Zalika Azim Derek Blasberg Joshua Chuang Allana Clarke Dan Colen Luisa Duarte John Elderfield Rachel Feinstein Libby Flores Raymond Foye DeVonn Francis Larry Gagosian Mark Godfrey Linda Goode Bryant Thierry Greub Lauren Halsey Walter Hood Delphine Huisinga Gillian Jakab William Johnston Rick Lowe Carrie Mae Weems Lauren Mahony Stella McCartney Alison McDonald Mabel O. Wilson Albert Oehlen Eiko Otake Cecilia Pavón Maya Phillips Jean Pigozzi Antwaun Sargent Nick Simunovic Charles Stuckey Ron Trent Carlos Valladares

Thanks Azja Alvarenga Richard Alwyn Fisher Chloe Barter Jennifer Belt Mollie Bernstein Priya Bhatnagar Sabina Bokhari Michael Cary Serena Cattaneo Adorno Rebecca Chang Elizabeth Childress Michael Childress Annie Cicco Nicola Del Roscio Ohemaa Dixon Sara Douglas Alex Dymond Stephanie Elliott Prieto Vivane Eng Andrew Fabricant Kate Fernandez-Lupino Emily Florido Mark Francis Michelle Franke Georg Frei Esther Freund Nicole Fromer Brett Garde Theaster Gates Nicole Gervasio Alexandra Giniger Sheila Glaser Marissa Glauberman Darlina Goldak Megan Goldman Marielle Ingram Kevin Jerome Everson Sarah Jones Chantala Kommanivanh

Chris Kraus India Lovejoy Jona Lueddeckens Donna McClendon James McKee Rob McKeever Marc McQuade Christopher Melton Adele Minardi Madeleine Molyneaux Lily Mortimer Olivia Mull Louise Neri Julie Niemi Max Orloff Kathy Paciello M. Cristina Prischich Ruhland Stefan Ratibor Virginia Regan Coleman Ellen Robinson Arabella Rufino Adam Setton Taryn Simon Rani Singh Elizabeth Smith Ashley Stewart Louis Vaccara Kara Vander Weg Adriana Varejão Janique Vigier Eva Wildes Hanako Williams Sarah Womble Kelso Wyeth Jason Ysenburg

CONTRIBUTORS Zalika Azim

Allana Clarke

Zalika Azim’s conceptual practice explores the tensions between personal and collective narratives to investigate the ways in which memory, migration, and belonging are contextualized in relation to colonized landscapes. Photo: Chris Edwards

Allana Clarke is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist based in Troy, New York. She has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works, Yaddo, and nxthvn.

Carrie Mae Weems Considered one of the most influential American artists working today, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power. Weems has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the Prix de Rome, the Alpert, Anonymous was a Woman, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first Medals of Arts awarded by the US Department of State in recognition of her commitment to its Art in Embassies program. In 2013, she received a MacArthur “Genius” grant, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Photo: Rolex/Audoin Desforges

Maya Phillips Maya Phillips was born and raised in New York. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary Review, At Length, the Baffler, boaat, the Gettysburg Review, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and others. Her second book, Nerd: On Navigating Heroes, Magic, and Fandom in the 21st Century, is forthcoming in the summer of 2022 from Atria Books. Photo: Molly Walsh

Antwaun Sargent Antwaun Sargent is a writer and critic. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications, and he has contributed essays to museum and gallery catalogues. Sargent has coorganized exhibitions including The Way We Live Now, at the Aperture Foundation, New York, in 2018, and his first book, The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, was released by Aperture in fall 2019. Photo: Darius Garvin

Ron Trent Ron Trent is best know for founding the legendary Prescription Records, Future Vision, Electric Blue Recordings, and his latest imprint, Music and Power. In order to preserve and perpetuate its essence to the new generation, Ron Trent has set up the SODA Foundation to ignite the preservation of the ethos of underground music culture. Photo: Marie Staggat

Linda Goode Bryant Linda Goode Bryant founded Just Above Midtown (jam, 1974–86), the first gallery to show work by African-American and other artists of color in a major New York gallery district. In 1995 Bryant began making documentary and experimental films, which led her in 2009 to create Project eats, a growing network of community-based food systems supporting low-income individuals and families throughout New York City.

DeVonn Francis Chef and artist DeVonn Francis is reshaping the culinary scene as we know it. He is the founder of Yardy World, which is a one of a kind hospitality company. Not constricted by having a brick-and-mortar location, Yardy World has the flexibility to navigate spaces in a way that utilizes food to authentically engage with people and their stories and identities. Photo: Michael James Fox

Lauren Halsey Lauren Halsey is rethinking the possibilities for art, architecture, and community engagement and produces both standalone artworks and site-specific projects. Combining found, fabricated, and handmade objects, Halsey’s work maintains a sense of civic urgency and freeflowing imagination, reflecting the lives of the people and places around her and addressing the crucial issues confronting people of color, queer populations, and the working class. Inspired by Afrofuturism and funk, as well as the signs and symbols that populate her local environments, Halsey creates a visionary form of culture that is at once radical and collaborative. Photo: Czariah Smith

Libby Flores Libby Flores’s writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Post Road Magazine, McSweeney’s, Tin House/The Open Bar, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is currently the director of audience engagement and digital projects at bomb magazine. Flores holds an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College.

Mabel O. Wilson Mabel O. Wilson is professor in architecture and professor in African American and African Diaspora studies at Columbia University. She also serves as the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and codirector of Global Africa Lab. Her publications include her own Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Smithsonian Books, 2016) and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (University of California Press, 2012), as well as Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020), which she coedited with Irene Cheng and Charles L. Davis II. She is cocurator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Dario Calmese

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

Albert Oehlen Albert Oehlen’s oeuvre is a testament to the innate freedom of the creative act. Through expressionist brushwork, surrealist methodology, and selfconscious amateurism, he engages with the history of abstract painting, pushing the basic components of abstraction to new extremes. Photo: Oliver Schultz-Berndt

Mark Godfrey Mark Godfrey is an art historian and curator based in London. From 2007 to 2021 he was senior curator of international art at Tate Modern, London, where he curated and cocurated retrospectives of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Alighiero Boetti, Franz West, and others, as well as the acclaimed exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.

Rick Lowe Rick Lowe is a Houston-based artist and professor of art at the University of Houston. He has exhibited and worked with communities nationally and internationally. His work has appeared in the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York; the Kumamoto State Museum, Kumamoto, Japan; the Venice Architecture Biennale; and Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece. He is best known for Project Row Houses, a communitybased art project that he started in Houston in 1993. Additional community projects include the Watts House Project in Los Angeles, the Borough Project in Charleston, South Carolina (with Suzanne Lacy and Mary Jane Jacobs), and the Anyang Public Art Program 2010 in Anyang, Korea. Photo: Brent Reaney

Charles Stuckey Charles Stuckey is a widely published independent scholar who has served as a curator in major US museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, helping organize highly acclaimed retrospectives for Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and others. He is currently head of research for the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Yves Tanguy.

Walter Hood Walter Hood is the creative director and founder of Hood Design Studio, Oakland, California, a cultural practice working across art, fabrication, design, landscape, research, and urbanism. He is the David K. Woo Chair and professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and he lectures on and exhibits professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally. He was recently the Spring 2020 Diana Balmori Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and the Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar for the Harvard GSD Loeb Fellowship.

Delphine Huisinga A freelance art researcher based in New York, Delphine Huisinga has been working closely with the Gagosian publications team on a series of ongoing projects for the past three years. She was also until recently the researcher for the forthcoming fourth volume of John Richardson’s Life of Picasso. Photo: Pamela Berkovic

Rachel Feinstein In richly detailed sculptures and multipart installations, Rachel Feinstein investigates the concept of luxury expressed in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Europe and challenges it through contemporary parallels. By synthesizing visual and social opposites such as romance and pornography, elegance and kitsch, and the marvelous and the banal, she explores issues of taste and desire. Photo: Markus Jans, Architectural Digest © Condé Nast

Nick Simunovic Nick Simunovic has led Gagosian’s operations in Asia since 2007. He entered the art world professionally in 2000 with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Simunovic has a BA from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Jean Pigozzi Jean Pigozzi picked up a Leica camera as an adolescent and began formulating a diaristic style that revolved around his observations of upper-class life. While attending Harvard University, he made regular visits to New York, where he mingled with artists and tastemakers, taking photographs in close proximity. His “sophisticated snapshots,” significantly influenced by Robert Frank and Helmut Newton, are candid and intimate, capturing friends including Andy Warhol, Anjelica Huston, Diane von Furstenberg, and others in scenes of social revelry or voluptuous leisure. Pigozzi often appears in his own photographs, affirming the role of the camera as a tool for his keen engagement with the world. Photo: Brett Ratner

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 (City Lights, 2019). He is a consulting editor with the Brooklyn Rail. Photo: Amy Grantham

Eiko Otake Born and raised in Japan, Eiko Otake is a New York–based, interdisciplinary performer and choreographer. After working for more than forty years in the partnership Eiko & Koma, she now works as a soloist and directs her own collaborative projects. Photo: Tatsuhiko Nakagawa

William Johnston William Johnston grew up in Rawlins, Wyoming. He received his BA from Elmira College, New York, his MA and PhD from Harvard University, and studied at Nanzan University and the University of Nagoya, Japan. He is the John E. Andrus Professor of History at Wesleyan University and the author of two monographs and numerous essays. Photo: Andrew Pekarik

Dan Colen In works ranging from painting and sculpture to installation and performance, Dan Colen plays with familiar materials and cultural symbols to interrogate the relationship between meaning and object. He is the founder of Sky High Farm, a nonprofit committed to improving access to fresh, nutritious food for New Yorkers living in underserved communities.

Taylor Aldridge Taylor Aldridge is the visual-arts curator and program manager at the California African American Museum (CAAM), Los Angeles. She has organized exhibitions with the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Artist Market, Cranbrook Art Museum, and the Luminary (Saint Louis). In 2015, along with art critic Jessica Lynne, she cofounded ARTS.BLACK. Photo: Paper Monday

Cecilia Pavón Cecilia Pavón was born in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1973. She holds a BA in literature from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. In 1999 she cofounded the independent art space and small press Belleza y Felicidad, Buenos Aires. She has published poetry and short stories in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. This year her story collection Little Joy will be published in English translation by Semiotext(e) and the anthology Bonbons à l’anis will be published in French by Brook and Varichon & Cie. As a translator from German and English into Spanish, Pavón has translated Diedrich Diederichsen, Chris Kraus, Dorothea Lasky, Ariana Reines, Werner Schroeter, and others.

Fiona Alison Duncan Fiona Alison Duncan is a CanadianAmerican author and organizer. She is the founder of Hard to Read, a literary social practice through which she curates books at Eckhaus Latta’s flagship stores in New York and Los Angeles. Duncan’s debut novel Exquisite Mariposa was the recipient of a 2020 Lambda Award. She is currently working on her second novel.

Luisa Duarte Luisa Duarte is an art critic and independent curator based in São Paulo. She has an MA in philosophy from the Pontifical Catholic University and a PhD from the UERJ Art Institute. Duarte was general coordinator of the conference cycle “The Bienal of São Paulo and the Brazilian Artistic Environment: Memory and Projection,” a debate platform of the 28th São Paulo Bienal, Em Vivo contato . . . (2008).

Lauren Mahony Lauren Mahony is an art historian based in New York. She worked as a curatorial assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, before joining Gagosian, where she has worked on exhibitions and publications devoted to Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Brice Marden, David Reed, and others.

Stella McCartney Born and raised in London and the English countryside, Stella McCartney graduated from Central Saint Martins, London, in 1995. A signature style of sharp tailoring, natural confidence, and sexy femininity was immediately apparent in her first collection and in 1997, after only two collections, she was appointed the creative director of Chloe in Paris and enjoyed great success during her tenure there. In 2001, in partnership with the luxurygoods company Kering, McCartney launched her own fashion house under her name and showed her first collection in Paris. A lifelong vegetarian, she uses no leather or fur in her designs. Her collections include women’s and men’s ready-towear, accessories, lingerie, eyewear, fragrance, and kids’ clothes.

Thierry Greub Thierry Greub is an art historian and lecturer based in Cologne, Germany. He received his PhD from the Universität Basel in 1991 and his postdoctoral lecture qualification, on Cy Twombly’s inscriptions, from the Universität zu Köln in 2017. He is in the process of publishing the six-volume Cy Twombly: Inscriptions (Leiden: Brill, and Paderborn: Fink, 2021).

John Elderfield 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.

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

Joshua Chuang Joshua Chuang is the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Associate Director for Art, Prints, and Photographs and Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography at the New York Public Library. Among the exhibitions and publications he has organized are Robert Adams: The Place We Live (2010); Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins (2018); and Santu Mofokeng: Stories (2019).

Gillian Jakab Gillian Jakab is an editor of the Gagosian Quarterly and the dance editor of the Brooklyn Rail.

ALBERT OEHLEN: TERRIFYING SUNSET The artist speaks with Mark Godfrey about his new paintings, touching on the works’ relationship to John Graham, the Rothko Chapel, and Leigh Bowery.

MARK GODFREY You’ve been interested in John Graham [1886–1961] for a long time and started making works that riffed on and remixed his painting Tramonto Spaventoso [Terrifying Sunset, 1940–49] after you discovered an image of it in Dore Ashton’s book about American abstract pa i nt i ng m a ny ye a r s a go. But wh at m ade you come back to that painting in the body of work that you have been making within the last two or three years? Why did you return to Graham after a period where you hadn’t looked at him? ALBERT OEHLEN I was experimenting, and I had several things in mind, and one was trying to make a large charcoal painting—not drawing, painting. And that had started with the charcoal drawings, the large ones. I needed a motif to find out what happens, and I just picked that one without thinking much, and then it turned out I got hooked and couldn’t stop. MG How long had it been since you’d last used that motif? AO It might’ve been ten years or more. MG What made you want to make a large charcoal painting at that point? Was it just sort of an interesting question about how to make a drawing that’s a painting? AO Yeah, exactly. With the large charcoal drawings on paper, I discovered several things you can do with that material—how it looks and what it does—and that got me interested in trying more and in trying the same thing on canvas. MG When you draw in charcoal on a smooth piece of paper, it obviously sits on the surface differently from when you put it on a canvas that’s been prepared and gessoed. This is a very techy question, but what different surface effects will you get when it’s on a canvas? AO You can use water—and I thought that was very interesting because you can very easily get different shades of gray. When you have that result and see some of the drips there, it’s funny because that’s so typical of painting. MG Is mak ing a huge painting in charcoal another way of disobeying the rules of painting? Because I think there’s always been a traditional hierarchy between drawing, which is seen as preparatory and a more minor work, and painting, which is the finished major work. So when you make a huge charcoal painting,

you’re kind of interrupting painting, which should have oil on it but instead it’s got charcoal. Was that one of your intentions? AO Yeah, that’s what happens. I’m not the first one to do this. [Konrad] Klapheck has always made his sketches the same size as his paintings. Most of them are charcoal on canvas—of course, they look very different. But I thought that those paintings were very impressive. And I thought I had enough reasons to do it . . . MG So, if I understand correctly, you were wanting to experiment with making a charcoal painting and you were looking for a motif and the thing that came to mind in some way—almost because it’s in your hard drive, in your memory—was the John Graham painting that you’ve been fascinated with for a long time. And Graham was a contemporary of [Mark] Rothko’s but made work that was obviously very different from Rothko’s. At what point did you start to think about putting together the remixes of Graham’s painting with the format of the Rothko Chapel in your own Tramonto Spaventoso [2019–20]? AO I don’t know, just while I was making the work. I thought it was an interesting idea to have that aim—like now I have to do this, I have to follow these formats, and how do I compose it, how much material do I have, and all these questions. It was challenging. I just needed something to do [laughs]. MG When I went to Houston, I was really excited to visit the Menil Collection and see the Rothko paintings in the chapel. And I don’t think I’ve ever had as disappointing an experience of art as that visit—partly because I really couldn’t see much in the painting. There was also some guy in the middle of the chapel doing yoga, not looking at the paintings—it felt like this person had been told he could have a spiritual experience in the middle of these Rothko paintings, but he wasn’t actually looking. I remember his eyes were closed—like it’s all about the suggestion, you know, that you can go to this place and have an experience. But I was profoundly disappointed with the surfaces. Maybe they’ve changed over time. Have you been, and what was your experience of that place? AO It was similar. In the books on Rothko, it always says the colors have changed because he used a mixture of materials and didn’t care if it was good stuff. Anyway, when I got there, it was so

dark, and I couldn’t see anything. And I thought, It’s funny, I don’t want to judge it, but if I sit here and just let this make an impression on me, there must be a lot of auto-suggestion working, because otherwise you don’t get a result. And so, with that impression, I thought that there is a kind of funny tension between my motifs and that installation. But also, right in the beginning, when you see that group of painters in the 1940s, they all were like—I mean, Graham was connected with [Arshile] Gorky and [Willem] de Kooning and was advising them—he had a lot to say. But his own works were absolutely not going in that modern direction, into what would become classical abstract paintings. And especially the painting that I’m referring to, Tramonto Spaventoso, seems to have an overload of meaning. From my point of view, it’s kind of ridiculous because I’m not interested in meaning at all, or how to transmit meaning in a painting. I especially can’t stand it if it’s like encoding and decoding, if that’s what you’re meant to do with a painting or a piece of art. MG Do you think that Graham had a set of meanings that he wanted to be communicated with that painting, or do you think he was playing with the idea of meaning? AO All of that is possible. I don’t know. The original painting is loaded with symbols. It almost looks like a puzzle, you know, like a drawing puzzle. MG But it may be a puzzle that can be solved. The mermaid and the self-portrait and the sort of swastika and the sunset and the words and the Russian writing and the Roman writing—it may be that, in his mind, he thought they all connected to produce something that added up. Or maybe he thought they didn’t connect and that it was a kind of game being played with the viewer, who would have a desire for them to connect, but they didn’t. I don’t know enough about Graham to know what— AO Yeah. I don’t know. He has these repeating motifs, like the cross-eyed ladies, and some of them have a wound on the neck. In one painting, he even painted the wound with the knife sticking in it [laughs], and it’s kind of perverse. But I’m so ignorant—I don’t even try to find out what a painting means. Never. I don’t care. It can take twenty years until I see, Oh, this is that figure repeating and he’s doing that. Because I absolutely don’t care. MG John Corbett, who’s a friend of yours from Chicago, writes about your early series of Graham Previous spread: Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 84 ¼ × 72 1⁄8 inches (214 × 183 cm). Photo: Simon Vogel This page: John Graham, Tramonto Spaventoso (Terrifying Sunset), 1940–49, oil on canvas, 16 ¼ × 26 inches (41.1 × 66 cm) Opposite and following two spreads: Albert Oehlen’s studio, Ispaster, Spain, 2019–20. Photos © Esther Freund

Final spread: Albert Oehlen, öbstruct reality/stop sign, from Tramonto Spaventoso, 2019–20, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, in 6 parts: öbstruct reality, 180 × 201 ¼ inches (457.2 × 511.1 cm); stop sign, 180 × 96 inches (457.2 × 243.8 cm). Photo: Erika Ede All artwork by Albert Oehlen © Albert Oehlen

paintings through the lens of the remix. And, you know, the remix takes you to dub DJs producing a new version of a reggae track, or house DJs taking a disco track or a funk track from fifteen years before and remixing it. But there’s also the idea of the mash-up—two completely different songs that are mixed together. One of my favorites—and this is quite old—was when someone put a George Michael song and a Missy Elliott song together. And what’s always amusing about mash-ups when you’re on a dance floor is how the two things are incongruous and there’s a certain pleasure you get from hearing one thing that’s sort of cheesy and another thing that’s cool, but together they’re great. So I was wondering, when you put the Rothko Chapel and the John Graham painting together, does that come out of your own interest in experimentation in music? AO Maybe that kind of attitude or humor that I find in some of the music, maybe I adopt that or try to do something like that, but unconsciously. You mentioned these musical mash-ups—have you heard about the shred videos? MG No. AO It’s super interesting. They are these videos that were circulating online around ten years ago. This guy picked videos of famous musicians like Santana playing, and overdubbed the footage of them shredding with audio of his own playing, as bad as possible. He played only whatever instrument you see being played on the screen—so whenever you don’t see the bass, you don’t hear the bass. Everything you do see, he replaced the sound for, and he can play, but he is intentionally playing it badly. It’s incredibly funny. And it makes you wonder why—it has this effect, like this relation of sound and image. So that is something that I think about. MG You first showed a group of these works at the Serpentine Galleries in London and now you are showing the remaining four panels at Gagosian in Los Angeles. Many people will recognize the format and scale as that of the paintings in the Rothko Chapel, and so there is that same kind of amusement, I think, that the imagery in your works is the very opposite. Inasmuch as the Rothkos, at least in my experience, give you very little to see, in these paintings of yours there’s almost too much to see. 38

It’s hard to think that you’ve seen the whole painting because there’s so much going on. AO Exactly—it’s kind of absurd. And I like that— that’s part of the idea, to see it from the other side. MG What did it feel like to make works that are this massive? Some of the new paintings are four and a half meters tall. AO Yes. It’s terrible [laughs]. MG When you’re on your own in your studio in St. Gallen [Switzerland], you make paintings that are more like two meters tall because they’re easy for you to carry around the studio by yourself if you want to. But when you embark on these larger paintings, you need to build a scaffold, you need to have a ladder. Maybe you need assistants. What was it like for you to make such big paintings? AO I could have done them alone, but it would’ve been hard. And it was hard to work that large—I worked on the floor, and then some have two parts. There were a lot of technical difficulties—they’re heavy, and difficult to carry around. It would’ve been possible to do alone, but not so much fun. It was fun, for this limited group, to have these challenges and have these problems and solve them. But if I were to only paint that large, I would not enjoy it. So I was happy when I had it done. MG We talked about the charcoal, but in one of the paintings, there’s a fabric, in kind of a floral chintz design. You used fabric in the 1990s, but— obviously, it’s the art historian in me, and also knowing of your training in Hamburg—it’s hard for me to look at that painting without thinking about [Sigmar] Polke and the way that he used these sorts of cheesy decorative fabrics as the beginnings of his paintings. When you decide to use fabric— which you hadn’t done for a while—do you see that as a deliberate gesture toward Polke, or is it just another material? AO When I use this fabric and think of Polke, it’s rather a test of courage for me if I still can do it. Because normally I would shy away from that and say Polke made great paintings that way and I shouldn’t come near it. But with the earlier group where I worked with these, I thought I had such a strong idea that I could do it. Of course, a lot of people will say, “Ah, he was a student of Polke’s, and now he works like Polke.” But I said to myself, I don’t care, I’m going to prove that I can make my own paintings.

In the case of that painting, I just had an idea and I wanted to make that one exception in that group. I had found some images of Leigh Bowery and I was so impressed by this guy. He was incredible, and I wanted to make a reference to him, to have Graham as Leigh Bowery. That’s why he has this fabric—it’s this thing that Leigh Bowery had all over his face, you know, where the dress goes up over his face. MG Have you been interested in Leigh Bowery’s work for a long time? He’s such an amazing figure. AO No, I haven't. I just learned about it within the past year or so and I’m very impressed. MG He did so many interesting collaborations, with Michael Clark and with Lucian Freud. And he had some great lines about how the dressing up is more important than the going out. AO Yeah, yeah [laughs]. MG Tell me about the two huge paintings that are more abstract than the others, where the image of the self-portrait doesn’t appear. Are those two paintings still based on motifs from the Graham painting? AO No. Maybe the first one, when I prepared for it, maybe that came from there. But the reason why they’re there . . . It’s kind of a statement about two things that I believe in. One is that everything is abstract anyway [laughs], so, yeah, what’s the difference? I mean, I know there is a difference, but still, I want to put it all on the same level. The other thing is if you do something figurative and it goes out of control, then you can still make an abstract painting out of it [laughs]. And I love to see abstract paintings in that light—like what if the painter wasn’t able to do something figurative, he couldn’t get it done, or he couldn’t get the painting done. I like that idea. MG In the corner of one of them, there are some marks that look to me like they’ve been printed, almost like they’re footprints. AO Those are footprints. MG Were these made on the floor mainly, or on the wall above? AO Both. MG I understand that these works were made in Ispaster, Spain. When you’re working there, do the different light conditions at the studio affect the outcome? Being able to move from Los Angeles, where you had a studio for a while, to St. Gallen, and to Spain, when you look at your work, do you know immediately that something was made in a specific place? AO I remember it. If it’s the light, it just means there’s more light in one place than in the other. And more light is good. But it’s more about the atmosphere—how I feel in that place, in that city or whatever. In one place, I’m more generous than in another one. I’m def initely less generous in Switzerland. The atmosphere in Switzerland is not telling you to go crazy. It’s not saying that. MG So do you think you’re done with the John Graham painting? AO I hope so [laughs]. I think I’m done with it, yes. MG Tramonto Spaventoso is a weird obsession that keeps on coming up. Is there anything else that has fascinated you to that degree? AO The other thing that still comes back from the past is the tree. For me, the tree is still an unsolved problem [laughs]. MG I hope the tree will be unsolved for all artists forever. It should always be unsolved.

DIGITAL MEMBERSHIP 2021 metrograph.com

Larry Gagosian reflects on the incredible life and career of his friend Doris Ammann.

DORIS AMMANN 40

Doris could light up a room, brighten every conversation, illuminate an artist’s intentions, and spark a collector’s passion. She had the high-wattage European sophistication that can intimidate in any language, but also a disarming warmth and wit that could put anyone at ease. She was both an impeccable perfectionist and a modest and forgiving friend. The ever-present twinkle in her eye was as irresistible as her quick and generous smile. The art world will be much dimmer without her. She became one of the most talented art dealers in the world, but it was not a role she chose for herself. In 1977 she cofounded Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, the Zurich gallery that bore the name of her charismatic brother, and where she happily played the supporting role. When Thomas tragically died, in 1993, she came from behind the scenes to center stage with fortitude and grace. Thrust into a world of extraordinarily competitive dealers, she became a beloved and respected friend among them. She had the attention of the top collectors in the world and gained their confidence by being a consummate professional and a true class act. Her discretion was legendary. She was strong but never forceful. You can gain power by force, but it’s stronger if you gain it through admiration. She commanded respect from artists, curators, and collectors alike through her sheer straightforward excellence. The art world’s love affair with Doris was earnest, deserved, and reciprocated. Doris found a collaborator and a soulmate in the art historian Georg Frei. They spent over three decades working together in one of the most enviable partnerships in the art business— the two were inseparable, cutting expertly tailored figures around the globe and finding themselves inevitably on every guest list. The thing about Doris and Georg was not only that they were sophisticated and erudite and really knew their stuff, but that they knew art was a grand adventure and seemed to have a lot of fun. Their affection for art, artists, and each other was infectious. We were friends and co-conspirators for forty years. Every encounter or conversation with Doris could be the bright spot of the day or the thing that kept you up at night—she made it all look so easy and her elegance seemed effortless, but it was born of real guts. What becomes a legend most? Warholian red lipstick is the perfect war paint. The art world is not for the faint-hearted, but Doris proved one can excel with decency and the rare quality of unshakable integrity. Her friendships were pure and lasting and true. She wouldn’t sell her real treasures for the world. For nearly my whole life in this business, she was a model and inspiration and sometime jousting partner. Her friendship was a gift that will long outlast the loss. Her unexpected death leaves a hole at the very center of the art world that we haven’t begun to get our heads around yet. She was so loved and she will be greatly missed.

Jean Pigozzi captures Doris Ammann and Georg Frei over the years.

Opposite: Doris Ammann, Frieze Art Fair, London, 2005 This page, clockwise from top right: Doris Ammann and Georg Frei, Rome, 2007; London, 2007; New York, 2007; Alba Clemente and Doris Ammann, New York, 2004; Basel, 2006; New York, 2012 Artwork © Jean Pigozzi

Rick Lowe, Black Wall Street #6, 2021, acrylic and paper collage on paper, 120 × 143 inches (304.8 × 363.2 cm) © Rick Lowe

Notes on SOCIAL WORKS A collection of the thoughts and images, gathered from conversations with artists, curators, architects, educators, essays, social media, the news, and exhibitions, that inform SOCIAL WORKS. i. A growing number of Black artists are using their dynamic practices in myriad instrumental ways to consider how personal and public, institutional and psychic space can be generated through artworks rooted equally in history and futurity as a way to explore the liberatory possibilities of spatial empowerment. These artists are engaged in what the art historian and writer Sarah Lewis has termed “groundwork.”1 Lewis explores the concept in the context of stand-your-ground laws, applying it to such artists as Mark Bradford, Hank Willis Thomas, Amy Sherald, and others who have deployed

Theaster Gates, Lauren Halsey, and the late Noah Davis, who have used their practices to establish physical spaces that catalyze opportunity and provide badly needed material goods in their local communities. They join a lineage of artists—the painter Rick Lowe, say—making social works that can only be completed with communal participation. Two decades ago, Lowe created the community art-platform Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas. The platform is a network of more than twenty buildings in the Third Ward section of the city that is responsive to artists and to the needs of the

ii. Joseph Beuys: A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART

iii. social sculpture in specific works “a set of aesthetic strategies through which the literal and figurative meaning of the ground is destabilized productively to establish new conditions.” Lewis’s framework is also useful in understanding how Black artists have “innovated conceptual, compositional, and material tactics” in a broader cultural context where such factors as institutional discrimination, community divestment, and increased market visibility have led Black artists to engage in groundwork as a way to rethink and rework spatial inequalities.2 Artists including the painter Titus Kaphar established nxthvn, a nonprofit art center in New Haven, Connecticut, with the specific goal of empowering “emerging artists and curators of color through education and access.” “I see what I am doing as a penance,” explains Kaphar, “a kind of reparations, money coming in from these different sources and we are deploying it back in the community.”3 Kaphar is a part of a new group of artists, such as

James Baldwin 44

I ask myself, how do black people survive abstraction today as the scope, scale, and density of matter is changing all around us due to climate change? I begin to answer by looking at what I call black compositional thought. Abstract drawing can lend itself to the intellectual and psychological pursuit of pulling black compositional thought close. Really close, inside close. From the black-inside-black position, I stand in front of a surface with my mind in complete awareness of form as power. As I begin to convey shape, line, movement, weight, scale, proximity, and perspective, representations of subjects oscillate between scaled diagrammatic images and expressive drawings. In the act of making I understand that it is the

neighborhood, establishing a program, for example, that provides shelter to unhoused single mothers. Lowe’s mission of responding creatively to local problems shares qualities with the artist Linda Goode Bryant’s decadeslong practice of space art. Bryant sees “the creation of space as art with real-life consequences.”4 In 1974, Bryant opened New York’s first Black-run gallery, Just Above Midtown, which showed artists such as David Hammons and Lorraine O’Grady. More recently, Bryant has been focusing on a living sculpture, “The Cube,” a multilevel community hub where growing happens through art and food. The idea is directly linked to her work with Project eats, an organization she founded that operates urban

iv. nasa has named the Martian landing site of its Perseverance rover “Octavia E. Butler Landing,” in honor of the celebrated science fiction author. farms across the city as a way to address food deserts in underserved communities. These notions are not just being enacted in physical spaces. The painter Torkwase Dyson has developed an abstraction that centers on what she calls “Black Compositional Thought.” It’s an evolving theory exploring how geographies are composed and inhabited by Black bodies, and how the properties of energy, space, and scale can form networks of liberation. Dyson elaborates:

integrations of forms folded into the conditions of black spatial justice where I begin to develop compositions and designs that respond to materials. Here I open up the power of abstract representation while engaging with the emotional implications of design space itself.5 An investment in futurity, a redefinition with “the power to imagine beyond current fact,” as theorist Tina Campt argues, “and to envision that which is not, but must be,” is also at the center of Halsey’s practice.6 She

constructs cool urban visions, grounded in self-regard and empowerment, that she has termed “#fubuarchitecture,” after the Black-owned ready-to-wear label fubu (For Us By Us). #fubuarchitecture can be seen as a kind of Blackpower architectural fabulation that Halsey is developing in paintings, collages, sculpture, and real space. These works function together as “an endless becoming,” entailing a

and others, all formed to consider notions of making community-centered works that challenged the status quo. In much the same way that Joseph Beuys theorized in the 1970s about “social sculpture”—art that could transform society and its institutions of power—Black artists and thinkers of that era, such as Imamu Amiri Baraka, agitated for Black artists to “move to establish

v. Black sound has functioned as an important conceptualization of Black space. Catch the beat. visualizing of communal liberation, an inclusive and selfreliant Black community achieved through funk, fantasy, and the experimental development of space: gardens, lawns, makeshift advertisements, shrines, vacant lots, churches, liquor stores, houses. Halsey’s work thang (2020) zeroes in on her own neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, remaking it in her own image. Stylish Black women and men appear, cut from found materials, as do pyramids, unicorns, statues, a Louis Vuitton– monogramed California bungalow, and advertisements for local businesses such as Urban Books & Thangs. We still here, there (2018) is a statement of empowerment against gentrification; gotta get over the hump? (2010) is a sprawling collage work in which emblems of Black mysticism and informal communion collide.7 The artist Carrie Mae Weems occasionally convenes Black artists and writers, as she did in the events The Shape of Things, at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory in 2017, and Carrie Mae Weems live: Past Tense/Future Perfect, at the Guggenheim Museum in 2014. Her photographic series Kitchen Table (1990) and Roaming (2006) involve reconsideration of the functions of space, both private and public. In the black and white images in Museums (2006– ), according to Weems, “a woman of a certain age, wearing a fabulous, sexy, and innocuous black dress,” is seen in public streets, in vacant interiors, and outside the most august museums.8 Her presence if not her person is visible, challenging edifice, haunting the scene, questioning who belongs, who has been excluded, and why. It is a poetic look at how authority, or the lack thereof, is racialized, feminized, or sexualized and impressed upon the body through spatial absence. Historically, these approaches can be traced back to a fusing of racial consciousness with artistic production that developed across the twentieth century, from the Harlem Renaissance through the Black Arts Movement, generating spaces such as the Studio Museum in Harlem and artist collectives such as Spiral, Kamoinge, Africobra,

our own institutions” rooted in self-determination, self-respect, and self-defense. They would function, in Baraka’s vision, as “pyramid[s] of revolutionary purpose.”9 vi. What is a Black social sculpture? Must it function differently from Beuys’s notion? Perhaps it has to address

vii. 12 46

viii. “Architextural” map of Harlem revitalized by the urban-design principles of June Jordan’s book His Own Where (1971). 14

David Hammons: I called it Delta Spirit because it was about that kind of spirit that’s in the South. I just love the houses in the South, the way they built them. That Negritude architecture. I really love to watch the way Black people make things, houses, or magazine stands in Harlem, for instance. Just the way we use carpentry. Nothing fits, but everything works. The door closes, it keeps things from coming through. But it doesn’t have that neatness about it, the way white people put things together; everything is a 32nd of an inch off. 11

slave labor, redlining, white flight, subprime mortgages, gentrification, a history of degradation and undoing. Perhaps it doesn’t. Maybe the vision begins in the future, and the builders of that sculpture will lay foundations that are out of this world, undreamed. Fabricated fabulations for bricks. “A narrative,” as the scholar Saidiya Hartman argues, “written from nowhere. From the nowhere of the ghetto and the nowhere of the utopia.”10 Perhaps we use overlooked spaces of freedom—the Black living room, the spice rack, the cookout, the juke joint, the rent party—as the blueprints for liberation sculpture. Those

ix. We cannot create what we cannot imagine. —Lucille Clifton xi. An informal network of Black spaces, being constructed both physically and digitally, uses art as a catalyst to engage in social labor and to address aspects of a vast history of lack. They include: Project Row Houses, Houston; Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; nxthvn, New Haven; Project eats, New York; Black Rock Senegal, Dakar; See In Black; the Underground Museum, Los Angeles; Home by Ronan Mckenzie, London; Art + Practice, Los Angeles; ARTS.BLACK; Conceptual Fade, Philadelphia; Yardy NYC, New York; We Buy Gold, Brooklyn; Medium Tings, Brooklyn; BKhz, Johannesburg; Black Artist Retreat, Chicago; SON, Los Angeles; Jenkins

spaces, invented beyond what was on the horizon, present a negation of the negation—strategies and tactics of resilience and investment that claim Black tomorrows. What we need are spheres in which Black betterment is centered on the social. I know, the sculpture must be about more than just redress or relief; it will require participation, communal and institutional, to establish realms of advantage. A sculpture where wants can be pursued, fulfilled, endlessly. x. Kellie Jones: The piece that was at Art on the Beach, does it have a name?

Johnson Projects, Brooklyn; Black Art Library, Detroit; Summaeverythang, Los Angeles; Bubblegum Club, Johannesburg; Ghetto Gastro, Bronx; etc. xii. Black Wall Street. xiii. Blackness is made and remade in location.13 xiv. A communal space, common space, community space. . . .

I’m just here putting mouth on the place. Modigliani whispers to Matisse. Matisse whispers to Picasso. I kiss the Rose in my pocket and tip easy through this tomb of thieves. —Essex Hemphill15 xviii. The deploying of space to benefit the community is the art. xix. David Adjaye: I want the architecture to make you feel the weight of an enormous body of history.16 xx. 500 W. Oak. xxi. Every year these four photographs Taught us how English was really a type of trick math: like the naked Emperor, you could be a King capable of imagining just one single dream; or there could be a body, bloody, at your feet—then you could point at the sky; or you could be a hunched-over cottonpicking shame; or you could swing from a tree by your neck into the frame. —Robin Coste Lewis17

xv. Fritz Henle, Cleaning woman in Museum of Modern Art, c.1948 xvi. MANIPULATE the space to become A landscape xvii. The government pays me nine thousand dollars a year to protect the East Wing So I haunt it.

xxii. Theaster Gates, early sketch of a possible space to redeploy the archive of DJ Frankie Knuckles (2021).

Visiting hours are over. The silent sentry is on duty. An electric eye patrols the premises.

xxiii. Black space has no style, no signature or formula. It does what needs to be done. Black space tells you what is possible and what is yet to come. Black space is a root for the future: a making a way out of no way. xxiv. If we control the spaces of power and meaning, the fear is we will do to you what you are doing to us. xxv. The shade provides shelter. xxvi. Black people are constantly in the space of remigration, searching, landing, moving, returning. xxvii. The Black body as a utopic space. xxviii. The Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) asks three questions: What is the architecture of Black futures? What does it mean to imagine Black reconstruction today? What is the architecture of Reparations?

xxix. Imagine a Black space. What does it feel like? xxx. Walter Hood: There were Apollos in every neighborhood.18 Put another way: all space has the potential to be Black social space.

xxxi. What else can art do? 1. See Sarah Lewis, “Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law,” Art Journal 79, no. 4 (2020): 92–113. 2. Ibid. 3. Titus Kaphar, conversation with the author, March 2021. 4. Linda Goode Bryant, conversation with the author, December 2020. 5. Torkwase Dyson, “Black Interiority: Notes on Architecture, Infrastructure, Environmental Justice, and Abstract Drawing,” Pelican Bomb, January, 9, 2017. Available online at http:// pelicanbomb.com/art-review/2017/blackinteriority-notes-on-architecture-infrastructureenvironmental-justice-and-abstract-drawing (accessed April 5, 2021). 6. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham,

NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 17. 7. See Antwaun Sargent, “The Future Will See You Now: The Private Worlds of Black Desire,” in “Utopia,” Aperture no. 241 (Winter 2020): 91–92. 8. Carrie Mae Weems, quoted in Sargent, “Carrie Mae Weems on a Career of Challenging Power and Black Representation in Art,” Artsy, October 31, 2016. Available online at https://www.artsy. net/article/artsy-editorial-carrie-mae-weemson-a-career-of-challenging-power-and-blackrepresentation-in-art (accessed April 5, 2021). 9. Imamu Amiri Baraka, “Counter Statement to Whitney Ritz Bros,” in Tom Lloyd, ed., Black Art Notes, 1971 (reprint ed. Brooklyn: Primary Information, 2012), 10–12. 10. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful

Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2019), 6. 11. Kellie Jones and David Hammons, in Jones, “Interview: David Hammons,” Art Papers, July/ August, 1988. Available online at https://www. artpapers.org/interview-david-hammons/ (accessed April 5, 2021). 12. Elizabeth Alexander, “Toward the Black Interior,” The Black Interior (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2004), 9. 13. Christina Sharpe, “Black Gathering: An Assembly In Three Parts,” in Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2021), 25. 14. See “Representing the ‘Architextural’

Musings of June Jordan,” November 26, 2013. Available online at https://raceandarchitecture. com/2013/11/26/writing-and-building-blackutopianism-representing-the-architexturalmusings-of-june-jordans-his-own-where-1971/ (accessed April 5, 2021). 15. Essex Hemphill, “Visiting Hours,” Earth Life: Poems (Be Bop Books, 1985). 16. David Adjaye, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “Annals of Architecture: A Sense of Place,” The New Yorker, September 23, 2013. 17. Robin Coste Lewis, “Frame,” Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 144–45. 18. Walter Hood in conversation with Rick Lowe, Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2021.

MABEL O. WILSON Where

should we start? Do you want to talk about process, your work, what’s going on in the world? LAUREN HALSEY Just a little bit of background on my art practice: I build installations that right now I see as experimental miniatures. They’re human scale, of course, but they’re models for architectures that I hope to build before I die—at least one. The background on that is that I took classes in the architecture department in the community college here for about five years. The icing on the cake in my fourth or fifth year was that we were able to apply everything we learned drawing at the drafting table to a design/build course that took place on the construction field, where we built in collaboration with the construction department. That rocked my world and changed my process forever. MW Can I ask what you built? LH Yeah, I took the class like four times just to get to that point. It was sort of a competition, and I lost every time. By the fourth time they were like, Just give it to her. I remember designing something that had superwild angles and it basically got reduced to a cube, you know? But for me the one-to-one of doing something with my hands at the drafting table and then getting in the dirt and building it with people I like—it was very special and soulful as a recipe. After that, I transferred to another school for architecture, and it couldn’t have been more different. Mostly everything became digital and about the slickness of renderings; no demographics around race and class were considered in the project proposals we were given. So I dropped out and went back to the community college, took art classes, and started appropriating what I thought the process of the architect was: mapping, blueprints, models, actual architecture. For much of my art practice I was making blueprints of my neighborhood and remixing city blocks, local landmarks, parks, and homes through a very fantastical lens. I’m still in a model-making phase, and I hope in ten years I’ll actually get to building on the block. So that’s where I am. It’s been a very long slow burn, of trying to get to it through the back door or the side door. MW That often happens. I have a friend, Mike Cranfill, who is a painter and architectural educator. Years ago, when we taught together at the University of Kentucky, he would teach his architecture students painting and life drawing, because architects should be able to see something threedimensionally, you have to learn to see spatially. Figure drawing is a really good exercise in understanding threedimensional form in space, particularly a form that’s dynamic. And painting, you know—it’s direct, literally making things with paint and whatever else. The problem with the digital is it’s not material, so you’re never working directly on “the thing,” the building. With architectural drawings you’re making a set of instructions for someone else to build. LH Totally. I’d been inspired by the free-style building that I’d watched my father do in the backyard with his friends my whole life, and architecture proper was nothing like that. So I thought I’d address it spatially through art, because the rules are different there—if there are any, you know? MW Yeah, artists work directly on the thing itself. There’s a famous essay by the architectural theorist Robin Evans, “Translations from Drawing to Building” [1997]: where he talks about how artists, typically but not always, work directly on what they make, while architects actually work through drawing, we work with a mediated representational mode in

Summaeverythang Community Center, Los Angeles. Photo: Allen Chen - SLH STUDIO

order to build. It’s a very different process of making. You’re absolutely right: that direct engagement with materiality, with gravity—you get a very different sense of building when you work that way. What you just said about your dad in the backyard making stuff seems to be a through line in your work, which is very much about the area you grew up in and the language of the built environment, and how that often translates into ways of building. LH Yeah, absolutely. I sampled collaboration with him, watching him build with his childhood friends—the social way of making something that’s at stake for everyone because we’re all from here, we care, you know. But also being a kid going to Home Depot every weekend . . . it’s sort of wonderful for me that gypsum panels are now my superstar material. I’m figuring out how to transform them into some sort of new form that’s a structural wall but also drawing and collage, and can be aesthetic and sort of stacked like Lego bricks to build an architecture with. That’s what we’ve been doing in the studio, very slowly, so that we can create our own aesthetic skin for the panels. MW What size are the panels? LH They’re two by two. But that might shift as the experiment shifts. MW Do you ever work with found material? LH Absolutely. I obsessively archive my neighborhood, and my favorite archives are the informal ones—the hood ephemera, the incense, the oils, the party flyers, the posters, the business cards, the graphic design that folks are making with their hands. My installations either sample them in the form of drawing or engraving, or I use them directly. My goal one day is to build an institution—no, that’s too formal—to build a space to hold these informal community archives. I find it especially important as LA is going through intense development. Neighborhoods are being erased and new migrations are happening. And just trying to hold on to our stuff— MW You’re in South Central? LH Yeah. It’s nuts. It’s disgusting. There’s all this development and global investment, you know? Market-rate condos, two stadiums in Inglewood, the trains—it’s nonstop. Folks are trying to hold on, and it’s especially compounded by this time that we’re in. So you see a lot of mutual-aid efforts, a lot of people with neighborhood pride and love trying to show up for here. MW My uncle was the artist John Outterbridge, who just passed away. He had a studio over there, off of Slauson, for about thirty years, and his way of connecting to the place was very much about friending your neighbors. I think the neighbors ran a pallet company, so they’d look out for him, he’d look out for them. It was interesting in terms of how community formed there. LH Totally. It’s the reason why I live and work here. I have to be immersed and in the mix of all of the different street worlds I navigate. I have a community center next door to my studio, but my studio space is also the kickback, communal space for friends, and I’ve found that to be super important. So I’m slowly working on that too. MW What are your plans for the community center? LH I don’t know yet. For the past year, almost, we’ve been doing an organic-produce-box distribution every Friday in Watts.

I saw that. It looks like an amazing effort. LH I’m literally just taking it a minute at a time, because it’s completely overwhelming. But the function of the community center will be to shapeshift with whatever the needs of the community are at the moment. When everything pans out, I want to open it up to bringing students in and doing super engaging one-on-one tutoring because of how flat Zoom learning has been. Soon after, I hope it’ll grow into a music studio, dance class, art class, whatever it needs to be. Right now it’s a hub and warehouse for produce, which is a lot. MW That sounds like a generous act for folks, because people need so much, especially in this time of crisis, which never seems to end. Crisis capitalism. To have a space that can be a conduit to the community, and then try to build around what their other needs might be, would be a really extraordinary project. LH Hopefully you’ll be able to visit one day. MW I know, if I ever get back out there. When I lived in the Bay Area I’d go to LA just to hang out. It made me happy and felt like home, more so than Oakland. I think there’s something about the history of Black communities in LA, folks who migrated from Louisiana and Texas, which felt very familiar. I just get the sense that for people in LA, anything is possible, they’re not constrained by any convention that building has to be in this style or it has to conform to that concept. The city is a space of imagination. LH Yeah, totally. I think that’s how I discovered my relationships with my best friends, with them as collaborators in art. We were doing a float for the Martin Luther King Day parade and I was out there by myself. It was a fifty-foot flatbed truck in front of my mother’s house and I wasn’t going to finish on time. My friends came outside, headed to their cars, about to leave, and they asked if I needed help. I said yeah, they jumped in, and we’ve been making together ever since. Only in a place like LA could I be working on a fifty-foot float at midnight on the block, using multiple backyards, you know, with all this music, all this fun. There’s a social aspect. There’s space to an extent. There’s just this freedom here. But it’s also not like it’s our utopia, either—there’s a lot of headache and oppression as well. MW Gentrification, policing— LH Of course. All sorts of forces, yeah. MW Could you imagine working elsewhere? LH Not on my scale. It would cost too much money. That was my problem with New York. When I was doing the Studio Museum in Harlem residency, I had a breakthrough with carving and landed on this form of making hieroglyphs of Harlem and South Central. But it was dependent on the architecture of the museum and I was confined to a smaller scale, because of the size of my studio. Which was beautiful— it was by far the best studio I’d ever had—but when I got back to LA, I realized, The sky’s the limit as far as building up here. And because I’m from here, being able to use five backyards at the same time. . . . If I was ever going to get to the scale of a building, and away from making an artwork referenced as spatial and just like an actual architecture, I could only afford to do it here. It just became a practical thing. I set up in my parents’ backyard and eventually my grandmother’s. And then it became like utilizing the sun, allowing materials to tan, letting them just do all these things that became part of manifesting the material. MW It sounds like the work is very site-specific in that way. MW

This page and following spread: Installation view, Lauren Halsey, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, January 25– March 14, 2020. Artwork © Lauren Halsey. Photo: Jeff McLane, courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Certainly in New York City, there were ethnic groups that did certain kinds of work. Unions were a big part of trying to integrate the trades, but sometimes unions reinforced segregation. But I think you’re right, having people who are building locally works. This would be an ideal for a place, because construction workers are paid well—it’s hard work, but it keeps the wealth in the neighborhood. LH It’s crazy driving in the neighborhood and it’s like, Well, this isn’t for us, you know? In West LA there’s the Cumulus project—for a year now, two years, we’ve seen them building up this fantastic building, and the results will be extreme displacement. You go online and look at the floor plans, and they have a two-bedroom penthouse for $16,000 a month. It’s a total separation from the community in every aspect. But I hope one day I can land on some space and build with people here, developing our own spaces as a community-landtrust effort. MW That’s the problem of the real estate industry and development: it’s all about extracting money. Sometimes I feel like a building is just the residue of some financial transaction by some offshore legal entity, moving money through the building to go who knows where and to whom. Rather than the building being the focus, built well and made meaningful because it’s going to be here longer than any of us, it’s just a financial instrument for making money. The conditions of who’s going to live there or work there are kind of afterthoughts, right? LH Totally. And even the workforce. MW Exactly. But even before Blacks in this country could enter the architecture profession, there was a whole history of Black builders. That’s what people were doing to build. And because it wasn’t formal architecture, with drawings filed with the building department and so on, the archive doesn’t really tell us much about those buildings or who built them. So we need to develop a whole other way in which people research these Black histories. LH Totally. Before LA was going through this phase, I’d see all these empty lots down main boulevards here and just sort of dream up these spaces that I wanted to see. Now, if I started building off the strength of just doing it, oh God, they would shut me down in five seconds. So the goal is to somehow acquire the land, and then try to exercise the community-landtrust model, like other mission-aligned, value-aligned folks, to just get to building our own spaces together, you know? To build our own architectures, our own gardens, our own spaces for leisure—I can’t even fathom what that would be like because I’ve always lived in other people’s spaces that don’t reflect me, you know? MW Yeah. But look at Simon Rodia and Watts Towers. LH Totally. But do you think that could happen in 2021? MW I don’t know. Rodia just did it. And then the city tried but failed to tear the towers down— LH And now it’s a landmark. MW Yeah, now it’s a landmark. Rodia believed, I have this vision and I have to build it. And he did. The Watts Towers have inspired so many after him. So I do think it’s possible.

Absolutely, yeah. I always wondered why—and the answer might be obvious, but I don’t know—why are there so few Black architects? Why do you think that is? MW To control space is power, right? LH Right. MW That’s why. The spaces we live in, the models of how wealth, land, and property are accumulated, are defined by racial capitalism. Who has access to the land and the wealth determines who gets to build. And that, sadly, is not Black folks. Because whether it was slavery or Jim Crow segregation, or even where we live now, as we can see with policing, the logic is to control our mobility or our ability to actually accrue property, right? Because that’s where power is. I think that’s why it’s made it difficult for Black folks in this country to become architects. LH Right. Which is why a lot of the architecture I find myself surrounded by feels as oppressive and cold as it does, probably. MW Yeah, you have to know people who have the resources to build—land, money. A lot of architects’ first project is a house for a parent, like Robert Venturi’s house for his mother. And Black people have never been allowed to accrue the kind of wealth to be able to do that. There are less than 500 Black women architects in the country. LH Wow. That’s nuts. MW It’s absolutely crazy. If you look at law, medicine—as those professions became institutionalized in the nineteenth century, and you had to get licensed to practice, it was hard but by late in the century, Black women had broken the color line in those fields. With architecture that doesn’t happen until the 1950s, when the first Black woman architect, Norma Sklarek, was licensed. So it’s very late. LH Do you find that architects are engaging with the community more in the design process from stage one? I don’t mean community-engagement meetings, or things like that; I mean, for example, having an open-air studio and designing collaboratively with who’s been here, you know what I mean? Sort of coauthoring. MW I think it depends on the architect. I do think that people are now more aware of the value of working collaboratively, but you know, there’s this idea of the architect expert—it’s a particular kind of character that’s out there, like Howard Roark in [Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel] The Fountainhead, you know? He’s straight, he’s white, he’s a man, and he builds—erects, as they say. People may laugh about that stereotype but I don’t think we’ve moved that far away from it. So a lot of Black women who trained as architects end up doing something else. I trained as an architect, but I’m not licensed—I work on various aspects of the built environment, but through writing history, curatorial projects, art projects, design projects. If I’m going to work on issues of Blackness or anti-Blackness, architecture is too limited and I need to be more expansive with ideas, references, and resources. LH Yeah. Out here we have the LA Black Worker Center, which basically unionizes folks to place them in the construction field, and then holds accountable these industries that are developing and claiming “diversity” or whatever but not hiring us. I wonder why I don’t see that more in LA, because once you have people who live in the neighborhood building something, I’m not saying that they instantly become designers, but it just becomes a lot more poetic. So that’s something I wish I saw. MW Many of the building trades have long histories of racism. LH

Pet Shop Boys, Se a vida é (That’s the Way Life Is). The Remixes, 1996. Parlophone

Theaster Gates, steward of the Frankie Knuckles record collection is engaging with the late DJ and musician’s archive of records, ephemera, and personal effects. For the Quarterly, Gates presents a selection of Knuckles’s personal record collection. Chantala Kommanivanh, a Chicago-based artist, educator, and musician—and the records manager for Rebuild Foundation—provides annotations, contextualizing these records’ importance and unique qualities. Ron Trent, a dear friend of Knuckles’s, speaks to the legacy evinced by these materials.

Frankie Knuckles, “The Whistle Song,” 1991. Virgin Records, promo pressing

Frankie Knuckles received his first numberone dance-chart hit, of an eventual four, with “The Whistle Song.” This early promotional copy of the track was released in 1991 and the song was included on Knuckles’s first fulllength album, Beyond the Mix, later that year.

The community that cohered around Chicago house music eventually spread worldwide, but in the early days the dialogue and camaraderie between DJ’s, producers, and musicians created an intimate, symbiotic milieu. These two albums are just a few of the thousands of records in Knuckles’s collection showing handwritten notes that attest to this closeness and gratitude.

Top: Danny Tenaglia, Hard & Soul, 1995. Tribal America, test pressing. Bottom: Pangea, Memories of Pangea, 1996. EastWest

Top: Sharon Redd, “Beat the Street,” 1982. Prelude Records, test pressing. Bottom and opposite: Celine Dion, “Misled (MK Dub),” 1993. Epic, acetate

Knuckles marked some records with a blue or red dot. This method allowed him to flip through his crate and identify party-moving records quickly in a dark, smoky club. Red dots cued him to a hot groove, bringing the crowd to a fever pitch, and blue dots indicated grooves for cooling off the crowd. Mixing these hot and cold tracks in his own way made a party a frankie knuckles party.

These records are test pressings, manufacturing proofs made in limited quantities for the artist, A&R team, label reps, and DJ’s to review or test in clubs before the disk goes into production. Test pressings are special because some don’t make it to the mass pressing. The Celine Dion record is an acetate, meaning the grooves are cut into a hard acetate disc. These are made for reference only and are never for sale to the public. Acetates are sometimes produced directly from the recording studio and are tested in the clubs the same evening. They play like a normal vinyl record but their grooves will quickly wear and tear, limiting quality play time.

Another example of an early acetate record, this one laser etched with pictures and song lyrics by Baby Ford.

Photos: David Sampson, courtesy the Rebuild Foundation

Top: Baby Ford, “Oochy Koochy (F.U. Baby Yeh Yeh),” 1988. Rhythm King Records, one-sided white label. Bottom: Baby Ford, “Oochy Koochy (F.U. Baby Yeh Yeh),” detail

On Frankie Knuckles The spirit of Frankie Knuckles’s music, and what he was doing in Chicago, met me before I met him. That was at the beginning of the 1980s, when I was a young guy and first wanting to express myself creatively with records. Before, because of my upbringing, I had really been interested in playing instruments. Being a child of the 1970s, you know, you wanted to have a band. So through neighborhood folkloric energy [laughs], let’s put it like that, Frankie Knuckles’s name started getting into my ears as the person behind some of this new style, this new underground thing that was happening. It was word of mouth and mysterious; it wasn’t commercial on any level. That had to be somewhere around 1982. Later, I got a chance to actually meet him in person, around 1989 or 1990. I had put out this record “Altered States” with Armando Gallop’s independent label, my very first release. Frankie was playing my record and he had started to work with Def Mix and Dave Morales and Judy Weinstein. He had left Chicago and was blowing up worldwide, traveling and starting to do his thing abroad in a bigger way. He would have these homecoming reunion parties, if you will, and everybody who was part of the whole Warehouse, Powerplant, Gallery 21 scene would be like, “Oh, Frankie’s coming back.” Whereas Chicago had been used to the classic Frankie, who played a lot of older music, new audiences knew him for playing more what they called “New York underground,” a combination of new stuff coming out of New York City, imported records coming out of Italy, and newer productions coming out of London. It was a new sound. And my record had been put in his hands, so when he came back to play this party, at this place called AKAs, he played my record multiple times that night. The sound system, as they say in reggae culture, is like the information center. Cats would chant on the mic and talk about different things—the sound was introducing new ideas. The DJ in our culture was doing that too, educating people about new music and turning them onto new things. So Frankie rocked my jam three times, you know what I’m saying? I was like, Wow, shit. It was kind of like a synergy was created there. Then over the years, man, we would see each other or get on each other’s phone lines and just talk about different things. He was much older than I was; I’m like a little brother to Frankie Knuckles because, you know, he was my elder and mentor. But we were coming from the same place, the same vision. I look at our work from a very ethereal standpoint. You’re doing a sacred thing, really—you’re playing music for people, you’re lifting their spirits. It’s another form of church, if you’re into that kind of thing, but even deeper than that: it goes back

to the tribal connection, the sonics bringing together a zeitgeist, creating a spirit, and then healing everybody. People deal with things, nowadays especially, with a very surface-level philosophy, you know? DJ’ing suffers from that now, because people stand up there posturing or whatever the case may be. But the truest essence of this culture is based on storytelling, which goes back to an older methodology. Going back in African culture, and many ancient philosophies around the world, people used a storytelling method to educate the community, right? And records are like books; they’re little pieces of somebody’s story encapsulated in something tangible. Back in the 1970s, 1980s, guys would take records and edit them. It was their selection of records that told the story. Frankie’s story was different. You could hear the beauty that he was into. He was into a lot of strings, he was into pianos. Somebody like Ron Hardy, who was another innovator in our scene, was into a rough, raw, hard kind of element. Radical. Frankie, on the other hand, was into refinement, and you could hear it in the production and his sets. All that ethereal stuff that he did before, in the early 1980s, coalesces in “The Whistle Song” [1991], which is very string oriented, flutes. It’s happy. It’s emotional. It’s all in there, like a computer chip of Frankie Knuckles’s feelings. A moment that always comes back to mind is when he was at what I would call his peak, in 1991, at Sound Factory. He was in the next phase of his career in terms of production and music. There was a lot of new stuff happening and he was a filter for that, a beacon. You felt like you were being taken to another realm of consciousness. That’s the best way I can put it. And there was a level of mastery there. It was a shamanistic kind of thing, like a shaman who wants to take you on this journey and these are the resources he’s using: vinyl, tape decks, MP3s, whatever, to sonically get you out of this world. So that’s what it was like to go hear Frankie Knuckles. It was out of space, brother [laughs]. Frankie’s music, his art, his style, everything, it talked to me. I was able to take that and then, through my own filter, develop my craft. The seeds that he planted sonically, through his emotions, everything else, they are why we—students of his, people that went to go hear him, people coming up under him— are following along this unseen spiritual thread he helped weave into the industry. His approach, his psyche, his emotions, and his energy are still here. As we know through science, energy doesn’t dissipate, it just changes form. It’s still floating around, you know. That’s why we’re having the conversation today. —Ron Trent, as told to Antwaun Sargent

Carrie Mae Weems, Lewitt’s Wall, 2006–

After Carrie Mae Weems’s Museums Series, 2006

I’d like to be beautiful Held by the attention of white walls and yet I forget the statue of my body the artifact I am Black and woman my survival is studied A lesson I relearn every day of my life I slip into the fabric of morning and already know how the world will greet me What a bold shoulder or taut bit of cloth around the hips will invite in the imagination Who asks admission into the rooms of my body Art’s mercy divorces the artist from her image her body’s exhibition I’m saying not I but the subject is the woman is not I is the topic of discussion That is to say I am only me when I’m found in the mouth of another What nomenclature will you give all my blackness all my woman What will I represent What other thing than the fact of myself Every other thing than the fact of myself

Carrie Mae Weems, The British Museum, 2006–

After Carrie Mae Weems’s Roaming Series, 2006

Have you ever thought how the sight of a woman wandering faceless in a long dress always looks like a haunting? Where can I be both a woman and safe from the horror of my image? Through this and more I travel unaccompanied fearsome— through the scene and the square frame Defiant! I am to command the work’s focus and yet keep myself private To demand something of the gaze that makes and remakes me a woman I am and again I am disturbing the scene The figure of a woman sharp in all its weaponry itself without footnote I stand over the city over the sea in the middle of the street as though offering my body as a challenge to the gods I have never owned my own country But here in the black and white landscapes that bow around me I stand something haunting and extraordinary an interruption in a black dress I make myself known watch me becoming If this thin slice of a world is all I’m granted then I’ll keep it and myself no I won’t turn around

Carrie Mae Weems, Pyramids of Rome—Ancient Rome, 2006

After Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series, 1990

In the half-light half-lidded my mother at the table in front of a vanity mirror She is thorough in her examination saying Her dark skin is— The falling light in the room a pause in the middle of a sentence You might call this twilight if the inside of a room could own a piece of sky There is something flightless in my mother who complains of the cracks in the ceiling powders herself with concealer traces the suggestion of her eyebrows with the fine point of a pencil She holds the tip to the flame I am afraid of what may mark me My own skin blemished and splotchy the tiny black hairs in an audience on my chin I shouldn’t have to admit this but I’d rather a house with no rooms in which to linger, no interrogation of what blackness I bring to the space, whole or half, light or dark— My mother wakes in the morning before the sun and in the darkness flicks the light on above the vanity she traces she erases She is often called beautiful

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman and daughter with makeup), 1990 Artwork © Carrie Mae Weems Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

For the Social Works exhibition at Gagosian, New York, opening this summer, you will be presenting Asaase, a large-scale sculpture that takes its name from the Twi word meaning “earth.” This marks an extension in your practice; you’re not abandoning the language of architecture, but Asaase falls squarely within the realm of sculpture, wouldn’t you say? DAVID ADJAYE Yes. This project is special for me, I’ve gone full circle. When I started working as an architect, I wasn’t interested in sculpture because I was terrified of a lack of responsibility that I perceived in the practice. I felt that I couldn’t engage with it; I needed something that gave me a certain weight and responsibility to carry. I hadn’t actually matured in myself to carry the weight of my own questions. In a way, architecture became the perfect vehicle for me to find purpose, and also to pursue a certain idea about the world and forms. Thirty years later [laughs] I get to this moment where I’ve built a significant number of buildings, and to make architecture as a young Black male is no longer in question. I no longer have to justify that I can be an architect to any of my clients, or to anybody in the world. That’s just assumed. I feel like I can finally deal with my own questions. And my questions have always been associated with fragments and the power of fragments. The history of art, the history of Black art, the history of white art—all of it is always this reconfiguring of the creative practice through fragments. I feel like we’re in a Black renaissance right now, and really the optimal issues for me are, How do we learn from the fragments that aren’t necessarily caryatid columns or fragments of Berninian bronzes, right? Rather, how do we learn from the fragments that are our past? And how do we do so without mimicry, because this is not about trying to create a classical; this is trying to reimagine another world. How do we create form with the freedom of an artistic mind, a human being expressing themselves? My thinking about the fragment is influenced by my time working on a country home for myself in my father’s village, which is my ancestral home in the mountains of Akwapim, Ghana. It’s this idea of constructing from the earth and constructing nonorthogonally, constructing against the urban—constructing organically, one could argue. I’m not interested in the caricature of the form, I’m interested in the essence of the form. In all my work I’m interested very much in the root essence, in the purity of the form, always trying to search for the DNA of the thing. In a world that’s so complicated with production and capitalism, to be able to have the reduction of things as elemental is something I pursue as an aesthetic pleasure. So in a way what I’m talking about right now is the ability that I now have in myself to be at one with the hamlet, the village, and the city at the same time. AS I think one thing that arises in this work is the materiality of it—the use of rammed earth is significant. DA I’ve always questioned the way material has a certain language within the classical canon of a European sensibility. There’s an apartheid in that, or a hierarchy

of materiality. I find this sense that, say, marble is noble and some other material is ignoble a really vulgar way of understanding the power of materiality. So I’ve just fully embraced this material that’s seen as the poorest material on the planet: earth. For me it’s actually the most profound material, because it’s the material that has sustained our humanity, literally, since our inception. We’re at this moment now of thinking that we can cut away from earth and live in a kind of artifice. Our biophilic relationship with earth—some now think it can be simply severed. How? So I’m deeply invested in reconfiguring the image of rammed earth as a radical twenty-first-century material. I’ve realized that I don’t even mind where the earth is from, it’s just about the earth. Again, it’s about the idea of what is the fragment that actually connects us back to our humanity, and the fragment in a city like New York is just to see raw earth. That’s actually the most radical thing. AS For you, then, is this a living sculpture? DA Totally, yes. It’s a way of preserving a fragment of life. AS How should it be experienced? What are the possible ranges of that experience? DA It works across many modes of sensory perceptions. It will become an atmospheric absorber of a certain kind of moisture in the gallery and will emit a certain atmospheric quality. It will have a kind of presence quality, an aura of form. I anticipate that when one is just still with it, and in reflection with it, it will hold the most power. It’s designed to create moments where the audience can just sit in-between earth. This is something people have forgotten how to do. It’s a return to a very primal moment. It’s also a sculpture that utilizes perspective. It’s a kaleidoscope that’s changing, so that it’s never what you think it is from any one view, always shifting. And that’s a playful element, but one that I really value. We are polyphonous in our understanding of how we engage with things made, and I want to engage the whole spectrum of the sentient nature of our presence and our bodies with form. So it’s working without the eyes, with the eyes, with the ears, with the nose, and even with the way in which we breathe through our noses and mouths.

ANTWAUN SARGENT

Zalika Azim, To transplant in alien soil (far from the promised land both north and south), 2018, inkjet prints mounted on archival pigment paper, 33 × 26 inches (83.8 × 66 cm) © Zalika Azim

Zalika Azim, Totem (Untitled), 2019 (detail), image overlaid wallpaper, 15 × 11 inches (38.1 × 27.9 cm) © Zalika Azim

Resistant relentlessly impossible objects of their aim in defense of the

From the perspective of those that believe in perspective subjects that won’t be objects after all.

Poems © Allana Clarke 77

Questions of temporality a language of the marked precariously relentlessly insistent

I have an incomplete thought I'd like to share with you all To forget memory the burden of memory

Poems © Allana Clarke 78

Zalika Azim, To raise sand (twice by arson, once by catch fire), 2016/2018, pigment print, 33 × 26 inches (83.8 × 66 cm) © Zalika Azim Zalika Azim, The tale of his arrival, 2019, twice impressed pigment print and gold ink, 33 × 26 inches (83.8 × 66 cm) © Zalika Azim

Should we start by speaking about history in general? It seems clear to me that we, as Black people, have to deal with the dirty truth of our history. We have to because our history lives with us so strongly, in every aspect of our lives. You can see it statistically, in terms of health, in terms of wealth, in terms of education. But white innocence cleans the slate, and then there’s a way for them to live without the messiness of the history. WALTER HOOD Yes. It’d be great to have someone articulate that, because I can’t, right? I’m not in that position. I ask my nonbrown friends all the time, Tell me, and they look at me like I’m crazy. I’m like, No, I want to know. What were you taught in school and at home? RL When I went to Tulsa to work on the Greenwood Art Project, we wanted to have a diverse group of artists tell the story of the Tulsa massacre. Obviously the Black people have a deep connection to it—it’s been passed along—but I kept saying, White people were part of this history too. What’s their story? It’s amazing how detached the white people were from their history. We’d have these meetings, and it would be mostly Black people who’d come, but a few white people would join, and they were like, Well, I feel a little uncomfortable trying to tell this story that’s so much with Black people, and blah blah blah. But this is not just a Black people— WH Not a one-sided conversation. RL I was like, So you mean to tell me that Tulsa is a place where none of the white people have ancestors? These are all people who have migrated to Tulsa since this massacre? Very odd. WH We’re complicit as well. There are ancestors who, once they were free, they did what they wanted to do. And sometimes passed. Throughout our history there have been people who chose to be white, right? We know this to be true. RL Yes. WH So we’re complicit in these experiences, but at least we’ve been able to talk about it through art. Spike [Lee]’s movies from the late 1980s to the early 1990s—he brought these issues central, and we were able to talk about it in a very powerful way. You know, Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of A Nation, a Klan movie, in the White House—people should talk about that, versus going, That was just a blip. No, it wasn’t. RL That whole history issue is so major and we’ve just got to figure out how to address it. WH There are large concepts that we can talk about in different ways. One of them is the fiction that we created the Black neighborhood. No, we didn’t. We didn’t design these neighborhoods. We had to improvise. But now there’s a kind of romance, right? I don’t want to romanticize that; I want us to be clear about how we were stuck in these places and how we were able to survive—through the arts, through creativity, through nurturing. RL We have a tendency to deal with history for the benefit of our present moment. That’s just a natural thing we do—we look around and see where we are, and then we start thinking, How do we fit in this place from a historical standpoint? And in order to take us in a forward direction, we try to twist things to give us momentum, because if we allow them to be twisted by other people, they’ll just take us down. WH That’s the beauty of your Project Row Houses [in Houston]—it’s clear in my mind that you saw this architectural asset not as something from the past but as something

that could take us into the future. The mindset wasn’t preservationist, about keeping things the same way—it actually became muscular, to a certain degree, allowing you to go forward. The other piece I was thinking about is that it gave white people a way to express their empathy without having to really step out of line, right? RL [Laughs] WH They could come and really get involved. An art institution of this kind created a structure. I’m trying to get Jacksonville to think in the same way—the LaVilla neighborhood has all these shotgun houses and they want to make up a new frame. I’m like, No, let’s use the shotgun. RL Yes, use what you have. It has a certain kind of richness in history. Also, the thing about the shotgun house is that it offers an opportunity for white people to reevaluate themselves in the context of something very familiar. It could be from an angle of them understanding a forced situation: we were forced to live in these neighborhoods with these kinds of houses. You can also look at it in terms of the ingenuity that impacted their architecture—I remember John Biggers talking about the efficiency of the shotgun house, in terms of how it was designed with the doors lined up for ventilation. And then later reading John Michael Vlach, who talked about how the shotgun house actually influenced the design of Southern mansions—they just sort of turned them to the side and put the porch on the broad side as opposed to the gable roof side. In your estimation, from an architect standpoint, a designer standpoint, an artist standpoint, this notion of investing in ourselves and our own history and our own skills and the things that we already have—what are your thoughts on that and our ability to do it? On us being able to harness what we already have and leverage it to build a kind of a Black space? WH It’s a tough thing, because I come out of two educational silos. I went to an HBCU [Historically Black College and University], which was completely constructed through the eyes of Booker T. Washington. Went to A&T [State University, North Carolina] and got a degree in landscape architecture through architecture. I could draw my ass off, right? But I wasn’t taught liberal arts, I wasn’t taught ethnography, I wasn’t taught political science, any of these other things. And when I went out and practiced, it was very clear to me that I couldn’t have that impact on these communities in which I was working. I was working in North Philadelphia, I was working in Harlem, but I couldn’t see past this kind of skill base. And then, once I’d studied in a liberal-arts program at Berkeley, that quickly showed me the deficiency and gave me a different way to see how I could talk about my Blackness and how I could be impactful. It was on the West Coast, right, and when I came back to the East Coast, it was like, Holy shit, how do I operate? It was really hard, because people weren’t open to some of the ideas, like that there could be another way of talking about something, particularly through the lens of Blackness. RL Walter, it’s so good that you’re saying that, because I’m dealing with that in my work now, as a kind of abstraction. When I started my career, I was doing what you were saying—I got to the point where I could draw people and I could make these images that show people, and it was direct. And then I did Project Row Houses in a Black community, so although from an art standpoint it was much more conceptual and abstract, in a sense, than what most people

RICK LOWE

are accustomed to, its being based in a Black neighborhood anchored it for people, so they could look at that. They didn’t have to look at all the conceptual stuff, the Joseph Beuys stuff, social sculpture, conceptualism, and all that kind of stuff that the work was tied to. But then I come along and start doing these paintings. I think when I was telling people that I was making paintings again, they thought they were going to see some Black people in the images [laughs]. And I was like, No, I’m not doing that. WH That just shows the limitations that are put on us. It’s like, if you even just read the blurbs that come out about me today, “Walter works in disadvantaged neighborhoods, taking unused spaces—” That was twenty years ago, right? But that’s still how landscape architecture wants to position me. It infuriates me, but I’ve given up on trying to change it. I designed the Cooper Hewitt garden on Fifth Avenue in New York, but they can’t characterize me that way, which I think allows them to stay in power, right? RL We do have these things where we’ve been forced to play the label game, right? Our society forces us to do that. We have to do it as Black people, women have to do it as women, everybody—there’s this forced being. And most of us don’t want to live in the box, because we’re human beings and we see the world in complex ways. But at the same time, many of us understand that label as being a box that has to be broken from the inside out—we’ve got to allow ourselves to be in that box and then break out of it, push it out. So of course there are lots of people who just want to kind of skirt around it and play, Race doesn’t exist, it doesn’t matter. But that’s not going to get rid of the box. By trying to ignore the box, you’re just perpetuating it. But it’s an interesting dynamic that we’re in, in that on the one hand we have to embrace the notion of what Black space is and Black culture is, as a way of connecting with it and communicating with it to empower it to come out of the box, and then on the other hand we don’t even want to deal with that box either. WH I remember my first year teaching, I presented a project in East Oakland to my faculty, and it was colorful, bold, expressionistic, and they immediately dove in and were like, How dare you subject these poor people to your artistic whims? I was like—what gives you the right to say that Black folk can’t have design, things that are speculative, things that are nonpaternalist, that come from a kind of wellspring of creativity? Name one community in America where the architecture of a Black community is expressive of a twenty-first-century kind of idea. None, right? We don’t have that benefit to go in and say, I can craft this other kind of aesthetic because I’m Black and it’s coming out of me. That’s how I want my Black Towers/Black Power project to read. They’re kind of crazy, but why can’t our shit be crazy? Why do we have to be so nonspeculative and derivative of these vernacular forms or paternalistic norms that keep us in a certain silo? RL Right. WH There’s probably a handful of artists of whom you can say, They just make work [laughs]. Those are people I look to. If you look at Martin Puryear’s early work, he’s doing landscapes, right? He’s doing sculpture. He’s doing architecture. That’s getting out of the box and saying, There has to be this freedom, and that I think is the only way culturally we can have a conversation in this country that’s equal, that’s on the same footing.

Opposite: Rick Lowe, Black Wall Street Manifesto #1, 2021, acrylic and paper collage on paper, 141 × 115 inches (358.1 × 292.1 cm)

RL That’s right. And unfortunately, the only way we can do it is, we have to go rogue. We can’t do it within a context of a society; we’re always having to approach it in being seen from the outsider perspective. Actually, now that I say that, it’s like, Oh, we’re outsider artists? Outside of what? WH Outside of what, right? RL What the hell are we outside of? But speaking of outside, a few years ago—I guess it was around 2015—I was having a conversation with Theaster Gates and Mark Bradford about whether it was important that as three Black artists whose careers were going well, we have a commitment to the physical space of Black communities. And now I’m struggling with this notion of Black Wall Street in the same way. As you said earlier, Black people weren’t all living in the same place because they thought, Oh, this is cozy, we all want to be next to our people. We were forced to do it, right? But since desegregation, people have been able to move and go where they want. And so the question is, how do we approach this idea of Black space and Black community in a time in which there is a kind of mobility, particularly among a certain segment of the Black population, which is the upper-income population? And that’s the part of the equation of the old Black Wall Street idea that made it work, right? That the lower-class, workingclass folks were in close proximity to the higher-earning folks. So is it possible for us to think about Black community and Black neighborhoods in a way that offers opportunities around Black economic sustainability, or expands economic opportunity for more Blacks? WH It’s a really good question, and a conundrum in a country that values a kind of preservation ethic for its history, keeping generations grounded in something very clear, as opposed to erasure. So when you get to Tulsa, Wilmington, all these places, they have to erase that shit. After the war, after integration, it had to go away, because that’s power. To me, the Black community as an image, as an institution, is power. And when you erase that, people have nowhere else to go, they’re just out wandering. So to me, it’s less about preserving and remaking the thing and more about acknowledging that the thing was there. And then can you put something on top of that thing that gives it footing? It’s almost like our infrastructure has been taken away from us as communities. And it’s not infrastructure that you can just point to, it’s this layered thing, a palimpsest. I mean, when I go to some places,

It’s unfortunate: in this country things have to be cataclysmic for people to say, I’ve got to do something. It took the cataclysmic event of George Floyd—it had to be on TV, there had to be all this infrastructure to project this thing that’s so commonplace to so many people. But we don’t want these events to keep happening so that we keep having these moments. I do think there’s one thing we can focus on that I’m beginning to see around me now—the notion of poverty. Every day here in Oakland we have a breadline that goes like three blocks,. There are Asian people in the line, there are white people in the line, there are Black people in the line. There are millions of people in this country who are just poor. RL That’s right. WH And I think that might be a way to somehow get to a place where we can be on the same footing. Because the thing about food is, people come together over it. I was looking at some images from North Carolina during Jim Crow. Asheboro used to have these big barbeques. They would have this long spit and a long table, and on one side is Black folk and on the other side is white folk, but they’re all eating the same fucking barbeque. RL [Laughs] WH Those are the kinds of things that might get people to begin to see. That’s the one place where people tend to come together, around being poor, right? And I just wonder, is that a place where you could begin to kind of talk about the commonality? RL Yes. When you talk about poverty and being poor, that’s another thing that Black people have taken an overshare of responsibility of the identity for, right? WH We’re hallmarked. RL Right. I mean, when people say “poor” in America, it immediately goes to Black. WH But we have ways to help other poor people. RL That’s right, absolutely. WH We’ve improvised it to a point where we got good at poverty [laughs]. Our food, our dress, our music, even our artistry—it’s rooted in poverty, but with that kind of improvisational spirit, instead of always lashing out, which I think a lot of nonbrown poor people do, right? RL Look at the difference in terms of protests. WH Right. We’re not going to the Capitol with guns. That’s the thing: when you see these images that have been broadcast from the Midwest with these armed militias, and contrast that with us doing the same thing. . . . We know what happened to the Panthers, man. Those things are deep in our consciousness. RL That’s it. As we started the conversation saying, this is not a time to breathe easy, it’s a time when we might be able to get some progress. WH If our work can’t get empowered now. . . . Now is the time for empowerment.

Previous spread: Rick Lowe, Black Wall Street #5, 2021, acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 108 × 192 inches (274.3 × 487.7 cm)

Opposite: Rick Lowe, Black Wall Street Journey Manifesto #2, 2021, acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 72 × 96 inches (182.9 × 243.8 cm) Artwork © Rick Lowe

like Harlem or the South Side of Chicago, there’s a sense of something. You can’t really characterize it, but you know that your ancestors walked in this place—I know that Malcolm stood here and talked, I know that this happened here and I know that this happened here. And as they were trying to get rid of some of those things in Harlem, people were like, Hell, no. Imagine if the Apollo was gone? RL Right. WH And there were Apollos in every neighborhood, when you think about it. In Jacksonville they still have the theater. So how do we somehow create a new way of not romanticizing these places, but saying, These are the infrastructural footings for the new generations, because you have to look back to go forward. It’s those things that I’m still trying to figure out in my head. I mean, what’s the next layer, and could that layer be something as simple as an educational institution? Places where we make work? It goes back to Project Row Houses, where there’s still that connection to our ancestors, which gives us strength to go forward. RL Yes. That historical foundation is such a powerful argument for sustainability and growth, but you know, we don’t know how to own our history. So this exhibition that Antwaun is doing at Gagosian is called Social Works, and I think it’s very interesting that this conversation is happening in that kind of space. Also with you and the whole group having that conversation at MoMA about architecture. It’s an amazing moment in time—but I don’t know if it’s the beginning of something, the opening up of something, or if it’s just a moment. WH Sorry, it’s a moment. RL Oh, Walter, man, you’re too much like me. I’m looking for that person who’s going to be like, No, this is going to open up to the world. WH It’s a moment, because the conversations are still set in these narrow contexts. Going back to our conversation about getting out of a box, I think when more of us break out of this box, that’s going to be the moment when shit starts to happen. Because we’ll have multiple voices then, right? RL Absolutely. We’ve talked about this before: what’s missing in the current movements is any kind of infrastructure that develops institutions that can carry things broader and longer than we as individuals can. How can we build something that’s broader than me, broader than you? Because otherwise it’s just a moment.

The last time I saw you you were running between three meetings— LINDA GOODE BRYANT: [Laughs] It was so terrible. It continues to be busy, Project eats. We continue to provide free food bags to people in the communities where we work, and we’re about to expand to the third community, which is in the Belmont section of the Bronx. So we’re in Brownsville, we’re on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, and now we’ll be in Belmont in the next few weeks, I believe. It’s a whole new world for us, an exciting one. It’s been truly fulfilling this year because as a farm, we were an essential service in the pandemic, which allowed us to keep operating the farms and provide free food bags. And our relationship with residents has become deeper and deeper. And then I’m hell-bent on heightening the elements of art in Project eats in a more concrete way. I’m really excited about that, and at the same time, I feel like I’m on this treadmill and the off button isn’t working as I try to keep up with everything we do at Project eats. DF How did you find your way to the location that’s opening in the Bronx in a few weeks? LGB We have a partnership with St. Barnabas Hospital. When they were building a new medical and residential building on their campus, they heard about Project eats and wanted to explore us having a rooftop farm there, which we now do. It’s been open just about a year and we’re working with their wellness center to provide programming for residents and their patients. In one of the programs we do, Farmacy, we partner with medical providers whose doctors prescribe fresh vegetables as part of the patient-treatment plan—we fill those prescriptions on the site of the provider. DF That’s so incredible. LGB Farmacy came about because I was naive enough to think that if we created farms, people would just come. I wasn’t even paying attention to myself as an example: before covid, 98.9 percent of all the food I ate was prepared food [laughs]. It’s not like I cooked at home. I don’t know how I had that disconnect. In the first year, some of the folks who did flock to the farm would go, “Oh, I don’t eat that, but I want my kids to.” And the Farmacy idea came up for me as I thought about how we could partner with folks who are essential to the residents in these communities, folks who have some influence and can assist them in moving toward eating fresh vegetables as part of their DEVONN FRANCIS:

Linda at Project eats Brownsville Farm during Wide Awakes/ Brooklyn Museum free food truck event. Photo: Azikiwe Mohammed treatment plan. DF You know, we were doing free grocery-delivery for a community-based organization in Brownsville and we’d raised some money over the summer in New York at the height of the BLM protests. We were essentially redirecting resources in the supply chain from restaurants, which had a lot of excess because of closures, to these families and communities. I feel like I should have called you immediately. My biggest question for myself and for the team was, How do you make free food distribution sustainable, not only from the aspect of financing it, but also ethically sustainable? Because something I think often is, Yes, let’s feed people, but how do we also give them the tools and resources to teach themselves how to use and implement this knowledge? For me, coming from a restaurant background, that was such a learning curve. The second layer of it is, I would love free food to be widely available, but we live in a society that operates in a capitalistic way, and where, you know, the money has to come from somewhere [laughs]. We were wondering how other organizations were thinking through this. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. LGB I’m basically a nationalist at heart, and when I say “nationalist,” I mean Black nationalists from the late 1960s, 1970s. I’m one of those. What does that mean? I’m very much about self-sufficiency: how do we create the things we need that will enable us to live healthy and thrive? So from that perspective, I’ve always been interested in local currencies. One of the ways I hope we’ll address what you’re talking about is to create local currencies in communities. Local currencies have been around for a long time. The system I’m thinking about is one in which you have a local currency that’s afforded to folks who have limited income, and who are unable to purchase all the things they need, available to them at zero to low prices. You then sell it to the general market at a higher price, and that currency has more value than the actual price that’s paid. So marketrate folks are buying currency that’s helping support the folks

Photo: DeVonn Francis

who have other resources that aren’t financial. Let’s use food establishments as an example: local currency can give food establishments an opportunity to reduce their loss costs. If they don’t sell all that food they’ve prepared, it’s likely they’ll either have to coordinate to try to get one of the nonprofits to pick it up or they’ll end up throwing it out. There’s a lot of waste. We’ll see what happens, but I think we’ll be able to appeal to food establishments with this local currency because while it might be seventy-five cents on the dollar, that seventyfive cents is better than no cents for what they might throw out. And you’re going to be more likely to sell it with this currency because we’re going to develop relationships between people who use the currency and vendors. DF This idea of value, and of defining value for yourself, is something I feel like I’m learning the hard and fast way in every conversation I have with any corporate entity. It comes up even just in my own practices, thinking about my family history and the dynamics around how I came to want to have a business that was engulfed in the politics of food. It always harks back to how you center yourself and these ideas of value. I remember going to Coronation Market in Jamaica for the first time as an adult and looking through the stalls and thinking about how all the produce there was imported from somewhere else, and about the ways in which property and land rights come into play. I think about the conversations I have with my dad or grandfather, who both come from a background of farming, about how their property was taken away or mismanaged and they don’t own it anymore. My dad talks passionately about growing up with chickens and mules and goats and all these different things on his land, and how his grandfather gave him land when he was maybe nine or ten, gave him a small acre and said, This is yours, you can grow what you want. The metaphor of that, as well as the literal implications of being able to declare space and value for yourself in that way, is something that resonates with me and I think about often. LGB It’s hard. We’re so inundated with the prevailing beliefs and value systems of the larger society that we lose sight of our own. I grew up in the communities that we farm in and we didn’t have money, but what we did have was creativity, resourcefulness, resilience, and the ability to use what we had to create what we needed, and to see opportunity where other people see nothing. There’s a whole lot of opportunity there, and in creating what you need, you’re not acquiring it, you’re making it. I hope that Project eats helps to reinvigorate that way of being and thinking and pursuing dreams in the places where we are. So have you found time to cook the whole time you’ve been working on these projects and ideas? DF I’ve been cooking some, but I’ve actually been mostly just trying to write and learn. I’ve been talking to a great friend of mine, Jennifer Williams, and she’s been helping me think about business strategy. I’d thought our sessions were going to be “how to,” as in “how to make your entrepreneurial endeavor work.” What I’m realizing in conversation with her is that it really comes from believing in yourself. I’m not trying to sound like a kindergarten poster in a guidance counselor’s room, but honestly, unpacking what that means has been really major for me. I go into meetings and I’m now more aware than ever of the optics of Blackness. There’s something special and important in this moment about being a Black chef, which I have complicated feelings about, but they’re

also looking at what distinct things can I bring to the table. Back to this idea of value: I’ve never had to name it for myself, I’ve always waited for other people to name it for me. So now I’m working to understand that even when I started Yardy World, it was a project through which I wanted to find my way, not just as a Black person but as a queer Black person, in the wake of going to Jamaica and having dialogues with my family about immigration and coming to New York and setting down roots and thinking about food culture. Now I’m realizing the other work I’m doing, what’s always running in the background, is creating a template for other Black people who want to understand what it means to be able to create your own boundaries in terms of what you can do and what you can make. This goes back to what you were saying about resourcefulness and creativity and being able to see opportunity. We’re in a position to have those conversations and to illuminate our experience for others. I didn’t have that guidebook for me when I was thinking about how my career would shape out. So no, I haven’t been cooking, I’ve just been trying to figure out what kind of framework I want to carry my mission and vision in. For a long time, I thought it was in just dining and events and catering. When Yardy World started I was mostly throwing parties. That’s even how I met you: we catered the office party for the Museum of Modern Art. LGB Yes. And I asked, Who is this chef, what’s his name, where can I find him [laughter]? DF And I’m so happy that we met, because even in that moment I knew there was something else stirring. When I came here to LA, I shot my final video for Bon Appétit for the season. Prior to that, a Haitian company had reached out to me to use their peanut butter, which is called Lavi. It looked great and I decided to use this last video slot to promote their product, but I really didn’t know what the implications would be. When the video came out, the founders were super excited and brought to tears: they did the same amount of sales in a week that they’d previously done in six months. And it was one of those moments where I was like, Oh my God, right, this is actually what my project and desire Project eats Essex Crossing Farm. Photo: Project eats

is. Yes, it’s cooking, but it’s also a synthesis in a lot of ways. With this peanut butter, they took an ingredient that felt distant or separated from people’s lives and brought these heritage plants and seeds, as well as these foundational ideas of how we care for ourselves, back into the fold for people to become comfortable with and find joy in themselves. This type of work ultimately helps to bring wealth back into communities that are already stewarding and laboring over the land. That’s the thing I love about Project eats, too. You’re going to the source of it. You’re going to where the labor happens. LGB I’m curious, does that tie into the website you’re creating? And when you say you’re writing, is your writing connected to your relationship with food or are you seeing different pathways that you’re going down simultaneously right now? DF When the pandemic started to take hold in New York last March, I lost all of my work. We had several events lined up and when they were canceled, I turned to drawing and writing. In the past, I would always draw dishes that I wanted to make, or I’d write about my experiences with my father, growing up in his restaurant, or about experiences I’ve had in the kitchen, spelling out the homophobia or the racism that happened— just basically keeping a diary of how those things made me feel without any real understanding of where the documentation would belong. So with the website, and the video with the peanut butter company from Haiti, I was like, Oh, wait, the way people are thinking about food is changing and I have to change with it. Even though our strategies might change for how we think about working, our mission has always been the same, and that’s wealth redistribution. That’s being a resource for education. That’s being an archive for the public. The website is a way for me to familiarize an audience with the products I care about and the people and the labor behind those products. Just in the way you’d go to YouTube and find a cooking video, we want to take that experience but make it specific to the Black diaspora. We want to start conversations about how food ways have changed—to think, for example, about how immigration has affected the way oxtails and curries may look different in London than they do in New York. We want to offer practical knowledge that you can take back to your home and re-create those recipes that we’re making. The website is also a marketplace. When we create a map of all the farms we care about and all the people we want to highlight, there’ll be links to buy products directly from those people. We’re creating a skill-share-based site that’s not only entertaining but useful in helping people bring sales and resources into their businesses. LGB So that’s another key mission of yours: to redistribute wealth, to create opportunities for people to generate income. DF Exactly. LGB I’m curious about what you’re saying in the context of space and place. Speaking with you, I think about how food itself, just the sensation of certain flavors on your tongue, can put you in a place separate from your physical space. Take the cinnamon toast that my mom used to make when I was a little kid as an example. If I bite into cinnamon toast now—if it has as much butter as she would use with sugar and cinnamon— I’m in her kitchen, I’m smelling that toast toasting. I’m in space, and I’m also in the experience of place in that space. It seems like you conceptualize this website as a space and a place. Are there other ways you’re seeing yourself doing that? DF That’s a really good question. I think the digital world lets

Photo: DeVonn Francis you invite people from all over into the same place. The idea of a brick-and-mortar destination has always been limiting for me because I want my aunt and uncle in Brixton to be able to experience it without having to jump on a plane, and I want my cousins in Canada to be able to experience it, and in Virginia, and so on and so forth. So how do we create a channel that people actually have access to, without a ridiculous paywall barring them from the place that they want to feel like they’re connected to? Another way I think about space and place is by bringing together the past and present, in addition to the physical and digital. I’ve always been in love with Yardy World as an archiving project. I’ve recorded my mom’s and grandmother’s and aunts’ and uncles’ voices talking about their experience since I was a teenager. It’s always been a part of my practice. I was inspired by the fact that every Sunday or Saturday morning, my mom would wake up and call her aunt or uncle on the calling cards in Jamaica. This leads to the third way I think about space and place: the local and global. The idea of proximity through voice over the phone was always really important to me because you’re able to meet in the same place in those moments. It’s all about connecting dots. Do you see Project eats existing outside of New York? LGB That’s always been the vision: if we can do it in New York, we can do it anywhere. When I came to New York, in 1972, the city was in the throes of going bankrupt. It didn’t have any money. It’s interesting to me that even in that time, its real estate values didn’t depreciate. So if you can grow on small plots in New York City and produce high yields, you can farm and grow food anywhere in soil. Quite frankly, my motto—which I’ve been saying to the board of directors of Project eats for over a year and a half, and they’re sick of me saying it—my motto is, if Project eats can support community-based farming beyond New York, I want to be in Haiti by the time I’m eighty [laughs]. So that’s what I’m working toward now: at least positioning Project eats so that it’s a viable enterprise in the communities we’re in and so that the community residents are skilled in operating and managing these operations. For us, that’s success. Success is when residents in the community are operating, managing, and generating income and wealth through these farms and the rest of the food system that we’re creating.

Farmer Johnnie Vickers at Project eats Help Sec Farm on Randall’s Island. Photo: Project eats

DeVonn Francis’s recipe for Jamaican Fish Tea

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY’S PICTURE COLLECTION Joshua Chuang, the Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography at the New York Public Library, discusses the institution’s singular Picture Collection, the artist Taryn Simon’s rigorous engagement with it, and four instances of its little-known role in the history of art making.

Since the industrialization of photography, observers from each generation have remarked on the condition of being awash in images. Relatively few of these images were intended for posterity; most, in fact, were made for a specific reason and time, to be disposed of after fulfilling their purpose. Around 1914, a handful of librarians at the New York Public Library began to salvage some of this pictorial flotsam, recognizing its value as raw material that might be re-consumed, digested, and transmitted by an American public back into the culture from which it came. The Picture Collection has been called upon by journalists, historians, filmmakers, designers, advertising agencies, and even the US military during its strategic preparations for World War II. But of all the image-seekers to plumb the depths of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection during its century of continuous operation, Taryn Simon may be the one most obsessed with pictures that are no longer there. Introduced to this quietly legendary trove of images at a young age by her father, an avid photographer, Simon returned to it many years later with the notion that embedded in its files (and the homegrown organizational system that governs its approximately 1.2 million physical images) is a largely untold history of images—one that serves as a prescient counternarrative to that of Google Images and other image-retrieval systems that have not so quietly revolutionized the way we find the pictures we want, and the entire image economy along with it. The Picture Collection was established just a few years after the main building of the New York Public Library (NYPL), at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, first opened its doors to a public hungry for information. The staff had found itself ill equipped to satisfy the growing number

of patrons who came looking for particular images within the Library’s vast holdings. (Among the earliest requests were depictions of ballot boxes, girls playing basketball, and, jarringly, the act of suicide.) They accordingly began to clip and save pictures from worn-out illustrated books and extra copies of newspapers and magazines that would otherwise have been discarded, and then to categorize each image with a subject heading and to sort it with other images on the same theme. The headings were then marshaled into an alphabetical index that could be consulted by the public, who were able to borrow pictures as they would books. This novel concept did not originate in New York—similar collections had already been established at public libraries in cities such as Denver, Chicago, Boston, Saint Louis, and, most notably, Newark—but the NYPL’s location in the country’s de facto capital of the theater, design, and fashion industries positioned it to be arguably the most influential. Despite having no outlet to promote its services, the collection’s staff was soon besieged by requests for pictures of every conceivable kind; word about its growing holdings, augmented by a continuous stream of donations from its devotees, quickly spread among those whose livelihoods depended on having access to the latest and broadest array of visual references. In 1929, a twenty-six-year-old Russian émigré named Romana Javitz was promoted to be the collection’s superintendent. More than anyone else, Javitz shaped the ethos and radically democratic practices of the collection during her nearly four-decade tenure, making a point of diversifying its offerings by collecting photographs and other depictions of American folk art and Black life, hardly popular subjects at the time. Having trained

as an artist, she is also credited with molding the collection into a stimulating refuge for working artists, many of whom sought her out as a sounding board for their visions and curiosities, recognizing in her boundarycrossing, hierarchy-flattening tendencies an unusually progressive set of values that were on the opposite end of the spectrum from that of, say, the Museum of Modern Art, which was founded the same year as Javitz’s appointment. Today the Picture Collection stands alone as perhaps the last of its kind: a capacious repository of physical images freely available to the public. The collection’s librarians continue to add to its stock, and patrons can still check out up to sixty images at a time on their library card (although there was a monthslong moratorium on borrowing pictures due to the ongoing pandemic). Javitz’s imprint can still be felt in the discoveries latent within its folders, even though the collection is not nearly as voluminous or bustling as it was in her day. (At one point it held over 6 million pictures.) Simon’s project, scrupulously developed over the past nine years, led her to comb through not only the collection’s circulating folders, whose evolving contents reflect the residual tastes and observations of generations of patrons and librarians, but also its historical archive of papers, through which she assembled an extraordinary narrative of foresight and survival. A meditation on the fate of the images we consume and the forces that compel us to revise what images we value, Simon’s project is also a paean to Javitz’s underrecognized legacy in twentiethcentury American art, to which the images following—included in Simon’s recent monograph (Cahiers d’Art, 2020) and forthcoming exhibition The Color of a Flea’s Eye: The Picture Collection (NYPL and Gagosian, New York)—amply testify. 95

Of all the image-seekers to plumb the depths of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection during its century of continuous operation, Taryn Simon may be the one most obsessed with pictures that are no longer there.

Previous spread: Taryn Simon, “Folder: Broken Objects” (detail), from the series The Picture Collection, 2013, framed archival inkjet print, 47 × 62 inches (119.4 × 157.5 cm) © Taryn Simon This spread: Installation view, The Color of a Flea’s Eye: The Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. Photo: Rob McKeever

walker evans

Page from Vogue with images from the Picture Collection selected by Walker Evans, August 1, 1949.

Aspiring as a young man to become a writer, Walker Evans was a habitué of the NYPL well before he was a serious photographer, at one point working the night shift as a page in the library’s map room. It was at the library that he first saw the issue of Alfred Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work containing Paul Strand’s 1916 photograph of a blind woman, an experience he would later recall as critical in setting his artistic course. Less well documented are the many hours he spent in the Picture Collection, which must have satiated, and perhaps even influenced, his penchant for direct, plainspoken, and deceptively potent imagery. (It is not a stretch to imagine Evans poring over the collection’s voluminous holdings of picture postcards, which he would later come to collect himself, organizing them by subject in a similar manner.) In the early 1930s, shortly after returning from a trip to Cuba, Evans showed the photographs he had taken there to Javitz, who immediately saw their merit and acquired more than thirty of them to add to the Picture

Collection’s files. Later that decade, thousands of photographs commissioned from Evans by the US government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) were added to the files, courtesy of Roy Stryker, who headed the agency’s photography project and surreptitiously sent Javitz packet upon packet of prints divulging the unvarnished realities of Depression-era American life, out of fear that Congress might suppress them. In 1949, Evans was commissioned by Vogue to make pictures to accompany a feature article about the library on the occasion of its centenary. Among the expected pictures ultimately published of the library’s facade, rare volumes, and celebrated main reading room is a full-page layout—surely edited by Evans and included at his insistence—highlighting the subversive delights to be found in the “Rear View” category of the Picture Collection. More than six decades later, Simon was drawn to the same subject heading; a handful of the pictures Evans selected for the Vogue spread (which Simon later discovered in her research) also appear in her triptych.

joseph cornell

Joseph Cornell’s exquisite shadow box constructions, whose graphic components largely derived from a clippings file he compulsively amassed over five decades, are replete with visual allusions that reveal his voracious cultural appetite. Years before he was compelled to create his own assemblages, the hermetic Cornell was drawn not only to the avant-garde art shown in galleries such as those of Stieglitz and Julien Levy but also to the opera, the ballet, secondhand bookshops, film screenings, and performances by Houdini. Stored in the basement of the modest house Cornell shared with his mother and brother in Queens, his personal reference archive of books, prints, postcards, films, and visual ephemera included a substantial number of photostats made from pictures he selected and borrowed from the Picture Collection, perhaps his favorite image source during the 1940s and ’50s. The reclusive artist had become a familiar presence in the Picture Collection by 1945, the date of his earliest surviving correspondence with Javitz. The two had quickly developed a

special connection: in the ecumenical Javitz, Cornell found a kindred spirit who, without batting an eye, would indulge requests as specific as an engraving showing Star Island, Maine, in 1852, the German pianist Clara Schumann as a young woman, or a Victorian street urchin with a white cockatoo. Javitz arranged for Cornell’s experimental films to be screened at the NYPL, and Cornell occasionally left cookies for her, as well as small gifts of his work.

Above: Letter from Joseph Cornell to Romana Javitz, July 7, 1950 Right: Joseph Cornell, untitled construction with matchbox, c. 1960, hand-painted wishbone and wooden beads. Gift from the artist to Romana Javitz.

andy warhol

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Being the enterprising and prolific commercial illustrator he was in the 1950s, Andy Warhol began to frequent the Picture Collection in search of fresh source material for his slyly irreverent drawings. Later he would find even more reason to spend time in the collection when he commenced an intimate relationship— thought by Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik to be his first—with Carleton Willers, who worked as one of Javitz’s assistants. “Oh, you just go to the Public Library and take out as much as you want,” Warhol once said, “and you just say that you lost them, or they were burned. And you only have to pay two cents a picture.” According to Willers, Warhol was assessed hundreds of dollars in fines, but his borrowing privileges were never revoked. A hand-colored greeting card from the “Cards—Christmas—1954” folder in the Picture Collection offers a clue as to why his recurrent delinquency was tolerated: depicting a ring of children at play, it is inscribed “Happy December rj—Andy Warhol.” Unsurprisingly, then, the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, include hundreds of mounted advertisements bearing the stamp of the NYPL Picture Collection. In some cases Warhol taped additional ads torn

from magazines on top of them (perhaps the mount provided a convenient stiff support); in others, he gave them new meaning by sealing them in his Time Capsules—personal archivecum-artworks filled with an eclectic array of source material, correspondence, invoices, and other ephemera from his daily life. While Warhol’s nonconformist borrowing habits deprived his fellow image-seekers access to the pictures he held on to, Javitz must have been privately delighted that the imagery in several of his breakthrough Pop canvases could be traced to what he came across in the collection’s bins. Indeed, she designed the collection to withstand a certain level of attrition; since many of its contents were clipped from popular media, there was little that could not be replaced. From Javitz’s perspective, pictures achieved their highest purpose when they were put to work, pressed into service in the creation of something new.

Left: Collage (Coca-Cola advertisement)[recto] by Andy Warhol. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. c. 1961–62. Right: Collage (Campbell’s Soup cans) [verso] by Andy Warhol. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. c. 1961–62

dorothea lange

In May 1957, Javitz received an unexpected letter from an old acquaintance, Dorothea Lange. “My dear Miss Javitz,” Lange wrote, “For some time now I have been gathering together a record which I started in my earliest days as a documentary photographer. These photographs . . . were made with no particular purpose in mind except that I was strongly moved by what was surrounding us during those days. Most of these have never been exhibited, nor shown to anyone. . . . My query to you is, What should I do with this group? I would like to place it where it can be seen and used and serve purposes.” The Picture Collection already had a few thousand of Lange’s photographs for the FSA, an embarrassment of riches that Stryker had deposited there, as he had with Evans, but it had none from her earlier period of work. Javitz seized the opportunity, eventually purchasing fifty-five prints for a total of $275. Delighted with the transaction, Lange continued her correspondence with Javitz over the next few years, leading to the Picture Collection’s additional acquisition of more than 300 prints spanning Lange’s entire output. Taken together, the NYPL’s collection of over 3,500 of Lange’s photographs constitutes one of the greatest collections of her work outside

the Oakland Museum of California, the site of her archive. In the 1980s, as library officials became alert to the cultural significance and rising market value of this collection—along with that of tens of thousands of other photographs enmeshed within the Picture Collection’s files— it started a gradual campaign of removing them from their subject folders and transferring them to a newly formed Photography Collection. Here they could be viewed and cared for as works of art, a change in status critiqued by the critic Douglas Crimp in his oft-cited 1981 essay “The Museum’s Old, the Library’s New Subject.” Among these transfers, highlighted in Simon’s new book, were multiple vintage prints of Lange’s “Migrant Mother” (1936), perhaps the best-known documentary photograph of the twentieth century. Each is marked with an official government stamp and inscribed with its full title, and one of them bears evidence of having actually been used for reproduction, the intended function of the prints made by the FSA. No longer circulating, their place in the collection presents a conundrum: their simultaneous potential as universal icon, valuable commodity, and functional document.

Three prints of Dorothea Lange’s “Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California, Mar. 1936.” and original photo file.

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the world. I picture you with a notebook—simultaneous with living. It has that immediacy. CP Yes, that’s what I’m searching for. That’s been my aim in life, my motto: writing while you walk. FAD There are many references to plastic and to different disastrous climate situations, floods and whatnot, in Little Joy, particularly in the stories “Types of Plastic,” “A Post-Marxist Theory of Unhappiness,” and “A Perfect Day.” What do you think about the need for poetry and literature to speak on that issue—the responsibility of poets, writers, and artists to use their creativity to think of solutions and raise awareness of the climate crisis?

Poet, writer, and translator Cecilia Pavón’s Little Joy, a collection of short stories written between 1999 and 2020, marks the first publication of the celebrated Argentine’s prose in English translation. Here, Pavón speaks with Fiona Alison Duncan, author of Exquisite Mariposa: A Novel (2019), about the art of translation, the costs of consumerism, and the importance of writing beyond the self. FIONA ALISON DUNCAN How was your day? CECILIA PAVÓN It was nice, because my son started school after one year. Now, I think little joys, like the title of my book, will mean more to people. After the pandemic, every small thing, like going to school one day, makes you happy. FAD It’s true. We’re recalibrated to gratefulness—resensitized, maybe. I can’t imagine being a teenager right now because they have so much energy and they want to explore and experiment. Whereas, I don’t know about you, but I can be inside, because I have a solitary practice. I’ll just write and read and talk with people on the phone, and that’s okay for me. CP Yes, for me it’s okay to be at home, because I teach these workshops via Zoom, and it’s fun. It has saved me during the pandemic. But still, I think there’s a limit to screens. It was exciting at the beginning, now it’s too much. The best thing is, you have time to read. Writing, not so much. Because for writing I need the world, the outside, movement. So this idea of staying quiet in the same place—for me it’s the opposite of poetry. FAD Right. I get that impression from your book and your other writings. It almost reads in real time, like you’re writing while you’re out in 102

CP It’s something I think about every day. For me, it’s not the topic of climate change in “ecological” art that’s important, but rather a total change of consciousness regarding what art is, what capitalism is, what this system we have is. I can never stop thinking about consumerism, how our subjectivity is constituted by buying things all the time. I mean, the economy is based on producing things that we don’t need. But I don’t have any answer. What I like to say is that poetry is a way to deal with reality, and that when the ecological catastrophe comes— if it comes, there are so many possible endings—poetry will help us deal with the change of life. When I was a child, growing up in the 1970s and ’80s—before neoliberalism came with all its excess to South America; prior to that they had social-democrat countries—I only had one pair of shoes a year, stores closed at midday on Saturday, and there were two brands of cars. Why don’t we stop there? Why do we need more and more and more? I want to hear your opinions.

gets reproduced and passed down and then accumulates. But I don’t know if we’ll reckon with the climate crisis at a popular level until it’s really, really here, unfortunately. I was reading an article about [the social scientist] Silvia Federici in the New York Times, and it made the point that her ideas of emotional labor and wages for housework are now becoming popular among a more elite and mainstream demographic because of covid. A ruling class who can no longer get their domestic labor taken care of by, for the most part, Black and brown women—I’m talking about in the United States—are now having to reckon with the reality of that work. Celebrities are making statements like “Moms deserve to get paid.” All these ideas that were once in a socialist feminist space are now getting into a capitalist feminist space. And of course Silvia Federici, and many other people, had been warning about this for so long: we cannot have this mass of labor, of energy expenditure, not be recognized and not be valued. The Times article felt like too little, too late. CP Here in Argentina, of course, Federici has had a large readership. The ideas in her book Caliban and the Witch [2004] were very important. If we know that we can’t go on using and using and using all the resources, when can we say, Okay, enough? Poetry, for me, has to do with the past in the present and the future in the present, so I think it’s a place to consider instabilities. What will happen when everything gets to that tip-

FAD I think a lot of humans have a hard time reckoning with anything beyond what’s immediately present to them, whether that’s understanding a different country’s point of view and how it could be to live with only one pair of shoes a year, if you haven’t had that, or planning for future generations. That’s not part of at least the culture I was raised in, which prioritizes short-term thinking, profit turnaround, immediacy, the next pleasure, the next thing. And that’s quite toxic in the ways that harm ping point? We’ll have to have another organization. It’s not the one we have today—a family, a house, et cetera. FAD Yes, I feel like poetry, and especially how you use it, is about insisting on the value of decay, or the value of the broken. It’s about the value of everything on an equal plane, witnessing all of reality, and that’s so different from this capitalist system that says, This is valuable, this is not valuable, this is hot now, this is not now. Poetry is like consecrating the everyday with meaning, which is a coping mechanism . . . or just the way we should live. I want to know more about the sociopolitical and geographic context of Little Joy and your writing. Often, on the back of your books

FAD Was it a label that you and your peers embraced, or was it put on you by critics? CP By critics, but people embraced it. It was really something new in poetry, in literature. Maybe there’s a correlative in New York, like Eileen Myles and her friends—for me, it’s similar to the idea of poetry that Eileen Myles has. FAD I’m curious what you think that idea of poetry is. It’s embedded in life?

in English translation, they’re placed in terms of the “Generation of the 1990s” and the economic crisis of 2001. But American readers might not understand what that means to you and how it impacted your writing practice. CP Well, Argentina had a dictatorship in the 1970s, like most Latin American countries, of course promoted by the CIA. Everybody knows it today; the files must have been declassified years ago. The International Monetary Fund lent a lot of money to the dictator. With this external debt, the economy was very hard to cope with, because it was always paying interest. Then we had democracy restored in the mid-1980s, but that ended in 2001; the external debt was impossible to pay, there was a big crash of the bank system, people couldn’t take their money out of the bank. This was something that happened first in Argentina but later happened in many countries, like Iceland. We were kind of pioneers of the crazy neoliberal order of the world that has now made itself known everywhere. Here, we’re used to this oscillation of the economy, of crisis, but it’s also what’s happening in the United States, in Europe, with the impoverished middle classes. It’s impossible to be an Argentinian writer and be distracted from this economic crisis. It’s the way the world is: in crisis. I don’t know where they don’t have crisis.

CP I know in New York there was this language poetry, very formalist, intellectual, and then there was a poetry that was modern, new, rejecting the academic idea, bringing something conceptual to poetry coming from rock, from pop, and also from tradition. Those were the voices of the 1990s here in Argentina, and with time they became important for all of the Spanish-speaking countries, because we have this particular thing in South America and Spain, which I love: every country has its own Spanish and its own tradition, but there are always dialogues, an exchange of ideas, among different national communities. It’s very interesting in that sense to be a Spanishlanguage writer—I love it.

FAD The “Generation of the 1990s”—is that a term you like? CP It’s a term used for a group of poets. It’s also an aesthetic in poetry that was originally an innovation in the poetry of Argentina; it’s highly valued in Spain, too. It had to do with experimental poetry related to letting other materials in: rock or pop or politics, not just the literary tradition. There’s a famous phrase by the poet Martín Gambarotta from the 1990s that goes “My classics are my contemporaries,” something like that. I was part of this; when I was young, I was always related to a lot of writers. There was a big community.

FAD You also work as a translator; what attracts you to particular texts in order to translate them?

FAD Are there authors who are famous or popular in Argentina but don’t have international acclaim or aren’t being translated, and vice versa? How do you feel about being translated and read internationally?

CP Translat ing always has to do wi t h how interesting the author is, you know? The first book I translated was by Diedrich Diederichsen, from German. For me it was always about admiring writers, making new friends. I want to translate this guy because he’s interesting, and if I translate him, we’ll be friends in some way, reading his book. And that happened with English when I started reading some authors who interested me. Around 2010, I read Dorothea Lasky, Ariana Reines, and other poets. I felt there was an affinity there with what had been done in Buenos Aires in the 1990s, at least by women. Then I started translating more English, and now I only get English books. Because I do it as a way of living, it can be very

FAD You have a head start in understanding that. CP Yes.

started asking my mother, Please, take me to study French. When you love books and poems, you love languages, too, because other languages are the essence of literature. I mean, to read a foreign language is to be constantly surprised: Wow, they use this word like this. I’m really happy being translated; it’s lucky that I can be read in other cultures and contexts. I’ve learned a lot from how people read my pieces in other places, they have perspectives I’d never thought of. When they translate your text, you learn something new about what you wrote.

CP Well, of course there are great authors here from the past and from the present who haven’t been translated. But Spanish is a widespread language, read in many countries, so it’s not like being an author from the Netherlands. Even if they don’t translate your work, you can always find an audience in Spanish. There are writers here who nobody knows, and maybe you go to Colombia and they tell you, Wow, there’s this Argentinian writer I love, and you say, Ah, I’ve never heard of him. It’s interesting, this traffic between different audiences within the same language. I’ve loved languages since I was a child, but in my home, nobody spoke other languages. All my grandparents and great-grandparents were from Spain, and when I was a child, I 103

in English because it’s not what I hear in the background. Maybe if I lived in an Englishspeaking country, but now, no. FAD Why don’t people translate their own work? It’s so rare. CP Because to achieve the mother tongue is very hard. I couldn’t translate something into English. It doesn’t sound so natural, for literature. Maybe something more technical, yes, but poetry—that’s why it’s so important it’s a literary translator, because they have the sensitivity of the work.

exhausting. I translate less now but I’m currently translating Claudia Rankine and at the same time, I’m translating Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own [1929]. It’s so different, the English from England—and also the interior view Virginia Woolf creates; that book is very full, but it’s very interior. What I like about translation is this intimacy with the text. For me, it’s a trip. It’s as if the ideas of this author come to your brain in a way that can only happen if you translate them. It can’t happen just by reading. FAD Does it affect your writing? CP Well, for one, I have less time. That’s why I write very brief texts, I think—I’m a mother and I have to work a lot. But really it affects me because translating gives me ideas when I write. Finishing a short story after translating was something I liked, and probably one or two things passed into my story.

FAD Right, the rhythms and all of that. There are references to noise in your book. The stories evoke music and poetry as noise and the city as noise. I’m hearing noise in the background now, so I wanted to ask about what writing has to do with noise. CP Yes, I think when I was starting to be a reader or a listener or a culture consumer—I hate the word “consumer”—but it has to do with being in an attitude of hearing. You say, Okay, I’ll stop and open my ears. Also, here in Argentina, Buenos Aires is a very noisy city in general. Compared, for example, with Germany; when I came back from Berlin I couldn’t bear it here. It’s one of the noisiest cities in the world, Buenos Aires. FAD What kind of noise?

to this kind of music and this ecstasy. For me, this feeling of music was so important in my life, and so I think I don’t care about historical time or biographical moments.

FAD Ariana Reines, in her introduction to Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl [2012], talks about translating that text from French to English as an act that made her physically sick, and that book generally can make you sick if you haven’t been exposed to something like it—it can cure you but it’s almost like you need the vaccine that contains a small dose of the illness, and there are side effects. Have you had psychedelic-like or mood-altering experiences with translating? CP Well, for me, it’s the psychedelic craziness of thinking you’re in the person’s mind. I used to know the term in Greek, something with ψυχή, with soul—I think it’s “out of your soul.” It’s the closest I come to a psychedelic experience. FAD Do you ever write in English or German first? Do phrases in a second language ever come to you? CP German is a language I have almost abandoned, and I regret this, but of course everything is becoming more and more in English, even in Germany. So many people in Germany write in English. But yes, I do, but not with the pretension of being literary, more like a game or a job; I could never write a poem 104

CP It’s talking of a world without men. I wrote it after reading scum Manifesto [1967], by Valerie Solanas; I remember I read that when I was in my late twenties. And the last one is “Types of Plastic,” which I wrote one year ago. I haven’t written a story in the last year, because, well, I told you that it’s really hard for me to write in the pandemic. I write only poems. I think it was the translator, Jacob Steinberg, who suggested not dating the stories, and I thought it was a good idea. In general I like to think there’s no time, no biographical time, no historical time. I like to think of the moments that escape time: the first, heroic moment of house music, when the beat drops, in an open-air party with thousands of people dancing. There’s no time when you’re dancing

FAD Yes, you get that sense in the book also. It feels like parts of it could take place in America right now, the stories that are less fixed in either space or time. But other stories seem futuristic. “The Post-Marxist Theory of Unhappiness” reads like speculative fiction or science fiction—at first it seemed very present to me, and then I realized that certain claims to technological advances or climate disaster had not yet reached their peak in our present. Rather, they’re things we fear, or that maybe are happening in little bits right now but are not as widespread as in that story. CP Cars. Cars and construction. Noise, it’s a good question—see, this is what I mean when I say that when somebody reads you in another linguistic context, they bring you something new. Nobody has asked me that question before; I hadn’t thought about what noise is. It has to do with this idea of paying attention to surroundings. FAD What’s the newest story in Little Joy, and what’s the oldest? What’s the timespan of the different stories? I noticed they aren’t dated. CP The oldest one is the one that’s about nuns— FAD Oh yes, I liked that one.

CP I’d never say I’m a science fiction writer, but more and more with time, I realize how important science fiction was, is, for my generation. My mother was a fan of science fiction books. My house was full of them. My father read “real literature,” “high literature,” like Dostoevsky or Borges. With him it was always, This is science fiction, it’s not real literature. But I’ve realized how science fiction influences our imagination and I’m starting to read it more. Today the world is kind of science fiction [ laughs]. It’s Elon Musk, nasa going to Mars. FAD The world definitely feels like science fiction. My next book is quite science fiction-y; that’s just what’s in my brain right now.

CP What’s it about? FAD Parts of it are about female reproductive technologies—childbirth, menopause, the menstrual cycle, hormones, all that stuff—and people coping with inaccessibility to health care and services. CP Yes, it’s a major consideration in the present, and I’m curious how children will be born in the future. FAD The reason I don’t read many science fiction books is, they’re often poorly written—the language is clunky. Do you need to read things that are beautifully written? CP Yes, totally. I don’t know if beautifully written, but graceful. Sometimes science fiction takes such a nineteenth-century idea of structure. The characters, the psychology, they’re not crazy enough in form for me. But this year I read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower [1993]. It has poetry in it. FAD Yes, she was embedded in a science fiction world and tried to play by some of its rules, but she has her own poetry. There are constraints to the genre: the robustness of it, the materiality of it, the way you have to explain. I like writing because you can go inside and outside of people so easily and don’t have to make everything perfectly, visibly clear in terms of the scene. I was trying to write a script recently and found it very difficult, because it’s so “objective.” CP I have no idea how that happens. I’ve always written poetry that’s in the moment, direct. And my stories are written in a way that’s like a longer poem. Instead of focusing on plot, it’s more like how one thing connects to another. FAD A few of the stories in Little Joy relate to the idea of the celebrity or popular figure as a tool for other people’s projections. Some people have been willing to let themselves be that mirror. I do think, or maybe I hope, that the idea of what’s celebrated is shifting.

CP It has to do with the twentieth-century artist and the twenty-first-century artist. FAD Yes, that’s what I’m thinking of. There’s a line in one of your stories: “I also had to admit that all twentieth-century artists were kind of monsters, monsters screaming their deformity at the world in high-pitched screams.” CP Yes. For that figure, it’s a wounded narcissism. In my view, art is a tool for relating with others, not for your narcissistic exhibition. And I definitely believe that this solitary genius, this solitary monster, is a thing of the past. It’s from the modern artists. And to use a poem to get revenge—which I did when I was young, now I’m grown up, I don’t do that, although maybe I will again in the future—has to do with using the work of art as something not autonomous. It’s in opposition to the idea of modern art as a world within itself. Maybe it comes from the world of hip-hop, this idea of, I’m always including you, even if it’s to say I’m better than you. That’s the art that I mean to make: art that includes the other. When I was doing these stories, many are messages for someone, whether intended as revenge or otherwise, because it’s fun to read, or necessary. I can’t sit and think of a great plot that I want to write—I admire people who do it, but for me, writing is always a message for someone specific. I think art has to do with relating to others. It’s my utopia, that idea. FAD Utopia’s definitely something that comes through your writing, a sense of projecting a utopia or offering possible utopias.

“you,” as you just said, or, I don’t know . . . writing about sparkly jeans. How are you instrumentalizing femininity? CP These concepts have changed so much in the last fifteen years. When I read many of these tropes that you referenced, and that I myself wrote, I say, What’s this? I thought so differently when I was twenty-five from the way I do now that I’m forty-eight. I really think it’s kind of an archaeological dig when I read it now, to be honest. It is like the thread of an extinct civilization, this idea of femininity being beautiful or buying clothes or whatever. But I think at the same time, the oppression of women has to do with neoliberalism, in the end, saying females or femininity are not serious, not valuable. I think everything has changed so fast. And I’m happy about that—that people who are sixteen have a totally different range of ideas about gender. On the other hand, when I’m translating Virginia Woolf, a book that’s almost a hundred years old, I still think so many things that she writes are true and still happen, even with women’s rights. So at the same time, I don’t know if things have changed that much. One place I see this come up is motherhood. When I was studying at school, all the feminists and intellectuals of the older generation were like, You cannot be a mother. It has to do with the idea of the independent individual alone, and a child is a burden, it bothers you, et cetera. Because again, in the free-market economy, an artist has to be productive. Twenty years

CP Yes. FAD I feel like the model of the solitar y genius is also becoming dated because of the Internet. Some of the veils are being lifted on the mechanisms that allowed certain people to become the celebrity; we better understand who was working behind the scenes, who was exploited or ripped off, who was entitled or persuaded to stake a claim. CP Yes. In general they say women’s writing is the “I” literature, but for me it’s the “you” literature. That’s my opinion, my reading. FAD I have read you discussing the degradation of the feminine in relation to poetry, art, and life. This has long been part of the feminist project, asking why women have been demeaned. But we’ve done so much work to decouple biological sex from gender, so that we can talk about femininity as a spirit or an energy or an aesthetic. I came upon an academic concept recently that has helped me give language to this: the term “femmephobia,” which is looking at how the feminine, or expressions of femmedom or hyperfemininity, are degraded and exploited across identity lines. You can look at how femmephobia affects trans femmes, straight men, cis gay men, Black women (misogynoir), and on and on. I see you employing lots of feminine tropes in your work, whether it’s the “I” that’s the

ago, it was a shame, it was uncool, for an intelligent woman to be a mother. For me, it has to do with this demeaning of femininity that you mentioned. But I passed through different stages. I know all kinds of artists with children, and in the end, I think it has to do with the idea of getting conscious that you’re bound to everyone, not only to your child. You’re a person who is not isolated. I don’t see how you say it’s a burden to have a child. For me, I think it’s too heavy to be an individual. Just like in my writing, I prefer to see myself as related to other people.

Cecilia Pavón, Little Joy: Selected Stories, trans. Jacob Steinberg (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2021). 105

OVERTIME: ON KEVIN JEROME EVERSON

By Carlos Valladares Topography love: that’s the game of Kevin Jerome Everson, one of the premier cinematic visionaries of our time. Everson’s audiovisual work evades every label that could be used to pin it in place: experimental, avant-garde, Black, US cinema, found footage, twenty-first century, fantasy, nonnarrative, and, the most dreadful of all, “realism” and “documentary.” Everson demolishes staid notions of the natural and the real. To meet the challenges of perception and existence demanded by his cinema, the viewer must refuse the belief that they can ever “know” anything about the “reality” of his filmed Black subjects, their work, the lives they lead when the camera isn’t rolling or when the festivals have shut down. His films play seriously with the omnipresent yet invisible histories packed into signifiers like “body,” “Blackness,” “knowledge,” “time,” “process,” and “work.” To date, Everson’s oeuvre consists of over 200 films varying in length from one minute to eight hours. His camera focuses on a wide berth of predominantly African American subjects engaged in a variety of experiences, activities, and events. The films are primarily set across the US South and Midwest, in locations such as Everson’s hometown of Mansfield, Ohio. To demand clarity from these unruly movies is to deal a disservice to them. It is the task of the 2021 filmgoer to meet Everson’s subjects and work toward them, not the other self-serving way around. Watching Everson’s films, one gets the sense that he has shot miles of footage only to select the shots that show the least and tell even less. Everson denies you a zone of privileged access into his subjects, the modus operandi of most conventional “explain-and-show-itlike-it-is” documentaries. His unique harmonization of crisp, suspended flows of time, Black being, slippery reality values, and a poetry sculpted from the quotidian dwells in a zone that Kobena Mercer has called the “in-between,” a diasporic sashaying and unmooredness that doesn’t stick to the frozen high values of the midcentury modernists, an “in-between” that assumes all art as political even if not at the surface.1 Here, the “in-between” refers to Everson’s sidestepping of various presumptions typically grafted onto Black artists like him and others in the United States. This “in-between” destroys notions of a strictly universalist consideration of the cinema—i.e., a white, ahistorical, hegemonic notion of what constitutes humanity. It also frees the Black artist to use the language of abstraction, of nonnarrative, of poetry, to move away from trying to find “verification” or a limited reality-value through private, intimate details in the Black artist’s life. Everson swirls his practice within and about Blackness, yet never reaches a fully communicated, totalized notion of it. I take as my guiding point, with regards to the latter, what Tom Meisenhelder writes in regards to notions of “whiteness” and “Africanness”: It is by defining the African other as a “black body” that the European identified itself as a “white soul.” Using the ideas of Lacan (1977) it is possible to see that European cultural identity was formed in part via the confused introjection of the African other. . . . The precolonial representation of the African other provided the general rules of discourse that have informed how Europeans think, talk, and act with reference to Africans.2 Everson rejects being defined in the exclusive terms of the European-derived “Black body”; in every film venture, the Black subjects he films become reified in

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Everson does not limit himself to a particular movement or national style; rather, he engages in a struggle with the entire cinematic apparatus, the labor concealed and the politics denied by the institution of viewing, watching, and listening.

Previous spread: Kevin Jerome Everson, 2019. Photo: © Erin Leland Opposite, top: Film still from Kevin Jerome Everson’s Undefeated (2008) © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobitearts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures Opposite, bottom: Film still from Kevin Jerome Everson’s Ring (2008) © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

the name of the act of “creative interpretation,” to use Michael B. Gillespie’s words in his seminal Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016).3 Everson reverses “the uneven critical burden whereby the fundamental value of a black film is exclusively measured by a consensual truth of the film’s capacity to wholly account for the lived experience or social life of race.”4 In Cinnamon (2006), we see the in-between in action. Mortgage-loan-officer Erin (played by Erin Stewart, actress and graduate of the Drama School at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where Everson is a professor of art) is stif ling in her white-collar office job, where she’s in perpetual search for a ballpoint pen to log down tiresome bureaucratic business. She can’t wait for the weekend, when she can race her dragster on dirt roads, guided by the mechanic John Bowles, a bracket racer for decades. Rejecting a likable Ford v Ferrari plot, and the easy-to-parse social dynamics of loyalty and professionalism that pervade every buddy-buddy film about a sport, Everson is most intrigued by the friction and drag of tires on dirt, the nitty-gritty that even Howard Hawks (a master of action and gesture, as seen in his 1932 racing flick The Crowd Roars) never had time to show: the sputtering motors, the whirling engines, the air thick with dust and gas. Any personal business is neatly played down, and when it does come up, the personal is clouded by elusive memory: an enigmatic teddy bear, for instance, belly stitched with a pink heart bearing the words “i love you,” adorning the bed of Ashley Bowles, John’s daughter and a Black-girl drag racer in the making. John, in a eureka moment, says to himself, “That’s what drag racing is: consistency.” What’s being endorsed here is evenness of temperament, the need for the artist to wield their tool, whether car or camera, with restraint and a respect for the arduousness of process. A lot of waiting fills up the spaces of Everson’s movies, in conspiratorial league with the tough, low-to-the-ground, tedium-forged miracles of Chantal Akerman or Andy Warhol. In Everson’s work, waiting for the show to begin, a harbinger for Something Else, becomes the main event. Everson sketches out vast formal worlds in ten minutes or less. Witness Old Cat (2009), Undefeated (2008), and Ring (2008), three short films that recall the histories of cinematic representation in order to trouble the photograph’s claim to unfettered reality. I turn to a description of Old Cat by Ed Halter in a 2010 issue of Artforum: “Old Cat . . . consists of an unbroken roll of silent black-and-white 16 mm, shot by Everson in a small boat navigating what seems to be a broad river. One man pilots the boat from a perch at the fore; another lies port side with his leg in a splint, crutch under his right arm. What seems like a single-take slice of life is in fact an instance of theater: the man’s injury is fabricated, inserted into the shot as a means of suggesting some unseen narrative.”5 With regard to Undefeated, I turn to an even shorter description by Everson himself: “Undefeated is about mobility and immobility, or just trying to stay warm.”6 The film features DeCarrio Antwan Couley (Everson’s son) shadowboxing to the rhythm of a hand-cranked Bolex. To discuss both of these works, it strikes me to bring up the point Everson himself makes with regard to his cinematic affinities. He denies, for instance, the “obvious” route—the “constant” comparisons, in his view, between himself and the Black narrative filmmaker Charles Burnett, known for his 1978 masterpiece Killer of Sheep, set in a predominantly Black neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. For Everson, a better comparison is the

films of “the Filipino experimental digital filmmakers Khavn de la Cruz, Lav Diaz, and John Torres.” As he said in 2013, “Lav Diaz makes these ninehour narrative films; they’re so cool. Like if it takes twenty minutes for the oxen cart to come down the road, it takes twenty minutes for the oxen cart to come down the road. But there’s something that’s super fucking humane about that. It’s so visceral.”7 Like Diaz, whose films are notoriously “difficult” (because lengthy), Everson does not limit himself to a particular movement or national style; rather, he engages in a struggle with the entire cinematic apparatus, the labor concealed and the politics denied by the institution of viewing, watching, and listening. Surpassing what is considered the “norm” of the cinema experience, Diaz breaks the contract of pleasure, equated with instant understanding. Everson takes up a similar challenge. It is crucial to tie Old Cat and Undefeated to the first filmmakers, the inventors of the cinematograph. The Lumière brothers are best known for their early films of the 1890s, shimmering one-shot “actualités” that feature white French citizens—working class, bourgeois, aristocrats—engaged in a variety of activities: a couple feed their baby, workers leave a factory, a gardener gets hosed by kids in a park, and so on. Undefeated lasts the exact length of time a Lumière actuality typically did: fifty seconds, an entire reel of film in 1896. And certain Everson films explicitly revisit the images of one of the Lumières’ most famous films, La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, 1895): 2013’s Workers Leaving the Job Site (Black construction workers punch out the clock for the day) and 2017’s Rams 23 Blue Bears 21 (spectators file out in single file at the conclusion of a football game and react to Everson’s camera). All of the above films make subtle nods to the Lumières in the intense focus on gesture and the bleed-through of presentational artifice and unrepresented “reality-caught-unawares.” In Undefeated, a young Black man—Couley— bounces up and down in the cold, jabbing the air as if boxing. His car has broken down on the side of a freeway; its hood is up, and his companion (James Everson, the filmmaker’s father) inspects the engine as cars whoosh by. In none of the above films are the profilmic events integrated into a master narrative that indulges the audience’s craving for engagement or entertainment. If anything, what get filmed are shards presented as such, unintegrated. There’s a dialectic of symbolic movement: the stalled car as a counterpoint to the jabbing, always-on-his-toes Couley, “undefeated,” the spirit and labor of the boxing ring divested from its physical location . . . reappearing as the titular symbol on the side of some hushed-away highway. This dialectic is mirrored in the form of the film and in Everson’s larger project. He divests his filmed subjects from what’s perceived as their common purview—narrative, explanation, documentary—while still thoroughly investing himself in questions pertaining to theatricality, performance, and action. It is hard (and historically untenable) to return to the kind of pure automatism of the Lumières. It is hard due to the ingrained expectation of smooth narrative that the moving image has encouraged for the century-plus of cinema’s existence. All the same, Everson still poeticizes that luminescence, that primacy of raw seeing. His camera registers the bits that can’t be inscribed into a larger order: wind rippling through the boatman’s white shirt in Old Cat, the play of grays on his skin, the older blue-shirted man who hilariously returns back to the work site in Workers Leaving the Job Site. 109

Everson shows both what happens outside the work site and what happens within it. In his mammoth Park Lanes (2015) we get peeks into this inside, but only peeks. The setting: a day in the life (shot over a period of a week) of the sweating and business that go on inside a factory that constructs—of all things—bowling alley equipment. The duration: exactly eight hours. A film that works like an inverted Kino Eye (1924; what’s prized is long takes, not the cut-’em-up frenzy of Dziga Vertov’s montage), this 480-minute valorization of labor doubles as mystification, lasting as long as the average factory shift in the States and in total rejection of any “explanation” of how a gutter gets built. For seven hours, parts are manipulated, and Asian, white, and Black workers laugh at lunch breaks. Then, in the final hour, we see the completed lanes. It’s one of the most fabulous films of unfolding I’ve ever experienced.8 As it starts, it’s early morning. One Black worker whom we follow from beginning to end complains with a guffaw to her colleagues in the break room, “I thought today was Thursday. Looked at my phone and went: ‘Ohhh. It’s Wednesday.’” Tiredness and forced indefatigability are the first notes sounded for the day. Later, a Black woman who ties up her hair in braided buns manipulates a series of long metallic arm-things for a good halfhour. I have no clue what the hell this arm-thing is, or where it even ends up in the blueprint for the bowling lane. But it’s engrossing to watch her toil over her component with monklike precision. As she plays with it, a radio plays softly in the background, so that, for eight hours, we hear the perfect soundtrack to 2010s late-capitalist life. Don’t want to work? Neither do we! At least there is pop to remind us that “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” that “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” that “Just Like a Prayer, I’m Gonna Take You There,” that in this country, “Sugar, We’re Goin Down, Down,” and that maybe some day we can say “We Found Love in a Hopeless Place” (not the club, but the break room). These are the same Top 40 radio hits that bored teens will hear at a bowling alley on a Saturday night once all this alienated labor has produced its perversely specific commodity. Park Lanes also features an intervention in the cinematic Symbolic for the ages: a young Black man takes a black paint nozzle and—elegantly, without muss—sprays the black paint across a flow of white metallic sheets on a conveyor belt. In Footlight Parade, a Warner Bros. backstage musical from 1933 starring pearly-white guys and dolls, Jimmy Cagney walks down a city street and, in a sudden burst of insight, conjures a foolproof plan to lure viewers into his movie theaters. The subsequent shot-reverse shot revealing his plan is the most blatant existing admission of whitewashing within the racist studio system. The shot: “That’s it!” Cagney cries on a New York street as he sees something offscreen that sparks his aesthetic epiphany. “That’s what we need! Beautiful white bodies on the screen!” The reverse shot: Black kids laughing, playing, and showering in a broken fire hydrant. Flash forward to 2015, where the terms of the imagination have flipped: now, Black living (in Everson’s work) is taken as the base of Cagneyian action, the material and psychic and symbolic foundation on which notions of the state and the individual are rejiggered. The ground below us becomes as unstable and fluid yet omnipresent as the river in which two teens baptize their friend for the camera in The Island of St. Matthews (2013). 110

Flooding is of central concern to this gorgeous film, set in Westport, a small community to the west of Columbus, Mississippi, the hometown of Everson’s parents. In 1973, Westport’s citizens were hit hard by the great flood of the Tombigbee River, and most folks lost everything: heirlooms, photos, homes. One of those who lost everything was Everson’s own aunt. So there’s a family connection, one that spills across the entirety of Everson’s films as various relatives play a host of personae. But St. Matthews quickly spirals beyond the familial into a knotty rumination on a host of daily sensations: water, its overflow, control and the lack of it, the beautiful stillness of surface, Black hands, delicacy, deliverance, survival, the casual, the coped with, the tyranny of visibility, ripples, starting and restarting, rebirth. Now, the flood survivors are impeccably dressed and bejeweled and coiffed. Presenting a version of themselves to the camera in their best Sunday church duds, they recall all the intimate details of the flood. Juanita Everson, Kevin’s aunt: “I was just married, and Roses and Sears Department Stores sold sheets and towels and clothes for 10, 25 cents each. And that was a wonderful thing, because a lot of people lost everything in their homes: they lost family pictures, heirlooms. And that’s the important thing, ’cause I’m a shopaholic, and I started then,” followed by a profound laugh, exemplary in its nonchalance. A woman next to Juanita: “It was awful. But we survived. And that’s about it.” Everson’s camera records historical events not as textbook as Kennedy’s assassination or Iran-Contra, but falling rather among those small microhistories that would barely make a dent in the footnotes of logy doctoral dissertations. These are the hyperlocalized events whose traces make themselves heard through long patches of communal silence, grainy floating voices that refuse to separate the remembered and the ongoing. Everson toils within cinema—the medium of the visible par excellence, owing to those indexical traces of the moving, physical world that we quaintly assume is reality—but he rails against the institution of visibility that gives it legibility. He undoes the viewer, asking her to question her relationship to images that purposely refer to more than they can show. Thus the art of material existence emerges, in ways to which the viewer is unaccustomed, weaned, as she is, on the cotton candy– like entertainments of Hollywood or the stagnant seasons of Netflix. As Everson avoids this cliché of insightful art, the event dissolves into a series of pulses: illegible shop talk about diesel drag-car engines, the quality of rope used for calves in Black rodeos, lunch-hour predictions for how a season of NBA All-Star basketball will wind up. Hortense Spillers asks us, “What is this thing called ‘race’? Our deadliest abstraction? Our most nonmaterial actuality? Not fact, but our deadliest fiction that gives the lie to doubt about ghosts? In a word, ‘race’ haunts the air where women and men in social organization are most reasonable.”9 Race is the Lacanian Real haunting the air of Home (2008), which focuses on the final seconds of a football game at a predominantly African American high school. But the only shot in the film is a fixed, distant one trained on the scoreboard. No literal Black bodies are seen, but they’re sensed behind and beyond the camera, framing the reality of US easy living. (I write this as the Super Bowl is going on and America tries to forget racial capitalism for a few hours. How? By watching TV commercials in between the collisions of Black bodies.) In Home,

Opposite: Film still from Kevin Jerome Everson’s Cinnamon (2006) © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobitearts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

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Everson toils within cinema, but he rails against the institution of visibility that gives it legibility.

Opposite, top: Film still from Kevin Jerome Everson’s Home (2008) © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobitearts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures Opposite, bottom: Film still from Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park (2017) © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobitearts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

the problematics raised by race are abstracted into the symbolic sphere of “Tygers/Visitors/3 down/23 seconds to go,” with the Pepsi logo underneath. We see “only” this, but we feel the spectacle, those crashes of bodies that are being neatly elided by the misleading signs of unquestioned reality. We sense the rah-rah in the stadium. We hear the voices of the crowd. But the scene has been fantastically pared down. Home is of a piece with Ring, where what’s accentuated is the balletic grace of the Black boxer (process), as opposed to what punches do to his face (destination). Only in the case of Home, no body is ever seen. Everson’s work seeks out the something else that Spillers also seeks when she writes, “Currently, the cultural analysis offers no theory of the ‘everyday’ and appears to have no firm grasp of social subjects in relationship to it.”10 Such language, I think, can partly be found within the visual histories and works uncovered by Everson, even as he complicates one’s notion of what goes into an everyday. In Grand Finale (2015) we look at the backs of two boys’ heads as they look at a last volley of fireworks in the Detroit sky. The main event is the people gathered for the event. One of the boys is recording the fireworks, and observes them on his digital phone. This is not an unfiltered everyday; the daily is explicitly mediated through the lens of the camera. As Everson hones his eye in his most recent 2010s work (Park Lanes; Erie, 2010; and the 2017 masterpiece Tonsler Park), these notions of an everyday emptied of typicality—yet still, to some degree, a “watchable,” consumer- and audience-oriented everyday—have been pushed to the durational Diaz-Akerman extreme. What we see in Tonsler Park is not the real, not what really goes on at an Election Day November 2016 polling station in Charlottesville, Virginia, several months before the infamous Unite the Right Rally in which a right-wing white supremacist intentionally rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one. That’s what the official record of history states, but not the Everson record. Though Tonsler Park is more honest than the intentionally misleading cable-news “explanations” of how Black people in the United States feel judging by how they vote, it’s also the day-to-day bereft of obvious context: the local candidates, the private jokes told between neighbors and friends in the voting queue. Thus, next to Roberto Rossellini’s Socrates (1971), Everson crafts the least sensational, nongiving, and most geometrical democracy movie in existence. You would expect him to fly off in a million directions once the voting day commences. Instead, a thrilling alienation overcomes the viewer as Everson sticks to one worker for nearly ten minutes, observing her every move, then panning briefly to her neighbor, who’s obscured by the backs of voters, before panning back to her, diligently registering each ballot and handing them out to prospective voters. It is up to the viewer to fill in the symbolic gaps. The boredom and tedium of the electoral process, what’s usually not shown or dwelled on—it’s interesting to see the diverse attitudes taken toward this strange one-day nonjob. With a young, handsome, tightly framed volunteer, blips like his knitted turtleneck or an earring fill in the space partitioned for character, on top of Everson’s tribute to the limitless expressions of the face: coy smiles (baring teeth, concealing), deep concentration, a mind in thrall to Zen nonthought, and so on. Another volunteer—a Black woman with braided hair—is decidedly chipper each time she has to greet a new voter. She beams as if she’s on a daytime game show: “Come on down!” she keeps

saying, making everyone feel like they’re the next contestant on The Price Is Right. Everson nails the rhythm of a day in which thrill-pumped acts are spaced out Morse code–style by dashes of waiting, of emergence. Everson has said, “We want things to be reality. I think it’s the same as in literature. . . . Ever since 1839 that whole idea of representing what was real got kind of stuck to the culture. With photo—ever since the invention of photography we’re just doomed.”11 So much of the lived experience of neocolonial subjects gets integrated, with the speed of a camera shutter, into data, bureaucratic information, violent reductions of the possibilities of life arrested at the moment of their imagining.12 Everson, by contrast, rejects the instant. He reacts against today’s social mediation of time as so many clips and detached climaxes and content. Whether his film is as short as a Lumière actuality or takes literally all day to watch, he delays the time it takes the human eye to understand a scene. Pressure is placed on perception, on codes that we have been trained to accept at face value for over a century. What happens when the unseen violence of centuries of racist brutality is revealed, burbling alongside (not beneath) a surface, known but unknown? What happens when linear time not only slows down but shatters? What happens when attention in our fast times is recirculated to pick up the throwaway gestures of women at work, of men making art in between inhales and exhales? Everson provides a radical glimpse into such an old-and-new world. Most of the films discussed in this essay appear on the following home-video releases: Second Run’s How You Live Your Story, a stellar two-disc (region-free) Blu-ray set of several Everson features and shorts, selected by the artist himself; Video Data Bank’s threedisc box set Broad Daylight and Other Times, featuring work from 2002–09; and the DVD I Really Hear That, focusing on labor-themed films. Park Lanes (2015) and Everson’s Black Fire collaborations with historian and UVA colleague Claudrena N. Harold are available to stream on the Criterion Channel. 1. From the author’s notes on “Blackness and Abstraction,” a weekly seminar attended by the author and taught by Kobena Mercer at Yale University, January–May 2020. See also Mercer, “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” Third Text 4, no. 10 (Spring 1990): 61–78. 2. Tom Meisenhelder, “African Bodies: ‘Othering’ the African in Precolonial Europe,” Race, Gender & Class 10, no. 2, “Interdisciplinary Topics in Race, Gender, and Class” (2003): 111. 3. Michael B. Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), quoted here from Jeff Scheible, “Throwing Punches: The Athletic Aesthetics of Kevin Jerome Everson’s Filmmaking,” World Records Journal 3, no. 3 (2019). Available online at https://vols.worldrecordsjournal. org/03/03 (accessed February 28, 2021). 4. Gillespie, Film Blackness, 4. 5. Ed Halter, “The Practice of Everyday Life,” Artforum 48, no. 9 (May 2010). Available online at https://www.artforum.com/film/edhalter-on-kevin-jerome-everson-28020 (accessed March 1, 2021). 6. Everson, Liner notes to Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson, DVD (Chicago: Video Data Bank, 2011). 7. Everson, in Terri Francis, “Of the Ludic, the Blues, and the Counterfeit: An Interview with Kevin Jerome Everson, Experimental Filmmaker,” Black Camera 5, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 198. 8. Note that due to the pandemic, the author saw the “work-fromhome” edition of Park Lanes, which received its streaming premiere on the Criterion Channel in February 2021. On television, it has a completely different effect from the version most viewers and critics have seen: one wavers in and out more often, the droning endlessness of factory work is that much more pronounced because it infiltrates the space of the bourgeois living room, and the volume can be manipulated to placate neighbors or sleeping roommates. 9. Hortense J. Spillers, “‘All The Things You Could Be by Now, if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” boundary 2 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 78. 10. Ibid., 109. 11. Everson, in Francis, “Of the Ludic,” 192. 12. “Thinking about imperial violence in terms of a camera shutter means grasping its particular brevity and the spectrum of its rapidity.” Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 27.

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helen fr ankenthaler: a painter’s sculptures On the occasion of three exhibitions in London exploring different aspects of Helen Frankenthaler’s work, Lauren Mahony introduces texts by the sculptor Anthony Caro and by the artist herself on her relatively unfamiliar first body of sculpture, made in the summer of 1972 in Caro’s London studio.

Helen Frankenthaler made her first sculptures in 1972, exactly twenty years after her major breakthrough with Mountains and Sea, a canvas whose soak-stain technique influenced her immediate peers in the early 1950s and charted a new direction for American painting. In essence, her method called attention to the picture surface by soaking thinned paint directly into the canvas rather than covering and concealing it. While it may seem that her goal was to highlight the flatness of her painting, this is only partially true: as art historian Bonnie Clearwater notes, “Frankenthaler has always maintained a tactile quality in her work that is sculptural and illusionistic.”1 While her interest in illusionistic space, along with her habit of working from all angles on a canvas placed on the floor, seems to readily lend itself to making three-dimensional works—and she certainly desired to do so—it would take over two decades for her to tackle this new medium in earnest. That Frankenthaler’s first such works would be made of welded steel was predictable. David Smith—the primary innovator of that revolutionary method among sculptors in the Abstract Expressionist circle—was a close friend of Frankenthaler’s from 1951 until his untimely death, in 1965.2 She knew his work well, and Smith invited her to work in his studio, but the opportunity never transpired. Both artists met the British sculptor Anthony Caro on his first trip to the United States, in the fall of 1959. That trip would prove hugely influential for Caro, leading him to abandon figural sculpture for large-scale, abstract constructions in painted steel. Frankenthaler and Caro remained close friends, and in 1972, after years of considering the idea of working in each other’s studios, Frankenthaler was the first to act on the opportunity, proposing that she visit Caro in mid-July, following a holiday in Ischia, Italy. 114

In letters to Caro leading up to that visit, Frankenthaler expressed both excitement and nervousness about the prospect, referring to herself more than once as a “novice.” She wrote, eagerly, “As you can tell, my whole sense of work and joy and new enterprise is geared to trying, observing, working within your studio framework.”3 She approached the trip with the same seriousness and drive she brought to her painting practice, and even considered bringing a studio assistant from New York, in part so that he could learn the fabrication methods should she want to continue the project upon her return home. 4 Ultimately, Caro set Frankenthaler up with his own former studio assistant, Charlie Hendy, who facilitated the fabrication of the works and took her to a junkyard outside London to source materials. Despite her nervousness about the prospect of making sculpture, Frankenthaler felt comfortable in London, having visited the city over the years; she even stayed in the same hotel as she had on her first visit there, as a nineteen-year-old traveling with her friend Gaby Rodgers—“full circle,” she noted on her return.5 Frankenthaler worked steadily over a two-week period and took inspiration from her immediate surroundings, a direct and spontaneous approach akin to how she painted. Even as a self-described novice, her choices revealed her confidence and her eye: Caro observed later on, “You work so freely and intuitively.”6 Matisse Table was inspired by her seeing the eponymous object in a poster of the French modernist’s Large Red Interior, Vence (1948) that hung in Caro’s office; Heart of London Map was based on Francis Chichester’s map of the same name, a copy of which is in Frankenthaler’s archive.7 Smith’s legacy was also prominent in the studio: after his death, Caro had received some of

his materials, specifically what Frankenthaler called his “doughnut-discs with wobbly edges.”8 Frankenthaler incorporated them into four works: Envelope, Pedestal, David’s Chariot, and Brice (For Charlie). However, the vertical, open, and linear nature of many of the ten sculptures she produced offers visual connections to the paintings she had recently been making, into which she had reintroduced the use of drawn lines.9 The antennalike appendages of Heart of London Map closely resemble similar forms in paintings such as Sesame (1970) and Chairman of the Board (1971), and also of one made shortly after the sculptures, Chill Factor. The latter painting was completed in February 1973, just two months after the sculptures were first exhibited, at the André Emmerich Gallery, New York, in December 1972. The following two texts offer insights from both artists into the making of this unique body of work in a moment of transition and experimentation in Frankenthaler’s career; the experience fulfilled a long-standing creative desire on her part and would inform what she did next. Caro’s was written in 2006, on the occasion of an exhibition of nine of these sculptures at New York’s Knoedler Gallery. At that time, with the exception of Matisse Table, none of the works had been seen publicly since 1974, when seven of them were installed outdoors at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. 10 Frankenthaler’s recollection was written in 1975. Although she stated then, and in an earlier lecture given at Swarthmore, 11 that she was not sure when she would next make sculpture, in six months’ she would begin to do so, working at large scale in clay with Margie Hughto in Syracuse, New York.

—Lauren Mahony

fr ankenthaler’s sculpture: a reflection Anthony Caro, 2006 In 1959, when my wife Sheila and I first visited America, we knew no one. We had been given some introductions and the New York art world warmly welcomed us, made us feel at home. It was at the art critic Dore Ashton’s apartment that I first met Helen Frankenthaler and Bob Motherwell. They gave me a lift uptown in their car. When they learned I was an artist from England, in New York for the first time, they said, “We’ll give you a party.” They threw a dinner party with about a hundred guests at their East 94th Street home. I found myself seated at a small table beside Hedy Lamarr (heroine of the famous film Ekstase), with David Smith on her other side, and Franz Kline at the next table. The stars of the silver screen together with the stars of Abstract Expressionism! Over the years, we got to know Helen well. We came to enjoy her enthusiasm, her risk-taking, her intelligence, her humour. We had talked about her trying her hand at sculpture; in May 1972, I received a letter: Dear Tony, Thanks for your nice note. The best part of it was the last sentence. How about that plan to make sculpture together? !!!!!!!!! How would the last two weeks in July be for you, for me to get oriented as a novice? I will be

going to Italy from here July 1 through 12 and could come directly to London from the 12th to the 28th. Is this good for you? If so, I will plan around it. So let me know as soon as convenient. Great. Love to you both. Helen. I don’t dare talk more about it, less it’s jinxed. But I’m so serious, and can’t tell you how much I hope it works out. My studio in London is in an old piano factory in Camden Town, and I invited Helen to work there. I hired Charlie Hendy to be her helper. He had recently retired from being my assistant, and while she was working on one end of the big studio space I planned to make my own sculptures at the other end with his young successor, Pat Cunningham. Helen arrived, ready to set to work, but with no experience in steel. Her approach was straightforward. She would focus on steel parts and have them welded together in accordance with the direction she had in mind. From the time of Rodin, many of the best sculptures have been made by painters. Picasso is quoted as saying, “Sculpture is the best comment that painters can make on anything.” An inherent part of a sculptor’s training is craft; craft

is demanded for carving in wood or stone, casting in plaster and in metal, even for fabrication in steel. But the sculptor’s attention to craft can tend to put a brake on a clear approach to the art itself. The painters bypass all this and find a way—any way at all—to be direct. Helen worked when she felt ready; she stopped when she was tired. She seldom needed to make adjustments. She did not agonize and had complete confidence in her “take.” As a result, her work has a breathtaking freshness. I remember her asking Charlie about some steel frames, stored higgledypiggledy in the roof part of the studio: “Can I use those?” “Yes.” “Then weld them together as they are.” When they were brought down, assembled as one unit, and set up as Helen intended, they became Ceiling Horses. Again and again she surprised me; her directness and her certainty were an inspiration. Over that fortnight Helen spent a lot of time with Sheila and me. She later wrote: I often think of the conversation we had at dinner, the three of us in London, and now I look back on it with the joy of having somehow established a rapport and friendship that is rare and wonderful. It was there all the time of course, but never had that chance to be cemented and meaningful. So much of it, apart from the clichés

Previous spread: Helen Frankenthaler, Heart of London Map, 1972, steel, 87 × 25 × 82 ½ inches (221 × 63.5 × 209.6 cm) This page, left: Helen Frankenthaler, Ten After All, 1972, steel, 72 ½ × 14 × 26 inches (184.2 × 35.6 × 66 cm) This page, right: Helen Frankenthaler, Brice (For Charlie), 1972, steel, 80 ½ × 34 ¼ × 75 inches (204.5 × 87 × 190.5), Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto

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of empathy, interest, values had to do with work and feelings, and feelings about work. You know many of us close to David [Smith] often used to feel slightly embarrassed by his sort of generous bravado when he was in the dumps or lonely, or wanton with himself: proclaiming work, keep working—and everyone knowing yes that’s true, that’s the whole truth and essence and savior but not all. And these days for me, I rely profoundly on an inner insistence that work and friendship—when they’re both from the gut, transcend the devils. I was able to silhouette that thought much more after the London visit, thanks to you. . . . Wasn’t it wonderful? Tony, something really was happening in that glorious studio of yours, and I think we’ll realize that increasingly. I’m curious to see how the work will look when I get a fresh eye on it in NY. . . . I miss that ambiance, beautiful Charlie, that killing tea made in the john, all, my smock. . . . I don’t plan to travel too much, or teach, at all. Plan to continue painting a lot. At the moment I have no strong view on having to make sculpture. I think I will again, but I don’t know when. On this round I feel I thoroughly experienced one urge—and result—that I’d been hoping for, for decades. I don’t know yet about the need or desire or wherewithal for the next session. It’s

interesting to think about the hows and whys and possibilities of painters making sculpture and at what periods for them it happens and works. By the end of her stay Helen had made a group of beautiful pieces. And she had won all hearts. To Charlie, she sent a dozen bottles of scotch. One night, sampling them, he called her in New York to suggest that he emigrate to the USA to become her full-time assistant. When Charlie died, Helen wrote to his son: Dear Mr. Hendy, I have the fondest memories of your father and his cheerful consistent help to me when we worked together at Anthony Caro’s studio in London. You were kind to write me t hat he received such immense pleasure from being on my mailing list of catalogues and announcements. Please accept my heartfelt condolences. Sincerely, Helen Frankenthaler 20 September 1989 Of course later Helen insisted that I come to New York to make paintings in her studio:

What about the reverse? Remember the seed of invitation I planted to use my space, Tony, even though you shyly put it down. Think. When will I see you both and/or hear from you? Come over and use the top floor guest suite chez moi. Sheila, how’s the work going? I’m curious to know what follows our exchange in your studio. Give a hint as to plans, etc. How was your vacation—kids, school, beautiful garden. Be well, keep in touch and again thanks from the heart. In the end I did work in her studio for about three weeks. On the very first day she generously made available to me her full-time painting assistant, her tools, canvas, paints and her own help, her superb eye. But that’s another story. . . . The works in this show take me back thirtyfive years. It was a unique experience to share my workspace with a great artist, who was—is— utterly clear about her direction. She was open, friendly, but always self-contained; she worked fearlessly with new materials in a new environment and produced pieces of the highest quality. It was achieved by addressing the work in her own way, with single-minded focus. The evidence is the sculptures.

This page, left: Helen Frankenthaler, Ceiling Horses, 1972, steel, 70 × 30 × 128 inches (177.8 × 76.2 × 325.1 cm), Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto This page, right: Helen Frankenthaler, Matisse Table, 1972, steel, 82 ½ × 53 inches (diameter) (209.6 × 134.6 cm)

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making sculpture Helen Frankenthaler, May 28, 1975 I had thought about making sculpture for a long time. Over the years, every time I went up to visit David Smith at Bolton Landing, we’d plan a potential visit of mine, to stay and experiment with sculpture. As a painter, I’ve always been involved in developing and enjoying my eye for sculpture. Wherever I’ve lived, I wanted sculpture around me—as much as painting—but I had never tried making it myself. Considering my fantasies of what I wanted to make, the materials, general wherewithal, the necessity of spaces, help, “landscape,” and time, it seemed an enormous undertaking. I never got around to it before David died. He encouraged me to try sculpture when we used to exchange and banter in our studios; said he would make it all available. I would have, eventually. Later, on-and-off, Tony Caro and I touched on my interest, and suddenly the moment seemed right. On a postcard from London, he just said something like “Name a date!” And I postcarded back, gave dates, and off I went in July 1972 (I would stay for a couple of weeks), full steam ahead. I knew I’d have a sort of streak of work, spinning it out. I stayed at the Russell Hotel. I’d go to

Tony’s studio after breakfast, work, come back to the hotel in the afternoon, unwind, eat dinner there (I became an “authority” on nightly BBC TV programs in my room), and would repeat the same invigorating and exhausting routine again the next day. Tony assigned a former assistant of his, Charlie Hendy, to help me. We hit it off. He was marvelous, rare, and he really felt sensitively what I needed, without insistence; a sturdy angel kind of helper, who guided me on materials and answered my impossible questions and impatient demands, never interfering or projecting. We produced. Tony was a “lord”—making lots of materials and machines and possibilities available. We were never in each other’s way, but gently and firmly aware of each other working or mulling. (I got used to strong tea there—at first it looked to me like coffee.) Some of the materials and parts were actually from, or reminiscent of, Bolton—tank tops, I-beams, and those familiar wheels (doughnut-discs with wobbly edges). My feeling was, of course, “They’re David’s, but so what? That doesn’t mean another artist can’t use his wheels and take off from there.” Actually, those wheels were the only specific

objects from Terminal Iron Works that I incorporated in my work. But I also wanted to draw and concoct my own sculpture that came out of painting—only the difference was, there were no edges or corners to cope with, but new considerations of space and air and weight. I would say to Charlie or Tony, for example, “Supposing I want to slap this here” (and I’d chalk out a lot of my own shapes on some metal I liked) “onto this spoke here, would it hold? Can we try to cut out that silhouette and perch it on that?” Then we’d try it and it would work, or not, or I’d add to it or crop it, often with “millimeter” precision, or rearrange the parts. Frequently, the problems and workings of painting and sculpture are the same. The materials, Charlie, Tony’s atmosphere and generosity—all of it was charged and intensely active, and we drove each other. Matisse Table came out of those strong tea breaks in Tony’s little office. There was a frayed Matisse poster announcement stuck on the wall and I’d stare at it. Great. It was a painting of the interior of a room with all the familiar Matissean objects we know. Having made several sculptures by then (and lots pending, in the works) and feeling

This page, left: Helen Frankenthaler, Harp, 1972, steel, 54 ½ × 32 ¼ × 48 inches (138.4 × 81.9 × 121.9 cm) This page, right: Helen Frankenthaler, Envelope, 1972, steel, 13 ¾ × 10 ¾ inches (diameter) (34.9 × 27.3 cm)

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more familiar with the vocabulary, I wanted to branch out a bit. I wanted to make my version of that Matisse table and use it as a taking-off point to develop my piece—to zero in on the whole painting of the interior, the table, as my sculpture. I then had to find and devise the parts, and also allow the sculpture, as an independent piece, to take off on its own. But I needed other parts, materials, so Charlie took me on an expedition to a junkyard, on the outskirts of London, for me “to hell and gone.” It was a Himalaya of junk-pile mountains. We climbed, and picked, and hauled, and shook rust off parts, and brooded, and finally got our load together, with begged-for local muscle help. (They weighed you in your truck when you entered and when you left, to see what to charge.) I found the smallest elements of Matisse Table there, as well as the “tabletop” itself, and other parts, some of which I used on other sculptures. Ten After All literally meant that I’d brought off nine pieces, had a tenth in mind, couldn’t get it to work, thought I’d scrap it, then got back with it, and it into me, and finally there were ten, after all. Those then were almost all I had in me for this time around and that last piece, Ten After All, and Ceiling

Horses (which I spotted tucked away on the studio ceiling one day, stretching my muscle-bound neck) shook me back to painting again. I was ready to go home. But I have an open pocket in my mind that says of course I’ll eventually do more sculpture. I’ve been trying to get Tony to do a return match and paint in my studio. At this point, I don’t know when or in what place I’ll do more sculpture. Like my painting, I guess all the sculptures look “different,” but they all possess the same genes. In a way, they are my pictures in the round. I didn’t do extensive sketches, just doodled ideas on the scratch paper from my pocketbook. But with these in hand or mind, the thing got born really on the spot. Back in New York, Charlie used to call me from London asking if he could come over to work for me here to make more sculpture. I’d explain I had no plan or desire for that in my studio at the time. But it’s a thought that plants a seed. We all left each other with wonderful feelings. 1. Bonnie Clearwater, Helen Frankenthaler: Paintings on Paper (North Miami: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), 16. 2. The connections between David Smith’s and Helen Frankenthaler’s works were the subject of an exhibition at Craig

F. Starr Gallery, New York, in 2014. See Helen Frankenthaler and David Smith (New York: Craig F. Starr Gallery, 2014). 3. Frankenthaler, letters to Anthony Caro, April 27, 1972, and May 24, 1972. Courtesy the Anthony Caro Centre/Barford Sculptures. 4. See Caro, postcard to Frankenthaler, postmarked June 12, 1972. Courtesy Helen Frankenthaler Papers, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York. 5. Frankenthaler, letter to Caro, May 24, 1972. 6. Caro, letter to Frankenthaler, November 2, 1972. Courtesy Helen Frankenthaler Papers, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York. 7. Helen Frankenthaler Papers, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York. 8. Frankenthaler, “Making Sculpture,” May 28, 1975. First published in Frankenthaler Sculpture, exh. cat. (New York: Knoedler & Company, 2006), 8. Courtesy Helen Frankenthaler Papers, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York. After Smith’s death, in 1965, the painter Kenneth Noland purchased the steel that remained in the possession of his estate, ultimately shipping thirty-seven tons of it to Caro in London. See Caro interviewed in “Last Hours with David Smith,” Web of Stories, available online at https://www.webofstories.com/play/anthony. caro/17 (accessed March 21, 2021). The discs Frankenthaler used can also be seen in Smith’s V.B. XXII (1963), made from steel Smith acquired during a trip to Voltri, Italy, in 1962. 9. Frankenthaler’s various uses of line through several decades of her painting practice were the subject of a 2016 exhibition at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, Line into Color, Color into Line: Helen Frankenthaler, Paintings, 1962–1987. 10. Matisse Table had been shown in the group show Art in Space: Some Turning Points, Detroit Institute of Arts, May 15–June 24, 1973. 11. See Richard Osterweil, “Mysterious Sculptures Explained,” The Phoenix (Swarthmore, Pennsylvania) 94, no. 48 (May 3, 1974): 1.

Helen Frankenthaler and Anthony Caro, Triangle Workshop, Barcelona, May 1987. Photo: Goldie Konopny All artwork © 2021 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photos: Jeffrey Sturges

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ALISON MCDONALD W hat are some elements of the market in Asia that might be surprising to European and American audiences? There are obviously many diverse countries, languages, and affinities there. NICK SIMUNOVIC Asia is an unbelievably diverse place. One of the most satisfying challenges in building our business in Hong Kong has been to learn the different histories of the countries in Asia and their collecting habits. Japan has a three-thousandyear history of cultural production;

an eye on the market

sophisticated global contemporary art as early as the 1960s. Many of the most established and comprehensive collections of contemporary art in Asia can be found in Korea—collections with an emphasis on Minimalism, for example, wh ich is t y pica lly rare in ot her Asian countries. There’s also a sense in Asia that an art collection can serve as an oasis of financial stability in what has sometimes been a turbulent part of the world, for various socioeconomic

to tell me about shows at smaller galleries in New York Cit y, a trend t hat would have been unthinkable when I first arrived in Asia, almost fourteen years ago. There’s no doubt that over the next hundred years, we’ll see a deepening interest in collecting in China. Collectors there are skewing younger, they’re interested in design, they’re interested in painting and sculpture, they’re interested in installation. They’re incredibly open and they’re receiving vast amounts

structural advantages that simply don’t exist in other countries in the region. The city is essentially a free port, and the absence of sales tax and import duties has been an enormous boon to the art industry here. Hong Kong is thought of as a hub city, where collectors are comfortable transacting. The common-law system established by the British continues to be in force today. There’s infrastructure to support collectors in the areas of art handling, shipping, logistics, and storage. And between

Nick Simunovic, director of Gagosian, Hong Kong, speaks with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about his fourteen years in Hong Kong, the shifting business developments there and across Asia, and the role of art fairs and auctions in recent years. how do collectors there differ from collectors in China, with its fivethousand-year cultural history but also with a collecting tradition violently upended and interrupted by the events of the twentieth century? Then there are regions in Southeast Asia with their own rich cultural legacies that are coming to the idea of collecting contemporary art for the first time. Or Korea, which also suffered the traumas of the twentieth century, yet collectors there began acquiring serious and

and political reasons. A collector I work with in Indonesia was one of the first people there to seriously collect modern and contemporary art. While the collection offers him personal joy and a sense of discovery, it also saved his business during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Of course, in the past twenty years, China has clearly been the major story in terms of the adoption of contemporary art in Asia. Collectors there are unbelievably ambitious, dynamic, and informed. It’s common for our clients in China

of information that they process and metabolize very quickly. AMCD So many different languages are spoken throughout Asia. Do you ever feel limited in your communication with different collectors? It must be a challenge in certain respects. NS Of course. But it’s important to remember that we aim to serve all of Asia from our platform in Hong Kong. We’re fortunate that many collectors speak English or have teams that do, and we’ve also built a very talented team throughout the region to work with local collectors in their respective languages. But there are clearly many collectors whom we haven’t met yet and who want to know more about Western artists. We start every day by trying to find and serve them. AMCD How does Hong Kong differ from other cities in Asia in terms of the market? What makes it an attractive place to have an art gallery? NS Hong Kong provides many

the auction houses, art fairs, and galleries, there’s market momentum. Finally, Hong Kong is blessed by its location, being geographically situated in the heart of Asia. Half of the world’s population is a five-hour flight from Hong Kong. And while cities like Beijing or Seoul or Tokyo or Bangkok have incredibly vibrant, thriving cultural scenes, the heady cocktail of factors I’ve described above doesn’t exist anywhere else in Asia. AMCD The gallery you opened ten years ago in Hong Kong for Gagosian was one of the first international galleries to open there. What was the impetus? Were there signs you were seeing in market activity that showed an appetite for Western artists? NS I arrived in Asia in August 2007, about 3 1/2 years before we actually opened the Hong Kong ga l ler y. I was immediately surprised at the depth of interest in Gagosian’s program and the number

an eye on the market

of collectors, even then. Many people were interested in acquiring serious modern and contemporary art from images on my laptop. I tried to get the ball rolling in many different countries at the same time—going to an opening here, meeting a collector there—and slowly we built a business. Frankly, I was astonished at how enthusiastic the response was. The obvious conclusion was that we needed a gallery in Hong Kong to provide a platform for our artists in the region. Many of our artists—even household names that we take for granted in the West as having monumental influence and impact on the global art world—had never had a gallery or museum exhibition in Asia. AMCD Was there interest in Western artists? If they’d never shown in Asia, how do you think collectors there knew about their work—what was the channel? And was the knowledge specific to established artists or modern artists, or did it include younger artists as well? NS If I think back to our earliest transactions, they happened in places like Taiwan and Korea—countries where collectors had long histories of buying their own cultural patrimony. Some clients might have been buying Impressionist and modern art as a gateway to Western art, but there was clearly curiosity about, and latent demand for, postwar and contemporary art. Many of these clients simply hadn’t met anyone who could offer them a work by Damien Hirst or Richard Prince or Jeff Koons. We were able to crystallize these initial transactions just by virtue of

sharing those collectors’ spaces and listening to their interests. AMCD Do you find that exhibition catalogues or artist monographs a re a helpf u l way of giving collectors more context? NS Ye s . B o ok s a re invaluable in providi ng c ontex t a nd credibilit y—t hey offer a supportive scaffolding around conversations with collectors. But this phenomenon doesn’t strike me as unique to Asia. In general, I think collectors here have historically been underserved by Western art galleries. Maybe there were pockets of activity—Japan was of course very busy acquiring Impressionist and modern work in the 1980s and early ’90s—but a willingness to commit to the region and meet collectors on their terms, on their time, and to have conversations about the kinds of artists they find compelling and important? This level of engagement was entirely new. We discovered a huge curiosity in the region for that kind of dialogue and exchange. AMCD Is it true that you brought the idea of opening a gallery in Hong Kong to Larry Gagosian? NS We l l , I ’ d b e e n t r a v e l i n g to Ch ina w it h t he Guggen heim Museum because they’d organized an exhibition called Art in the USA: 300 Years of Innovation, a survey of American painting and sculpture that traveled from Beijing to Shanghai. I’d had a wonderful experience at the Guggenheim, but I wanted to do something different. Before my work at the Guggenheim I’d been a consultant at McKinsey, so I’d long been interested in business. During my travels to China in 2006, I had a sense that the audience was there but that there were no Western art galleries to serve them. That made absolutely no sense to me and it was clear that opportunity was knocking, however softly. It felt like the right time for me to try something entrepreneurial and Gagosian

was at the very top of the list because Larry had the most amazing artists and he’d already expanded to London. I mean, who wouldn’t want to work for the gallery that represents Cy Twombly? Anyway, that was what I wanted to shoot for and I was introduced to Larry through a mutual friend. By that point I’d already decided that I was going to t r y to ma ke somet h i ng happen in the contemporary art world in Asia. Eventually I met with Larry and laid out my rationale. I explained why I thought he should open a space in Asia, and why—even though he didn’t know me—I might be a qualified person to do so [laughs]. At the end of the meeting he starts drumming his desk with his fingers, he looks up at me, and he goes, “I’m tempted. Let’s keep in touch and maybe in a few months we can have another conversation, after you’ve been out there a little while.” Of course I felt somewhat despondent, because I really wanted it to work out. But on the other hand, I felt like I’d put my best foot forward. Anyway, the next day he called me and said, “Let’s do it.” AMCD T hat’s ver y funny. I’m surprised it took him that long [laughs]. NS Four weeks later I was in Shanghai. AMCD You started in Shanghai, not Hong Kong? NS The staggering scale of the Chinese economy made it the obvious destination, but 2007 was very early days for Western contemporary art there. Between a punitive tax structure, a small collecting community, and my inability to speak the language, we decided that Shanghai wasn’t the right first port of call in Asia. So, six weeks after I landed in Shanghai, Larry made the very prescient suggestion that we pivot to Hong Kong and use that as our base of operations, for all the reasons I enumerated earlier in the conversation. It was, characteristically for him, a great decision. AMCD How has the expansion

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of ot her contemporar y Western galleries in Hong Kong shifted the business over the past decade? Has it helped build interest or expand the collector base? NS H u g e l y. M o r e a n d m o r e Western galleries have been coming to Asia, first maybe to participate in the art fair and then to think seriously about taking space. The art fairs have been really inf luential. Take for example the transition from Art Hong Kong to Art Basel: Art Hong Kong had been a popular fair that generated a lot of interest in the region, and people would f ly from across Asia to attend it, but Art Basel buying Art Hong Kong was a major signal that sent shock waves rippling across the continent. It was a quantum leap in terms of awareness, recognition, and interest. Hong Kong galleries were now visible on a global stage and Hong Kong’s fair was spoken of in the same context as Basel and Miami. You couldn’t imagine a bigger endorsement for contemporary art in Asia. Today, the auction houses are incorporating Western art into their evening sales in Hong Kong in a way they never did before. That trend only started in the last two years, give or take. And all of this has led to an enormous groundswell of interest. The desire to collect Asian art in Asia continues, but collectors now have a wider scope. AMCD Before the onset of covid, there was serious political unrest in Hong Kong. How did that affect the art economy? Did that instability make the challenges of the covid impact more complicated? Was the market in a place of uncertainty, or was it robust when covid shut things down? NS Obviously the protests were a difficult time for Hong Kong, and covid has presented an extended series of closures in the city, as it has everywhere in the world. Many people have suffered tremendously. The fairs aren’t happening and collectors aren’t traveling. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this has had a massive impact on the financial performance

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of galleries in town. That said, I feel fortunate that Gagosian was perhaps uniquely situated to confront the challenges of the past eighteen months. We’re an international business that had already been working with collectors in the region for over a decade before the protests started. We had also invested a lot in terms of preparing for the digital future of the art market. And collectors here have long been accustomed to buying art from social media platforms. Asia continues to be a growth story for us. I think this is fundamentally due to the fact that people want to collect. People enjoy buying art and they enjoy sharing discoveries with their friends. The lockdown measures and lack of public gatherings haven’t changed that dynamic. People continue to be interested in collecting art as a way to understand themselves and the world around them. AMCD Social media and communication platforms are quite different

an eye on the market

to talk about an acquisition before making a purchase, but I’ve found in general that collectors are very happy, if not relieved, to do business over social media platforms. It’s also important to bear in mind that this protocol has been established and facilitated by over a decade of face-toface meetings across Asia. I look forward to having those meetings again when possible. There’s no substitute. AMCD What roles do art fairs play? Are there any fairs in particular that you can speak about as examples of types of work offered, regional influence, or audience reach? NS Art fairs are absolutely indispensable to our business here. It’s a wonderful way to connect with friends and meet new collectors, often through warm introductions by existing clients. The sharing of information through informal networks is a very well-established pattern in Asia. Most collectors have a group of friends who influence each

AMCD W h a t

a b out We s t Bu nd and Art021? NS Fantastic fairs. T hey’ve set the standard for fairs in China and they’re truly international in scope and quality. Once we phase back to normal, Shanghai Art Week in November will feel a lot like Art Basel Hong Kong in March. It’s become a de facto destination for collectors from other Asian countries as well, and is of course underpinned by the enormous interest from within China itself. AMCD Is that a new phenomenon, or has that been going on for a long time and it’s just building momentum now? NS West Bund and Art021 have been around for about five years, give or take, and they continue to go from strength to strength. Shanghai enjoys world-class programming at a growing number of extraordinary museums, including Long Museum, tank Shanghai, the Centre Pompidou

had happened to the economy. They recognized that artworks might be brought to market in this moment that would not otherwise be available to them. AMCD What role do auctions play? How have the recent, highly produced online live auctions by Sotheby’s and Christie’s been received? NS I have found the collectors I work with in Asia to be incredibly curious, passionate, and dedicated, but also pragmatic. Which is to say, it’s very difficult to gauge whether the theatricality of these online auctions and their production values are persuasive enough to spark buying. The online approach is entertaining and I can understand why it’s necessary at this moment, but I don’t think collecting decisions are being swayed by TV-style auctions. My impression is that Asian collectors never really took part in the pageantry of the evening sale anyway, and a vanishingly small percentage of people would be will-

Hong Kong is the third-largest art market in the world. . . . We’re still discovering the contours of what’s achievable here, and I find that enormously exciting, challenging, and rewarding. — Nick Simunovic throughout Asia. Would you touch a bit on how you communicate with clients and artists? How do these platforms factor into promotion and direct sales? NS You know, it’s not my personality type to begin with, but reaching out too directly to a collector and asking if they’re going to buy something is not a winning formula in Asia. It’s seen as aggressive. And oftentimes social media platforms play a very useful role in terms of sharing information with collectors or initiating a dialogue, but at a remove. That way, if they’re not interested they can pass on a work without feeling like there was pressure. And if they’re interested, it’s a very convenient and efficient way to keep in touch. I very, very rarely e-mail collectors in Asia. I can’t remember the last time I offered a painting by e-mail. Almost all the business I do out here is done over WeChat, WhatsApp, Line, Kakao, and of course over the phone. Collectors will often want

other’s thinking and opine on what should and should not be acquired, and fairs are a logical extension of this; they’re an opportunity for people to get together with their friends, have dinner, and talk about what they might have seen. The further development of a healthy art market in Asia at least partly depends on t he existence and expansion of fairs. But like the countries themselves, the fairs in these different places each have their own unique character and identity. Art Basel Hong Kong is exceptional in that collectors from across Asia and indeed the world will come to Hong Kong for it—attendance is seen as compulsory for any serious Asian collector. Most other fairs tend to be heavily regional. So while some Japanese collectors will come to Taipei Dangdai, for example, our main focus in Taipei is to serve Taiwanese collectors who might not come to Hong Kong or who are just incredibly private.

Shanghai, Yuz Museum Shanghai, and others still under construction. Galleries are continuing to proliferate. Taken together, I would wager that there are more cultural events happening in Shanghai during Art Week than in Zurich during the week before Art Basel. The last I heard, it was something like 100 art events between the various openings and fairs. I’m sure it will continue to grow. AMCD How did the markets in Asia fare during the financial collapse that happened in November of 2008? NS A sia la rgely sidestepped the global financial crisis of 2008. Investors here didn’t have as much exposure to the risky, synthetic financial products that triggered it. In fact, during that moment of profound instability, our business in Asia grew. And similarly with covid, Asia has taken a radically different approach to dealing with the virus. Many collectors here had been through a similar cycle with the sars virus in 2003, and I think they remembered what

ing to travel from Beijing to New York to attend an auction in the first place. They’d much rather just bid on the phone or through their representative at the auction house. AMCD What advice would you have for anyone who might be interested in starting an art business in Hong Kong? Or, looking back, what advice might you have given yourself ten years ago when you were starting out in Hong Kong? NS I would encourage them to come. It amazes me that every morning I wake up and we’re still at the beginning. It’s been almost fourteen years for me personally, and I feel like we’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible in Asia. Hong Kong is the third-largest art market in the world behind New York and London, and will soon supplant London for good, if it hasn’t already. We’re still discovering the contours of what’s achievable here, and I find that enormously exciting, challenging, and rewarding.

GREGORY CORSO On the occasion of the forthcoming publication of The Golden Dot: Last Poems by Gregory Corso, Raymond Foye reflects on the poet’s enduring engagement with the human condition and explores the unique structure of this final collection.

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Previous spread: Gregory Corso, New York, May 3, 1986. Photo: Allen Ginsberg, by permission of the Allen Ginsberg Literary Trust Opposite: Gregory Corso, “Elegium Catullus/Corso, for Allen Ginsberg,” 1997, holograph manuscript from The Golden Dot. Courtesy Downtown Collection at the Fales Library at New York University This page: Gregory Corso and Patti Smith at Allen Ginsberg’s loft, April 5, 1997, with Corso painting in background. Photo: Greg Masters

This is how it happened: At the end everything that was dwindled into a dot; the dot exploded into the void and the beginning began again— —Gregory Corso, from “The Golden Dot,” c. 1998 Time, cosmic and terrestrial, was one of Gregory Corso’s great subjects. He saw the decades as distinct parcels, the centuries as larger ones, and millennia more so. Throughout the 1990s he had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the millennium, exploring in his poems themes of Armageddon and apocalypse, ecological cataclysm, Revelations, and the promise of a New Age. But as the momentous date approached, personal tragedies mounted: the death of his closest friend and literary champion, Allen Ginsberg, in the spring of 1997, followed four months later by the death of William Burroughs, his second-oldest friend and the person he considered most incorruptible in life. Then came news of liver, heart, and lung disease, and finally inoperable prostate cancer. He managed to see the new millennium, but only just. He left his beloved Greenwich Village for the care of his daughter’s home in Minnesota in 2000, and died there shortly thereafter, on January 17, 2001. Corso had struggled with his final manuscript, The Golden Dot, for the last twenty years of his life. It went through countless visions and revisions, both textual and conceptual. He knew it would be his poetical last will and testament. It had to be precisely on the mark, a summation of the many literary and philosophical themes that preoccupied him in life. Even more daunting than the personal hardships (which were nothing new to him), he had changed his fundamental approach to the poem, casting off an elaborate stylistic toolkit that no longer served his purpose. The rudiments of the poem were what mattered now, a direct and elemental relationship with the Muse. Frustratingly, throughout the 1990s, the project continually collapsed under its own weight . . . until. Following Ginsberg’s funeral at New York’s Shambhala Meditation Center, Corso returned to his small apartment at 26 Horatio Street in the West Village and composed “Elegium Catullus/Corso,

for Allen Ginsberg.” It is modeled on a funeral ode by the Latin poet Catullus, as he sits next to and addresses the “unspeaking ashes” (alloquerer cinerem) of his brother. Corso lightens Catullus’s famous final line, Ave atque vale (Hail and farewell), with the salutation he and Ginsberg always used on each other, “Tootel loo”—a bit of ’50s camp silliness. With this short and simple poem, the floodgates opened. Over the next 3 1/2 years Corso rewrote the entire manuscript of The Golden Dot, 200-plus pages, beginning that evening with this simple elegy. The Golden Dot is framed by Ginsberg’s death on one end and Corso’s own death on the other. It is, among other things, the story of a lifelong friendship between two of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Corso is now alone, left to argue with his mentor and rival, pleading his case and making amends. His insecurities lead him to question the very reasons Allen befriended him in 1950 in a Greenwich Village bar in the first place: was it just his good looks and street smarts? But he comes to trust and accept Allen’s estimation of his work, so succinctly stated on the dedication page to Planet News (1968), some of the only serious recognition he ever got for his poetry in his lifetime: “Dedicated to the Pure Imaginary poet Gregory Corso,” and once again in Ginsberg’s Selected Poems 1947–1995: “To Gregorio Nunzio Corso, Wisdom Maestro, American Genius of Antique and Modern Idiom, Father Poet of Concision.” Allen always told anyone who would listen that Gregory was the greater poet, and often lamented the lack of serious critical evaluations of Corso’s work. Corso did not like to overpublish, and by the 1960s one book per decade became his general rule, usually at the turn of the decade, with each book expressing something of what he felt to be the zeitgeist of the moment: The Happy Birthday of Death in 1960; Elegiac Feelings American in 1970; Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit in 1981. Another rule was that the books should be brief: these were 92, 120, and 66 pages respectively. But by the time 1990 arrived, Corso chose not to publish. He turned fifty that year, and while his reasons for not publishing were never clearly stated, profound changes were taking place in his life and work since “Hitting the

Big 5-0,” as he called it in a poem marking the occasion. Corso’s relationship to poetry had been a trajectory from intensely private to famously public, sometimes reading to audiences of a thousand or more. He complained to me often, “I began writing poetry alone, after midnight, just me and the poem, by candlelight. The next thing I know I’m on stage reading to hundreds of people. It messed me up.” This led Corso to favor humorous poems, crowd pleasers with punchlines. He’d come to see himself as a performer, a clown, even, in his own words. He had been on the reading circuit for twenty-five years, often touring with Ginsberg—they were public poets in a way that is almost unimaginable today, and they both took that role very seriously. But Corso’s brash persona and drunken antics at readings masked a painful shyness, and he longed to escape that grind. As he so memorably put it in a poem of the time, “I feel like an old mangy bull crashing through the red rag of an alcoholic day.” He’d come to see this public face of poetry as a routine, a job, an act. And while he may have had many shortcomings, being dishonest with himself was not one. Slowly, he withdrew. These had been hard years. The drinking itself was no longer sustainable and that necessitated an increasing withdrawal from society. More profoundly, the half-century mark awoke in him the need to confront the many traumas that haunted his adult life: abandonment by his mother shortly after his birth due to domestic abuse by his father; six cruel Catholic foster homes; frequent prison time, starting in the Tombs at the age of thirteen. The orphanages and prisons had always been part of his personal mythology, but until this point the painful details had never been publicly examined or revealed. And once that door was opened in his writing, it could not be closed. Corso was a native New Yorker, born on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets. It annoyed him when people talked about the Beats hanging out in Greenwich Village: “I wasn’t hanging out. I was born there.” Gangsters frequented the cafés and restaurants and the culture of organized crime was hard to resist. From individual acts of petty theft, Corso eventually became the ringleader of his own larceny gang, whom he organized with walkietalkies. At the age of seventeen he was sentenced 127

This page, left to right: Gregory Corso, Self-Portrait, c. 1990. Collection of Zachary Wollard Gregory Corso, Portrait of W. S. Burroughs (Nude of a Good-Hearted Sage), c. 1993. Collection of Raymond Foye Opposite: Gregory Corso, “You cannot replicate the soul … ,” c. 2000, holograph manuscript from The Golden Dot. Courtesy Downtown Collection at the Fales Library at New York University

to three years in upstate New York’s brutal Clinton Correctional Facility, known as Dannemora. Ever the prodigy, he often noted that he was the youngest inmate to enter that prison and the youngest to leave. There’s a remarkable film of Corso on a return visit to Dannemora Prison (as he always called it) two years before his death, speaking with prisoners about writing poetry. He recounts the advice an old inmate gave him the day he arrived: “Don’t serve time, make time serve you.” The prison library held few books but they were choice: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the Bible, the Encyclopedia Britannica (eleventh edition), Bulfinch’s Mythology, and a 1925 anthology titled Ideas and Forms in English and American Literature, edited by Homer Watt and James Munn. I recently ordered a copy of the latter for a few dollars on the Internet, after finding Corso’s reference to the book in the manuscript of The Golden Dot. It’s a fascinating selection and explains a great deal about his penchants for early epics such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and for the ballads of the British Isles, such as “The Twa Sisters” and “Sir Patrick Spens.” Running through all of Corso’s work is a healthy mistrust of literacy and the written word, which he considered latecomers to his profession. The stories and beliefs handed down from ancient times were his true guides, and he always said his favorite author was Anonymous. He loved Sanskrit and Akkadian epics, chronicles of dynastic Egypt, the myths of ancient Greece. His sense of history was synchronous: ideas, events, and subjects rhymed and interconnected inside his head like the gears of a clock. I first encountered Gregory Corso in April 1973 at a Jack Kerouac symposium at Salem State College in Massachusetts, where he was a featured guest along with Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. After a certain amount of debate by the school administrators, the honors English class at Lowell High School was allowed to attend. I was still a junior, but since I was the only student who was actually reading Kerouac, I was allowed to accompany them. The Beats were controversial, but several of the teachers and headmasters at Lowell High had known Kerouac, many had gone to school with him, and 128

personally he was very much liked. The excursion was the idea of our English instructor, Miss Rita Sullivan, a proper elder New Englander—a quality that did not exclude open-mindedness. Alas, the weekend proved a shocking revelation as it quickly dawned on everyone that the poet on the page and the poet in person were two very different things. There was drinking, smoking, cursing, and arguments, and Corso seemed very nearly the devil in the flesh. Were such a thing to take place today, poor Miss Sullivan would be fired and would never get another job as an educator as long as she lived—such is today’s reward for introducing an impressionable youth to the cult of Orpheus. That weekend, in velvet suit and silver flask of cognac, Corso was on the attack against everyone: Ginsberg, the academics, and Kerouac himself, or at least the myth of Kerouac. (The famed witches of Salem seemed to be the only people he had any respect for.) But then something remarkable happened: the event concluded with an evening poetry reading, and I saw Corso take all of the hostility he had created and suddenly polarize it. (Later I would see performers like Nina Simone and Miles Davis do the same thing.) After ninety minutes of poetry and chanting by Ginsberg and Orlovsky, Corso took center stage and read what I still consider to be his greatest poem, “Elegiac Feelings American (for the Dear Memory of John L. Kerouac).” Suddenly a hushed silence fell on the auditorium as Corso cast his spell; the poem was profound, eloquent, and ravishingly beautiful. At the end of the reading, many in the audience (including Kerouac family members) were weeping, as was Corso himself. There was no question who the heavy was on that stage. From that point on I was determined to know him, which wasn’t easy because he was hard to find and when you did he was usually unfriendly. Four years later I found myself living in the same neighborhood as him in North Beach, San Francisco. We occasionally spoke. One day he asked if I had a record player, which I did. The next morning he was yelling up from the alley, holding a record in his hand. No album cover, that was lost, just the actual piece of vinyl: a Bartók violin sonata played by Yehudi Menuhin. He came upstairs, we put it on

the stereo, and he swooned silently. It was a great lesson in how to listen. He returned for dinner that evening, a gathering of half a dozen poets. In the course of the evening he overturned the table not once but twice: he had a talent for taking it out there, and then some. One of my favorite things about hanging out with Gregory over the years was watching how he dealt with fans. He had a lot of them, and since he always looked like Gregory Corso, they often approached him on the street. Depending on his mood he might be gracious, but was more often flatly dismissive or downright confrontational, accusing them of pandering and vicariousness—they were the source of his pain. “Mister Corso, I just want to say how much your work has meant to me down through the years,” someone would say in a heartfelt manner. “Do I bother you with my problems?” he would reply curtly. Other times he was more practical: “Oh that’s great, gimme $5.” I can’t count the number of people who came up to him to say that his poem “Marriage” was read at their wedding—a true epithalamium for our times if there ever was one. (The poem is heavily anthologized; Gregory once told me he estimated he’d made over $100,000 from “Marriage”—“Not bad for one poem.”) Especially surprising to me was the number of people who quoted back to him the line “Standing on a street corner doing nothing is power.” Written in 1953, that line somehow represented the quintessentially Beat challenge to authority. And as Gregory often said, one great line is worth an entire book of poems. Whether Gregory was home alone, playing pool in a bar, or sitting in a café, there was never a time when he wasn’t with the poem, turning a line or image over in his head, speaking it aloud to test the sound and cadence, or questioning the inner logic. I never knew anyone who asked himself so many big questions so relentlessly. At any given time, a scholarly issue was on the table, and he was familiar with them all. In a barroom one afternoon he suddenly slammed the table with his fist and shouted, “It was all because of that damn swan!”—and I knew he was back onto the Trojan War. For Corso, the great subjects of ancient times were not past, but alive in the contemporary painting or poem.

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Opposite: Gregory Corso, page from The Geometric Poem (designed and published by Ettore Sottsass and Fernanda Pivano at East 128 in Milan, 1966), from a unique hand-colored copy, 1993. Collection of Raymond Foye This page: Herbert Huncke, Gregory Corso, and Francesco Clemente listening to John Wieners read, Small Press Book Fair, Mechanics Library, New York, 1990. Photo: Allen Ginsberg, by permission of the Allen Ginsberg Literary Trust

In 1997, his sixty-seventh year, as he labored over his final book, startling news arrived. A documentary filmmaker had discovered his eighty-yearold mother. She had not returned to Italy immediately after his birth, as he had been told, but had merely fled across the river to Trenton, New Jersey, where she raised another family. Their reunion was captured on film, and a few days later they made their first excursion, to an Atlantic City gambling casino—which seemed to establish matrilineal proof beyond doubt. But joking aside, though initially joyous, the reunion only reexposed painful feelings of abandonment. Corso told me a few years later that he wished the filmmaker had left well enough alone. “I lived sixty-seven years without a mother— how can all that be made up for now?” he said. Meanwhile, his father was dying. Although Corso had hated and feared the man all his life, he made the effort to visit him, only to find that Alzheimer’s disease had turned his father into a gentle and kindhearted soul. They had a poignant reunion, but the encounter ended on a painfully embarrassing note: as he left, his father called him Dominic. Life now seemed a daily succession of bewildering events. These and other remarkable events are recorded in The Golden Dot. One positive development in these years was the emergence of a patron, Hiro Yamagata, a successful visual artist from Japan. His monthly stipend allowed Corso to move out of the apartment of Roger and Irvyne Richards, proprietors of the Rare Book Room on Greenwich Avenue, who had taken him in several years earlier after they learned he’d slept on the subway the night before. When an apartment came vacant next door, Corso had his own living space for the first time in many years. There’s no doubt this helped with the work. Those of us who visited him will recall the floor covered in typed poems, often stained with wine, coffee, blood, and god knows what else. The space also allowed him to begin making art again, which brought in a little money. He was a skilled draftsman with a charming style and a deep knowledge of art history. I regularly commissioned works during this period, requesting portraits of Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Burroughs, and Bob Kaufman. I also commissioned a hand-colored edition of The Geometric Poem, his paean to ancient Egypt, first printed by Ettore Sottsass in Milan in 1966. He had his visitors and

admirers and a calm domesticity prevailed. The one vexation was his addiction. A heroin user since the 1950s, now alternating with methadone, he told me it had been almost twenty years since he’d actually gotten high from the drug—it was simply a matter of maintenance. Veins had collapsed and he was losing use of both arms. Infections led to visits to nearby St. Luke’s Hospital. He recounts these events in several poems, always referring to heroin as “the dirty nurse.” Corso often spent years revising a poem, and in many respects a poem for him was never finished. Friends who had put him up for days or weeks would later find the books of his in their libraries extensively amended. Poetry readings, especially in later years, often consisted of glosses on the poems; he always seemed to be having a running argument with himself or the poem (they were the same thing). But as the end drew near he seems to have realized these endless revisions would not do, and suddenly we have the rarest of articles in his oeuvre: poems written all at once, in a single stream of thought and inspiration, from start to finish. This is indicated to the reader by the date of composition, and sometimes even the exact time (always in the middle of the night). He called these “diary poems” and he was extremely unsure about them. To me they are the capstones of his career, the works that most show off his extraordinary powers as a poet. To read such poems is to fully enter his mind and to witness the very act of creation. In these last poems he has gone back to the candle, at midnight, writing to himself and the solitary reader. The level of intimacy is exquisite and the effect is ethereal. Another unusual characteristic of The Golden Dot is how very few poems have titles—perhaps only half a dozen out of almost two hundred. I don’t know why this is, except clearly they were superfluous. One is left with the sense that these are not literary “products” or “objects” but instead a kind of unnameable issuance or outflow. It also facilitates Corso’s wish, stated on page 1 of the manuscript, that this work be seen as a “shuffle poem,” a random, nonhierarchical configuration, or, if one were more occult-minded, a method of divination like the shuffling of the tarot or the throwing of the I Ching. Such a book as this may exist somewhere, but I know of none like it.

Of the many dragons to slay in these last poems, the most pernicious was hubris. “I hate old poet men,” Corso wrote at the outset of his career. Like Pete Townshend’s “Hope I die before I get old,” it was a line he would live to live down. Corso now sees his arrogance (and he was very arrogant) as an obstacle to faith, and to true knowledge. His stance that poetry is the province of the young has had to be exorcised, for he is now an old man and poetry is all he has left. He is emphatic that poetry is for every age. The Golden Dot is a radical coming to terms with old age and failing powers, and Corso’s economy and dispatch are stunning: he knows exactly what to use and what to discard. Dream and myth take over—the places where his Orphic self was most alive. The reader may ask why, if this book was completed twenty years ago, is it only being published now? After the poet’s death the apartment was cleared out and the manuscript was gathered into a paper shopping bag. In his will, Corso left the rights to the book to his friends Roger and Irvyne Richards, for their faithful support in his final years. Roger Richards, a legendary figure in New York’s rare-book world, died on his seventieth birthday, December 18, 2002. In less than two years, Irvyne had lost her two closest companions in life, and she gradually became a recluse. I called numerous times, hoping to obtain a copy of the manuscript, but she always demurred, saying she wanted to edit the book herself—which I knew would never happen. Irvyne was a chain smoker and for years I lived in fear the apartment would burn down and the manuscript with it. Eventually she stopped taking my calls. The original work remained in her possession, a talisman to a life that no longer existed, and she guarded it against the outside world. When I learned of her death, in September 2020, I called her stepdaughter Hillary and soon the manuscript was in hand. Although some pages had been copied and circulated among Corso’s friends over the years, those were clearly fragments. While not without its share of editorial complications, what we came to possess was a carefully shaped final manuscript, with the author’s intentions plainly evident. After close work with George Scrivani—the poet’s lifelong friend, editor, and translator—the book will soon be published by New Directions, the decisive and concluding chapter of a profound career. 131

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. In this installment we look at the compilation and publication of chronologies as building blocks for art-historical scholarship. Chronologies can provide factual skeletons for future research, yield valuable insights into simultaneities and influences, and illuminate art-historical contexts. They can inform exhibition presentations and in recent years have assumed increasing prominence in accompanying catalogues. Here art researcher Delphine Huisinga speaks with scholar Charles Stuckey about their respective experiences in researching and compiling chronologies, discussing some of the considerations and the “welcome skepticism of elitism” implicit in the form. I’d like to start by asking what your definition of a chronology is, as it pertains to art history? CHARLES STUCKEY It’s a plot line, a timeline—a sequentially arranged series of events that seem to have some relationship to one another. The nice thing about approaching a subject that way—always realizing that the approach is inherently temporary—is that you don’t have to leave anything out. Anything you want to keep track of has a place. There’s room for misfits in a chronology, which can turn out to be pretty helpful. DH You and I both worked on the same chronology for John Richardson—or, more specifically, I inherited the chronology you had started to compile for the fourth volume of John’s Life of Picasso. John always used a detailed chronology as a starting point for his biographies. Do you think most biographers do the same thing? CS I would think so. I don’t know how detailed. With the Picasso chronology, it was ready to expand as John needed. Whatever else it is, a chronology is inevitably a work in progress; the idea is that if you correct it or add to it because you’ve consulted a source that you hadn’t been able to consult before, it just gets better. It seems to me that technology has enhanced the chronology as a tool over the past twenty-five years. Back when researchers were working with typewriters and pads of paper, maintaining a chronology was more difficult. Now it’s just sort of effortless. It’s very easy to make a chronology in a way that it didn’t use to be. DH An enhanced tool for sure, but I don’t know about effortless. For me, the challenge now is how to work with the overwhelming volume of information to which we have access. How did you start the process of compiling the massive Picasso chronology? DELPHINE HUISINGA

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John wanted me to go through all of the files that he’d accumulated over the decades and compile the relevant information in a chronology format where he could find it again. At the same time, he had asked me to write a long essay for the catalogue to a show at Gagosian [Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris–Vallauris 1943–1953, Gagosian, New York, 2012], so the research I did for that flooded into what I already had. It just got bigger and bigger and bigger. In fact, I still keep a copy of the chronology on my computer and add to it. I keep about twenty-five or thirty different chronologies going that way. DH You’re the only person I know who continues to add to so many chronologies just for pleasure! Can you remember the first time you worked on a chronology? CS I like the question, but I really can’t recall. I think it was probably for an article on Monet’s late mural paintings [“Blossoms and Blunders: Monet and the State; II,” Art in America 67 (May 1979)]. The subject was topical because the Metropolitan had just presented its Monet at Giverny exhibition [Monet’s Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1978]. I was working with so much previously unconsulted information and was simply trying to organize it so that there’d be some kind of a map of all the various things that were going on. Monet was a painter, but he had relationships with architects and people involved in public funding and things of that sort. Often these details wouldn’t be included in a chronology, yet they were pretty significant to the story. I mean, if you want to be sort of speculative about the significance of things that the artist was doing as an artist, being able to consult the most complete possible chronology of events would, it seems to me, CS

help you avoid mistakes that might result from failing to consider certain things that were a part of the story. DH Yes, this is why a chronology is such a great multifaceted tool. In a previous discussion about this topic, we talked about the fact that chronologies, for the longest time, were just one or two pages at the end of an exhibition catalogue. CS I think that’s one of the things that most attracted me—and continues to attract me—to the form: that it was the work of the assistant. The important work was thought to be the essay and the catalogue entries, and the chronology was always something very much done by the sous-chef. As someone who loves underdogs, I just thought that if you took that format seriously and gave it the same respect that you would any other kind of text contribution, you could really do wonders with it. And nothing’s discouraged me, really. DH I find it fascinating that exhibition catalogues—and I believe you were one of the first to do this with your Monet catalogue [Claude Monet, 1840–1926, Art Institute of Chicago, 1995] —are increasingly using chronologies as a backbone to present the scholarship. CS Oh, I agree, and I welcome that. There’s a stigma to chronology, you know? It’s like the old academic mindset where people thought that figure painting was more distinguished and elevated than landscape or still life. I doubt you could go to a graduate school in art history in this country and say, Well, for my dissertation, I’m going to do a chronology of . . . I think that would be shot down immediately, and yet I don’t understand why, because in many cases the creative effort in making a chronology is equivalent to the creative energy of writing an essay. I presume it will eventually change.

As someone who loves underdogs, I just thought that if you took that format seriously and gave it the same respect that you would any other kind of text contribution, you could really do wonders with it. And nothing’s discouraged me, really. — Charles Stuckey

Yes, just as the format of the exhibition catalogue has changed. CS Right. It seems to me that, at least in the second half of my career, there has been a constant, welcome skepticism of elitism of every sort and an effort to avoid it. I would think that chronology has a kind of moral advantage over most other kinds of argument: there’s a certain neutrality to the way the information is relayed; it really invites the reader to make whatever they wish of it, without the necessity of reading it from beginning to end. I mean, overall a chronology is quite like a Jackson Pollock composition, I’d say. DH I like this analogy. But do you think that in a chronology there’s generally an effort to create an association in the reader’s mind that would lead to possibilities of interpretation? CS I don’t really think of it as guiding someone through a particular train of thought so much as reminding readers that they should be aware of a variety of relationships, that they should be taking into account various things. DH Recently I was rereading the first chronology I helped research, for a Fernand Léger exhibition [Fernand Léger, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998]. I came to the entry for October 1907, with the big Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d’Automne, and the next sentence we wrote was, “Almost certainly, Fernand Léger would have seen that exhibition and would have been influenced by it.” I thought it was a nice, concrete way to introduce the influence of Cézanne in Léger’s work. CS Yes, because as with almost everything in the whole field of knowledge, it’s something we think is true, but we can’t absolutely guarantee that it is. There are relatively few hard facts. We don’t have a diary entry from Léger saying, “I went to the Salon DH

d’Automne and it changed my life”—or at least not yet—but nevertheless, it seems fair to imagine that something like that happened. DH Yes, there’s the issue of reliability. It’s marvelous to find an artist’s memoir or diary, but one must be careful using these sources since they may have a lot of inventions or incorrect dates. CS That’s right. I’d just try to indicate whether the source of the information is softer or harder. If you’re making a chronology, the idea is that you do it in such a way that someone can check to see whether you’re right or not—for example, if something is in conflict with their concept of what was going on. That seems to be an essential part of chronology. DH That’s a difference between chronologies now and chronologies twenty or thirty years ago, when you would definitely not publish your sources. Chronologies weren’t deemed important enough. Now almost every entry in a chronology is footnoted. CS I think it’s an indication of the stigma we talked about before—Who needs footnotes? It’s just a chronology—and also of how the technology has changed. The shift to computers has really been advantageous to the compilation of chronologies. The trick going ahead will be to find a way to publish a chronology that others will be able to add to or correct as they see fit. I imagine something like this will be devised eventually. DH That would be fabulous. What would you say are the chronology’s main limitations? CS To me, it’s very difficult to indicate a delayed reaction. In life, often you’ll have an idea and are so busy with other things that you might not get to it for five or ten years. The general idea of a chronology is that it presents a group of causally related, or potentially causally related, events at a particular

time—whereas in reality the most significant chronological relationship might be quite distant, either in the future or in the past. A chronology is not necessarily as good for indicating that kind of information as a text might be. And then chronologies can put things next to one another that are simply coincidental. Your concentration on things happening at the same time can lead you to connect two things that are completely unrelated, just because they happen to have occurred at the same time. But that’s certainly just as possible in a standard text. DH Tell me, Charlie, how did writing chronologies impact your curatorial work? CS When I made a shift from the academy into working in museums, that generated a need to think about things chronologically that was new to me. Probably more than anything else, the museum part of my career got me on the chronological hobbyhorse. When I first went to the Art Institute of Chicago to take over their department of twentieth-century painting and sculpture, in 1987, the collection was divided into three sections: American art, European art, and contemporary art. And I thought that what was needed was to merge the three sections into one collection. As I wondered how that might happen, it seemed to me that the fairest way was to install everything in chronological order. Rather than focusing on movements or personalities, wouldn’t it be interesting, if not beautiful, simply to see everything from a similar time period in the same room? Wouldn’t that be provocative? To my surprise, the reception was incredible—this idea was something that people really thought they wouldn’t like until they saw it, and then they seemed to like it more and more. 133

The general idea of a chronology is that it presents a group of causally related, or potentially causally related, events at a particular time—whereas in reality the most significant chronological relationship might be quite distant, either in the future or in the past. — Charles Stuckey

Most museum displays in one way or another have a kind of a chronological thread to them, but in Chicago I was able to take it a little bit to an extreme, and the feedback only made me more chronologically minded. To the extent that just before I left, I did the Monet retrospective, and the catalogue was essentially an extensive chronology—nothing else—and illustrations. In the exhibition itself, there was a halfway point where we created what may have been the largest wall text in recent museum history, where I had a chronology of Monet’s life on one side and a chronology of the city of Chicago on the other. It was simply about, Why are we having this exhibition in Chicago? DH Fascinating. Have you ever worked on a chronology of a living artist? CS Whenever I work with anybody who’s alive, chronology is now always part of what I do. It’s become standard practice. I’ve recently worked a lot of with Janet Ruttenberg, for example, who has no interest in chronological order in particular, but I made a chronology just to try to keep straight what’s going on. And I did that with Virginia Dwan, I have a detailed chronology of her life as a gallerist. It’s just essential to keep an awareness of all the different things that were going on at the same time. DH Well, what I wanted you to say is how much more challenging it is to work on a chronology of an artist who is still alive! More seriously, it’s a much more collaborative project; we’re more dependent on what the artist provides. Hopefully they have good memories and have kept detailed records, but sometimes they simply want to be described or interpreted in a particular way—they want to control their narrative. CS Well, yes, there’s no question about it. When you’re working with a living person and you point out something to them and they say, That has nothing to do with it at all, then you’re sort of obliged to 134

omit that idea, no matter how interesting it might have seemed to you before you went to them. DH Working on a chronology of a living artist has its challenges, but it also has great benefits, like feedback and conversation. But I wanted to go back to what differentiates a chronology from a biography. I think that for me the main difference is that with a biography you can try to re-create the emotional state of the subject—you can take liberties that you can’t in a chronology. CS I guess so, yes. A lot of the author’s hunches would be sort of tacit in a chronology, they wouldn’t necessarily be spelled out. But of course chronologies aren’t only about artists’ biographies—I keep chronologies for all kinds of different subjects as well. Accumulating examples of information sometimes leads to an amazing chain of events that wouldn’t seem particularly interesting on their own. DH Talking about chronology and accumulations, a few years ago in Santa Barbara you gave a very interesting talk, “Piling On,” where you showed, using chronology as a tool, that artists have consistently since the 1960s been using “piles” as motifs in their work. CS That’s what I was after in “Piling On,” how if you go almost year by year looking at artists’ works, you can identify that patterns, or in this case piles, manifest themselves over and over again, and then stand in wonder of the fact that you could map out so much repetition. And I think one could do that for lots of different subjects. I did the one about accumulations for no special reason, but it puts things in a different kind of context. DH How did you f ind all those images and sources to substantiate this pile aesthetic? CS I’ll keep a Word document for conventional sources, but then I often have a visual chronology as well. I’ll make a PowerPoint document and keep

shuffling the images into what seems more and more like the right sequence. DH Don’t you think that future chronologies will likely consist of just images with captions? CS Absolutely. DH I must admit that chronology has always been appealing to me because it mixes text and images. CS Yes, but it was this attention to images—as opposed to written, published information alone— that created a stigma with those in the academy. Certainly in my professional lifetime, there have been pioneers like Julie Martin and Billy Klüver who brought attention to the fact that a photograph can be far more important as a document than any text, if you look at it carefully and study it. When I was in graduate school, there were very few illustrated art-history books, or they were sparsely illustrated because of the cost; as a result, the text had much more power than the images. Luckily, I think that this kind of elitism is starting to dissolve, and as it does, it allows virtually every subject to be looked at anew. DH One last question: Do you think a detailed chronology could be enough to understand the work of an artist? CS It could be, depending on who’s doing the understanding and what it is they’re hoping to understand. It seems to me that a chronology is so easy to use, and so much faster to use than a conventional text, that if you’re interested in some particular thing—let’s say, a work of art—it may be more than enough. I’d turn your question back on itself and ask, Would an essay-type text necessarily help someone address a work in the correct way? A text can be a turnoff; it can be its own worst enemy in terms of what it’s trying to do. I don’t think the chronology has that kind of ego problem yet, and hopefully it can grow up without getting one.

THE WHITE REVIEW

SUBSCR IBE INTERNATIONALLY

T H E W H I T E R E V I E W.O RG/S U B S C R I B E

SAY gOODBYE, CATULLUS, TO THE SHORES OF ASIA MINOR

Cy Twombly: 1928–2011 Text by Thierry Greub From 1953 until his death, in 2011, Cy Twombly inscribed hand-written notations into his works, and from 1959 onward these were mainly literary quotations from 111 different authors.1 Speaking of the inscriptions in Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), 2 the painter Brice Marden has said, “I find that reading [the writing] really informs the rest of the image . . . it becomes so much a part of the image; it isn’t a distinct separate thing.”3 Begun in Rome in 1972, completed in Lexington, Virginia, in 1994, and first exhibited at Gagosian, New York, that same year, the work carries ten inscriptions from eight sources. 4 Even its title is a quotation: “Say good-bye, Catullus, to the plains of Asia Minor” is a line from “Carmen 46” (Song 46), titled “Farewell to Asia,” by the first-century-bc Roman poet Catullus, though Twombly replaces the original word “plains” with the liminal “shores.”5 Catullus’s verse virtually electrified Twombly: “The sound of ‘Asia Minor’ is really like a rush to me, like a fantastic ideal.”6 Yet the painting itself, he said, referred not to “Carmen 46” but to “Carmen 101,” an elegy for the poet’s brother. “Catullus went to Asia Minor to see his brother, and while he was there his brother died, and he came back on this little boat. I found the idea of Asia Minor extremely beautiful. Saying goodbye to something and coming back on a boat.”7 According to Twombly, the painting should be read, contrary to Western convention, from right to left—from east to west, that is, like Catullus’s solitary return from Asia Minor to Rome, or like Twombly’s own journey with his monumental painting from Rome to Lexington. Read in this way, the painting, a work of three abutting panels, opens at top right with fragments of lines from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Tenth Duino Elegy” (1922), in blood red, and set there like a motto: “How you gaze/beyond/on bitter duration/the bitter duration/to See an end/( . . . ) our winter/our dark evergreen/Our dear/ duration/Our time.”8 The fragment from the second of George Seferis’s Three Secret Poems (1966) at the bottom-right edge also evokes death: “and yet there on/the other Shore/under the dark gaze/Sun in your eyes/You were there/the other side/the other dawn/the other birth/& yet there you were/in the vast/time/drop by drop.”9 To the left, below the painting’s center, we read Rilke’s verse “His Mortal heart/presses out/an inexhaustible/wine/wine/ wine” (Sonnets to Orpheus, 1922); and to the left of that lies a fragment by Archilochus, from the seventh century bc: “In the hospitality of War/we left them their dead/as a gift to remember/us by.”10 The central canvas shows remnants of phrases that Twombly once considered possible titles for the work: “Idleness,” from the line “On mists in idleness,” by the Romantic poet John Keats, as well as “The Anatomy of Melancholy” and “The Aatomia of

melcholia,” references to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).11 (When shown at Gagosian in 1994–95, the work was simply called Untitled Painting.) To the right we find the concluding lines from Rilke’s “Tenth Duino Elegy”: “and you who have/ always thought of/happiness rising/would feel the/emotion/that almost over/whlmes/whenever happines falls,” as well as the fragment “( . . . ) of AiR,” from Rilke’s “An die Musik” (On music, 1918).12 Next to an aimlessly spinning circle of lines, symbolizing the passage from life to death, the word “[me]mory” forms the transition from the eruptive cascades of color at the right to the grisaillelike, Cimmerian, left-hand part of the painting. For Twombly, the pictorial space of his Catullus canvas was “a loose gravitation comparable to mythology itself which also has no center of gravity.”13 At the transition to the work’s left-hand panel, floating vertically down through this aperspectival, centerless space, unknown to Western pictorial aesthetics, are verses from Rilke’s “Ninth Duino Elegy” (1922): 14 “this fleeting world/ Which in Someway/Keeps calling to us/Us the most/fleeting of all/Once for each thing/Just once no more/And we too, Just/once/ and never again/But to have/Been/this once/completely/even if only/once.”15 Below come lines from Seferis’s “Automobile” (c. 1931): “high & light/how the dizzininess/slipped away/like a fish/ in the sea.”16 Partly interwoven with these wander erratic inscriptions: the name of the Greek musician “orpheus” and the names of three Egyptian deities, “khonsu,” “amun,” and “maat.”17 On the left panel itself, verses from Richard Howard’s “1889 Alassio” (1969) flicker as if stammering: “Shining white/AiR/ ShiNiNg White AiR trembling in/TReMbling in White/in white light light/reflected in the white/flat sea/flat Sea/La Bella noia.”18 Between shrill eruptions of color and boats that disappear into a gray nothingness, Twombly’s inscriptions span a panorama in some ways similar to a parable, encompassing farewell, affirmation, mourning, and crossing over. The prevalent themes, elevated to the status of myth, are Catullus’s “saying goodbye to something and coming back on a boat,” Orpheus’s descent to the underworld, 19 Twombly’s own journey on the Nile, and his homecoming to Lexington in 1993. The canvas, fifty-two feet long, which he worked on for over twenty years, for Twombly symbolized a journey through life and toward drifting into death. “I think of the painting’s movement as falling. . . . It cascades and it exits on the left. The painting is about life’s fleetingness. It’s a passage. It starts on the right and as you move to the left it just goes out.”20 Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) is a painted and written trace of life, of our being here, and of our bidding farewell—for Twombly, “a passage through everything.”21

1. See Thierry Greub, “‘To Revalorize Poetry Now’: On Cy Twombly’s Literary Inscriptions,” in Greub, ed., Cy Twombly. Image, Text, Paratext, Morphomata 37 (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), 388–413; Greub, Das ungezähmte Bild. Texte zu Cy Twombly (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), 191–267; and Greub, Cy Twombly. Inscriptions, vols. I–VI (Leiden: Brill, and Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2021). 2. See Cy Twombly: An Untitled Painting, exh. cat., with an essay by Robert Pincus-Witten (New York: Gagosian, 1994), and Mary Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 36–50. 3. Brice Marden, in “Cy Twombly: An Artist’s Artist,” conversation among Marden, Francesco Clemente, and Richard Serra, moderated by Kirk Varnedoe, October 4, 1994, published in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics no. 28 (Autumn 1995): 172. 4. See Greub, Cy Twombly. Inscriptions, vol. VI, cat. no. 810. 5. The original Latin is “linquantur Phrygii, Catulle, campi.” Twombly used the translation by Horace Gregory from William A. Aiken, ed., The Poems of Catullus: Translated into English by Various Hands (New York: E. P. Dutton,

The Modern Library, 1995), 389. Here and below, quotations in the painting are given in the artist’s spellings (sometimes incorrect) and showing his strikethroughs. ( . . . ) means the writing is indecipherable. 9. George Seferis, Three Secret Poems, On Stage, V, lines 1–10, from George Seferis: Collected Poems, ed. and trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, 1982 (rev. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 205. It is possible that it was the lines “and yet there on/the other Shore” that inspired Twombly to change the Catullus quotation from “the plains of Asia Minor” to “the shores of Asia Minor.” 10. Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus, 1922, Part 1, VII, lines 3–4, in The Selected Poetry, 235, or Ahead of All Parting, 423. Archilochus: Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age, trans. Guy Davenport (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1980), 58, no. 184. 11. From John Keats’s “The Human Seasons” (1818), line 11. 12. Rilke, “Tenth Duino Elegy,” lines 110–13, in The Selected Poetry, 211, or Ahead of All Parting, 395. Rilke, “On Music,” line 13, from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. and with a

1950), 138, no. 60, where he could also find the historical context (ibid., 128–29). In 1965 he began by using the quote correctly, then modified it for the first time in 1988; see Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings, vol. IV, 1964–1969, ed. Nicola Del Roscio (Munich: Schirmer, 2014), 99, and Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, vol. IV, 1972–1995, ed. Heiner Bastian (Munich: Schirmer, 1995), 52). See also Nicholas Serota, Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat. (German trans. Munich: Schirmer, 2008), 49–50. 6. Twombly, in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 176. 7. Twombly, quoted in Serota, Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, 50. “Boat” refers to the “small yacht, or phaselus” (Aiken, ed., The Poems of Catullus, 140) in Catullus’s poem no. 4 (ibid., 145–47). 8. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Tenth Duino Elegy,” 1922, lines 11–14, from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, with an introduction by Robert Hass, bilingual edition (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 205, or Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Mitchell, bilingual edition (New York:

commentary by Robert Bly (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 169. 13. Twombly, quoted in Pincus-Witten, “Twombly’s Quarantine,” in Cy Twombly: An Untitled Painting, 17. 14. On Twombly’s concept of the Far Eastern image from the 1980s onward, see Greub, “‘He was a traveler’: L’esthétique (extrême-)orientale de Cy Twombly,” in Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 138 (Winter 2016/2017): 84–99. 15. Rilke, “Ninth Duino Elegy,” lines 11–15, in The Selected Poetry, 199, or Ahead of All Parting, 383. 16. Seferis, “Automobile,” lines 10–12, in Collected Poems, 234. 17. See Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly, 40. 18. Richard Howard, “1889 Alassio,” lines 97–100, in Untitled Subjects (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 59–60. 19. See Ralph Blumenthal, “A Celebratory Splash for an Enigmatic Figure,” New York Times, June 4, 2005. 20. Twombly, quoted in Hayden Herrera, “Cy Twombly: A Homecoming,” Harper’s Bazaar no. 3393 (August 1994): 147. 21. Twombly, in Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, 174.

Cy Twombly, Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catallus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), 1994, oil, acrylic, oil stick, crayon, and graphite on three canvases, 157 ½ × 624 inches (400.1 × 1,585 cm), The Menil Collection, Houston. Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: © The Menil Collection

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FASHION AND ART The fashion designer Stella McCartney is best known for pioneering “vegan style,” a term referring to the designs of her luxury label, which don’t use fur or any animal products. She’s also the daughter of Paul McCartney, a Beatle and Rock & Roll Hall of Famer. What’s less known about her is her proximity to contemporary artists as she grew up, calling painters such as Frank Stella and Willem de Kooning old family friends and neighbors in East Hampton, Long Island. Derek Blasberg spoke to Stella about a childhood surrounded by artists and how their inspiration continues to affect her design process.

PART 6: STELLA McCARTNEY

DEREK BLASBERG: Where are you right now, Stella? STELLA McCARTNEY: I’m on my organic farm in the countryside in England. DB: Presumably that’s where you’ve been for the past forever? SMcC: Yeah, I’ve been here pretty much from the start of covid. DB: Being a designer, your creative process is so affected by what you see and where you go. How has it been to work without discovering inspirations on the road? SMcC: I think many people in our industry felt for a long time that the pace was relentless, like we never got a second to stop and think. So, in lockdown, I finally found myself with a second to think and it was like, Now what? But it was quite refreshing and maybe even shocking. I asked myself, “Why do I do this? Why does anyone care about this industry? What’s important about what I do?” I realized that this is a critical moment in the history of our planet. I have an important role to play in the industry, I’m proud of my unique position in it—my staunch advocacy of the environment and its protection, treating animals with respect, and coming to business in a more mindful way. It felt like this was an important place for me to be right now and I have a reason to do what I do.

DB: You had a great interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN, which isn’t a regular forum for fashion designers. SMcC: Oh, why thank you! DB: That’s what’s so great about what you do: you’re not just a fashion designer, you’re an ecowarrior, a political figure. You can show up on CNN as well as you can show up on Vogue as well as you can show up in the Quarterly. SMcC: That came to light at the beginning of covid. Creativity fell into place for me. I felt inspired to be alive in this moment, and to have a career as a working mother and as a woman. I have a voice and I have a platform that’s powerful. For the first time in maybe forever, I realized I had my family, I had my fashion family at work, and then I had this larger community that I don’t get to connect with often in the fashion context. All of my friends are artists, essentially, and actually all of them work in isolation. I called David Hockney and I’m like, “How are you doing?” He’s like, “Well, I’m just doing what I always do.” I called the musicians I knew, like my dad, and he’s like, “Well, I just write songs on my own anyway.” And it occurred to me that creativity is actually at the core of everything we all do. “What does the word ‘accountable’ mean to you, Rashid Johnson? Or ‘kindness,’ Jeff Koons? Or ‘timelessness,’ William Eggleston? Or ‘effortlessness,’ Cindy Sherman?”

DB: Is that what inspired the manifesto that you released earlier this year?

DB: You had a Jerry Maguire moment. You were suddenly, late in the night, fueled by passion, creativity, making a manifesto.

SMcC: Yes, exactly. I wrote that manifesto in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. It came to me and I was suddenly so excited and fueled by creativity. It’s an alphabet of words that stand for the brand’s core value system: A is for accountability, B is for British, and so on.

SMcC: I don’t even know if I like the word “manifesto”! It’s a bit of an overused word now. But I had clarity and I was afforded this moment and I went with it. Of course, now, I’m completely overloaded with all the crap again and it feels like a million years ago.

Previous spread: Stella McCartney. Photo: Dougal MacArthur This page: Stella McCartney’s “A to Z Manifesto” exclusive artist T-shirts: “X is for Kiss,” in collaboration with Ed Ruscha. Photo: courtesy Stella McCartney Opposite: Paul McCartney and Willem de Kooning, 1983. Photo: © Paul McCartney. Photographer: Linda McCartney

DB: This isn’t your first conversation with artists. One of my favorite things to do with you is reminisce about your whole family’s longtime connection to contemporary art. Your mother’s father was the lawyer to all those incredible— SMcC: My grandpa, Lee Eastman! He was an entertainment lawyer and represented all kinds of great artists, as well as actors, writers, all of the great creatives of that period in New York. He used to write Quincy [Jones]’s paycheck when Quincy was only a kid. Quincy always reminds me of that when I see him. He also worked with the Abstract Expressionists. So he represented de Kooning and built his studio out in the Hamptons, in the Springs. So, yeah, I was hanging out with de Kooning all my life growing up. He drew all these charcoals of my mom because he and my mom got on really well. Later my dad became good friends with Bill too. DB: Bill? SMcC: Yes! We called him Bill, that’s how much we hung out! But my grandpa represented Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell and Joseph Cornell and Josef Albers and Mark Rothko. I mean, it was insane really. We grew up with all of that around us as kids. DB: There’s an amazing picture your mom took of your dad and de Kooning. SMcC: At his studio on the chairs. I have a copy of that, it’s beautiful. It’s funny because I still go to the studio every summer and I can still go out there and sit on those chairs. DB: Of course, they still have the chairs! SMcC: Yeah, they’re still there. It’s amazing, and now it’s his grandchildren out there. Sadly, his daughter passed away. DB: That must have been incredible to see from such a young age. SMcC: Looking back now, I feel very privileged. But back then it was just a room and some chairs. Know what’s crazy?

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My grandpa used to swap his time in law fees for art. He was one of the last true collectors. It was all for the love of it. None of it was monetary. He’d come home with a de Kooning and my grandma would be like, “What the fuck is this? How am I going to feed the kids with a painting?” But when he passed away, he had the largest private collection of Abstract Expressionism. DB: Do you know where some of the paintings are now? SMcC: They pop up. I’ve had friends, who I won’t mention, say to me, “Oh, I’m going to buy your grandfather’s Kline,” and I’m like, “Noooo!” I remember we’d come home from de Kooning’s studio in the ’90s and some critics had accused him of having Alzheimer’s because he’d gone into the white period. I remember the discussions because my grandfather was his lawyer. They’d say, “Is this worthless, this art?” Which is actually so poetic and beautiful and breathtaking. And of course the critics were wrong. I remember being so moved by those works and now I appreciate living and breathing that then. DB: Has your perspective on the art world changed since then? SMcC: It’s sort of fluid for me. For example, Leo Castelli was always around in our life when I was a child. And that turned into Larry Gagosian, maybe with Tony Shafrazi and some other characters in between. In London, Robert Fraser was the equivalent, and he was one of my mom’s best friends. My father bought some Magrittes off of him. The art world is like a whole separate life. Peter Blake is my godfather. It’s all still in my life. I mean, Ringo [Starr] is a huge [George] Condo collector! [Allen] Ginsberg and all these other kinds of artists were around constantly too. [David] Bowie and music artists. It was such a huge influence on me. DB: And it continues now. SMcC: Of course it does! I grew up, went to college, and became a fashion designer and found my own little gang. Urs Fischer! He’s done campaigns with me. I met Jeff Koons at Larry’s house for dinner one summer. I met Ed Ruscha when I wrote a fan letter. Cindy Sherman I met in the Springs and I go and see her every summer. I’ve accumulated an incredible collection of work by amazing artists and I feel so blessed I’ve been able to work with many of them. DB: Speaking about Cindy, I interviewed her last year and she said you were one of the easiest designers to collaborate with. You literally sent her a box of clothes and were like— SMcC: I sure did. Did you see the stuff we did? DB: How could I not? There was a big portrait right in the National Portrait Gallery, it was the opening image! SMcC: I’m very sensitive to being used and using people of talent. I’m aware of the fashion industry hooking on to people and selling them out. And I have a real allergy to it. In fashion, it’s typical for a brand to think, “Omigod, I’m going to get So-and-So to do this bag and I’m going to pay them a million pounds.” And I feel it, as a consumer, I’m like, “Ew, I don’t want that. That feels like dirty money in a sense.” Every single relationship I’ve been blessed to have is an art-based relationship. And I value that. An artist will remind me of what I’m saying, rather than what I think I’m saying. I just work in a way with artists where we’re just enjoying it. With Cindy, I was like, “I love you, I worship you, do whatever you want.” And she was like, “I’ve never been a man.” And I was like, “That’s it, we’ll send you the menswear.” It was just beautiful and it went on for years. I never bothered her about it. I don’t have an ulterior motive. DB: Talk to me about the Yoshitomo Nara collection. I see you’re wearing the Nara shirt now. SMcC: It was so easy and effortless. I love his work. I’m a fan. He’s punk. A real one, too! I haven’t had the chance to work with many artists in Asia and I was longing for a little bit of that Japanese Zen culture, and his love of music and the references to British punk in his work, and the innocence and the

Opposite: Jeff Koons and Stella McCartney. Photo: courtesy Stella McCartney This page: Stella McCartney Shared, Spring/Summer 2021 unisex capsule collection, in collaboration with Yoshitomo Nara. Photo: courtesy Stella McCartney

childishness. I’m a huge fan of what he does. And underlying it all is this wonderful respect for nature. To be the first fashion designer that he’s ever collaborated with is absolutely blowing my brains away, I can’t quite believe it. DB: In the past year, there have been so many new conversations around sustainability, fashion’s impact on the world, greenwashing. To a certain degree do you feel like, “Oh, welcome to this party I’ve been at for twenty years”? SMcC: I don’t know what to say about that, really. We all arrive at things at different stages, don’t we? I was hugely blessed to grow up with that level of awareness. I admire people more who didn’t grow up in a kind of rock ’n’ roll, vegetarian, family-on-a-farm context. I acquired it through my upbringing. And while there are so many people now at the party, we still have so much to do. I’m very aware that there’s a lot of greenwashing going on. There needs to be a little more encouragement in the industry. There needs to be more policy to support changes that are much needed. But it feels like people can’t avoid it now and they’re deeply invested in being part of the conversation and not missing the boat. So that’s good. DB: My last question: When people ask you is fashion art, what are your responses? SMcC: It’s in the eye of the beholder. I would never be that presumptuous to say I’m an artist. I mean, the word “art” is so weighty to me. What is and what isn’t art? That’s the beauty of art. It’s not for me to say. DB: Even if you’re not an artist, you’re many other things to me. SMcC: Honestly, I don’t know what the fuck I am anymore! I know I’m a mom and a wife and a mate. Other than that I couldn’t tell you. 147

A BODY IN Movement-based artist Eiko Otake and historian/photographer William Johnston speak with the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab about their book A Body in Fukushima, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Otake has worked for decades as part of the performance duo Eiko & Koma; her ongoing project A Body in Places marks her first solo endeavor.

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FUKUSHIMA Published ten years after Fukushima’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown of 2011, the book documents six years of Otake’s and Johnston’s visits to the irradiated landscape. Here they discuss the relationships between performance and photography, history and the body, witnessing and conveying.

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ILLIAN JAKAB The two of you first worked together in a classroom: you cotaught a course on the history and artistic interpretations of Japan and the atom bomb at Wesleyan University. How did your partnership begin? WILLIAM JOHNSTON Well, Eiko, how was it that you and Sam [Miller] got together and decided you should be teaching courses? Because that’s the real inception of this. EIKO OTAKE Sam was a good friend of mine. We met when he was director of Jacob’s Pillow, and in 1998 he asked me to be an adviser to the National Dance Project, the presenters’ network he created some time ago. I was frustrated to be only advising, not voting or fully discussing as equals with the rest of the group. I wanted to do something more in a setting like this. After 9/11, I was so shaken; my calm, which I don’t have much of, was totally taken away. I spoke with honesty among our artist friends, and with Sam, and out of these conversations Sam created the Center for Creative Research, which we called CCR. Eleven choreographers, none of us young. We got funding to explore how this particular group of artists could converse within institutions of higher education, and nurture sustainable relationships with them, for their mutual benefit. From there I made my way to Wesleyan, where my sons were students, and met Bill early on. He knew I was working on my master’s thesis on atomic-bomb literature and he asked, “Want to coteach?” And I went, “Oh, could I?” [laughs]. WJ It was actually even funnier on my side. I was invited by the director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts, Pam Tatge, now at Jacob’s Pillow, to work with

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a group of visiting artists and see if they would want to integrate performing arts with courses on history and science, et cetera. Then Eiko came in and I was like, “Wait a minute, you’re Eiko & Koma Eiko” [laughs]. I’d been a fan of their work, and I knew a photographer who had shot them before, so we really hit it off. GJ It was meant to be! So your shared interest in the subject matter of the class led to your collaboration on A Body in Fukushima? EO Yes, I would credit our teaching. I knew Bill was interested in matters of massive violence, energy, public health, and radiation, which we were able to explore together in different forms. WJ We had these background intellectual goals, as you’ve noted, coming out of the atomic-bomb project. And behind all of this, there’s this larger question: how is it that Japan, which became the first country and only country to experience nuclear bombing in war, also then managed to become the site of the world’s second-worst nuclear meltdown? How do you go from a nuclear wound inflicted by the Other to a self-inflicted nuclear wound? We’ve got a way of exploring this through Eiko performing in these places. At least for me, as we were working, I came to realize that the performance isn’t really something I’m photographing; rather, I’m trying to create photographs that create a performance for the viewer. In a sense, looking at the photographs is a manifestation of a performance itself. When I’m shooting with Eiko, my inclination toward large-format photography is always with me. I’m seeing a landscape and I ask, How do I place Eiko in this landscape? How are they in a dialogue with each other, as well as with me, at the same time?

What made you decide to go to Fukushima in 2014? EO Well, I didn’t all of a sudden come up with the idea of, Let’s go. I was there in August of 2011. I’m the kind of person who does not shy away from visiting the site of a historical event, of massive wrongdoings. If I’m in Poland, I go to see Auschwitz, for example. Since a long, long time ago, performers have functioned as sort of community connectors. People live in their communities, and we performers travel, see, hear things, and sometimes get intimate knowledge by being somewhere. So when my old friend was available to take me to Fukushima, I knew it would be a very strong experience. But I had to be a little bit dormant on this, because in 2011 we were doing an Eiko & Koma retrospective project. We were extremely busy looking back at everything Eiko & Koma had done—presenting the history, editing Eiko & Koma’s book published by the Walker Art Center—and creating a new work. It was only after 2013, after Eiko & Koma’s engagement at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, that I could begin to ask, Now what? What’s next? Eiko & Koma had been inv ited by t he Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to perform in Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station and I decided to do this alone. I wanted to do something that wasn’t with Koma. Being in the busy and grand Philadelphia station somehow made me think of desolate Fukushima stations—they were almost opposite places, which makes me see the particulars of both. When I decided to go, my first plan, which didn’t last very long, was to take photographs of myself in very deserted stations I remembered from the 2011 visit. But once we were there, there was absolutely no reason to limit ourselves to stations, so, we decided to forego that plan. GJ

Previous spread, left to right: A Body in Fukushima, Trip 4, Yachihata, 27 June 2017, No. 106. This part of Namie Town is 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) north of the Fukushima Daiichi Reactor; close to the beach, the tsunami here reached approximately 15.5 meters (over 50 feet) high. A Body in Fukushima, Trip 5, Minami Soma, Mouth of Ota River, 25 December 2019, No. 224. The tsunami reached 9 meters (30 feet) at this point, 18.3 kilometers (11.4 miles) north of the Fukushima Daiichi Reactor. At that height, these concrete barriers would have made little difference. Opposite: A Body in Fukushima, Trip 1, Tomioka, 15 January 2014, No 227. At 21 meters (69 feet), the tsunami was higher in Tomioka than in any other place in Fukushima. The image shows Eiko in front of what was Tomioka Station’s restroom. The entire area was later razed. This page: A Body in Fukushima, Trip 2, Tomioka, 22 July 2014, No. 742. Here, Eiko stands on what was part of the original seawall next to the Tomioka Fishing Harbor.

Next spread: A Body in Fukushima, Trip 2, Tomioka, 24 July 2014, No. 722. Eiko is standing on the road that once led to the Tomioka Fishing Cooperative. The Fukushima Daini (No. 2) Plant, which barely missed a meltdown itself, looms in the background. Final spread, left to right: A Body in Places, Met Breuer, 12 November 2017, No. 343. Eiko performed with projected images from Fukushima for eight consecutive hours at each of the three separate locations of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in November 2017. In Eiko’s words, she used the Fukushima images to “stain the walls” of the Met with Fukushima. A Body in Places, Indian Point, 17 May 2016, No. 1298. As an extension of the Fukushima project, Eiko performed in front of the Indian Point nuclear power plant, 57.5 kilometers (36 miles) north of Midtown Manhattan. Two of the three units there have been shut down, and the last is scheduled to shut down by the end of April 2021. Photographs and captions by William Johnston

WJ I’d say, “Eiko, here’s a road. I don’t know where it goes, but I can tell what direction we’re heading and about what to expect.” EO I’m a horrible navigator [laughs]. Bill, who can read Japanese, is better than I am at reading the signs on the road. WJ That’s how we ended up at this one place called Yabure-machi, which is the image where Eiko is sort of red around her lower body, white on top, and she’s crouched down in the field with her head bent over. It was at that point we realized, “Oh, this is a body in places, this is much larger than stations. We’ve got to just keep exploring more places.” GJ How could you sense when a place felt right? WJ We got there, and both of us spent probably fifteen, twenty minutes, a half hour, walking around separately, just looking. I remember I was just in tears, looking at these houses—what people had, their living effects, the insides of their houses, were as they were right after the tsunami, it had never been cleaned up, it was all radioactive. I’m going, “My god, these people, they couldn’t come back and even take care of their places.” Eiko and I then saw each other again and she was in the same condition, very much in tears. “My god, what do we do here?” we asked each other. That’s where it really took off. It was a very real physical sensation for both of us. EO Yes, and for safety reasons, we were limited in the areas we could go. You can visit these areas but can’t stay overnight. People commute to work there. I remember this body feeling: the minute we got into this area where people can’t stay, my whole body tensed. In this trip, looking at the brokenness all around, I learned that many things imitate the

human body. For example, the seawall built to protect from tsunamis: when the seawall looks complete, it looks very alien, but when it’s broken, inside it looks like an intestine. I started to feel the skin. I started to feel its core, like a backbone. I started to see the body as a metaphor or perhaps as unintended inspiration. Maybe because I’m a body-worker. Maybe because people who make the wall are unconsciously imitating human bodies, as those are what we live with. GJ From your first visit to Fukushima together, in January 2014, to your most recent visit, in December 2019, what felt different? How did your experience with the region evolve and how did that play out in the performance project? WJ As time went on, I think we got a lot looser in terms of where we would go. We would take a road not knowing where it would lead or come across a little shrine and decide to check it out. I think both of us really had a sense of how things were changing in Fukushima. In particular, in that first place we went to, Yabure-machi, we explored this old house that had these two chairs sitting together. The next time we got there, in 2016, it was gone. Buried. It seemed to have been dismantled like the surrounding houses that had just disappeared without a trace, and the vacant lot where it had stood was then used to store dirt from other places. A lot of places were like that, so it had this very visceral effect on both of us. By 2019, everything was changed for us. The coastline had become this huge concrete thing, which is as much political as anything. Eiko’s approach to performing there also changed. Her costume went from being, “Gee, which kimono do I wear,” to all of a sudden she found herself performing in street clothes.

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The materials Eiko wears or holds are stunning parts of the performance photographs. I’d love to hear more about them. EO W hen I was there in 201 1, it was much stricter: you couldn’t go within twenty kilometers of the radiation site. But outside of that, I saw all the things the tsunami had scattered, irradiated piles of what looked like blankets, futons, comforters. And in places like Fukushima, futons often have kimono colors, because often people use old kimonos to make the surface. A tsunami covers everything with dirt, but I could still see those colors, and I could resonate with those colors—they were the colors I’d grown up with. So when I returned to Fukushima in 2014, I packed my grandmother’s kimono. I have this policy: I never hire a costume designer or buy a new costume. Instead, I tend to seek some sense of personal relationship with props or costumes. In Fukushima, when we found a site, I would then think about which color to wear or carry with me. And that became part of the choreography for me, too, once I was committed to being there. GJ How does the choreography come about? You’re used to collaborating on movement as part of Eiko & Koma. For this project, what was it like to collaborate, not in creating the movement, but in its documentation? EO With Eiko & Koma, we don’t always have to do the exact same thing, but we do have choreography in relation to one another. For a solo performer, there’s no inconvenience to improvise; I don’t have to worry about meeting Koma at a certain point in a certain area. So I can focus on motivating myself. In Fukushima I was sensing the wind, history, and bleakness of our future. GJ

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Once Bill starts to shoot, all I care about is a possibility that he can pick some moment—that mindful eye is all I need. The movement itself just happens. Either I’m moving my body or my body is sensing other movements in the world. Bill’s being, his eyes, his point of view with the camera—these made me able to reach what I call “movement and dance at the same time.” What happens is, I’m at the intersections of many different movements, drawing from history, social dynamics, wind, waves—many of the parts of Fukushima that we visited are by the ocean, so you always hear the ocean waves growing louder or quieter. All those natural shifts, the changes of seasons, are movement. And trucks and workmen’s machine noises change the landscape. For the performance, once I choose the color of the costume, the rest really is: how do I be a part of this, my surroundings? I’m now saying to myself and to others, Going to a place is a choreography. Being in that place determines a lot of things. I think that’s a discovery that came out of this project. GJ It’s quite a feat to communicate the visceral experience of being in a place with audiences far away. You’ve done this over the years in many forms: exhibitions, video installations, film screenings, and now your forthcoming book. How does the book form provide another way of engaging with and sharing the project? EO Yes, I made a commitment to the Fukushima project: I would bring it everywhere I go. After every visit there, Bill and I would work together to create a video or have a photo exhibition. How we do it and what it looks like, each community has to decide. It gave us both the opportunity to work with curators, learn how to create exhibitions, and then how to present my body in those exhibitions.

And then the book project itself was something people had said to us, “You really need to make a book of these photographs.” Once we started talking about it more seriously, WesPress felt like the right fit: they do excellent photography work, they were historically a fairly major player in photography, and they’ve remained a major player in dance publications. We went back and forth with the idea of inviting various authors. Eiko had been working with a curator who said, “Look, you’re working with a historian. Use him.” So that’s what we decided to do for some of the writing in the book. What I’ve written there does very much come out of my historical background. I come from the field of the history of disease and epidemics. As a result, I think in terms of multifactorial causation all the time, to use the epidemiological term, which is quite simply to say, a causal agent—a virus, bacillus, toxin, whatever—doesn’t instantly cause disease in the body; it’s many things coming together. A big example right now: some people are exposed to the covid virus, nothing happens. Other people with the same exposure, bam, they’re down. And why? Well, it’s all of these different factors coming together at the same time. And that’s always been my thinking about epidemics, but it also works for something like a big nuclear meltdown. What were the different historical, social, political, and cultural elements that came together to create this huge meltdown in Fukushima and the way it’s been handled ever since? There’s no single narrative as a result. The way we understand the world around us is not a single narrative, it’s always multiples, this layering of narratives. That’s the way I envisioned working with this book: that there would be visual narratives WJ

in the sense of its change over time between 2014 and 2019. GJ You mentioned covid—I wonder whether this pandemic has heightened or altered our sense of collective trauma as a global community, as we’re all going through it. Do you think your work garners empathy for, or brings closer, disasters in places that would otherwise have felt far away? WJ Yes, exactly—we wanted people to take away from the book an empathy for the people in Fukushima, an intimacy with Fukushima from having experienced these landscapes, these places close up that otherwise one might not have the chance to see. We had the time and the freedom to explore these little towns, these little shrines, spots along the coastline, et cetera. I really wanted people to be able to have that, so hopefully, when they hear about Fukushima in the future, it would call up something, even if they don’t take all these narrative threads and bring them out of the book completely. Although the book is an object, the people looking at it are giving it their own interpretation. The witnessing transforms the object being observed. So it’s changing, but at the same time, it has a kind of continuity that other things don’t. Almost all the digital media are ephemeral, but books can last for centuries. I hope that it will last a lot longer than both of us as a visual source, a kind of historical document. EO I think it’s dangerous for us to assume the book does only one thing. People take very different approaches and have very different responses to the same information, the same artwork. And that’s just a fact. Once bookmaking started to roll, I totally embraced the process. I love writing, and [my

assistant and former student] Nora [Thompson] really helped me. She and I looked back at what I’d written for program notes, for catalogues, all those things I wrote throughout the Fukushima project. I worked off those materials and made selections. It’s kind of a dialectic. I was a bookworm; I always wanted to be a writer. But I rebelled against that because I didn’t trust, at that point, that more knowledge is better, or that more words are better. As a dancer/choreographer and interdisciplinary artist, I wanted to trust something else: a body’s sensation, a body’s experiences and instincts. But now I’m embracing words more publicly, with this book and in many opportunities to speak up throughout the year 2020. I worked on Bill’s writing. He worked on my writing. It wasn’t light work. And I’m proud of this book. Hayashi Kyoko, the writer of atomic-bomb literature I studied for my thesis, writes fiction, except she declares, “I never write anything that didn’t happen.” She’s very careful. She’s very committed to be a kataribe, which is a person who will witness and who will deliver, use their body and their mind as a conduit to the people who are not there or to the next generation. That affected me a lot. Even though I’m not from Fukushima, I’m from Japan. I spent four years of my childhood in a prefecture next to Fukushima. My sense of intimacy with a complicated history and that landscape, I’m using that to bring myself as a conduit, not to a Japanese audience but to an American audience. GJ This aspect of the project, and the book living on for future generations, made me think about an article by scholar Cathy Caruth, which I just revisited. Writing about the opening scene of Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour [1959], she asks, “What do the dying bodies of the past—the

dying bodies of Hiroshima—have to do with the living bodies of the present?” She sets it up as the relationship between history and the body. In a way, in your work, you witness and remember through the body. WJ Eiko can recite the opening lines from memory, I think. EO “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.” “I saw everything in Hiroshima. How could I not have seen it?” “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.” That’s basically the conversation. The point is, certain experiences are so strong, it’s impossible for other people to feel exactly how it was. That’s why the man says, “You know nothing about Hiroshima.” But the woman is saying, “Well, I made an effort. I went there. I was there for real.” The man counters, “Well, you can never understand this because you weren’t there then.” Then: “Yes, but I can have my own understanding if I try.” Which is both making your own experience and flaring up the imagination. And for me, imagination is a product of knowledge and willingness. You know about Fukushima? No, you don’t know about Fukushima. It’s that tension between those two.

Eiko Otake and William Johnston, A Body in Fukushima (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, June 2021).

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M PR

AN QUART SI

PE N A

ICA × GAG R E

My life was a morsel at the time. I was always looking at the doors of restaurants and bars instead of the face across from me. The light coming in: a silhouette, a promise. I was divorced, I told people. Making plans felt silly, pathetic even. But I did anyway, as friends said, as an “exercise.” My truck still ran. The house still moaned on every third step. I mowed our lawn—something Meg used to do. When I couldn’t cross a room without blackening the bottoms of my feet, I managed to sweep. I missed the screen door slamming and fresh sheets on Sundays. The first year, a few kind ladies in town sent a cleaning woman who left well paid, but with the rooms still untouched. The tomatoes went wild, ripened, split open, and then dropped, unpicked. When I went to pick up my mail they still wanted to sell her life insurance or a new summer wardrobe. Instead of throwing the junk in the trashcan I set hers in a pile where she used to open it on the kitchen table. I inherited her debt, but I knew how little it mattered. I’d been paying to love her for years and now seeing out her Mastercard bill was just the tax. On Fridays, a trip to the PO box in town and finding her name printed there saved me a little. A part of her was still heading to me and I was still driving her home. Gissup is a small town in northern California and it was not her first choice. My job kept us there. When Meg met me in college she had ideas about how to change things. And all she needed was a master’s degree. Instead of getting that degree, she took on a small town’s education system. She watched me plan small parks and open lakeside camping grounds. There were cities that could have used her guts. But then, there was always someone who wanted her. That was the kind of woman she was. We used to walk down to the stores after our coffee on Sundays. Just to look at things through the windows. She loved interior design and we’d stop and talk about what she liked in each display. Linen pillows, midcentury chests, and side tables clear of clutter—as they never are in life. We couldn’t afford much. The glass separated us. In its shine on sunnier days I’d admire the two of us before we got close—her in a long dress, some flowery thing, and our hands clasped. My body was leaner then and my shirts were always clean. When it was my turn to take out the trash I’d lift the lid and drop in the waste of our lives, even her scraps were not that heavy. I’d start to turn back, but pause. My gaze would hold at our house. The living room glowing warm orange and the sound of whatever record she’d put on to wash the dishes to—drifting out. We rented, but it felt like ours. With my head tilted up, right over the Bradleys’ chimney, you could see Mercury shining like a porch light left on. Whether or not the moon was bright, Mercury was there. It wasn’t long till she started to get cramps in her legs. The shaking was the worst. It embarrassed her most. I still admired her spine—the thing holding her together. She’d try to be mean, lash out, but it was useless. She was angry at it. I was too. On some holiday or anniversary, I decided to make her pancakes. There was little cooking happening anymore. I watched videos and read up. Just like my practice exams for my landscaping license. I purchased the natural vanilla and bread flour. Pancakes are simple things to make, most say. We’d been using trays for her meals and I balanced the hot disks one on top of the other and butter nestled in between. OJ and water sloshing as I crossed the hall—her pills getting soaked from the spill. I walked into our bedroom, or by then her room really. She’d tried to comb her hair unsuccessfully and was weeping at the dropped brush near the bed. Her useless hands unable to grab it.

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I’d forgotten the syrup. And without that, the pancakes were just bready circles. It was comforting what her brown eyes could let me know. Schmuck, they said. My mistake made her forget the brush, me the syrup, and that was enough. That breakfast was the last thing I made her. That night we slept as I dreamt of her tan body darting around thin trees at night almost in a dance, headlights reflecting off her thighs, a rabbit running back toward the swamp where she was raised. At the beginning of our relationship, she wasn’t mine—completely. She was living with a man off campus whose name she rarely mentioned. For about six months, she was always leaving. Leaving my apartment, leaving the city for out-of-town trips with his family, leaving to get eggs and not able to return. The sound of her keys rattling and her boots being zipped up years after we were together caused me panic. We never really fought about it. Her leaving was an unspoken agreement. No matter how long our afternoons were, how much I made her laugh (she’d often laugh so hard she’d sneeze), I knew what I was getting. At this point I started to love her, but at the end of the day or weekend I’d have to let her go. Of course, eventually, the other man lost. I finally got his name. Sam—a man who suspected nothing and gave everything to Meg. He proposed to her and that was what finally made her leave. She cradled that guilt for years. Once after a bit of wine she told me that for nine months she’d wake up early and move his Sunday paper from the curb to his welcome mat. Seven summers ago, I caught up with her one night at a bar on a snaking back road off of I-90. It was the Fourth of July. She was supposed to be out with some friends. It had been so long since she’d left the house. I’d followed her to the bar to assure her safety. Holiday traffic and all. That’s what I told myself. Truth was, since her diagnosis she was teetering on something all the time. It could be a bout of laughter or a sudden ambition to clean the garage, but it came in wallops of extremes. I’d hold the mop; I told myself, This is when men get tougher. I’d watched them leave a bar together. Watched as this new stranger stuck his finger into one of the belt loops of her jeans. A move that made me jump a little, jostling my table. Somewhere I’d admired the move—the boldness of it, the fresh stupidity of it. She had met up with a few friends, but when they saw the two of them getting on they left in that way that women know how to leave. I had embarrassed myself in a lame disguise, my baseball cap, an old windbreaker she wouldn’t recognize, my posture a hunch. Our town hosted three main bars and on a Friday the Whiskey Tip was busy and unusually full. The night when interlopers appeared from neighboring cities, and to top it off it was the Fourth. I grabbed a seat in the back booth, the ones made for two. There was newer staff to cushion the holiday crowds so no “Hi Wal” or asking about the business. My windshield had speckled bird shit across it and worse, on the inside, her obscured handprints from a day when she tried to take her bandana and clean it. I kept saying, It’s outside, Meg, it’s outside! What remained looked like desperate gestures to escape. Fingers in frenzy on the edges of my eye line. On a different day, this would’ve resembled a preschool hand painting. I kept forgetting to clean it. I guess I understood. Her diagnosis new: a horrible thing waiting. A woman stamped with expiration. Her body was still together then, in control, not vibrating away from her. And he was someone who didn’t know. A gift.

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The back of his car said plenty. A dirty vehicle, an Acura at least ten years old. One aged bumper sticker I saw when my headlights hit it just so: a local mayoral-candidate campaign and expired tags. It’s the mornings when you can see where the love lies. The languid hope lingering, the smell of coffee, her long legs in terry-cloth shorts, and somewhere on my cluttered bed-stand a cup used to appear, the cream still swirling in it—the light encapsulating the dark. He was a steady driver so no sudden stops. His rear window was dusty and slightly tinted. I’d know the back of Meg’s head anywhere and I still couldn’t make it out. I was thinking by now he’d graduated from a belt loop to a crotch seam. The last thing I drank in the bar, bourbon straight, was burning in my gut. A reminder that I’d skipped dinner to find something I did not want to know. A van pulled between us with one of those dumb illustrations showing the family in stick figures, even the dog represented. I swerved to make sure they were still there, that silver Acura license plate not yet memorized. He turned fast and sharp, something Meg would hate. She detested that kind of driving unless she was doing it. I thought of a bad joke then: what kind of man follows his wife? Well, what kind of wife? So there we were barreling down a smaller road, fields of strawberries either side of it, dust picking up behind them, lights beaming brighter through the haze. Heading to his house maybe. This wasn’t a lookout area and the fireworks were going to be south not north this year. The road changed to gravel. Their windows were open; her arm appeared outstretched and her thin fingers traced the air like a conductor. It was a cool evening for the Fourth. I still held back my boot over the gas, coasting a bit then pressing down, lifting it again like a compress. I stayed just far enough behind unnoticed, or it could be that to the two of them inside, that Acura was all there was. I’d come this far to see how much she wanted to undo. She’d taken to reading her weekly horoscope. It was a different truth she wanted. One afternoon I dropped her at a tarot reader’s house. I say house because putting a neon hand in your window does not make it a business. Honestly: I would have driven her anywhere. When I picked her up she was quiet but smiling and when I asked her what the woman said she put her arm around me and whispered, her voice breaking—I won’t choke and don’t forget to close the garage door at night. The doctor said she was lucky to catch it so early. I didn’t know medical practitioners were allowed that word. When I first asked her to marry me we’d been dating a year. College was over and we’d combined our stuff in a small apartment in Santa Cruz. How I did it doesn’t matter. But people ask. It was after dinner on one of our walks. No ring. Just a question. One of the most anxietyinducing questions a man can ask. She said nothing for a long time. Then she grabbed my hand and squeezed it like a thank you. But didn’t say yes. At the time, that singular moment held enough promise that I allowed the ambiguity. I can only assume it was his house and that he must’ve been in the strawberry business. A onestory nothing that needed work. Concrete foundation and a roof cratering. They didn’t get out

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of the car. The Acura stopped and she drew her hand back in the window. I parked across the road and watched as he cut his lights. We wouldn’t know then that a nurse would come in and loud equipment would live near our bed. That you have to decide when it’s time to go on breathing machines and that the worst fear of the disease for the patient is choking on your own tongue. That we’d never buy that coffee table or marble coasters because being sick is expensive—more expensive than anything that was on the other side of those glass windows. A security light clicked on and the passenger door opened—those legs slipped out. Something that sounded like “Jessie’s Girl” was coming from the car. The notes echoed out of weak speakers that made me think of ice melting too far down in a drink. The headlights turned back on and he came out of the car, tilting back a fifth of something brown. He threw the bottle down and she was already laughing so hard that she was wiping her eyes. The lights shone through her white shirt and her arms so long, then, so strong still, waved over her head then side to side. She started to pull on it, teasing it out of her jeans. Each time it rose a little higher above her stomach on that dusty stage. He leaned on his car door taking in the last of the song and then he started his first steps toward her. What indeed can you call a man who wears jeans that look like slacks? I thought, What if I crossed that road and caused the disease to speed up—all that adrenaline in her body. Irrational, I know. I imagined her looking up from her dance, her eyes dropping the laughter they held moments before, her shirt falling back into place. Even then, a small part of me hated to disappoint her. I turned my engine on. It was then I could see her gaze, past his sloppy gait, into the cabin of my truck. For a month it had squealed when it started up—a neglected belt that needed attention. We had bigger fish. He paid no mind to it. To her it was a sound not only that she knew but that had embarrassed her on countless occasions, pulling out of grocery store lots, movie theaters, and once picking her up from a baby shower when it had reached such a pitch that we fought the whole way home. She knew. Most understand that just as women are taught to cross their legs, men are always supposed to know what to do. There she was out of my reach again. Out there on that summer night with this stranger, I’d witness one of her last bright volleys. She didn’t choke after all. I did. I stayed to watch the scene. Their heads tilted up when the first firework of the night went. Its dandelion burst I could see in my rearview over the strawberries. Fucker had planned it right. And when I drove home from work today I saw those shitty stands on the side of the road selling bottle rockets and Black Cats. The sellers have aged, but they’re still handing out free smoke bombs with purchase. Then it begins. I’ll hear them start up weeks ahead of the holiday. Mostly kids at first, but it gets worse from there. I find myself under our comforter, like a dog, waiting it out. It was a last-minute decision, but when her parents and I were selecting her clothes I slipped the ring on a thin string, our tightrope, and asked the mortician to place it around her neck. Maybe I wanted to finally have something on her. I never looked up at the sky that night, but I heard the pops coming at a greater speed. I sat there in the driver’s seat and watched the colors reflect on the siding of his house and when she stepped closer to him, I saw her shirt and face turn shades of red, then blue, then white again.

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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. This summer installment presents former pen Emerging Voices Fellow Libby Flores. The Emerging Voices Fellowship provides immersive mentorship for early-career writers from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in the publishing world. To learn more about the Emerging Voices Fellowship and the rest of work, please visit pen.org.

pen’s

ADRIANA VAREJÃO: FOR A POETICS OF DIFFERENCE Curator Luisa Duarte considers the artist’s oeuvre, writing on Varejão’s active engagement with theories of difference, as well as the cultural specters of the past. Our era has been marked by a regressive desire for segregation. The reactionary movements that darken the world today share an appeal to ideas of community, of unity in sameness, and of the rejection of difference, clinging to an imagined community of resemblance guided by notions of caste, purity, and exclusion. 1 An entire iconography of walls, metal barriers, and closed borders has emerged, drawing a thick line between “us” and “them.” Adriana Varejão’s art, as a poetic and political event, lies in stark opposition to this trend. Since the 1990s, before anticolonialist studies and practices became central to debates on contemporary art, Varejão’s practice has been informed by a critical vision of colonialism, one equipped with an ethos at once baroque and anthropophagic. One of the tenets of the Brazilian Antropofagia movement, whose manifesto was published in 1928, is “I am only interested in what isn’t mine.”2 A central element of Varejão’s poetics of difference—a poetics motivated by the desire to see what can happen in the encounter with the other—is the azulejo.3 Arab in origin, the azulejo is a ceramic tile that played an important role in Portuguese architecture and came to Brazil during the colonial period. Having absorbed various influences— from Moorish artisanal work to Italian Renaissance painting, from Chinese porcelain to the Latin American Baroque—the azulejo encapsulates a multitude of cultural encounters. It is precisely this locus of contagion between different latitudes and

periods that makes it central to Varejão’s art and the guiding principle of her exhibition Talavera, at Gagosian, New York, in the spring of 2021. The exhibition gathers large-scale paintings inspired by azulejos found in the city of Puebla, Mexico. Varejão’s specific starting point is a photograph of azulejos that she took in the mid-1990s, when she was dividing her time between Rio de Janeiro, her hometown, and Mexico. In each of these paintings, it is as if she were using a magnifying glass on the small azulejos of a Talavera wall, and, in a gesture combining attention and curiosity, drifting and observing, were capturing a variety of things that our eye, quickly scanning the surface, would have trouble noticing: curving black forms; blue flourishes; a yellow square; another square, this one in translucent reds; three diamonds, a red and a blue one overlaying one in yellow; a large black sphere with a light blue showing through within its borders; a white sphere with an orange surround; a subtle blue frame outlining a huge square target; a target in which a diagonal forms two triangles, one white, one blue; and a decentralized black square on a white ground. For Varejão, it is never a question of copying an azulejo, never mind of merely reproducing one. It is a question, rather, of parodying and theatricalizing the genre. All those largely geometrical motifs are painted not on a serene backdrop but on one traversed by tremors: Varejão makes incisions and gashes in the picture plane, revealing its interior and giving the canvas a kind of corporeality. In doing so, little 163

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Previous spread: Adriana Varejão, Jaguar, 2020, oil and plaster on canvas, 70 7⁄8 × 70 7⁄8 × 1 5⁄8⅝ inches (180 × 180 × 4 cm) Opposite: Adriana Varejão, Brown Sphere, 2020 (detail), oil and plaster on canvas, 70 7⁄8 × 70 7⁄8 × 1 5⁄8 inches (180 × 180 × 4 cm) This page: Adriana Varejão, Red Square, 2020, oil and plaster on canvas, 70 7⁄8 × 70 7⁄8 × 1 5⁄8 inches (180 × 180 × 4 cm) Following spread: Adriana Varejão in her studio, Rio de Janeiro, 2021. Photo: courtesy the artist Artwork © Adriana Varejão Photos: Vincente de Mello

by little, it acquires a crackled effect, the painting developing a series of fissures across its surface. Inspired by eleventh-century Song-dynasty ceramics, whose monochrome enamels are characterized by controlled cracks, Varejão has used craquelure from the beginning of her career. It emerges in her work as a kind of wound, alluding to the effect of time on materials and revealing a rhizomatic structure. Because the final form of craquelure is impossible to predict, it combines both calculation and chance. These paintings traversed by tremors echo what the Martinican philosopher and critic Édouard Glissant called a “poetics of diversity.”4 First, they mark Varejão’s encounter with a Talavera wall in Puebla, the capital of the Mexican Baroque. Talavera is a kind of applied art, popular and hybrid, with roots in both Hispanic and indigenous practices. Second, through the visual excess typical of Varejão’s work, they capture the presence, generally unsuspected in Talavera, of supposedly clean, neutral, abstract geometric forms. The artist creates a kind of filter that reveals the microuniverses within the myriad forms of Talavera. But the goal of this filter is not to purify, to separate, but to combine—a crossbreeding, or, better, to borrow again from Glissant, a creolization: the creolization that comes from painting not on a clean white stretched canvas but on the convulsive, tremulous surface of polysemic craquelure. In other words, different cultures and latitudes interweave, from Portugal to China, from Mexico to Brazil, different points that touch to create a universe never seen before. I use the word “touch” to emphasize the tactile, corporeal, eroticized sign in Varejão’s baroque art.

Varejão’s work has since the beginning had ties to the Baroque tradition, and creolization, in Glissant’s words, is “always a manifestation of the baroque.”5 Far removed from notions of caste, purity, and single identity, the baroque is close instead to the relational proliferation of intersections and the embodiment of difference. If the European Baroque is linked to the CounterReformation, Varejão aff iliates herself with a Baroque style proper to the Americas, described by the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima as the art of counterconquest. By capturing the geometric forms hidden with a popular medium of the Mexican Baroque, and by laying such forms on a craquelure base, Varejão might seem to remind us that geometric abstraction is not the exclusive province of white Western thought. This shift in perspective is aligned with an idea at the heart of Varejão’s poetics, the idea of counterconquest. It is not just a question of juxtaposing geometry—ideal, limpid, organized—with unpredictable rhizomatic traces close to the vital realm of the body; it is also a question of speculating about another origin—and, why not?, another destiny—for geometric abstraction. From the graphics of pre-Columbian art6 to Talavera, from indigenous body painting to Brazilian Neo-Concretism,7 from Athos Bulcão’s azulejos in Brasília 8 to the straight lines of Rubem Valentim’s sacred motifs, there are many roots and destinations for a sensitive geometry.9 In the end, Varejão suggests, with this displacement, this exercise in profanation, 10 the possibility emerges of other epistemologies, distinct from those governed by anthro/phallo/egocentric and totalizing discourses. In this sense we descry an anticolonial poetics that underscores the importance of creating 165

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epistemologies born of a baroque process, one that always conjures the embodiment of difference. But let’s be clear: such a profanation of reference points, such a subversion of official histories in favor of marginal ones, such an affirmation of epistemologies distinct from those of the colonist, doesn’t happen quietly.11 As Frantz Fanon reminds us, “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon” because it is a “program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding.”12 It is in this sense that the three painted sculptures Ruinas de Charque (Meat ruins, 2021), which conclude the exhibition, reveal a more dramatic side of Varejão’s explorations. The Ruinas simulate architectural fragments covered in paintings of azulejos that reference Talavera. Inside, however, in sharp contrast to the planar geometrical surface of the cold modernist grid, we find a warm representation of the body’s interior. In a substitution for anodyne gray cement, Varejão reveals a theatricalized version of charque de carne, or beef jerky—the sun-dried salted meat, slow to spoil, that was a staple of the slaves who worked the sugarcane fields of northeastern Brazil in the sixteenth century. The Cuban writer and poet Severo Sarduy identified substitution as a signal process of the Baroque. Depending on what elements it puts in play, this substitution isn’t simply a neutral permutation; it displaces the original meaning to establish a new one. If ruins evoke a time that never came to an end—something so familiar in Brazil, a country in which “everything appears to be under construction and is already a ruin”13—Varejão presents this era as permeated by a history of violence and eroticism.14 Though in her paintings Varejão works from traces and remnants of Talavera, these ruins remain traces and remnants of a time that is past, but whose echoes darken the present and clamor for collective reckoning.15 Varejão goes against the grain of the past in order to bring to light marginal histories and to reveal the perspective of the vanquished. To do so, she deploys a gesture of baroque counterpoint, tracing a cartography woven of different cultures, eras, and latitudes, marked by the political tension of her own poetics of difference. We can, at last, return to the beginning of this essay, where we referred to a present marked by a regressive desire for segregation, for the unity of like and like. It seems clear that like Varejão’s work itself, her exhibition is an event, at once poetic and political, that lies at the opposite pole from this regressive shift. Her work seems to say that a possible way of overturning such political currents lies not in affirming pure identities but in the often imponderable experience of the encounter, in the mixture of the many, the different. To once more evoke Glissant, “The single root is that which kills everything around it whereas the rhizome is the root that reaches out to meet other roots.”16 In other words, each of Varejão’s rhizomatic craquelures is a call to meet other voices, other cultures, other climes, offering imaginative pathways to a more polyphonic yet more unified world.

Translated from the Portuguese by Sheila Faria Glaser.

1. It is important to remember that the world that is moving quickly in a counterrevolutionary direction is simultaneously seeing a once-imperceptible shift of tectonic plates in terms of traditional notions of race, gender, and family and of a Eurocentric canon. In other words, these regressive currents are a response to an ongoing process of anticolonial historical revisionism that is creating a new geography and proposing new epistemologies. 2. Oswald Andrade, “Manifesto Antropófago” (Cannibalist manifesto), Revista de Antropofagia, São Paulo, 1928. 3. On the question of the other in contemporary art, see Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, “Disothering as method (Leh zo, a me ke nde za),” in Solange Farkas, Gabriel Bogossian, Luisa Duarte, and Miguel A. López, 21a Bienal de arte contemporãnea Sesc:VídeoBrasil—Comunidades imaginadas, exh. cat. (São Paulo: Editora Sesc, 2019), 68–71. 4. Édouard Glissant, Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, trans. Celia Britton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020). 5. Ibid., 30. 6. Readers should remember here the relationship between Anni and Josef Albers and Latin America, a connection forged during their travels in Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Cuba between 1934 and 1967. Through this contact with Latin American culture, the German artists were influenced by the geometries of pre-Columbian art and indigenous graphics. 7. The Neo-Concrete movement developed a geometric abstraction that referenced the body, nature, politics, the street, and the everyday. It began in Rio de Janeiro in 1959 in response to the Concrete movement, and included such artists as Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape. 8. Athos Bulcão was a foundational artist in what we think of as Brazilian modernism, having been an important collaborator with the architect Oscar Niemeyer. Well-known for his azulejo works in the Brazilian capital, he is less recognized for the democracy of his practice, which involved construction workers in the creative process. His singular patterns thus function as open systems, reflecting multiple decision-makers. 9. See Roberto Pontual, América Latina, geometria sensível, exh. cat. Museo de Arte Moderna (Rio de Janeiro: Ediçoes Jornal do Brasil, 1978), and Rosana Paulino and Renata Felinto, “Violenta geometria,” Revista Zum, no. 19 (December 2020). 10. An entire essay could be written on Adriana Varejão’s work taking Giorgio Agamben’s notion of profanation as a point of departure. See Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 11. See Adriano Pedrosa, Adriana Varejão. Histórias às margens, exh. cat. (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna, 2012). 12. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963), 33, 35. 13. Caetano Veloso, “Fora da Ordem,” from the album Circuladô, 1991. Veloso was thinking about the sense of temporality in New World cities expressed by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his book Tristes Tropiques (1955). More specifically, Veloso had in mind this passage: “Some mischievous spirit has defined America as a country which has moved from barbarism to decadence without enjoying any intermediary phase of civilization. The formula could more correctly be applied to the towns of the New World, which pass from freshness to decay without ever being simply old.” Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Eng. trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, 1973 (reprint ed. Penguin Books, 2012), 118. 14. Severo Sarduy reflected on the relationship between Baroque language and eroticism in his book Escrito sobre um corpo. The Baroque has the very qualities of excess and expenditure, each its own justification, that characterize eroticism. In the Baroque, language deviates from its natural purpose, communication, just as in eroticism, sex deviates from its purpose of reproduction. Sarduy writes, “This obsessive repetition of a useless thing (as it no longer has access to the ideal of work) is what determines the Baroque as play, as opposed to the classical work that is designated as work. The inevitable exclamation that all Baroque acts elicit, whether in painting or confection—‘What work!’—masks a poorly disguised adjective: What lost work. What a waste, what effort for no purpose. Here the superego of Homo faber, who exists for work, declares itself as against delight, the voluptuousness of gold, happiness, unfolding, pleasure. Play, loss, waste, and pleasure: that is, eroticism as an activity that is always ludic, never more than a parody of the function of reproduction, a transgression of the utilitarian, of the dialogue of our ‘natural’ bodies.” Sarduy, Escrito sobre um corpo (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979), 77. Translated from the Portuguese by Sheila Faria Glaser. 15. Glissant uses the term “traces” to talk about the condition of African migrants who arrive despoiled of everything, of every possibility, even of their language. Given this condition, the migrant, according to Glissant, “reconstructs, on the basis of traces, a language and forms of art that one could say are valid for everyone. . . . Trace thought seems to me to be a new dimension that in the current state of the world we must set in opposition to what I call ‘systematic thought’ or systems of thought.” Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, 7. 16. Ibid., 37. On the difference between a single root and a rhizome, Glissant writes, “Because in fact that is what is at stake here: a sublime and deadly idea that the peoples of Europe and Western cultures have exported around the world, i.e. that every identity is a root-identity exclusive of all others. This view of identity is opposed to the idea, ‘real’ today in composite cultures, of identity as factor and result of a creolization: that is, of identity as rhizome, identity no longer a single root, but a root reaching out to other roots.” Ibid., 11.

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When the artist Dan Colen fell in love with a piece of land in upstate New York, he thought it would be a place to escape the city. Nearly a decade later, the fruits of Sky High Farm have inspired Colen’s artistic process, as well as feeding thousands of New Yorkers without access to fresh produce and meats. Derek Blasberg sat down with Colen to ask how one of New York’s former bad boys embraced the farmer’s life.

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DEREK BLASBERG Where are you?

I just got back to the farm. I went to the city yesterday so I could vote and I couldn’t wait to get back up here. DB Presumably, 2020 was the most time you’ve ever spent at the farm. DC Yes, definitely. The farm’s mission has been given a new level of attention against the backdrop of the covid pandemic and Black Lives Matter and the social-justice uprising. Food justice has become a consistent part of the news cycle, which has made it easier for me to engage and broaden our audience and support network. I’m grateful for the time I’ve gotten to spend up here—my connection to the farm has definitely deepened. DB Let’s start with the basics. Where is the farm and how long have you been there? DC It’s on the border of Dutchess and Columbia counties in the Hudson Valley. In 2002 I spent the summer upstate, finishing my first show ever, which was at Rivington Arms on the Lower East Side. Nearly ten years later, leading up to my first big show with Gagosian, I went back upstate to finish the work for that show. I realized how vital these experiences were to the development of my work, so after I installed the show I immediately started looking for property here. I moved in 2011. DB You bought it as an artist’s space, which is much different from what it is now: a fully functioning, working farm that provides fresh produce DAN COLEN

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and meats to underserved New Yorkers. How did that transition happen in the past ten years? DC Ha. . . . It’s still an artist’s space, but it’s true I came up here intending to build a much more conventional artist’s studio. Zero thought of farming, zero interest in farming, no farming fantasy, no actual experience, nothing. I came up here to disconnect from the city and build a sculpture shop, but very quickly the land felt like it wasn’t fulfilling its purpose. It felt stagnant in a way I didn’t expect. I’d come north with a fantasy of communing with the landscape; the reality was much different. Concurrently, I had started making a little more money than I needed for the first time in my life. Going from having so little to feeling the excess in a very short period of time was jarring, and my instincts led me to seek out a way to give back. DB And you knew you wanted to do something with farming and food? DC Well, no. I have a close friend (who now sits on the board of the farm) who worked in public health and HIV education in Africa and Asia, and I asked him if I could go there and get involved. But he made it clear that I had nothing to offer them on the ground! DB Ha! DC At the same time, I started learning about communities with little to no access to fresh food, the same communities that the farm now works with, communities so close to where I grew

up—actually so close to everyone in the city, no matter what neigborhood you live in. I started imagining what it would mean to activate the land, and at the same time started brainstorming with farmers I was meeting. Unknowingly, unwittingly, through them I started to meet people in food justice. I began absorbing bits and pieces of information. DB And then you saw a path? DC Yeah, I guess I saw a path, but I couldn’t see far down it, I was learning about it one step at a time. I think it’s important to be clear that when I started the farm I had no fucking clue what I was doing. At all. In terms of farming or in terms of food justice. The path only became clearer as I took action and moved forward. DB “Food justice” is the term we use to describe the work being done to combat inequities in the food system. There are parts of New York and other cities where young people are raised on deli food, like soda pop, processed sugars, high-fructose corn syrup, and that kind of stuff, right? DC Yeah. There are communities that have no access to supermarkets or to any fresh food at all. It’s a food apartheid, a term referring to the phenomenon of these communities that have been systemically cut off from access to nutritious food. I knew so little going into this but I’ve been able to have amazing learning experiences along the way. We live in a world that is full of inequity; I’ve

Previous spread: Lexie Smith planting Sky High’s first wheat field Opposite: Linda Goode Bryant and the Project EATS team on a farm visit helping to harvest the food they will take to the city for their food-box program This page: Sky High Farm team: Ora Wise, executive director, Jonathan Wilson, farm director, and Dan Colen, founder and board president

Following spread: Jenny Holzer’s Sky High Farm T-Shirt, “YOU WANT TO LIVE,” 2021

learned how fundamental food is to oppression. Without a healthy diet, you don’t have a fair chance at anything. It’s like housing, it’s like education, it’s like health care—well, it is health care. A lot of Sky High’s work has to do with acknowledging that, and with trying to create a new model that can effect policy changes in farming and public health. We don’t talk enough about the externalities that affect the oppressed. The type of food that’s generally offered bears the marks of these degrading effects. Public health isn’t the only thing that suffers; issues around land justice and government subsidies and policies are directly related to the same root issue. DB Bad diet certainly impacts health concerns such as diabetes, obesity, and that sort of thing. DC Yes. And we know that small-scale farming is much better for the earth and its people. Critics will say it’s too expensive, but hello? So much money gets spent on treating the symptoms and the results instead of the cause. There needs to be more consideration from a policy standpoint of the intersection of farming and health care. Over 300 new policies have focused on food over the last ten years, yet the diabetes numbers haven’t changed at all. Something is clearly not working. DB One of my favorite days with you was when you and I delivered Citymeals on Wheels after Hurricane Sandy washed out downtown New York in 2012.

That was an amazing day. It definitely shaped my relationship to the farm’s work. What I remember most is that the people we were bringing food to were totally isolated. They were so happy to see us and we sort of had a peek into their worlds. What was most special about that day is that it was serendipitous. We didn’t actually make a plan, it just kind of happened. You had worked with the organization for years already, but I wasn’t supposed to be there, and then it was this beautiful experience that shaped how I saw the city. DB I never thought about it like that, but I’m incredibly flattered if I had anything to do with the good works you’re doing now. DC In the last two years I’ve met so many people, partners and collaborators, through the farm. These relationships have been so inspiring and have all helped to expand my perspective. For a long time, I felt like, How do I parse out enough time to focus on the farm and enough time to focus on the studio? Then I remembered what I always knew: that the true gift of being an artist is that we don’t have to define ourselves in those terms. In fact, I see it as my goal as an artist to constantly redefine myself and shift gears. The farm has become a fluid part of my practice. Taking down some of the barriers between these compartments in my life has been energizing. DB What were the f irst few things that you planted or raised? DC

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When I first started, and didn’t know what I was doing, I basically built a petting zoo. I loved the first animals we bought and we named them, which meant of course we couldn’t use them as livestock. We still have all those animals, basically, they’re kind of moseying around at the field. Also, I got hustled a few times by farmers who could smell the city on me. I was sold a “young pregnant donkey” that ended up being a decrepit, old, not pregnant, and sterile donkey for a high price. Her name is Joy and she’s like the mayor of Sky High— in retrospect I guess we actually got her for a bargain, she’s been the heart of the farm for the last ten years. DB I don’t smell any city on you anymore. DC For sure, that’s gone. We planted a halfacre garden, which is where it really started. We jammed so much in there: lettuce and asparagus and corn and strawberries and cucumbers. Then I brought in some new farmers, Joey and Abbey, who were tireless, relentless, and beyond dedicated. That’s when things began falling into place. DB What were some lessons you learned with those first few plantings? DC I knew nothing—I learned so much from the farmers I brought on. Farmers are very special, they are all so unique. Sky High has had three head farmers in the last ten years; my dialogues with each of them have been some of the most fulfilling moments. Being in dialogue with people who are so connected to the life cycles, the season cycles, who understand diseases, remedies, insects . . . people who are so intimately connected to growing and protecting life, and to the inevitability of death and the delicacy and beauty of the natural cycle of life—to be connected to them has changed me. The art world is a funny place, I’ve been able to meet so many special people in it, but it has its limits and the worlds of food justice and farming having opened me up to new experiences. In these last few months I’ve allowed my involvement in all these different worlds to collide, which has been a real gift. DB Has it been difficult to be a part-time artist and a part-time philanthropic farmer? DC I had a dilemma about that for a time but I’ve learned to let that conflict go. Now, I assume I’m always in my process, my experiences in these different worlds inform one another, and that feels awesome. My relationship to the land, the farm’s mission, and my studio practice continue to evolve but they all feel fluid. It’s funny, people have an easier time associating some things with art than others. Something like craft has always been linked to creativity, but as much as I personally love craft, it’s not what I equate with artistic progress, it’s not my focus—I’m not interested so much in mastery. Artists constantly explore new frameworks and try out new lenses through which to see their creative process. Caravaggio used new aesthetics and thematic modes, Andy Warhol used popular culture, Donald Judd used manufacturing. They pushed boundaries of accepted modes of making, all in service of the same ultimate goal I have as an artist: questioning hierarchies. Obviously, a social-justice practice can cut to the heart of questioning power structures, too. But in a similar way to spirituality, it’s kind of a dirty word in art. Both castrate the ego and subvert the individual; they suggest that artists are not authorities. I think that’s hard for an audience to accept, given the myth of the “great artist.” DB When you started the farm, did you think that would happen eventually? DC

When I started the farm there was no grand plan, but it wasn’t a flimsy thought either. I never know the right word to describe it—somewhere between a whim and an inspiration. I had no clear or specific intention at the outset, I did no research, I had no prior relevant education or experience. It was just an idea and I believed in it enough to start building it. DB I like that. DC The farm came to be through a creative process in the same way I’ve always made things: I get an idea in my head and I decide whether I want to invest my energy in that idea. I have to trust the process and to let the idea be a catalyst for something else. When we delivered meals after Hurricane Sandy, the farm’s first harvest, the first calf being born—through all these years I could never have imagined where all that would lead me. As I look back, I see it as no different from any other kind of artwork that I’ve made. My art practice has always been about exploration—the thread is conceptual or maybe spiritual, but the material, forms, and themes have always been diverse and searching. I’ve come to see the farm seamlessly within my art trajectory. DB What works remind you of farming? DC I think Nest [2007], an artwork I made with Dash [Snow] and that I see as among both of our most important works, shares similarities with the farm. When we were originally doing it, I didn’t see it as art at all. Art is a process that relies on the tension between doubt and faith. As artists we’re trying to make something new, or at least redefine things to allow for new experiences and insights. I’m always searching for where the art is located, whether it’s in the art object or in the mind of the audience as they walk away from the object. What’s the source of the art, and how and where it can be contained, are questions I’m always asking myself. The farm has become a central part of that investigation. DB I think there’s a deeper connection between Nest and the farm, and between who you were then and who you are now. I might not be philosophical enough to explain it, though. DC There’s definitely an interesting relationship between Nest and the farm and what makes me tick. I think it’s important to acknowledge that art is meant to be indefinable. Art is meant to break definition and to break its own boundaries and to find new space and new form and new territory. What is or isn’t art is always the question. Our job is to try to suggest new possibilities for what it can be. The world changes and we change in it. The farm has opened up new possibilities for me to explore these constant developments. So much has changed about my life since Nest but so much is the same. Both projects are about trying to love the people around us and to take part in creating a shared experience. Nest was about a very beautiful world that I cherish, but the possibilities seem much bigger now. I guess, if anything, considering Nest and the farm together helps me see what’s consistent in me. Fundamentally I don’t believe I’ve changed—I was crazy then and I’m crazy now. The difference is just that I’ve learned that I can focus my energies, and I’ve decided to put them somewhere different. DB What’s next for the farm? DC We’ve recently started a new chapter. In August 2020 the farm registered as a 501(c)(3) [an IRS category designating it as a tax-exempt charity]. We have a board of directors and are building out a more robust team, bringing together a group DC

of inspiring and passionate people. I believe the role we play at the intersection of food justice and regenerative farming is unique and desperately needed. We remain focused on the immediate and urgent needs of the communities we work with by continuing to bring to them the highest-quality local fresh produce and meat. We’re now also looking at the bigger picture: creating programming that will help to build out community wealth and infrastructure. Through building more intimate, meaningful, and collaborative relationships and a participatory research component, we hope to play a role in effecting system change. We’re working with Bard Prison Initiative to create a new fellowship program, and we’ve been putting a lot of energy into building our brand, from which the funds raised will be used to purchase food from a handful of partner farms with aligned missions and practices. This aggregated product will constitute our new weekly foodbox program, launching in 2022. Most important, we plan to spend more time in dialogue with community members and partner orgs to learn more about what’s truly needed so we can be more and more impactful in our role in overcoming injustice in the food system. DB You mentioned the Sky High merch, which I love. DC I’ve been working with Dover Street Market in New York and creating, for lack of a better word, a brand for the farm. It’s in its infancy but we hope to create a new charitable model, new ways of creating awareness, advocacy, and fundraising. I think we can change stereotypes about the nonprofit world and in doing so play a role in bringing about a new generation of donors and activists. We created the first collection with a group of streetwear designers who I have a lot of respect for, and who I think are in sync with the farm’s mission. We’re now preparing to release an ambitious artist apparel project, followed by a collaborative food project and fashion collaborations. In Febuary 2022 we officially launch our workwear line at the Dover Street Market in Paris with a Spring/Summer 2022 collection that will be distributed globally. I want to work in this boundless territory. I see art as my priority, but I trust that these other projects are informing that process. I have to trust that the farm as an idea has played a vital role in my creative process and will continue to shape the trajectory of my artistic practice. I believe that deeply. DB It’s awesome that you’ve had this clarity at a time when the world can feel so unsure. DC covid, BLM, and the social-justice uprising have offered the general public a lot of clarity into the work we’ve been doing. Although we are going into our tenth season, it feels like there’s more potential then ever for real impact. The world seems more ready to prioritize things like food justice and I see more and more creativity entering the realm of justice work. I think there’s a lot of potential when these things blend together.

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LIGHT & LIGHTNING 174

In this second installment of a two-part essay, John Elderfield resumes his investigation of Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field (1977), focusing this time on how the hope to see lightning there has led to the work’s association with the Romantic conception of the sublime.

WONDER-REACTIONS AT WALTER DE MARIA’S THE LIGHTNING FIELD 175

Previous spread: Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977, long-term installation, western New Mexico. Artwork © Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: John Cliett, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York, and © Estate of Walter De Maria Opposite: San Estevan Del Rey Mission Church at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico. Photo: Smith Collection/Gado, courtesy Getty Images

Romanticism is where the modern age began, and its sublime light has often been observed to be shining from The Lightning Field, Walter De Maria’s installation of 400 highly polished stainless steel poles set in a huge grid on a remote site in New Mexico. The frequency with which visitors have spoken of the work as sublime or transcendental has been encouraged by the extensive literature that has grown up on “paths to the absolute” in modernist art—stretching the heritage of Romanticism into the early twentieth century, then down through Abstract Expressionism to land ar t, the movement in which this, De Maria’s most important work, belongs.1 But is The Lightning Field’s Minimalism a modern version of Romanticism as such interpretations imply?

The Wayside Chapel A 1947 essay by the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rot hko beg ins, “T he Romant ics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.” True enough; but there has long been an association between the distant and the transcendental. And Rothko himself, who claimed that “pictures must be miraculous” and deliver a “religious experience,” spoke of wanting people to go to a far-off place to see his work: alone in “a kind of wayside chapel, not one in the city where you could just drop in, but more out of the way, a destination outside the city.”2 This was far from a new idea within Romanticism. Peter Brown, the great scholar of Christianity in the late-antique world, has explained that the cult of the 176

saints required that their remains be placed outside the walls of the city, a practice eventually leading to the creation of relic-rich shrines that became the object of pilgrimages, often to far-off places.3 In words that reverberate for our experience of The Lightning Field as well as for Rothko’s desired wayside chapel, Brown speaks of how the “therapy of distance” created by a long pilgrimage carefully maintained tension between distance and proximity. This, he said, “ensured praesentia, the physical presence of the holy . . . the greatest blessing that a late-antique Christian could enjoy.”4 An imposing example of a place of pilgrimage lies about halfway between The Lightning Field and Albuquerque, its closest city—namely, the San Estevan Del Rey Mission Church at Acoma Pueblo, a National Historic Landmark and one of the longest continuously-occupied buildings in the North American subcontinent. The relative proximity of the two extraordinary structures is telling. It invites us to ponder the Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s admonition that we be conscious of “the accuracy with which similitude in dissimilitude and dissimilitude in similitude are perceived.”5 Both sites confirm that there is a persistent place for pilgrimage in a secularized society, but Acoma Pueblo has been surrendered to destination culture and the “place-based marketing” of cultural tourism. The Lightning Field, guarded by the Dia Art Foundation and following De Maria’s instructions, has been fortified against it. 6 This is ironic insofar as the former resembles a fortress and the latter is transparently open. And while they similarly maintain a tension between distance and proximity as you approach them in the New Mexican desert, they do so in dissimilar ways. The 35-foot-high seventeenth-century adobe church perches atop the 357-foot-high mesa that supports Sky City, a

traditional Acoma Pueblo settlement, visible from even a long distance. The Lightning Field cannot be seen until you arrive there after a long journey, and even then is at first all but invisible under the glare of even a cloudy early-afternoon sky. But then you arrive into a light, open field. In contrast, entering the church, you at first seem plunged into near darkness owing to the paucity of the small windows in the almost ten-foot-thick walls.7 The church and the Field continue to respond to each other in similar-and-dissimilar ways; which is to say, the meanings of The Lightning Field gain focus in the work’s comparison to the ancient place of worship. They are similar in the obvious dissimilarity of both to the Gothic wayside chapels favored by Romantic painters: the church is a hybrid of Spanish-colonial and Puebloan styles; the Field is a distant descendant of a colonnaded classical temple. Materially they differ utterly: the massive church was built of stuff from the locality—sandstone, clay, and straw for the walls, together with ponderosa pines from Mount Taylor, twenty-five miles away, for the forty-foot-long vigas, or beams, that support the roof some fifty feet above the nave— about twice the height of The Lightning Field. As such, it is the church that patently constitutes a realization of De Maria’s statement about the Field: “The land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work.”8 The church has the character of a solid citadel rising miraculously from the stone of the mesa, whereas the rows of steel poles composing De Maria’s work, manufactured in New York and New Jersey, rise out of the rough and irregular desert floor to produce a contrast between the work and the land. Nonetheless, the Field does fulfill its creator’s claim, for it has atavistic agrarian associations. Adjacent to it is the refurbished log cabin where

visitors stay overnight, a product of the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave tracts of land to citizens who were required to “improve” them by building a dwelling there and by cultivating crops or grazing animals. And, as explained in part 1 of this essay (Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2021), walking into the Field you are conscious of the age of the land, of its impediment to moving quickly through it, and of how difficult it had to be to plant clean rows in such a terrain. Drawing attention to the massive amount of posthole digging it took to site the Field’s 400 poles, literary scholar Christopher D. Campbell has pointed to the work’s possible influence on the enigmatic epilogue of Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian. This speaks of “a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground,” trailed by wanderers who “move haltingly in the light,” following “one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it.”9 Needless to say, The Lightning Field was constructed in no way like this; indeed, a charming “toys-for-boys” photograph shows a grinning De Maria seated on the massive auger truck from Holco, Inc., Albuquerque, that drilled the holes. 10 Still, the association summons consciousness of an ancient landscape once worked with rudimentary tools, an image that seems appropriate to the Field when you trudge through it on an uncomfortably, even blazingly hot day, pondering the sequence and causality of the poles. Going through the Field in bad weather is even worse, since you have to navigate your way across the broken ground, and up and down the mounds

and hollows, of a patch of desert whose ground elevation varies by more than eleven feet. Where the Mission Church is inspiring to visit in all weathers because of its sturdy, elevated setting, our experience of the Field varies enormously owing to the openness of the site to the weather and to the highly porous ground on which it is built. This drains slowly in downpours, especially in its lower sections—as critic Kenneth Baker learned when visiting the site in February 1978. He had been told that mud would be part of the experience, but was not prepared for the vast pools of it that forced him continually to revise his path through the Field: “Meanwhile great braids of mud accumulate around the soles of my boots, making every step more difficult until they fall off of their own weight and new ones begin to form.”11 In the words of a fifth-century bishop quoted by Brown on the siting of early pilgrimage shrines, “Nulla est religio in stagno”—There can be no religion in a swamp.12

The Aeolian Harp If the Field does not offer a conventional religious experience, what about the transcendental in Romanticism to which Rothko referred? “It is only with the advent of Romanticism that the literary act came to be conceived as a sort of raid on the absolute and its result a revelation,” observed Jacques Rivière, a prominent French man of letters of the period immediately following World War I.13 Recalling these words in 1940, the modernist T. S. Eliot bemoaned, “And so each venture / Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling / Undisciplined squads of emotion.”14 This was the problem—and is

the problem in thinking in terms of succession from Romanticism old to new. For instance, we cannot imagine De Maria speaking as Rothko did of his art communicating squads of emotion, “tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on,” and claiming that “lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures” as a result.15 Nonetheless, words are not deeds. The impact of Romanticism did produce among many modern artists what now seems to be a “general mess of imprecision” by turning on the hot tap of emotion. Clement Greenberg was indubitably correct in saying that “the hard-headed, sober, ‘cold’ side of Modernism . . . part of what makes it react against Romanticism,” produced its finest achievements. 16 Hence, while Rothko intended his paintings to produce a highly emotional reaction, the means of his doing so were coldly calculated. They involved the creation of a pictorial performance in the picture plane that appears to f loat on or forward of the literal surface of the painting, which then appears to expand or contract in a viewer’s temporal perception of a work. 17 The effect is of a disembodied light situated in an unlocatable space, as the literal experience of a painting gives way to a virtual one. This is analogous to how one’s experience of The Lightning Field is driven by the perceptual activity that De Maria programmed it to deliver in the hard-headed, sober, cold manner that shows in its construction. In part 1 of this essay, I observed that when touching the poles on a windy day, one both feels and hears a vibration; and I quoted Baker saying that at the poles’ brightest, they become “beams of dazzling light that pierce the air like tones. … I can hardly believe it doesn’t disturb the wide silence of the plain.”18 The increase in energy experienced from this intensification of light is also transmitted through other senses, in the bipolarity of touch and 177

by being heard; and visual attention, too, can have the quality of a sort of listening. In 1946, before Rothko became the Rothko we know, he made a painting that, as art historian David Anfam points out in his catalogue raisonné, has “stretched across its center, a horizontal band of three parallel red lines that suggest nothing so much as the strings of an Aeolian harp”—a reading reflecting the painting’s title, Aeolian Harp/No. 7. Anfam was interested in how this feature reveals the artist’s “painterly metamorphoses” of objects in such transitional works. 19 We may be more interested in the object itself. The Aeolian harp, lute, or lyre, as it is variously known, usually comprises a long narrow box with a sound hole and ten to twelve strings strung lengthwise between two bridges. It is meant to be placed on a windowsill, or kept outside, where the play of the wind across it will produce sound. Described by one scholar as “that favorite Romantic toy,” it appears in the poetry of Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among others, the “music” produced by the wind f lowing through the strings being understood to deliver nature’s transcendent powers autonomously to the listener. 20 Moreover, as a vehicle for transmitting the improvisations of nature itself, it could, for the Romantic poet, represent the involuntary motivation of the creative act, in which the poet, as Wordsworth put it describing his commerce with the moods of the natural world, is “obedient as a lute / That waits upon the touches of the wind.”21 Let us leave aside the superficial visual similarity between the taut strings of the Aeolian harp and the poles of The Lightning Field. More important here is how Rothko’s mature paintings, which after 1948 rarely contain stringlike elements, 22 were nonetheless conceived as functioning like that “Romantic 178

toy” in delivering an experience of the transcendental to their viewers. De Maria’s work has been thought to do the same. The reflective poles of the Field, polished to the highest degree possible for stainless steel used outdoors, produce constantly changing images of whatever is around them on the earth and in the sky. 23 This, together with the changing heard and felt vibrations that they deliver, is not so distant from the function of the Aeolian harp of Romanticism and its autonomous delivery of nature’s transformational powers. But what about voices from outer space? Not far east of The Lightning Field on US Route 60, Jodie Foster heard signals from the Vega star system at the Very Large Array, a component of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, where scenes of the 1997 film Contact were shot. Construction on the Very Large Array began in 1972, the first of its twenty-eight antennas was installed in 1975, and it was completed in 1980 as the largest configuration of radio telescopes in the world. It was, therefore, begun before and built contemporaneously with The Lightning Field. The antennas, massive radio telescopes with dishes 82 feet in diameter, are distributed along the three, thirteen-mile-long arms of a Y-shaped track, which can hardly be missed since at one point it intersects with US Route 60 at a level crossing. To add to this association, the artist Terry Winters, who assisted De Maria in the construction of The Lightning Field, tells us that in early December of 1977, after the Field was completed, he went with De Maria to New York’s Ziegfeld Theatre to see on its big screen the newly released Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “The experience,” he recalls, “was uncanny—funny overlaps of sculptural obsession, the American West, and astronomical wonders.”24

I think it is fair to see these funny, uncanny overlaps in The Lightning Field itself. And let us not forget that in 1976, the year before the Field was built, David Bowie was The Man Who Fell to Earth in the movie of that title directed by Nicolas Roeg, and the region of the earth onto which Bowie fell was—as of course it had to be—the New Mexico desert. Conversely, Baker, whom I mentioned earlier, said to himself, “Being here is like being on another planet!”25

The Romantic Sublime Baker then qualified his statement, saying that his exclamation “really expresses an unaccustomed consciousness of being on this planet, on being on a planet at all.”26 De Maria originally called his creation the “Mile-Long Lightning Field”; 27 the title he ultimately gave it leaves it to us to discover the area of space on the earth of the planet that it occupies. John Beardsley, one of the many writers about The Lightning Field, observes that “at all times the piece is an experience in the demarcation of space, referring through the use of the mile and the kilometer to the manner in which much of the earth has been divided and brought under human sovereignty.”28 Similarly, Baker writes that “the poles calibrate the space of the plain in a manner that links pictorial perspective conventions and the modern Western mania for appropriating and subduing the earth.”29 Such interpretations have led some critics to claim that the poles have a bellicose appearance, one suggesting that they are “elegant, potentially lethal forms [that] stir associations to high-tech weaponry and its ancestry of spear, dart, and arrow . . . [and] conf late symbolism of weapons and the human figure to evoke a vision of society as a war

179

of each against all.”30 Another remarks that their situation only 200 miles from Los Alamos invites us to see them as “modern tapering missiles pointed into an unsuspecting sky, constructed just over two years after the fall of Saigon, in the feverish midst of the Cold War.”31 While De Maria was certainly interested in danger—of which more in a moment— imagining the poles as modern weapons to be launched into the sky is difficult to align with their function of representing the earth below and the sky above them. As for earth brought under human sovereignty, it hardly needs saying that the Field makes reference to this condition. It is itself the most recent of a succession of landscape colonizations of its particular site, ranging from that of the earliest indigenous peoples, through America’s annexation of lands from Mexico, to the recipients of that parcel of land through the Homestead Act.32 Moreover, though it may seem a minor point, the Field is not precisely one mile by one kilometer in size; and I think we should be wary of saying that anything about this artist’s work is insignificant. De Maria himself was precise, writing, “The Lightning Field measures one mile by one kilometer and six meters (5,280 feet by 3,300 feet).”33 One kilometer and six meters, the modern French metric dimension, is as close to one kilometer as was possible when the old Roman/English system of measurement governed the distance between the poles (220 feet). It may be too much to imagine that the slight mismatch of the two systems is a reminder of the near impossibility of agreement upon the divisions through which the earth has been brought under human sovereignty. At the Field itself, it is an unnoticed acceptance of an inevitable incompatibility— unnoticed because the power of the continually changing whole, transmitted by changes of light on 180

the poles, overrides it. And our experience of nature behaving autonomously in so vivid a manner tells us—in words not written about The Lightning Field, by the philosopher Stanley Cavell—of “the release of nature from our private holds,” adding, “No doubt such art will not repeal the enclosure acts, but it seeks to annul . . . our attachments to enclosure. It reasserts that however we may choose to parcel or not parcel nature among ourselves, nature is held— we are held by it—only in common.”34 And one of the lessons of the Field is that nature is ultimately beyond our control. As we shall see, this is partly a consequence of De Maria’s preoccupation with danger and vast spaces; but it is readily noticed as the appearance of the Field changes in response to changes in the lightness of the sky. De Maria insisted that “because the sky-ground relationship is central to the work, viewing The Lightning Field from the air is of no value.”35 The “sky-ground relationship” is at its most dramatic, of course, when lightning occurs. “Did you see lightning?” is the first question you are asked when you tell someone you have visited The Lightning Field. As Kathleen Shields, a longtime manager of aspects of the site, has observed, it is what people hope to see: “The desire to witness lightning’s spectacular discharge of this energy, combined with the awareness of its force and the peril it poses, aligns with a commonly held romantic notion of the sublime.”36 This brings us to the term “the sublime,” with which the present text began. It goes back even beyond the Roman Long inus’s foundational first-century ad essay “On the Sublime,” but its importance to this context is that it became fundamental to Romanticism through the treatises of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, of 1747 and 1790 respectively.37 Although Kant had a reservation about the term, as we shall learn, and while it

was not without its early detractors, who famously dubbed it just a step from the ridiculous, it has long passed into the vernacular to mean the affectingly spectacular.38 For both Burke and Kant, however, the sublime had two defining characteristics: it described a “vastness” or “magnitude” whose extent was impossible to grasp, and it was “fearful” in its effect, as opposed to the calming influence of the “beautiful.” As mentioned earlier, De Maria was interested in both danger and vast spaces. Without making reference to the sublime, one or the other of these attributes of it appears in notes and drawings he made around 1960, had become an obsession by a decade later, and were of critical importance to The Lightning Field. By 1972 he was envisaging the creation of “a vast spatial experience.”39 This would be created by the effects of light upon the Field. Earlier, in 1969, his interest in the fearful had led to Time magazine dubbing him the “High Priest of Danger.”40 In the Field, danger would be created by lightning. Announcing the completed Field in Artforum in April 1980, De Maria wrote that “The Lightning Field began in the form of a note, following the completion of The Bed of Spikes in spring 1969.”41 That sculpture had appeared in his exhibition Danger, at the Dwan Gallery, New York, in the year of its making; and it was definitely a dangerous work. Burke wrote, “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain and danger . . . is a source of the sublime.”42 The Bed was so fitted. Not only might you accidentally fall on the spikes, but naming it a bed was also an invitation to try it out. 43 The art historian James Nesbit learned that, while working on this sculpture, De Maria wrote, “I am trying to understand . . . the relationship between Danger—Time—Pleasure,” and told a journalist that “if there’s no danger, then the meaning

Previous spread, left: Friedrich Schultes, woodcut of an Aeolian harp, or Windharfe, 1684. Photo: courtesy Deutsche Fotothek Previous spread, right: The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, Socorro, New Mexico

of the piece isn’t there.”44 Had anyone still doubted that danger was on De Maria’s mind, in 1960 he published a short text, “On the Importance of Natural Disasters,” which included the statements, “I like natural disasters and I think they may be the highest form of art possible to experience,” and “If all the people who go to museums could just feel an earthquake.”45 This unamiable suggestion appears to have led him to ask himself, What if people could just feel a bolt of lightning—or at least see one? In searching for a site for The Lightning Field, De Maria insisted that it must have “high lightning activity.”46 In commissioning John Cliett to photograph the Field, he requested that images with lightning be among those taken; this required obtaining a high-speed camera trigger designed by nasa to study lightning at Florida’s Cape Canaveral launch site, 47 and half of the eight Cliett photographs De Maria selected for publication with his Artforum statement show lightning on or around the Field. 48 On the other hand, he had privileged ref lectivity over conductivity—light over lightning—in his choice of the type of metal for the poles: the commonly used, extremely reflective, type-304, austenitic stainless steel, which is not very magnetic and a relatively poor conductor of electricity. 49 Had he wanted to encourage lightning strikes, aluminum and, better still, copper would have been preferable. Contrary to the assumption produced by the photographs, instances of lightning around the Field are uncommon, and of lighting actually striking the poles rarer still. De Maria did state in the Artforum piece, “The light is as important as the lightning.”50 Publication of the lightning photographs in Artforum, and then in other publications and on Dia’s own website, opened a Pandora’s box in the reception of the Field: insofar as they encouraged an understanding of the work as excitingly dangerous

that was unlikely to conform to visitors’ experience, their proliferation came to worry both the artist and the foundation.51 Dia subsequently removed such photographs from its site and added the statement, “A full experience of The Lightning Field does not depend upon the occurrence of lightning.”52 Nonetheless, when lightning does occur, the experience may be enjoyed from the porch of the log cabin. As Kant wrote of lightning, thunderclaps, and volcanoes, “The sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place.”53

The Classical Sublime The critic Jon Cook makes two important observations on the sublime within Romanticism. First: “From a historical distance the sublime can seem the invention of a culture which wanted to feel more secure by frightening itself.”54 We may want to ask ourselves whether a hope to see lightning in the Field also has that motivation. Second: speaking of the second characteristic of the Romantic sublime that I mentioned earlier, an object’s vastness or magnitude whose extent is impossible to grasp, Cook suggests that “it renewed the mystique of art, allocating to it the privilege and burden of expressing the inexpressible, at a time when there was considerable concern that art was losing its value by becoming a commodity in the market-place, subject to a commercial organization of production and consumption.”55 Similar claims were made of some land art created earlier than The Lightning Field, effectively back-projecting such work into the aesthetics of landscape design in Burke’s eighteenth century, not only to the “sublime” but also to the “picturesque,” halfway between the sublime and the beautiful.56

Opposite: Walter De Maria, Beds of Spikes, 1968–69, stainless steel, five sculptures, each spike: 10 5⁄8 × 1 × 1 inch (27 × 2.5 × 2.5 cm); each plate: 2 5⁄8 × 78 ¾ × 41 ¾ inches (6.5 × 200 × 106 cm); each sculpture, overall: 13 ¼ × 78 ¾ × 41 ¾ inches (33.5 × 200 × 106 cm), Kunstmuseum Basel. Artwork © Estate of Walter De Maria

In 1968, just before De Maria began conceiving The Lightning Field, critic Sidney Tillim complained in Artforum of the “overcultivation” and “sentimental” understanding of nature implicit in such land art and its interpretation.57 Whether or not De Maria read this essay—we may presume that he did—his work firmly distinguishes itself from what Tillim called the “New Picturesque.” One way in which the Field escapes any nostalgic compensatory thrust against the incursions of the commercial is that it is a patently modern, industrial construction. I suspect that only those who know that stainless steel was invented in 1913, and first employed for building construction in the 1920s, would even vaguely associate the material of the 400 shining poles with the Art Deco structures for which it was soon widely used. In any event, it is unsurprising that one source of the sublime for Burke has been unanimously disregarded by those who have written about the Field: that “the effects of a rugged and broken surface seem stronger than where it is smooth and polished.”58 Experience of walking within the Field, however, shows that these two kinds of effects seem even stronger when juxtaposed, as they are by the broken ground and the polished poles sited on it. Many observers have remarked on a contrast between the smooth and polished poles “inside” the Field and the rugged and broken surface “outside” it. These two zones have been said to be, respectively, ordered and disordered, cultivated and wild, a plantation and a plain, a fold and a field. These contrasts speak broadly of culture and nature—as does speaking of “inside” and “outside” at all. De Maria’s siting of the Field on an open, uncultivated expanse encourages—and disputes— these antithetical readings, which may be summarized by one critic’s statement that stepping outside 181

Left: Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (Fontainebleau?), c. 1897, oil on canvas, 32 × 25 ¾ inches (81.3 × 65.4 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Collection. Digital image: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York

Right: Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Tree Hit by Lightning, 1651, oil on canvas, 39 × 52 inches (99 × 132 cm), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York

the grid “creates an immediate discomfort, a yearning to return to the fold, to the ‘civilized’ space of the field itself.”59 I am far from sure that the return produces unallayed comfort: it can be bewildering “inside,” and this complicates one’s wonderreaction at The Lightning Field. “Bewilderment” originally meant being led astray, lured into the wilds. As experienced “inside” the Field, it is an alertness to the wildness of nature that is normally “outside” but is now beneath your feet. The encounter is choreographed by the continuing and continuous spatial displacement of the poles as you walk through the Field, which, as I explained in part 1 of this essay, makes it easy for you to stray from the straight and narrow. But finding and losing your own sense of symmetry and order within the work’s symmetry and order is integral to the narrative that De Maria designed. Losing your way within the Field can be unsettling, but it is not the panic we imagine in the familiar “wild wood” of northern landscape painting and children’s fiction, or of a scene like that in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, set in Muir Woods, north of San Francisco, and recalling Albert Bierstadt’s “Romantic” big-tree paintings.60 The feeling is far closer to the unsettled response of careful viewers to the “classical” order of impossibly straight, parallel, seemingly ever-immobile pines in Paul Cézanne’s painting of the forest of Fontainebleau at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It is not that all of this seems “against nature,” but rather—and wonderfully—“against what we know of nature,” and therefore of a singularity whose order serves more than a merely formalizing purpose.61 Likewise, being “inside” The Lightning Field is not being in a “civilized” space set “against nature,” which is “outside.” It is a place where wonder may be a situated response to a reminder of 182

the regularity, structure, and order of nature; and where changes within that order produced by the changing light become even more wonder-inducing precisely because they are reflected, literally so, in the ordered structure itself. The scholar Louis Marin used the oxymoron “classical sublime” to refer to the seventeenthcentury painter Nicolas Poussin’s firm control of effects in his paintings of lightning storms constructed around geometrically rigorous clusters of buildings.62 The Lightning Field similarly employs what Marin calls “a ‘formatting’ of space according to a stable and immobile order,” the poles constantly mirroring nature’s autonomously durational changing appearance—and then, like Poussin’s buildings, being instantaneously altered at moments by “re-markings of the effects of the irruption of the sublime,” when lightning strikes, say, or, rather more often, at sunset.63 But those dramatic markings create an effect of gratification, not fearfulness. Visitors may therefore be forgiven for supposing that the Field was built to show how the sublime is, as Kant thought, “almost too much” to comprehend—and has been reserved for those special occasions when lightning does fall.64

The Templum Comparing The Lightning Field to the church at Acoma, I called the Field a distant descendant of a colonnaded classical temple. The largest such temple, the classical scholar Faya Causey tells me, was the Ionic Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, longer than a football field and in one reconstructive plan comprising 100 columns, of which only a portion of a single column remains. We may wonder whether De Maria knew of such a prototype.

In fact, Causey suggests, the sources of the Field may go even further back to the templum of an ancient Etruscan belief system, later incorporated in Roman traditions, about spaces and boundaries.65 The word templum derives from the verb “to cut out,” and the structure was not roofed but an open rectangle, a delineated, inaugurated space marked out—cut out—from the landscape, oriented to the points of the compass, as is The Lightning Field. In this projected transposition of the celestial region, priests observed and interpreted signs, notably lightning, for the bolts were understood as communications from the gods. The section of the sky where the lightning originated was very important, as were the bolts’ physical details. Those looking long and impatiently for lightning at The Lightning Field may well have thought of Waiting for Godot while doing so. More to the point, though, is that the rectangular space of the templum was understood to mirror the space of the heavens where the gods lived, and the priests’ markings of the field to record markings of the sky. Perhaps we may imagine the demarcated ground, as well as the imaginary flat plane of the top of The Lightning Field, as reflections of the celestial realm above. However, if this too is almost too much to comprehend, what is never too much is the continual wonder experienced while viewing the Field—wonder caused by the continual sudden surprises in its appearance, which its classically stable and immobile order has been designed to produce all through the day. In René Descartes’s famous account of the wonder reaction, he stressed that it was “when the first encounter with some object surprises us . . . this makes us wonder and be astonished.”66 De Maria’s great work is a field of many close encounters of this first kind.

1. Three very different arguments are presented in: Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Maurice Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986); and John Golding, Paths to the Absolute (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 2. Mark Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” Possibilities 1 (1947–48): 84; Rothko, quoted in Seldon Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devein-Adair, 1957), 93; Rothko, quoted in James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 376. I discuss these issues in “Transformations,” in Glenn Phillips and Thomas Crow, eds., Seeing Rothko (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005), 101–22. 3. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), esp. chapters 5 and 6; 86–127. 4. Ibid., 86–88, an important extended account of the pilgrimage experience. 5. William Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 1:148. 6. Prior to covid 19, six people could visit The Lightning Field daily from May 1 through October 6; a maximum of 1,104 visitors per year, as compared to the roughly 55,000 per year who visit Acoma. This limited access, along with the constraints on publication of images, is decried in John Beardsley, “Art and Authoritarianism: Walter De Maria’s ‘The Lightning Field,’” October 16 (Spring 1981): 35–38, and more generally in Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 1 (January 1990): 44–63. 7. This experience is also created by the wayside chapel that Rothko did finally get to have built at the Menil Collection in Houston. 8. De Maria, “Some Facts, Notes, Data, Information, Statistics, and Statements,” Artforum 18, no. 8 (April 1980), repr. in Walter De Maria: The Lightning Field (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2017), 17. For additional information on the creation of the Field I am indebted to Elizabeth Childress, director, and Michael Childress, archivist, at the Walter De Maria Archives, and to Helen Fosdick, affiliated with the project from its inception. 9. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 1985, quoted here from 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): 40. Available online at www.cormacmccarthy.com/journal/PDFs/Campbell.pdf (accessed November 30, 2020). 10. See Walter De Maria: The Lightning Field, 10, for the photograph, and 111–13, for Robert Fosdick’s essay “Technical Development of The Lightning Field, 1976–1977.” 11. Kenneth Baker, The Lightning Field (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 14. Dia’s limitation of visits to the Field to the period May 1–October 6 was contrived in order to reduce the likelihood of such experiences. 12. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 125. 13. Jacques Rivière, quoted in T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933 (repr. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 120. 14. Eliot, “Four Quartets: East Coker,” V: 7–11, 1940, repr. in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 1:191; the association with Rivière’s words is noted on 952. 15. Rothko, quoted in Rodman, Conversations with Artists, 93. 16. Clement Greenberg, “Necessity of ‘Formalism,’” in Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, ed. Robert C. Morgan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 47. 17. Rothko spoke of the surfaces of his paintings either expanding or contracting: see Breslin, Mark Rothko, 301. 18. Baker, The Lightning Field, 17. 19. David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas. Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 57, referring to cat. 308. 20. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 51. 21. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805, 3:137–38. Coleridge’s poem “The Eolian Harp” (1795) is commonly cited as the first full exposition of the association, although it does have precedents. An early discussion of this now familiar subject appeared in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, to which its author returned in Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in “Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973). 22. A great exception is No. 5/No. 22 of 1950, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and cat. no. 442 in Anfam, Mark Rothko. 23. I am grateful to Michael Childress of the Walter De Maria Archives for the information that De Maria ordered “Type 304 welded ornamental stainless-steel tubing, 240 grit buffed and polished.” This is a #6 finish, which produces finer directional lines and is more reflective than #4 (the nearest lower number), which is commonly used for dairy and sanitary projects, but not moving into the #7 or #8 finishes, which are more highly reflective but require more maintenance than possible for external uses. Helen Fosdick points out that very little maintenance is required of the Field’s poles, as the weather takes care of the cleaning. 24. Terry Winters, “Field Work “(for Hayden),” in Katherine Atkins and Kelly Kivland, eds., Artists on Walter De Maria (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2017), 90. 25. Baker, The Lightning Field, 19. 26. Ibid. 27. See ibid., 7. The Field was originally intended to be one mile square, with twenty-five poles in each direction. That would have taken it right to the northern edge of the lot that De Maria and Dia had purchased, however, hence the reduction of the north-south

length to just over one kilometer. See James Nesbit, “Land Is Not the Setting: The Lightning Field and Environments, 1960–1980,” PhD diss., Stanford University, September 2010, 246 n. 79. 28. John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (New York: Abbeville, 1984), 62. 29. Baker, Minimalism: Art of Circumstance (New York: Abbeville, 1988), 127. This and the preceding observation of Beardsley’s are brought together in Campbell, “Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field,” 51. 30. Baker, Minimalism, 127. 31. Jason Rosenfeld, “Walter De Maria and The Lightning Field at Forty: Art as Symbiosis,” Brooklyn Rail, December 2017–January 2018. Available online at https://brooklynrail.org/2017/12/ artseen/Walter-De-Maria-and-The-Lightning-Field (accessed February 27, 2021). 32. Landscape colonizations are the subject of Alicia Inez Guzmán, Connected in Isolation: Land and Landscape in New Mexico and the Greater Southwest, PhD diss., University of Rochester, New York, 2016. Guzmán’s chapter 3, 132–76, “Searching for Site: Real Estate and the Blank Canvas in American Land. Art of New Mexico and the Southwest,” is largely concerned with The Lightning Field. Drawing on the papers of Robert Guido Deiro, the site locator for the Field, at the Center for Art and the Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, it contains fascinating information on De Maria’s requirements for the site and its selection and purchase, more specific than that provided by De Maria as cited in notes 8 and 10 above. Among its surprises is the news that De Maria appears to have briefly considered a housing project of “ranchettes,” small artists’ houses, as part of his plan; 167. 33. De Maria, “Some Facts,” 18. Even though the size of the Field was not De Maria’s first choice (see note 27 above), it is characteristic of his practice that he thus adopted it. 34. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking, 1971), 114. Cavell is writing of the modernist paintings of Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, and of his friend Michael Fried’s appreciation of them. Neither was enamored of Minimal art and both would likely object to my application of these words to an example of it. 35. De Maria, “Some Facts,” 18. 36. Kathleen Shields, An Essential Solitude: Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field Revisited (New York: SNAP, 2020), 125. 37. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1747, is readily available in online versions. The citations given here are to the Harper and Brothers, New York, edition of 1844, on Google Books: https://www.google.com/books/ edition/A_Philosophical_Inquiry_Into_the_Origin/ ShuHS2RvZuAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Edmund+Burke,+A+ Philosophical+Enquiry+into+the+Origins+of+Our+Ideas+of+ the+Sublime+and+Beautiful+harper+and+brothers+1844&pg =PR2&printsec=frontcover (accessed February 27, 2021). Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the sublime appears in Part 1, Book II of his Critique of Judgment, of which there are many editions that maintain the method of pagination that I use here. The appropriately enormous literature on literature on the sublime includes a useful recent anthology: Robert R. Clewis, ed., The Sublime Reader (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 38. The association with the ridiculous apparently originated in the expression Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas (From the sublime to the ridiculous is just one step), coined by the eighteenth-century French historian Jean-François Marmontel and popularized by Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason (1793). 39. See Shields, An Essential Solitude, 33–36, referring also to notes and drawings that date back to around 1960. 40. Time 93 (May 2, 1969): 54, quoted in Nesbit, “Land Is Not the Setting,” 79. 41. De Maria, “Some Facts,” 17. 42. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, part I, section VII, 51. 43. I wonder whether, in conceiving this work, De Maria had in mind Thomas B. Hess’s comparison of Willem de Kooning to the mythical robber Procrustes, who “cut and stretched travelers to fit his bed,” a reference inspired by the artist’s Woman I. Artnews 52, no. 1 (March 1953): 31. 44. De Maria, letter to Robert Scull, January 20, 1969, Folder 5, Scull Papers, Archives of American Art; Grace Glueck, “New York Gallery Notes: Trends Down, Sales Up,” Art in America 57, no. 2 (March/April 1969): 119; both quoted in Nesbit, “Land Is Not the Setting,” 82. 45. De Maria, “On the Importance of Natural Disasters,” May 1960, in La Monte Young, An Anthology of Chance Operations (New York: Heiner Friedrich, 1970,) n.p., and recently in Atkins and Kivland, eds., Artists on Walter De Maria, 71. 46. De Maria, “Some Facts,” 17. 47. See Jeffrey Kastner, “The God Effect: An Interview with John Cliett,” Cabinet 3 (Summer 2001): 91, cited in Nesbit, “Land Is Not the Setting,” 143. 48. On photography and the infrequency of lightning at the Field see notes 3, 5, and 8 in part 1 of this essay. 49. See Fosdick, “Technical Development of The Lightning Field,” 112, and the confirmation by Michael Childress in note 23 above. 50. De Maria, “Some Facts,” 19. 51. An author long in the De Maria/Dia team that manages the Field recently wrote at length of her concern that Cliett’s photographs have come either to define the work or to signify “a desire to exalt the work, to romanticize nature,” and notes that almost two decades before making the Field, De Maria had written, “End all photography of art.” Shields, An Essential Solitude, 87; De Maria, “One Hundred Activities for Rich and Poor,” 1960–61, unpublished, quoted in ibid., 90. 52. Dia Art Foundation, “Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field,” available online at https://www.diaart.org/exhibition/ exhibitions-projects/walter-de-maria-the-lightning-field-site

(accessed February 27, 2021). My emphasis. (This statement was controversial within the Dia circle because it was so explicit; see note 5 in part 1 of this essay.) In addition, Walter De Maria: The Lightning Field, published by Dia in 2017, featured some fifty of Cliett’s photographs, of which only six contained images with lightning. 53. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Part 1, Book II, sec. 28, 262. 54. Jon Cook, introduction to William Hazlitt: Selected Writings, ed. Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), xix. 55. Ibid. 56. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, eds., The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620–1820 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), is an exemplary collection of source materials. Both earlier and later examples of land art than De Maria’s that suggest that back projection may be found in Kastner and Brian Wallis’s massive compendium, Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon, 1998). 57. Sidney Tillim, “Earthworks and the New Picturesque,” Artforum 7, no. 4 (December 1968): 43. 58. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, II, VIII, 91. 59. Campbell, “Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field,” 52. 60. Albert Bierstadt’s and other artists’ big trees are discussed in Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 185–201. 61. The distinction between something appearing “against nature” and “against what we know of nature” was made by Saint Augustine of Hippo. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 48. 62. Louis Marin, “The Classical Sublime: ‘Tempests’ in Some Landscapes by Poussin,” Sublime Poussin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 120–40. The relevant landscapes, painted in 1651, are catalogued in Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen, Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), Tempest, cat. nos. 55 (and its Calm companion, cat. 56), 57; 260–67. The subject is broadly discussed in René Démoris, “From The Storm to The Flood,” ibid., 91–101. 63. Marin, “The Classical Sublime,” 136–39, includes discussion of durational versus instantaneous change, the latter an interruption of the former, dividing its flow. 64. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Part 1, Book II, sec. 26, 253, compares erhaben (the “sublime”), the “almost too much,” to ungeheuer (usually translated as the “monstrous”), the “absolutely too much,” defeating rather than challenging our capacity for conceptual comprehension. 65. See, for example, Nancy T. de Grummond, “Thunder versus Lightning in Etruria,” Etruscan Studies 19, no. 2 (2016): 183–207; Ingrid E. M. Edlund-Berry, “Ritual Space and Boundaries in Etruscan Religion,” in de Grummond and Erika Simon, eds., The Religions of the Etruscans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 116–31; and templum in William Smith, William Wayte, and G. E. Marindin, eds., A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (London: J. Murray, 1890–91). I owe these sources to Faya Causey. 66. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. S. Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 52; cited in Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 41, in a broad discussion of wonder especially as understood in the Middle Ages, 37–75. My emphasis.

183

JEAN PIGOZZI AN INTERVIEW WITH

RACHEL FEINSTEIN

184

Famed photographer of the famous, Jean Pigozzi speaks with artist Rachel Feinstein about the publication of his new book, The 213 Most Important Men in My Life. Explaining the impetus for the book and the importance of mentors, he also shares some golden anecdotes and gives a sneak peek at what’s coming up next. Jean, how are you? Receiving your book was a great gift during this time. Life has been so strange, given the pandemic and everything else, but at the same time, having a lot of time to just sit and think has been a blessing. It’s been intense. You’ve been in France the whole time? JEAN PIGOZZI I was in Panama when everything started. I was there until the end of May and then I flew to my house in the South of France, and I have not moved one inch. I haven’t been on a plane for the last nine months. RF Wow. Have you ever stayed anywhere for— JP Never. I’ve never stayed more than fifteen days in the same place for the last sixty years. But I can’t complain. I swim every day. My dogs can talk to me. I’m happy. I’ve never been here in the winter, but it was so interesting to see the day become shorter and then the day become longer, and then there are beautiful flowers that come in the winter that I’ve never seen. I started taking black-and-white photographs of gardens. There’s a lady who runs a very important garden and she wants to do a book with me. But I said, My pictures are in black and white. She said, exactly, I’m very interested because we never see pictures of gardens in black and white. RF That is so true. JP So I visited some incredible gardens with people who tell me all these names in Latin. I have no idea what they’re talking about, but it’s been very interesting. RF Did you know there’s an app you can get on your phone that identifies flowers through the camera? It’s really fantastic, since I’ve never been able to figure out what’s what. And that’s the same thing with us, we were out in the North Fork of Long Island, where I’ve never spent more than a weekend. We have a little farmhouse that’s very simple and we usually just go there on weekends. We were there for four months. But I want to go into your book—it’s incredible! I love the photographs so much because you literally capture every single person in a different light; you get them in a way that most people don’t see them, which is the whole idea of being part of the inner club, of this inner world that you’ve been part of your whole life. You know, coming from Miami, I’ve often had this feeling of otherness. Miami in the 1970s RACHEL FEINSTEIN

185

and ’80s was not the Miami that people know now, it was really off the charts in terms of weirdness. When I was young and in this off-the-radar place, the fantasy was that all these celebrities and fabulous people—Sting to Steve Jobs to David Geffen to Mike Nichols—everybody, all knew each other secretly and had this secret life outside of what the general population really knows and understands. And then in reality, it’s kind of true [laughter]. Everybody in that world, they’re all really good friends and you’re giving people this little peek into it. The worlds of cinematography, technology, fashion, art, music, even lawyers . . . they’re part of this incredible, sexy inner sanctum, and you give us a chance to see it. And because the book is about men, because it singles them out, it made me think of how men, as a group, in our new world are in a different position than they had been. You’re capturing the last of a kind, in a way. You take it to a level where you say, This is my life and I don’t know if this is ever going to be a life that anyone could ever lead again. I think it’s touching. So, I wanted to ask you, were you ever afraid that, being as open as you are, and how smart as an artist to show things the way they are, you would offend anybody in the book? Did you think, Maybe I shouldn’t present this photograph this way? JP Well, I have some pictures I didn’t include, and I also had some people I couldn’t include. But I was careful—I don’t feel that I included any embarrassing pictures. You know, there are no people vomiting, people not with their wives, people naked . . . not that I have many of those. I think one of the reasons people let me take pictures of them is that they trust me. They trust that I won’t use bad pictures. You know, I’m not a paparazzo who hides behind a tree with a long lens. I’m always like two feet away from people. RF Well, that’s because you’re part of the thing. JP I’m part of the thing. Yeah, and the funny thing now, if I go to a party and I don’t take pictures, people say, Was my party no good? Why are you not taking pictures? They get upset, but the thing is, I very often use a very small camera so it’s not scary. I have a big hand, so people rarely even see the camera; I take one or two pictures and then I walk away. It’s not threatening, and I think the result, you can see, is that they’re not scary pictures. RF When was the first time you did this? When was the very first moment where you said I love doing this, I love taking pictures of people at parties? Do you remember the first moment? JP Oh, I don’t know. You know, I’m dyslexic. My handwriting is unreadable. So I always wanted to document my life, but writing was out of the question, so I started taking pictures at about nine or ten. And when I was in college, that’s when parties became my main interest. I’ve always taken pictures of my friends and things around me. Actually, the first selfie I ever took was with Faye Dunaway in 1973 at Harvard. RF I love the pictures you took of Henri CartierBresson and people like Laurence Olivier. Now you didn’t know them, right? JP No, but I admired them. You saw the picture of Francis Bacon on 57th Street? RF Yes. Incredible! JP I’d never seen him before that moment—I said, This guy must be Bacon, and I took his picture. I really didn’t know, but turns out I was right. 186

And then the funniest story was when I took a picture of Lucian Freud, which is in the book, at the River Café. In those days he didn’t want to have his picture taken, so he had his girlfriend come over to tell me that he hated it and wanted me to turn over the picture. So I told her, Okay, I’ll give him the negatives if he gives me a drawing [laughter]. That didn’t go over so well. RF See, that’s the thing, it’s so important to get these little stories. I love that each image comes with a little text you wrote. I just wanted more! I loved that your voice came through on every single one of them. To go back to the idea of having a book on just men, versus making it men and women or just women—what was your thinking? Are you going to do a book about women eventually? JP I’ve started doing exactly that. The women book will be different. The story about the book of men is: my father died when I was twelve, okay? So I had a lot of mentors in my life, and a lot of the people in the book are my mentors. There are about ten in there that have been very, very important men in my life. Now that I’m

Previous spread, left: Mel Brooks, Paris, 1978

This page, from top: Tom Hanks, Venice, 2004

Previous spread, right, from top: Ahmet Ertegün, Italy, 1978

Bruce Springsteen, New York, 1989

Jack Nicholson, Cap d’Antibes, 1989

names. Would you feel offended if I only put “Rachel”? If I don’t put your family name? Would your friends? RF I don’t think so, but I’m a lot more informal that way. The only thing I would say is, maybe people would get offended now that you have the man book and the men get the full name. They’d compare it and you have to be careful about that. JP That’s right. But you see, for the women’s book, I don’t want to give any details. I want people to imagine what the context or relationship might have been. I want it to be more mysterious. RF Yeah, I like that. But the thing is, the gossip makes it extremely interesting, because it goes back to what I was saying originally: that it’s this kind of little insight into this inner world that everybody wants to know. Actually, it’s not really even that tiny a glimpse; it’s extremely generous, really. That’s what’s so endearing and true and exciting. You’re doing it because you have this incredible eye and this wonderful heart and you’re joining them both by looking and also lovingly telling at the same time.

How to follow through with the opposite sex . . . I mean, have you ever been a mentor to a woman or had a woman be your mentor, or is it very different? JP I have had female mentors, yes, and now I have a few daughters of friends of mine who say, Oh, you’re friends with my dad, but there’s something I can’t really ask my dad, or my dad doesn’t tell me about this, what do you think of it? And like business things, or they even tell me about their boyfriends and things like that that they don’t want to discuss with their dads. It’s so much fun, and it’s interesting and I hope I give them the right answers because I’m kind of guessing [laughter]. And then the other book I’m working on is about all the traveling I did. RF That’s fantastic. You have to talk about the stories on those trips, because that would be just incredible.

Jean Pigozzi, The 213 Most Important Men in My Life (Bologna: Damiani, April 2021)

becoming . . . I’m old, I’m sixty-nine—I now have some young people I talk to. The thing of mentoring I find incredibly interesting. People like Ahmet Ertegün— RF I love that picture of him, with the MercedesBenz broken down and his hands up. That’s a fantastic image. JP You remember them all! So, Ahmet, I met him at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel when I was twenty-five. We became instant friends because we were wearing the same polo shirt. That’s it . . . we became friends and traveled together for many years. He gave me three rules in life: One, never go to the office before noon; you can work from home, but you don’t go to the office until noon. Two, business should be fun. And the third one, women like to have sex. These changed my life. RF [Laughs] Those are very good points. Yes. JP This book, it took me forty years to take the photographs and some of them are very old, okay? But you know, the hardest part was writing the little entries. It was a complete torture. RF That’s a beautiful point about being a mentor. Having this advice that you’ve accrued, and being able to pass that along, is priceless. The funny thing, I have young people that I want to share advice with, but they’re absolutely not interested. They don’t want any advice whatsoever [laughs]. But really, you have every great person from every art form—I don’t think you forgot anybody. JP Well, now I wake up at night because, Oh, I forgot that person. I’m going to have a few enemies. RF No! I don’t think so. It’s wonderful how you have the greats, but then you have your swimming coach. There are some personal touches throughout that are beautiful. And I love the picture of Larry [Gagosian] with the Charles Ray sculpture next to him [laughs]. It’s so good. I applaud you, Jean. JP Well, thank you so much. RF John [Currin] looked through it with me and he loved it, just like me. I’m curious to see what’s going to happen with the women book next. JP The women—well, let me ask a question. Let’s say I include a picture of you, and, as is often the case, let’s say you’re at a party with a few of your female friends. I don’t know their 187

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Wayne Thiebaud Cakes on Cake Stands Pastel and pencil on paper 12 ¼ × 12 inches (31.1 × 30.4 cm) Executed in 1967 Sold privately by Gagosian Art Advisory

This exhibition is sponsored by

THROUGH AUGUST 8

In its world premiere and only US showing, this groundbreaking exhibition explores the affinities between the work of Chaïm Soutine and Willem de Kooning. Organized by the Barnes and the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, Paris, Soutine / de Kooning features nearly 45 works by these titans of 20th-century art. The exhibition, on view in the Roberts Gallery, considers how Soutine’s paintings, with their built-up surfaces and

Soutine / de Kooning: Conversations in Paint

energetic brushwork, served the art of de Kooning, shaping his groundbreaking figurative/abstract works in the late 1940s and beyond.

Chaïm Soutine. The Communicant (The Bride) (detail), c. 1924. The Lewis Collection Artwork © 2021 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © 2015 Christie’s Images Limited Willem de Kooning, Woman II (detail), 1952. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork © 2021 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

B A R N E S F O U N D AT I O N . O R G

The long-awaited monograph on one of the most influential artists of our time

Georg Baselitz Richard Calvocoressi 392 pages 400 color illustrations Hardcover

thamesandhudsonusa.com | thamesandhudson.com | thamesandhudson.com.au

GAME CHANGER: DR. DAVID DRISKELL Taylor Aldridge reflects on the enduring legacy of the artist, educator, curator, and scholar. In the Black American tradition, inheritance is not Driskell became a bit of a darling at Howard, historically tied to economic wealth, but to mem- praised often by professors Porter, James V. Herring, ory, culture, rituals, and wisdom—a different kind Lois Mailou Jones, and Alain Locke. During his of prosperity that is engendered out of love and undergraduate studies he developed an art pracrespect. This type of wealth is cultivated through tice, exhibited his work throughout the United generations by the living, who are responsible States, and curated exhibitions at the university’s for never forgetting those who have passed on. In Gallery of Art. Driskell was primed to be a major return, the living inherit these elusive gifts, help- figure in late-twentieth-century American art; his ing them to better navigate this thing called life. I mentors at Howard poured into him all the wealth consider the ways in which Alice Walker sought of knowledge they had amassed in their careers. But out Zora Neale Hurston after her death, reviving his final and most significant encouragement came her from posthumous obscurity. 1 Walker did so by when, before he graduated, Porter advised that he claiming to be a progeny of Hurston, even if that not only focus on painting but consider becoming wasn’t entirely true. Elders are sometimes chosen, a scholar to “help define the field and keep the traand through acts of deference we become worthy dition going.”5 Porter explicitly passed the torch of of their legacy. When I think about Walker’s rec- African American art discourse to Driskell, and lamation and subsequent revival of Hurston’s life even in his youthful outlook, Driskell accepted the and work, I think often about the way in which my challenge with filial pride. generation of art scholars might do the same in the It is significant that Porter had a distinct belief about how art by African American artists should field of contemporary art. Last year, we lost one of the greatest pioneer- be treated, believing that it should not be seging scholars of modern Black art: David Driskell. Since his passing, I have been thinking about the ways in which we might institute posthumous care. So few of us are deserving in carrying the torch on the path he lit for us decades ago. Similarly, Linda Goode Bryant, Okwui Enwezor, Suzanne Jackson, Kellie Jones, Samella Lewis, Howardena Pindell, and countless others have dreamed worlds for us where we can be our most capacious selves. Some live, some have passed on; we will forever be indebted to these leaders. Driskell knew deference well. H av i ng g row n up i n E a tonton , Georgia, raised by his mother, a housewife, and his father, a Methodist preacher, Driskell described his child- Dr. David Driskell, 2002. Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images hood as an “encouraging atmosphere” in which he was exposed to a community of leaders regated and “belonged within the mainstream who often held him accountable in his studies.2 This canon of American art,” according to scholar Julia encouragement would propel him into undergradu- L. McGee.6 This same ethos would be the guiding ate studies at Howard University, Washington, DC, mission of Driskell’s career and of the landmark in 1949. He did not take his first art class at Howard show Two Centuries of Black American Art, which he until 1952; he was a history major, with no intention curated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of studying art history specifically, until a profes- in 1976. Driskell insisted that Black art is American sor told him in an art class one day that “you don’t art, and by paradoxically dissecting and platformbelong [in the history department]; you belong here ing the long-marginalized and quieted legacy of art [in the arts].”3 This declarative statement came from contributions made by Black artists in America, his pioneering art historian James A. Porter, a profes- exhibition would help insert such histories within sor at Howard and the author of the seminal text- the previously ahistorical narrative of American art book Modern Negro Art (1943). Driskell would later in the second half of the twentieth century. Two describe Porter’s majestic teaching style: “He would Centuries of Black American Art came well after walk around in the classroom and never use the Driskell had established himself as a scholar and book [Modern Negro Art] and cite what was in the curator, having taught and developed art departbook. And I was so impressed with him and wanted ments at Talladega College and at Howard and Fisk to do that and be like him. … I would stand up and universities. He had contributed to several exhibistart reciting what was in the book and pretending tion catalogues and stood firmly in his beliefs about that I was Professor Porter.”4 Sometimes, to begin to how Black art throughout American history should imagine alternative and ambitious routes in life for be appreciated. The endeavor was a long stroke of ourselves, we have to locate our aspirational selves revision and editing of the field of art. in others. This ambitious show included over 200 objects, 202

dating from 1750 to 1950. It won large audiences and wide press coverage and traveled to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. But it received mixed reviews for its explicit intention of codifying works through ethnic experience. Driskell would later insist, “I did it … so people would know that this is not a level playing field and that somebody has to point this out and have the courage to show why it should be done my way.”7 With all the accolades Driskell received—more than a dozen honorary degrees, a National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton in 2000, the title of distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Maryland—his courage always remained grounded in a sense of humanity and accessibility to others. His conviction and generosity would spill over to foster the careers of other scholars who came after him in the field. Pamela Newkirk, professor at New York University and author of a forthcoming biography of Driskell, recounts that in the recent years before his passing, he continued to provide space and time for friends and mentees in the field, often writing letters of recommendation and advocating for the work of budding scholars. 8 Driskell had assumed the role of mentor—the role of Herring, Jones, Locke, and Porter—and committed to it with grace and dedication. W hile earning his MFA at the Cat hol ic Un iversit y of A mer ic a, Wa sh i ng ton , D C , i n t he 1960s , Driskell was indelibly marked by the influence of professor Nell Sonneman, who focused on the importance of spirituality and beauty in artmaking. At the height of racial terror and the fight for civil rights in the United States, Driskell found refuge in the allure of form and the metaphorical possibilities of nature. After a summer studying in Skowhegan, Maine, he returned to Catholic University and wrote his thesis on the evergreen tree as a symbol of eternity.9 I like to think that Driskell was foreshadowing his own stature in the art field, writ large through this particular scholarship: rendering himself as a quiet-natured yet towering figure, looming large in the canon for centuries to come. 1. See Alice Walker, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” Ms., March 1975. Available online at https://www.allisonbolah.com/site_ resources/reading_list/Walker_In_Search_of_Zora.pdf (accessed March 21, 2021). 2. David Driskell, in Cynthia Mills, “Oral history interview with David Driskell,” March–April 2006, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Available online at https://www.aaa. si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-david-driskell15943#transcript (accessed March 21, 2021). 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Julia McGee, David C. Driskell: Artist and Scholar (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2006), 16. 7. Driskell, in Mills, “Oral history interview with David Driskell.” 8. Pamela Newkirk, “How Late Curator and Artist David C. Driskell Changed Art History Forever,” Artnews, April 10, 2020. Available online at https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/pamelanewkirk-david-driskell-rememberance-1202683648/ (accessed March 21, 2021). 9. McGee, David C. Driskell, 49.

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