Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2023

For the Summer 2023 issue we have invited voices from the worlds of art, fashion, literature, and activism to reflect on the legendary career of Richard Avedon. Author and poet Jake Skeets has written a powerful and personal response to a photograph of his uncle, Benson James, from Avedon’s series In the American West . Skeets addresses the power dynamics and underlying tensions beneath the surface of the image and draws parallels to similar structures that endure in society today.

Harold Ancart and Katharina Grosse participate in illuminating conversations about the challenges of painting, articulating their unique concerns in the medium and describing how they push the limits of their distinctly different practices. And Péjú Oshin talks with Phoebe Boswell, Adelaide Damoah, and Julianknxx about artmaking that explores the function of ritual, the role of identity, and the blurring of cultural boundaries often defined by such constructs.

The fight for women’s rights—specifically for reproductive rights in the United States—has traced a long history through several generations of artists. Salomé Gómez-Upegui reflects on the power of these artists’ images, their ability to define and shape public opinion, their long-term influence, and the critical role of artists today in facing this conflict with heightened urgency.

We highlight the work of IntoUniversity, a British nonprofit that addresses systemic inequities, both in society at large and specifically in the art world, by creating educational opportunities for young people from disadvantaged communities.

The sudden and rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence—AI— in our world at this moment is both fascinating and disquieting. In this issue, Benjamín Labatut considers Bennett Miller’s engagement with AI as a partner in the act of creation. The possibilities of AI are truly limitless, yet the grave responsibility that accompanies those opportunities is as yet undefined and cannot be underestimated.

Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

Harold Ancart

In a wide-ranging conversation, Harold Ancart and novelist Andrew Winer cover a lot of artistic and philosophical ground, from being present to pathological escapism, and from portals and all-things-arepossible to palm trees.

44 Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Lynn Hershman Leeson

The sixth installment of the series.

48 Avedon 100

In celebration of the centenary of Richard Avedon’s birth, almost 150 artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and representatives of the fashion world were asked to select a photograph by Avedon for an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, and to elaborate on the ways in which image and artist have affected them. We present a sampling of these images and writings.

66 Rites of Passage

Péjú Oshin speaks with Phoebe Boswell, Adelaide Damoah, and Julianknxx about their participation in the exhibition Rites of Passage at Gagosian, London, and about the complexities of community, performance, truth, and identity.

72 Fashion and Art, Part 14: Edward Enninful

Edward Enninful OBE has held the role of editor-in-chief of British Vogue since 2017. Here, Enninful meets with his longtime friend Derek Blasberg to discuss his recently published memoir, A Visible Man

78

Building a Legacy: Provenance

For this installment of the Building a Legacy series, Lisa Turvey met with Sharon Flescher and Lisa Duffy-Zeballos of the International Foundation for Art Research (ifar) to discuss the complexities of provenance research, the recent burgeoning of the field, and the multiple resources available for tracing the ownership history of artworks.

82

A Wild Wild Wind: Bennett Miller’s AI-Generated Art

Benjamín Labatut addresses Bennett Miller’s engagement with artificial intelligence as a partner in the creation of a series of new artworks, asking what this technology—and its hallucinations—can reveal about our own humanity.

88

Bigger Picture: IntoUniversity

Precious Adesina charts the development of the UK-based nonprofit organization IntoUniversity.

94 Tom Wesselman

Susan Davidson, the editor of the forthcoming monograph on The Great American Nudes , a series of works by Tom Wesselmann, explores the artist’s early experiments with collage, tracing their development from humble beginnings to the iconic series of paintings.

100

The African Desperate

Artist and filmmaker Martine Syms teamed up with writer and poet Rocket Caleshu to create the 2022 film The African Desperate . Starring the artist Diamond Stingily as Palace, the film received rave reviews for its honest and unflinching portrayal—and parody—of the art world. Syms, Caleshu, and Stingily met with Fiona Duncan to discuss the film’s creation.

106

All I Wanted to Do Was Paint: A Conversation between Katharina Grosse and Sabine Eckmann

Curator Sabine Eckmann met with Katharina Grosse to discuss the evolution of her practice.

114 American Artists and Reproductive Justice

Salomé Gómez-Upegui traces the evolution of visual artists’ involvement in the fight for reproductive rights in the United States.

122

Soothing Sounds of Dread

Mike Stinavage profiles Weyes Blood during the musician’s world tour with a new record.

124 Still Life, Still

Harry Thorne reflects on the collaborations and friendship between Marcel Duchamp and the artist and author Brian O’Doherty.

130

Screen Time: Internet_Art

Ashley Overbeek speaks with Omar Kholeif about their new book Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs

138

A Vera Tatum Novel by Leonora McCrae

by

The second installment of a short story by Percival Everett.

152 Copyright

Novelist Rachel Cusk responds to artist Taryn Simon’s Sleep (2020–21), exploring the fraught relationships between motherhood, artistic practice, mortality, and repetition.

156

Waiting for Clarice

Carlos Valladares marvels at the life and work of the prolific and peerless Brazilian author Clarice Lispector.

160

Out of Bounds: Marcia Tucker

Raymond Foye speaks with Lisa Phillips, the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum, New York, about Out of Bounds: The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker, a comprehensive anthology of the writings of the museum’s founder.

180

Game Changer: Dorothy Miller

Scholar Wendy Jeffers is working on a comprehensive biography of Dorothy Miller, the groundbreaking curator who joined New York’s Museum of Modern Art in its early years and built a remarkable program, introducing many now-famous artists to the world. Here, Jeffers recounts key moments from Miller’s extraordinary life.

Front cover: Richard Avedon, Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

HIGH JEWE LRY

Necklac e

Wh ite gold, sapphire, emer alds and diamond s

Editor-in-chief

Alison McDonald

Managing Editor

Wyatt Allgeier

Editor, Online and Print

Gillian Jakab

Text Editor

David Frankel

Executive Editor

Derek Blasberg

Digital and Video Production Assistant

Alanis Santiago-Rodriguez

Design Director

Paul Neale

Design

Alexander Ecob

Graphic Thought Facility

Website

Wolfram Wiedner Studio

Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2023

Cover

Richard Avedon

Founder

Larry Gagosian

Published by Gagosian Media

Publisher

Jorge Garcia

Associate Publisher, Lifestyle

Priya Nat

For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries

Advertising@gagosian.com

Distribution David Renard

Distributed by Magazine Heaven

Distribution Manager Alexandra Samaras Prepress DL Imaging

Contributors

Precious Adesina

Harold Ancart

Derek Blasberg

Phoebe Boswell

Rocket Caleshu

Rachel Cusk

Adelaide Damoah

Susan Davidson

Lisa Duffy-Zeballos

Fiona Duncan

Sabine Eckmann

Edward Enninful

Percival Everett

Sharon Flescher

Raymond Foye

Salomé Gómez-Upegui

Katharina Grosse

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Wendy Jeffers

Julianknxx

Omar Kholeif

Benjamín Labatut

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Péjú Oshin

Ashley Overbeek

Lisa Phillips

Jake Skeets

Mike Stinavage

Diamond Stingily

Martine Syms

Harry Thorne

Lisa Turvey

Carlos Valladares

Andrew Winer

Thanks

Karrie Adamany

Richard Alwyn Fisher

Julia Arena

Laura Avedon

Andisheh Avini

Ashleigh Barice

Victoria Beard

Priya Bhatnagar

Michael Cary

Serena Cattaneo Adorno

Vittoria Ciaraldi

Maggie Dubinski

Poppy Edmonds

Andrew Fabricant

Paatela Fraga

Hallie Freer

Brett Garde

Jonathan Germaine

Lauren Gioia

Darlina Goldak

Séverine Gossart

Yasmine Hanni

Delphine Huisinga

Sarah Jones

Nina Joyce

Jennifer Knox White

Bernard Lagrange

Jona Lueddeckens

Lauren Mahony

James Martin

Constanza Martínez

Kelly McDaniel Quinn

James McKee

Rob McKeever

Bennett Miller

Jade Morgan

Olivia Mull

Kathy Paciello

Adam Rahman

Antwaun Sargent

Isabel Shorney

Taryn Simon

Diallo Simon-Ponte

Micol Spinazzi

Chandler Sterling

Putri Tan

Kara Vander Weg

Timothée Viale

Lily Walters

Lilias Wigan

Eva Wildes

Mimi Yiu

Adelaide Damoah, Nyɔŋma (Ten), 2023 (detail), cyanotype, ink, and gold on cotton and rag paper, in 2 parts, 11 ½ × 15 inches (29.2 × 38 cm) © Adelaide Damoah

CONTRIBUTORS

Harry Thorne

Harry Thorne is a writer and an editor at Gagosian. He lives in London.

Harold Ancart

Harold Ancart was born in Brussels in 1980 and lives and works in New York. His paintings, sculptures, and installations explore our experience of natural landscapes and built environments, alluding to a range of art-historical sources and often characterized by abstract passages of color. Focusing on recognizable subjects, Ancart isolates moments of poetry in everyday surroundings.

Susan Davidson

Curator and art historian Susan Davidson is an authority in the fields of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art with a specialty in the art of Robert Rauschenberg. Davidson is also an accomplished museum professional with over thirty-year’s experience at two distinguished institutions: The Menil Collection, Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Andrew Winer

Andrew Winer is the author of the novels The Marriage Artist (2010) and The Color Midnight Made (2002). He writes and lectures on art, philosophy, and literature. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, he is presently completing a novel and a book on the contemporary relevance of Friedrich Nietzsche’s central philosophical idea, the affirmation of life.

Wendy Jeffers

Wendy Jeffers is completing a biography of the legendary curator Dorothy Miller. She is past chair of the board of trustees of the Archives of American Art.

Percival Everett

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

Jake Skeets

Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (2019), winner of the National Poetry Series, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the American Book Award, and the Whiting Award. He is from the Navajo Nation and teaches at the University of Oklahoma.

Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse is a German artist who lives and works in Berlin. Embracing the events and incidents that arise as she paints, Grosse opens up surfaces and spaces to the countless perceptual possibilities of the medium. While she is widely known for her temporary and permanent in situ work, which she paints directly onto architecture, interiors, and landscapes, her approach begins in the studio.

Sabine Eckmann

Sabine Eckmann joined the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, Saint Louis, as curator in the fall of 1999 and also regularly teaches seminars in the university’s Department of Art History and Archaeology, School of Arts & Sciences. Eckmann, a native of Nuremberg, Germany, is a specialist in twentieth- and twenty-first-century European art and visual culture.

Precious Adesina

Precious Adesina is a London-based freelance journalist who specializes in arts and culture and often explores sociopolitical topics. She writes for a number of publications, including the New York Times , the Financial Times , the Economist , and BBC Culture , and has given many talks and panel discussions at British galleries on arts writing and research.

Mike Stinavage

Mike Stinavage is a writer and waste specialist from Michigan. He holds a master’s degree in political science from CUNY Graduate Center. As a Fulbright and Martin Kriesberg fellow, he researched the politics of waste management and wrote his second collection of short stories in Pamplona, Spain. His writings can be found in Slate , the Brooklyn Rail , the Riverdale Press , and more.

Photo: Bear Guerra

Photo: Max Vadukul

Martine Syms

Martine Syms obtained an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-onHudson, New York, in 2017 and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Syms has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. Using a combination of video, installation, and performance, often interwoven with explorations of technique and narrative, Syms examines representations of Blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions. Syms’s research-based practice often references and incorporates theoretical models concerning performed or imposed identities, the power of the gesture, and embedded assumptions concerning gender and racial inequalities.

Rocket Caleshu

Rocket Caleshu is a writer based in Los Angeles, where he is the director of Ashtanga Yoga Glassell.

Danielle Levitt

Fiona Duncan

Fiona Duncan is a Canadian-American author and organizer and the founder of the social literary practice Hard to Read. Duncan’s debut novel, Exquisite Mariposa (Soft Skull Press), won a 2020 Lambda Award. She is currently developing a narrative biography and critical study of the transdisciplinary American artist Pippa Garner.

Sharon Flescher

Sharon Flescher has been the executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research (ifar) since 1998 and is editor-in-chief of the award-winning ifar Journal . A graduate of Barnard College, Flescher holds master’s degrees in both English literature and art history and has a PhD in art history from Columbia University. She also attended the Wharton School of Business.

Diamond Stingily

Diamond Stingily is an artist and actress who was born in 1990 in Chicago, lives and works in New York, and is currently on a residency at the Art Explora foundation, Paris, in collaboration with the Cité internationale des arts. Her work has been presented in many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022), the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2022), the Kunstverein Munich (2019), the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2019), and the ICA Miami (2018). She acted in HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness and was the lead in Martine Syms’s debut feature film, The African Desperate . Photo: Farah Al Qasimi

Lisa Duffy-Zeballos

Lisa Duffy-Zeballos, PhD, is the art research director of the International Foundation for Art Research (ifar). Duffy-Zeballos received her PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. Since 2008, she has overseen the Art Authentication Research Service, the Provenance Research Service, and the Catalogues Raisonnés Database at ifar

Photo:

Photo: Danielle Levitt

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk is the author of the Outline trilogy (2014–18), the memoirs A Life’s Work (2001) and Aftermath (2012), and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. A Guggenheim fellow, she lives in Paris. Photo: Siemon Scamell-Katz

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

Benjamín Labatut

Benjamín Labatut is a Chilean writer born in the Netherlands in 1980. He is the author of The Maniac (2023), When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), La piedra de la locura (2021), Después de la luz (2016), and La Antártica empieza aquí (2012).

Salomé Gómez-Upegui

Salomé Gómez-Upegui is a Colombian-American writer and creative consultant based in Miami. She writes about art, gender, social justice, and climate change for a wide range of publications, and is the author of the book Feminista por accidente (Ariel, 2021).

Raymond Foye

Raymond Foye is a writer, publisher, and curator based in 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 for City Lights. He is presently editing The Collected Poems of Rene Ricard He is a consulting editor with the Brooklyn Rail Photo: Amy Grantham

Omar Kholeif

Dr. Omar Kholeif is an author, curator, broadcaster, and cultural historian who currently serves as Director of Collections and Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE. Born in Cairo to Egyptian and Sudanese parents, Kholeif has curated over seventy exhibitions of visual art and has authored or coauthored over forty books, which collectively have been translated into twelve languages.

Photo: Juana Gómez

Phoebe Boswell

Phoebe Boswell is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in London. She embraces the fluidity of language and storytelling as a means to unpack the cultural associations with which bodies of water are imbued. Sharing new writing based on research for recent and ongoing work, Boswell explores the relentless dichotomy of water. Layers of historic violence and trauma attest to how it continues to bear witness to an inequitable society, while its ebb and flow, its surge and swell, posit water as a site for possible renewal, rebirth, reclamation—a healing, holding, place.

Péjú Oshin

Péjú Oshin is a British-Nigerian curator, writer, and lecturer born and raised in London. Sitting at the intersection of art, style, and culture, her work shows a keen interest in liminal theory and diasporic narratives. She is the author of Between Words & Space (2021), a collection of poetry and prose, and was shortlisted for the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list.

Julianknxx

Julianknxx’s work merges his poetic practice with films and performance, engaging in a form of existential inquiry that seeks at once to find ways of expressing the ineffable realities of human experiences and to examine the structures through which we live. In casting his practice as a “living archive” or a “history from below,” Julianknxx draws on West African traditions of oral history to reframe how we construct both local and global perspectives. His work challenges fixed ideas of identity and unravels linear Western historical and sociopolitical narratives, attempting to reconcile how it feels to exist primarily in liminal spaces.

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershman Leeson is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of contemporary society: identity, surveillance, the relationship between humans and technology, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression.

Adelaide Damoah

British-Ghanaian artist Adelaide Damoah is a London-based multidisciplinary artist who uses investigative practices spanning painting, performance, collage, and photographic processes. Her key areas of interest are colonialism, joy, and feminism. She exhibits in national and international galleries and institutions including Gagosian, and serves on the boards of two art charities.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

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

Tyler Mitchell

Photo: Marc Hibbert

Photo: Adenike Oke

Photo:

HAROLD

ANCART

Previous spread: Harold Ancart, Untitled , 2017 (detail), oil stick and pencil on canvas, in artist’s frame, 73 × 91 × 2 ¼ inches (185.4 × 231.1 × 5.7 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Opposite: Harold Ancart, Untitled , 2020 (detail), oil stick and pencil on paper, in artist’s frame, 31 × 23 5 8 × 1 ½ inches (78.7 × 60 × 3.8 cm)

This page: Harold Ancart, Untitled , 2021, oil stick and pencil on canvas, in artist’s frame, 24 × 31 × 1 ½ inches (61 × 78.7 × 3.8 cm)

Although, as the reader will see, Harold Ancart and I would have wished to be lost somewhere on a desert road, the two of us managed to have an enjoyable conversation about—well, getting lost. Getting lost, that is, from those aspects of society and the self that tend to fetter people to the familiar, harness them to what’s useful, and generally prevent them from becoming, as Nietzsche would have it, what they are. I spoke to the artist on the occasion of his first solo exhibition with Gagosian and found him to be warm, unassuming, and disarmingly honest. He was an ideal traveling companion and we covered a lot of artistic and philosophical ground, from being present to pathological escapism, and from portals and all-things-arepossible to palm trees. And, of course, painting.

—Andrew Winer

ANDREW WINER Too bad we aren’t conducting this interview on a road trip, Harold. I love the travel accounts that you’ve published—they’re so honest and intimate that they turn the reader into your traveling companion. We just met, but I already feel like we’ve logged all these hours in some tetchy and choleric Chevrolet Blazer from the ’90s.

HAROLD ANCART No, a GMC Yukon!

AW Oh yeah, that’s what it was. I was hoping the gallery would say you were waiting to meet me in some town like Joseph, Oregon.

HA I wish!

AW Right? I’d throw the easy questions at you first, on our way over to, what, Ely, Nevada?

HA Or we’d just look out at the desert.

AW Then, pulling into Hanksville, you know, down in Utah, we’d cover painting and drawing.

HA Then you’d hit me with the heavy stuff—

AW Right, about Existence and Being—when we’re heading up into Colorado’s Western Slope. We’d grab dinner at Natalia’s 1912 in Silverton. Of course, that would probably be too prescriptive for us! Sometimes I feel most free when I can tap into a way of being and working that isn’t governed by goals. It reminds me of what E. M. Forster asked: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” Does that speak to your experience of making a painting—to how much you know of what you want to do with a particular painting?

HA Yeah, I don’t know anything in advance. I’m relatively young, but I’ve learned, often the hard way, that I was lucky not to have reached the goals that I used to fixate on or set for myself when I was a young adult. It’s not out of many successes that I am who I am. Rather, it’s in spite of anything else, and through an innumerable amount of failures. I used to have a lot of opinions and a lot of prescriptive ideas about how life should be lived and about how painting should be done or what it should eventually look like. Those were difficult times of emotional conflict and physical and financial struggle. I remember being angry that things weren’t going my way.

AW My friends joke that I always say this, but you sound like Nietzsche! He wondered whether he had reason to be grateful for his failures and felt obligated to the hardest years of his life. He also cautioned against striving for a particular outcome, and even sort of mocked envisioning a “purpose” or a “wish.”

HA Yes, and luckily, as a result of these inner conflicts, I’ve come to realize that life, just like painting, has very little to do with what I thought I wanted. I came to realize that painting was about what I was doing, and subsequently about the observation of what had been done. That said, I always have some kind of an idea of where I want to go prior to starting a painting.

AW Ah, so you do have an idea . . .

HA But I tend to keep it simple: it can be an image, a shape, or the color blue. I know now, however, that these ideas, these things that the mind projects, are not to be fulfilled and that a particular destination is not to be reached. I guess that, just like Forster, I firmly believe that if you knew what you were going to paint before you actually painted it, painting would be of no interest at all. Same goes with writing or living, I would guess? Isn’t it by getting lost in writing them down that our ideas or our stories unfold? Almost as if our personal adventures, the accounts of a day, only begin when we start telling them or putting them into words?

AW I want to get lost in both the experience and my accounting of it. But by getting lost I paradoxically mean being present. Or maybe it isn’t a paradox, since being lost forces us to be very awake, doesn’t it? Awake to whatever will unfold. HA I agree, and while painting, I try as much as I can to welcome the unexpected. To consider failures, if not as blessings, then at least as opportunities for change or growth. I can then watch the painting unfold in front of me while making it. Working in that spirit allows the paint to become what the paint truly tends toward, not where I want it to go. Because of this, it’s very rare that I find myself conflicted after completing a painting. One

can only do what one does, after all. It’s in that spirit that I also try to live my life, with a vague idea of where I want to go, abandoning myself to it, watching it unfold in front of me as I walk through it.

AW Can you please be my life coach on the side?

HA Believe me, you wouldn’t want that.

AW But it’s very beautiful, what you’re saying, because you’re talking about something rare, I think, which is achieving a kind of freedom.

HA Or a nonchalance.

AW Sure, if by “nonchalance” you mean responding to reality in a way that involves actively doing something that gets you beyond the truncations of the familiar, the overly constructed, the duly reasoned, or even the named. It’s like Wallace Stevens telling us to see the sun again with an ignorant eye.

HA I’ve seen the moon many times and I’ve painted the moon many times, but it’s never the same moon when I look at it, nor is it ever the same moon when I’m done painting it.

AW Yeah—the moon is great. Can we stick to the sun for a second?

HA [Laughter ] You don’t need to get all California about it!

AW It’s not California! It’s Stevens! He writes, “The sun must bear no name, . . . but be in the difficulty of what it is to be.”

HA That’s pretty California, dude.

AW “What it is to be , man . . .”

HA Fine: the sun. Unlike with the moon, you can’t look at it. Or you can, but only in an unfocused way. Which is actually a way I like to look at things, as if they weren’t things. As if they were light. I like to get lost in sight and begin to account for what’s not in focus. To account for everything around the point of focus. Maybe that’s what Stevens means by seeing the sun with an ignorant eye. Other times, something comes into focus for me while everything else remains blurry. I try to pay equal attention to both: what’s in focus and what isn’t, for one cannot exist without the other. I try to consider both as whole.

AW I see this in your paintings! In your photos, too. And it makes me think of another Stevens poem, “July Mountain,” in which he writes, “We live in a constellation of patches and of pitches, not in a single world.”

HA I relate to that. I tend to look at the world as a formidable supermarket of colors, textures, and reflections. All the elements one needs to make a painting are out there.

AW Is that how you assemble a painting, then— the way, as Stevens writes at the end of that same poem, “when we climb a mountain, Vermont throws itself together”?

HA Well, through a process of distilling and recombining, which is the process by which all artistic activities come into shape. It’s through this process that I know whether I like a painting or not. If I look at a painting of the face of an old man, for example, I try to focus only on its color, texture, and light—the pitches and patches that the painting is made of—until it becomes that face again.

AW Which returns us to you watching the painting unfold in front of you while making it: the whole throws itself together before you, out of all these patches and fragments.

HA And by the way, that’s what makes the difference between a painting and an image: paintings are made of piles of patches and fragments.

AW But that can’t be easy, and to connect it back to conflicts and difficulties: I feel that one of the things that makes your paintings so generous is that they seem, in part, to be a record of your struggles. I sense that some sort of acquiescence has usually occurred during their making.

HA What do you mean?

AW Well, as in the work of Clyfford Still, for example, there’s often a sort of jagged beauty to your paintings: you see it in the edges, but also in the worked areas of color. Yet it seems to me that you get out just before the point where they’re overworked. What’s often left are traces of dissonance. My late friend the poet Adam Zagajewski wrote that “one must think against oneself, otherwise

Opposite:

one is not free.” Your paintings do give off a glow of freedom, yet they contain these frictions, and are made with these hard things—oil sticks—that are composed of thick, half-dry paint. And as with writing, as with any art form, the medium pushes back—pushes back against your freedom. It makes me wonder if, in addition to a kind of freedom when you’re painting, you also experience anxiety. Or even panic.

HA The only moment I feel anxious is when I pace the floor in the studio, smoking way too many cigarettes instead of working.

AW I feel anxious when I’m doing anything instead of working!

HA For me, this usually happens when I’m about to start a new work and the canvas is still untouched and I’m thinking about it too much. As if there was a risk that I would fuck it up . . . there’s no way one can fuck anything up beforehand. Perhaps the anxiety is because, beforehand, the realm of possibilities is vaster than it is once you’ve already started?

AW Yes!

HA I don’t know. It’s a bit like jumping into a lake on a hot summer day. If you try to enter the cold water gradually, you may take forever to enter. You must plunge into it, one way or another. Headfirst or not makes no difference—once you’re in it, you ultimately feel good. I call it “the zone.” A lot of things happen in there . . . some of them I’ll probably never be able to describe. But if there’s one thing that doesn’t belong there, it’s anxiety or self-esteem issues. There’s struggle, of course—I would even say that struggle is the necessary condition around which everything is built.

AW Tell me more about “the zone.”

HA It’s a zone of tension. That tension resides between two things: what the mind demands is one of them, and what the hand can do is another. It happens all the time that the mind rejects what the hand has done. This is where I find freedom.

AW Interesting. So freedom isn’t a willed thing—

HA No, it’s when something unexpected

This page: Harold Ancart, Untitled , 2017, oil stick and pencil on canvas, in artist’s frame, 80 × 96 × 2 ¼ inches (203.2 × 243.8 × 5.7 cm)

Harold Ancart, Untitled , 2017, oil stick and pencil on paper, in artist’s frame, 48 × 51 × 1 ½ inches (121.9 × 129.5 × 3.8 cm)

happens—when a terrible choice has been made, or when something happens to be poorly executed. When it doesn’t look how it usually does or when it doesn’t look how I think it should look. When one starts thinking against oneself, as Zagajewski says. The fact that you can only do what you do doesn’t exclude ending up doing something you usually wouldn’t.

AW That’s brilliant. And comforting, somehow. Do you think that, in this way, art can lead us to our longings?

HA I don’t know how to answer that question. As a young child, I was never satisfied with the here and now. I’ve always had a tendency to create some sort of alternate realm in which I was the almighty sovereign. Every child does that to a certain extent, I suppose? And that’s fine. Except that I’m no longer a child, and it hasn’t changed much.

AW For you and for many adults.

HA One must dream. I think it’s essential, but to what extent? I suffer from escapism. Pathologically. Sometimes I wonder if longing is actually a good thing . . . being here and wishing to be elsewhere. To ultimately realize, over and over again, that there’s no there there, and that reality belongs here and now—that’s brutal. The human condition is brutal. I don’t see how one could live if one didn’t have the ability to escape into one’s own thoughts. But to return to reality, this cruel reality with its physical rules and needs . . . it’s like trying to eat soup with a fork.

AW That’s what I was trying to ask before: should painting show us a world equal to our longings? Or should it change our longings? What I mean is, we often say that someone who dreams of the world being different from what it is—as in John Lennon’s “Imagine” or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream”—is a person with imagination. Those are attempts, you might say, to impose what’s imagined on the world—in order to change it. Do you think there are painters like this? There’s also another kind of dreamer, who lets the world reveal and form itself around them, the kind of dreamer who

is capable of becoming enchanted with whatever appears. Do you identify with one of these kinds of dreamers?

HA I certainly do relate to both—to the first kind of dreamer, whose dreaming is so strong and persistent that it ends up altering their surroundings, and to the second kind, who finds enchanting moments in the ordinary. For me, they go hand in hand. The dream of a better life became true when I came to realize that everything is and always has been there, lingering, waiting for me to finally be able to see it. I personally believe that painting has to do with both the ability to dream of an elsewhere and the capacity to distill, or isolate and extract, elements of the everyday visual environment. These are the things that dreams are made of. This ability to recombine or reframe allows you to give shape to an elsewhere, whether it’s a human figure or a cloud, a window ledge, or an abstraction. AW What you say about painting—that it has to do with both the ability to dream of an elsewhere and the capacity to distill elements of the everyday—returns me to the Monet–Mitchell exhibition I just saw [at the Fondation Louis Vuitton] in Paris, and makes me think of the late Monets in particular, which have that quality without question, but which, stripped of their frames, also confront us with something shocking: their provisional nature. You can feel the speed with which Monet’s arm and wrist moved across the canvas, how fast and extemporaneously those paintings were made. After all, he was trying, in each of them, to capture the light of a particular part of the day—before it changed.

I happened to be at the Fondation Louis Vuitton with the painter David Salle; it was late, and we had only an hour before closing on a rainy cold night, so almost no one else was there, and we were able to move around the paintings as we pleased. I learned then that Salle is a fast looker: we did that place in forty minutes, and this, too, added to my sense that when it comes to making art, whether with paint or with words, there’s so little time. What’s that passage from the final volume of Proust’s In Search

of Lost Time , where he writes that the mind has its landscapes and almost no time is permitted for their contemplation? Proust tells us that his whole life has been equivalent to something like a painter hiking up a road over a lake that he wants to paint and that’s obstructed by rocks and trees. Brushes in hand, he can glimpse the lake through the gaps, but night is falling and he will soon have to stop painting, knowing that no day will ever break again. The Monets haunted me, but I couldn’t understand why until speaking with you now. It seems like we have so little to go by, that the whole enterprise is doubtful. Adam was referring to this, I think, when he wrote that doubt is more intelligent than poetry but that poetry surpasses doubt. In other words, we can’t get rid of doubt, and it can even be good for our art, but we need to trust that art, executed properly, overcomes doubt. Do you ever feel, when painting, that you’re answering to this kind of “I don’t know,” or managing it, say, with technique? HA Well, this is why I can say that, when it comes to my paintings, subject matter doesn’t hold as much significance as you might think. If I choose to make a painting that pictures flowers, for example, it pictures flowers almost in spite of all the meanings that we attach to flowers. The flowers in this case serve as a kind of alibi that allows me to push color onto the canvas. I don’t see myself as a painter of images, I see myself as a painter of color. When I think of all the figurative painters I admire—the list is long, spanning from Monet to Cézanne to Van Gogh to [Pablo] Picasso to [Henri] Matisse to [Philip] Guston to [Wayne] Thiebaud, to name a few—I also think about them as painters of color. It becomes more evident with the abstract painters I like, such as [Barnett] Newman or Still or [Richard] Diebenkorn (although he sits somewhere in between), that they are painters of color. I don’t know whether all these figurative painters were particularly attached to the images they were painting, but to me it feels secondary. The subject feels secondary. When you look at Van Gogh, who is the opposite of Seurat, it seems evident that very little is scripted or predetermined: he’s guided by some kind of a flux that allows him to open a door to somewhere beyond the subject of the painting itself, and this “beyond” is a place that even he could not see beforehand. I think it was his pragmatism, the very action of painting, that took him there. This also makes me think about this quote in [Carlos] Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan [1968]: “a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.”

AW You mention Van Gogh opening a door to somewhere else, somewhere beyond the subject of the painting, which suggests that he saw alternate possibilities to what was immediately before him, both in the landscape, say, and on the canvas. It interests me because, a few days ago, I made a note for the novel I’m working on, in which I say that a finished painting, for all that it might have accomplished, paradoxically contains a paucity of alternate possibilities: this is how the painter knows it’s done, and how a painting gains an air of inevitability. Does finishing a painting feel this way to you—that there’s a closing down of other possibilities—even if it leaves open, or suggests, a path to another painting?

HA For me, to finish has everything to do with starting anew. As a matter of fact, I know that a painting is ready when it becomes a promise for another one, when whatever is in the painting, or whatever defines it, starts calling for even more that is not part of it, and that will never be part of

it, because it already belongs to the next one—the one that has not yet been painted.

AW That’s important, what you’re saying. It feels like a metaphor for the ongoingness of life—the way one moment dies into the next, or, to put it more positively, the way one moment’s end gives birth to a new moment. The idea that whatever is happening now is okay, ultimately, even if it feels negating, because it has a relationship, some direct connection, to what comes next, no matter how different what comes next will be.

HA Yes. What makes a work unique can be defined by everything that is the work as much as by everything that is not the work. Everything that is not the work but that could be the work constitutes its transformative potential. This transformative potential works as a promise for another work to come. This idea of a painting becoming a promise for another painting brings me back to what we were talking about earlier: the subject itself, and how it becomes secondary to what it’s made of. I think that it’s because the subject surrenders to paint that a thing can be painted over and over again without ever being the same thing. It shows us how Cézanne painted Mont SainteVictoire over and over again without ever repeating himself; how something as boring and banal as an apple never ceases to amaze us. It explains why every shadow of a plate longs for another shadow of another plate. How every painted cupcake begs for another painted cupcake. How every stroke of color demands another one, consecutively, endlessly, without ever being the same thing.

AW That thought is happy-making. Your paintings make me joyful. They’re like good memories. Something about the colors and the simplified forms—they make you think, I’ve seen these things before, I’ve been there . In his book Landscape and Memory [1995] Simon Schama writes something to the effect that landscape is the work of the mind before it can ever be trusted to the senses, that its scenery is built from layers of memory as much as from the strata of rock. Do you employ or think about memory in making these

paintings? Is memory important to them?

HA I like this idea of the landscape being made from memories as much as it’s made of rocks. In 2014, I took a road trip across the country. I bought a car and drove from east to west, back and forth. The car was a Jeep so the trunk sat high off the ground. I was painting out of that trunk along the way. I ended up making a lot of paintings—about twenty-seven, I think. I took the trip because I’d been living in New York for six or seven years and had never seen the rest of the country. I also read somewhere that one could never be a real American painter without having driven through and seen the country. I think it was [Jackson] Pollock who said that, and I guess I naively followed his advice, or maybe I just needed a good excuse to drive around—I love to drive, and I drove a lot during that journey, sometimes up to thirteen hours a day.

I believe you read the small essay I wrote afterward, which I used as an introduction to a book of photographs called Driving Is Awesome [2016]. I took the photos through the windshield while driving. I have the book right here. Let me read you just a small portion of the essay: “Around that time, I had already made a few drawings that were drying in the trunk. The car smelled of paint. My friend would ask me to stop here and there, so we could get out of the car and film. While he was filming, I drew. I drew anything. It does not matter. I have so many images in the eyes that I barely have to look around anymore.” As is the case for most of the landscapes I’ve painted since then, none of these road trip paintings (except for one of [Robert Smithson’s] Spiral Jetty [1970]) was of a particular place. These places don’t exist. They were created out of thin air. I think it’s because of their archetypal qualities that they induce a feeling of familiarity. Because they were made of piles of memories, of the many nowheres and everywheres that this world has to offer. This may be what makes them relatable.

AW The palm trees that make up your new show also induce a feeling of familiarity. Yet I’ve never

This page: Harold Ancart, Untitled , 2014, oil stick and pencil on paper, in artist’s frame, 15 ¾ × 19 ¾ × 1 ½ inches (40 × 50.2 × 3.8 cm)

Opposite: Harold Ancart, Untitled , 2023 (detail), oil stick and pencil on canvas, in artist’s frame, 81 × 71 × 2 ¼ inches (205.7 × 180.3 × 5.7 cm)

Following spread: Harold Ancart, driving is awesome, 2014–16, inkjet print, in 2 parts, each: 7 × 9 ½ inches (18 × 24 cm)

Artwork © Harold Ancart

Photos: JSP Art Photography

seen palm trees like them. How did you come to paint this series?

HA I painted the first one a long time ago. I think it was in 2014. I was living in my studio at the time, because I couldn’t afford both an apartment and a studio. The way I live and work now is very different: I come to the studio every day to work, and then I leave at the end of the day and do something else. There’s a clear separation between living and working, although I do carry most of the work with me, in spirit, even when I’m not in the studio. But back when I lived in my studio there was really no separation at all. I would sleep next to the paint that was drying and wake up in the middle of it. I wouldn’t say that it was healthy—in fact it was physically un healthy as much as psychologically disturbing not to be able to draw a line, or to have a physical separation. I was always in it; therefore, I couldn’t gain the necessary distance to determine whether what I was making was good or bad. I didn’t have the luxury to leave the studio and to come back to it with fresh eyes, to see what I’d done as if someone else had made these paintings and not myself. I was emotionally too involved in what I was making, therefore lacking perspective. My work was also very different: it was more abstract, mostly black and white, and very austere. I guess I reached a point where the pain I was in overcame the fear I felt about making a radical move. I began to want to make something completely different from these austere abstract works, and eventually to create a new window for myself, a more joyful window that I could project myself into, and that wasn’t just a reflection of the cold industrial environment that was surrounding me, which was Bushwick and its waste management. That’s how the first palm tree came. At first I thought it was ridiculous, but, since it brought joy and light inside my studio, I kept the painting up for a while, not as something serious but as a kind of a talisman I could look at. A promise for a brighter future. Then I came to realize that the people coming to visit me in the studio felt the same way about it— that it was bringing them a similar sense of joy and

lightness. I realized that just like me, they enjoyed looking at it.

I’ve made maybe ten of these palm trees over the past ten years, taking a lot of pleasure painting each one of them, for I knew that upon completion they would bring me instant gratification. Two of them belong to museum collections, one to the Hirshhorn Museum [and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC] and the other to the Beyeler Foundation [Basel], but somehow I never gave them their moment, I never made an exhibition out of them and always kept them on the back burner. Sometimes when you have the feeling of something being too good, you tend to be careful not to use it too much. You tend to be protective of it so that it doesn’t wear out. You save it for a great occasion.

AW Is painting a kind of sharing for you, then? Maybe a sharing in the delight of being around, of being here—a delight in what’s out there? I’m thinking of something Henry James wrote, and this I have to look up, because it’s impossible to paraphrase him. Here it is: “The very provocation offered to the artist by the universe, the provocation to him to be . . . an artist, and thereby supremely serve it; what do I take that for but the intense desire of being to get itself personally shared, to show itself for personally sharable, and thus foster the sublimest faith?”

HA From palm trees to the sublimest faith!

AW What do you think? Could this be an acceptable form of spirituality for the artist? Is there a place for this kind of calling, this kind of generosity—we almost could call it love —in what you do as an artist?

HA I love what I do, although I don’t really see myself as a supreme servant of the universe [laughter ]. I’m just a humble Belgian painter who happens to live in the here and the now. However, I do like the idea of paintings being portals that open onto a greater beyond. As I said earlier, I suffer from escapism. It doesn’t take much for me to start wandering around. What can I do? I often find myself thinking about paintings as vessels, or as a means of transportation that leads to the many elsewheres that are not the here and the now.

AW So you are sort of like old Henry!

HA Well, I wish for my paintings to do that for people—to transport them. To take them elsewhere. This is the intimate experience that I hope to share with others. To enter the world of paint, where

nothing resists and everything remains possible.

AW All Things Are Possible [1919]—that’s the name of an important book by the existentialist Lev Shestov, who was one of [Albert] Camus’s heroes and is also one of mine. I guess many of my writer heroes involve themselves in chasing the incalculable, including James. James wrote of things intimated by the deep, often hidden processes of living, things that, for this reason, can’t necessarily ever be fully known. Yet if it was seeable , James saw it. He once wrote to a struggling friend that experience, in this case sorrow, comes to us in great waves but is blind, whereas we see . Do you ever feel, when you’re painting, that you’re going after the incalculable or the unseeable, even as you’re making something that’s very much meant to be seen?

HA Yes.

AW [Laughs ] Let me try it this way: If I grant an openness to what’s around me—to that which is —I can sometimes feel that what’s out there possesses so much in excess of what I can perceive or determine. And every once in a while, I get a glimpse of that excess, but, almost immediately, words and names and meaning rush in to claim it. Do you think about this? Do you think painting can sometimes capture that ephemeral in-between moment, just before descriptions and meanings start to attach to what’s being perceived?

HA I’m familiar with these moments and with the sense of excess that you describe.

AW Phew!

HA It’s when a much deeper truth finds itself attached to a rather banal encounter. They often come to me when I’m completely detached. When I’m not trying to perceive anything—while peeling a potato, for example. They come to me as emotions, or as in a dream. But it’s almost impossible to hold on to these encounters because they change all the time and never maintain the same form. They’re grafted to the perceptual world but escape as we try to seize them or describe them.

AW They only exist as a flash.

HA Yes, and what I feel is that some paintings can revive these moments or feelings in me. They bring me back to a deeper truth when I look at them. Here I’m not talking about a deeper meaning but about an exhilarating moment that is the opposite of meaning—a great sense of silliness or obsolescence that is attached to all things. The reason

why I think painting or poetry or music can do that is that they’re among the very few activities on which meaning loses its grasp. They are in essence very silly and obsolete. They belong to a world in which rationality does not reign. Very few things can escape the shell of meaning like painting can; and when it does, historians and critics always do their best to bring it back to a rational sphere by describing and naming what should sometimes remain its own language: the unspoken language of paint. When I read about painting, I often feel that this sense of excess is being murdered by a cold and serious analytic language.

AW I pledge not to murder the deeper, silly, unseeable excess of your paintings.

HA Can we get that in writing?

AW Obsolescence and silliness: you’re reminding me of your countryman Simon Leys’s great collection of essays The Hall of Uselessness [2008], in which he quotes [the fourth-century bc Daoist philosopher] Zhuangzi as writing that everyone knows the usefulness of what is useful but few know the usefulness of what is useless. At the end of that book’s introduction, Leys writes that the sort of “uselessness” with which he, as a writer, has always concerned himself is the very ground that all the essential values of our common humanity rest on. Is painting “useless” in this way for you?

HA Society mostly recognizes a thing as being useful when it serves a practical function: a coffee machine, a cell phone, an airplane, a hair dryer. Poetry and painting don’t make coffee or dry your hair, so most consider them trivial and useless. What are these drawings going to do for you? Where is that going to take you, Mister Ancart? These are things I used to hear at school when I was caught “wasting my time” making drawings instead of doing whatever task was assigned to me. You’re a dreamer, a pariah, a good-for-nothing, you serve no purpose, and you’ll never be able to find a respectable position in society. For me, making purposeless things like paintings, or writing about nothing, is paramount. I still find hope in these things. They’re the opposite of what consumerism demands. Things that exist just for the sake of being, for the love of life, for the spirit. They are essential because they tend to stay away from the tyranny of meaning and the economic way in which the world supposedly turns. Ultimately, these are the things that will elevate us.

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire

Lynn

Leeson Hershman

Hans Ulrich Obrist Lynn Hershman Leeson

In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents are invited to make a selection from the larger questionnaire and to reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the second installment of 2023, we are honored to present the artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Lee. son

2. Does money corrupt art?

A: No, lack of money does.

5. What is your most recent work?

8. What was your first museum visit as a child?

A: The Cleveland Museum of Art, which I went to at least weekly.

A: They are all always unfinished, but the latest is about immortality. I’m working on the final part of The Cyborgian Rhapsody, a project I began in 1996 about the evolution of AI and how it affects identity and culture. Part 4 was written and performed by a GPT-3 chatbot that thinks it looks and sounds like me thirty years ago. I hope to have this complete by May. I’m also working on a much larger project about immortality, investigating the existence of immortality in certain plants, bacteria, and even jellyfish. I’m not certain what final form this will take yet—most likely a multimedia installation like The Infinity Engine (2014) or Twisted Gravity (2019–21).

7. What role does chance play?

A: Failure and chance are indispensable to complete a work.

17. Has the computer changed the way you work?

A: Hahahah. I live in the Bay Area mostly, where you breathe technologies and use the computer as your brain.

11. How did you come to art/How did art come to you?

A: I was born.

6. What is your unrealized project?

A: My life.

27. What was your biggest mistake?

A: Fretting about past mistakes.

9. What keeps you coming back to the studio?

A: Noise.

29. Do politics and art mingle?

A: Yes: one can’t exist without the other. Art is about change and perception in the context of current states of life, which politics defines.

23. What is time?

A: An invention to quantify reality.

34. What is your advice to a young artist?

A: Don’t throw anything away, and keep your sense of humor.

Photo Mathias Zuppig er Zurich Artw ork Karin Schiesser Zurich

Avedon 100

In celebration of the centenary of Richard Avedon’s birth, almost 150 artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and fashion world representatives were asked to select a photograph by Avedon and elaborate on the ways in which image and artist have made an impact on them for an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, this Spring. Participants include Hilton Als, Naomi Campbell, Elton John, Spike Lee, Sally Mann, Polly Mellen, Kate Moss, Chloë Sevigny, Taryn Simon, Christy Turlington, and Jonas Wood. A publication commemorating this exhibition consists of statements from these luminaries, as well as essays by Derek Blasberg, Larry Gagosian, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, and Jake Skeets. We present a sampling of these materials here.

Everywhere Light

Jake Skeets reflects on Richard Avedon’s series

Oil. Rodeos. Drifters. A map to the American West, also called Frontier. We know the myth of it well. Open land for miles. Long horizons only broken by one or two mighty rivers. But there is little water still. There is dirt, and oil and rodeos and drifters. The open road is a metaphor for the opportunity that might exist out west . Out there Somewhere in the Frontier

One road is a vein through it all: US Highway 66, also known as Route 66. The Mother Road. According to the National Park Service, there are more than 250 sites along the road that are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a road of both myth and history. The road was crucial to the US expansion in the West and contributed to several American industries, like fast food, roadside motels, and Native American jewelry. Entering any gas station or convenience store along the road still offers memorabilia of the all-American story. Richard Avedon entered this space while working on the series In the American West , stopping by several towns along the road, including small towns like Gallup, New Mexico. Travelers often speed through on their way to Las Vegas or Los Angeles. It’s a town that relies on this travel, both by road and train. One of the revenue streams for Gallup is (American) Indian Jewelry, earning it the nickname “The Indian Capital of the World.” And I consider it one of my hometowns. The other is Vanderwagen, New Mexico, just south of Gallup, located in the checkerboarded area of the Navajo Nation, also known as the Navajo Indian Reservation. For me, it’s Diné Bikeyah, the people’s land. It’s home. Gallup is a border town nestled between the homelands of the Navajo, Hopi, Laguna, Zuni, and Acoma people. It’s the nearest town for a lot of these communities, and families are often forced to travel into Gallup for groceries, supplies, and other amenities. For me, it was all of the above, even schooling. I know Gallup like the back of my hand. I know its history. I know its future.

Avedon visited Gallup in June of 1979. According to Laura Wilson, who worked with Avedon during In the American West , she would often approach subjects Avedon found interesting. While in Gallup, they encountered a man named Benson James. He was wearing a dirty shirt and they photographed him. His face is almost a mirror for the landscape. His face is a reflection of the American West. His hair is shoulder length, and he stands before the white backdrop with the weight of a century. James is holding some crumpled cash in his hand as he stares into the infinity of the camera lens and tells us a story without any words.

James and Avedon represent two histories colliding. In the photograph, we see the visible hand of James and the invisible hand of Avedon. We then see white as if a moment before blackout or death. White like the absent clouds above the western sky. White like foam on spilled beer outside a bar. White like the teeth of pageant queens in Texas or the large letters of small-town pride that are embedded in roadside hills. White like lightning. White like the story of the American West, all boom and roll. James represents the ones who were rolled, and Avedon represents the ones who do the rolling. And I mean this literally. James was murdered a year later in Gallup. Avedon went on to lead a life of celebrated photographs.

Avedon’s photographs tell so much of the American story. James’s death tells so much of the American story we all try to forget.

In 1985, my family received the finished book, In the American West . My grandmother had no idea

her son, my uncle, had been photographed. My aunt, Paula James, wrote a letter to Avedon, dated February 20, 1985, explaining that James was “stabbed about 40 times behind a Cedar Hills grocery store in Gallup.” My aunt sent the letter from the post office box she still uses today. The letter also inquired about the photo itself, asking if my uncle was paid for his photograph. My mother has a story about my grandmother charging people who wanted to take her picture whenever they traveled into Gallup. Many people wanted photographs of Native people back then. Avedon’s portrait feels different, however. It has a different texture. It has the stain of a forgotten side of American history. The side we lock our doors to, clutch our purses near, pretend we do not notice as we pump gas.

Avedon, in his erasure of background and the orientation of light, situates the American West in an infinite space, both past and present. Our only gesture of time is a face, a stare, a posture, the human body, all beautiful and true. Time is not an experiential element in Avedon’s work. Time is emotive. Time is physical. We can trace time along the photographs themselves. There is no history. There is no destiny. There is only story. And it was this story that moved me when I saw the portrait of my uncle.

I sent several e-mails to Laura Wilson, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Avedon Foundation during my research into the photograph of my uncle. I wanted to learn as much as I could. I even requested, if there were additional photos taken of my uncle, if I could view them privately. In a previous essay, I wrote about seeing the photograph as a child and again as an adult. I explained, then, that the photograph changed the direction of my first collection of poetry. My book became an investigation into the history of Gallup and my association with the violence that exists there. James’s story is not the only one. It belongs to a long legacy of people dying in Gallup because of alcoholism and racism. Those stories join the many others in various border towns across the United States and Canada. It even joins the hostility in borderlands across the world. Collision, after all, is violent. My first book attempted to write into the turbulence, to offer beauty within the chaos. I wrote to reclaim the story of my uncle in the way Avedon attempted to reclaim the forgotten stories that exist in the out there.

The frontier is my home. I’ve only known collision. My book was an attempt to let the sediment of that legacy settle and hope for a river stone somewhere in the future. Today, as I return to the portrait, I see only the story of my Uncle Benson. I hear the ghost hum of Gallup somewhere in the background. Beyond the white background exists a town that proves time is never what it seems. Time is a road. Time is a building. Time is a turquoise necklace. Time is a gas pump. Time is a body.

One of the kinds of artworks you can find in Gallup are rugs woven by Diné master weavers. They travel through space and time because of their beauty. The designs are everywhere today. One of the prominent designs is the Diné chief blanket with its famous bands of black and white wool. I asked once what the stripes mean. I was told by various people various things. The white and black can represent touch, as in the moment rain hits the ground, or the early morning when the sun is about to rise. And I trace the outline of my uncle’s figure on the white space and observe the same thing: rain, early morning. There is no tragedy in his portrait, only the world, plain as early morning light, an everywhere light.

In the American West, focusing on the portrait of his uncle, Benson James.

Opposite: Benson James, drifter, Route 66, Gallup, New Mexico, June 30, 1979

Opening spread: Deborah Willis

Photomat portrait of Richard Avedon, photographer, with a mask of James Baldwin, writer, New York, September 1, 1964

Framing a portrait of two artists who are also known as activists can be viewed as a complex production. The first time I saw the image it engaged my curiosity about masking, twinning, and storytelling. I selected this image because of the beauty of the constructed moment when I viewed it and the combination of the political and the personal merged in one single image. I have researched the philosophical writings of Baldwin and the aesthetic images of Avedon for years and find this pairing of identities an excellent example of hope, possibility, and friendship in the long rights struggle that included cultural transformations.

Spike Lee

Malcolm X, Black Nationalist leader, New York, March 27, 1963

To my dismay the great photographer Richard Avedon never took a portrait of me. It just never happened, but all was not lost. The New Yorker featured an Avedon portrait of Malcolm X with the review of my film. On my mantelpiece is that portrait of Malcolm signed to me by Avedon. I also have now on the walls of my 40 Acres and a Mule office in Brooklyn portraits of Lena Horne, Joe Louis’s right-hand fist, Marlon Brando, and Brando with Frank Sinatra. Richard Avedon was as great as the portraits he took of the greats.

Awol Erizku

Malcolm X, Black Nationalist leader, New York, March 27, 1963

Considering the fact that this particular portrait was made in the midst of the most tumultuous and divisive decade in world and American history, marked by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, political assassinations, and the emerging “generation gap,” I have a strong conviction Avedon was aiming to capture the spirit of Malcolm X and not just his image. Despite Avedon’s technical and conceptual intentions with this image, I find this portrait of Malcolm X abstruse and yet inherently compelling. The departure from his conventional portraits to this expressive style is perhaps indicative that this is (in fact) a psychological portrait or an attempt to express Malcolm’s dynamic within the country at this time.

Larry Gagosian

Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957

One of Richard Avedon’s most well-known portraits is of Marilyn Monroe in a moment of pensive introspection. Because she looks melancholy, and also because she would die less than five years after it was taken, it’s often referred to as “Sad Marilyn.” The world is less familiar with this mural of Marilyn, which Avedon produced using new advances in photography technology in 1994. This is what I find fascinating: it’s composed of images photographed in 1957, the same night as the iconic Sad Marilyn. Look closely and you’ll notice she’s wearing the same dress. Marilyn’s range as a performer is undeniable when you digest both images. In the mural, she is the opposite of sad: she’s a wild animal in her stride, a glamorous cascade of the ultimate female form, which has been immortalized for decades. It’s like choreographer Bob Fosse’s version of The Human Figure in Motion , Eadweard Muybridge’s 1901 book of photography that dissected human forms. For me, the most appealing part of this work is the notion that we are watching two legends at the peak of their powers: Avedon behind the camera and Marilyn in front of it. I’m a huge collector of Avedon’s portraits. In addition to the Sad Marilyn, I have acquired images of John Huston, Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, and others. Avedon has a signature style and you know an Avedon when you see one. I admire his ability to keep someone in front of a camera until they exposed their true self, whether that meant waiting for them to crack and show a vulnerable side, or just cranking up the music and letting them go wild. With Marilyn, it seems he did both on the same night, which was surely one of the longest and most memorable of his career. (After all, he must have cherished the memory of that 1957 shoot to revisit it thirtyseven years later and make a new work out of it.)

I met Avedon many years after he photographed Marilyn. I’d visit him in Montauk and we’d have hard-boiled eggs and champagne, which he said was his favorite breakfast. He was always upbeat, bright, and talkative. I regret never asking him about Marilyn, because I’m still fascinated by her. But I find solace in knowing that now, years after they’ve both passed, the world is still reveling in their mysterious processes, epic careers, and undeniable mark on pop culture.

Amber Valletta

Twiggy, dress by Roberto Rojas, New York, April 3, 1967

I’ve always been drawn to this image of Twiggy because Avedon’s incredibly keen eye and mastery of composition are so clearly defined in it. The symmetry of the horizontal lines in the dress, her gentle facial expression, the demeanor of her body, the twilight of the studio light: it’s all exquisite. Avedon was a master of capturing a person’s interior world at the same time he was creating a specific moment in time. Though it is a fashion picture—with a fashion credit in its title— it’s even more moving as a portrait of Twiggy, the boundary-breaking, era-defining model who launched a fashion revolution. Avedon had an entirely modern view of photography, and so much of his work has defined the history of fashion photography and continues to inform much of its future. I’m honored to have worked with him and have been moved by his work since I first encountered it. He was and remains a true legend.

Kim Kardashian

Elizabeth Taylor, actor, cock feathers by Anello of Emme, New York, July 1, 1964

I’ve always been taken by Richard Avedon’s portrait of Elizabeth Taylor because it epitomizes her timeless beauty. In this image, he proves why she was such an icon of her era yet, at the same time, completely transcended it.

Denise Oliver-Velez

The Young Lords: Pablo Yoruba Guzmán, Minister of Information; Gloria González, Field Marshal; Juan González, Minister of Education; and Denise Oliver, Minister of Economic Development, New York, February 26, 1971

Looking at that photo reminds me of how very young we were to have the weight of leading a large group of members who were mostly younger than we were—and the amazing pressures we were faced with; we literally were Young Lords twenty-five hours a day—with a driving need to help our people while being harassed and spied on by multiple police agencies—local and federal.

Hilton Als

Truman Capote, writer, New York, January 21, 1949

When I was growing up, I admired Truman Capote’s unabashed queerness. He put it out there at a time when folks thought it best to keep it in. Back then, being out could get you arrested. It took a certain amount of toughness to be who you were if you were gay and unashamed in the 1940s, also a belief in what you could project as an out gay man: an effete stylishness, and a belief in fantasy. Dick captures that in this lovely, misty, and mystical portrait of a unique American artist.

Sally Mann

Ezra Pound, poet, at the home of William Carlos Williams, Rutherford, New Jersey, June 30, 1958

A few years ago, a picture of a man’s contorted face was used for the cover of a novel. I imagine it was chosen because of the ambiguity of the expression, although the title helpfully informs us that this was the subject’s expression at orgasm. So, unless something is terribly wrong with the guy, we can assume his face was contorted in pleasure.

The Avedon portrait of Ezra Pound is similarly ambiguous—as almost all good photographs are— although there is no mistaking what is on Pound’s face for orgasmic pleasure. At first glance it might appear to be anguish or deep grief, and that would not be an impossibility by any means. Ezra Pound was a man of oceanically deep sorrows, and he was also batshit crazy.

In 1958, the year this picture was taken, he had just been released from the bughouse, as he called it, at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. Shortly after this, he adopted his very public vow of total silence, which he steadfastly maintained, breaking it at long last by proclaiming, “I have never made a person happy in my life.” Interestingly, Cy Twombly told me that during this famous silence he happened to be sitting behind Pound in his private balcony at the Spoleto festival and clearly heard him speak to his wife, Olga; his voice was raspy and weak, but he was lucid. Or as lucid as a man can be who has been locked up outside like an animal in a 6-by-6-foot wire cage, keeping company with the doomed father of Emmett Till, while writing on pieces of toilet paper the uneven but often brilliant Pisan Cantos

In this moment captured by Avedon, Pound’s expression could reflect the exquisite intensity of concentration as he declaims those very cantos to his friend William Carlos Williams, or it could be the revelatory moment before the camera when he realized he was, in his own words from “Canto 115,” “A blown husk that is finished / But the light sings eternal.”

We can never know what this wounded, bitter, and confused man was feeling, and the unknowing, the question, the gift of ambiguity is what Avedon bestows on the viewer.

Artwork © The Richard Avedon Foundation

RITE S OF PASS -AGE

‘Rites of Passage’, an exhibition at Gagosian, London, this spring, explored the concept of “liminal space,” a coinage of the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, through the work of nineteen contemporary artists who share a history of migration. Here, Péjú Oshin, associate director at Gagosian, London, speaks with Phoebe Boswell, Adelaide Damoah, and Julianknxx about their participation in the exhibition and about the complexities of community, performance, truth, and identity.

PÉJÚ OSHIN The show was titled Rites of Passage , and it considered the idea of liminal space. What are your experiences with this notion, conceptually as well as personally?

PHOEBE BOSWELL A lot of my work exists in the porous space between what we know and what we’re yet to know, what we’ve experienced and what hasn’t become yet. The idea of liminal space is really interesting: as a mental state, it can create a lot of tension because it’s a state of unknowing. But I think that the alternative reading of it, or the alternative sensation of it, is that it’s the space of massive possibility and radical hope. It becomes a space of immense knowledge, a space of everything that has been up till this moment, and also a space where the future hasn’t been tarnished yet, right? If you look at it in terms of who we are in this moment, it’s where we can place memory, and it’s also where we can dream.

JULIANKNXX It’s something I’m living out daily. I’ve been looking at the question of what it means to be Krio, from Africa, specifically West Africa, Sierra Leone. We’re made up of the African returnees who came back from Europe, the Caribbean, the Americas, and had to start a whole new identity and language. They had to reinvent modes of representing themselves. There’s this constant movement happening, but the excitement, as Phoebe was saying, lies in all that potential—the potential of shifting and drifting. The Krio people in Freetown created this identity of borrowing as they were moving along; they’ve borrowed literally everything that creates who they are today. And I’m here today because of this borrowed identity—that for me is exciting, and passing that on to my kids to think about feels positive. They are partly Sierra Leonean, partly Zimbabwean, but they were born in England. How they carry on this thing of what’s possible with humanity, how we can think of ourselves not just from a social/political lens, how we move as Black people and own spaces and take what we can without this limiting thought of, I’m this, therefore I should do X. . . . How do you say, No, I will take what I can wherever I’m at—I find that inspiring.

For an artist thinking about identity, thinking about how I present myself visually, there is a level of performance. I’m carrying these things with me into the ritual space, into the spiritual space, and into the physical space. I can bring my ancestors with me. In this space, for me, time and truth don’t matter. I don’t have to care about facts; I’m going to tell these stories in whatever way I can. Because when you look at how many stories white people tell about themselves, who cares about facts?

ADELAIDE DAMOAH There’s so much in what both Phoebe and Julian said that has inspired and added to what I’ve been thinking about in my practice, specifically from the perspective of Sankofa and the idea of understanding your past so that you don’t repeat the same mistakes in the present. It all leads to the question, How can we create another future? Being comfortable in what is known and what is unknown allows for the space to dream, to mythologize. I often use ancestors to mythologize. In this specific work, the ancestors existed at a time when Ghana, which is where they were from, was under British colonial rule, so there’s so much that I don’t know about what they thought and how they lived. That gives me the space for telling a completely new story, where I can ignore or break fixed ideologies and concepts that are no longer relevant, that have held us back in the past, whether that’s with regard to religion, race, or gender.

PO Liminality is expansive. It allows for all of these future possibilities. For many of us who identify with this notion of living in liminal space, or constantly being in transition, there is inevitably this idea that you have to accept and expect the unknown, and for that to happen, whether in a small way or in a big way, is paramount.

Before the show was called Rites of Passage , it was called The Space That We Create . While we operate individually, many of us with Black and African diasporic identities don’t operate as singular beings; we often operate in a communal space. What does it mean to operate in a society that promotes the fantasy and supremacy of the singular being, but also, at the same time, to have that very strong sense of wanting to be, or acknowledging that it is important to be, part of a community?

AD We are social creatures, and the way this capitalist Western world has pushed us into this space of individuality isn’t working for most people, especially after the last couple of years with covid and lockdowns. I feel like we’re now in a place where a lot of artists are crying out for community and connection. Selfishly thinking “It’s all about me” doesn’t work, because no man or woman—especially when part of a marginalized group—is an island. In order for all of us to really get somewhere, we must lift each other up, as opposed to only thinking about the self.

We’re at a critical time when we’re becoming aware of the need for consciousness, all of the tendrils that were already out there in terms of the connections that we all have are tightening up, and we’re all gathering together. And I feel like that’s reflected in what’s happening on the art scene

specifically with regard to Black artists, and that’s evidenced in things like Lisa Anderson’s Black British artists photoshoot in London for the BCA [Black Cultural Archives project].

PB Everything mentioned is true, but I also want to say that I think a pressure comes with this idea of Black community—the feeling that we all have to speak the same way, we all have to speak for each other—and there’s something so restrictive about that. The Kenyan writer Keguro Macharia has written a book called Frottage [2019] about the intimacies of Blackness. We talk about Black kinship, but kinship suggests the familial—suggest that we all have the same ideas, and speak in intimate ways that are all affirming of one another. Macharia tries to queer this idea of kinship by calling it “frottage.” There, Blackness doesn’t have to be a thing where we’re all embracing each other in a homogenizing, normative way but becomes something where we can rub against each other, and the rubbing against is where the energy to propel us forward exists. We can read with and read against one another. Frottage exists in the ways we don’t see eye to eye, in the ways we enable each other to have singular points of view and perspectives, while still being completely entwined in this overarching, interlocking rhizome of what Blackness is. As soon as we become a monolith, we’re very easily managed by those who don’t ever want to truly see us anyway. PO I want to clarify and also agree with you, Phoebe. I think the idea of community can sometimes be divisive because it can be a flattening force. Along those lines, I want to speak very specifically to all of your works. I’m thinking about you, Adelaide, and how when we talk about community

in the context of your practice, that can mean multiple things for different people: the people who surround you, the people who build you, the people who make you, the people who eventually become a composite group that bestows you with what you are. And then for you, Phoebe, your works in the show are tender and about risk. And then you, Julian, address the idea of the masquerade, which, within our various cultures and communities, may come out at festivals or particular family harvests. What I’m driving at is that there are multiple layers of community that look really different but all feed into this broader idea of interconnectivity across space and time. In truth, it can’t ever be flat, and I think that’s what we’re all working toward.

J The way I’ve been approaching this project specifically is from the idea of creating a living archive. If the archive is alive, that means it changes—it has to keep being moved and shaped and interrogated and challenged. For me, I can’t legitimately make work without talking to people, so listening becomes a big part, which I enjoy. I have a special love for people telling me stories that can’t be proven [laughter ].

PO “I don’t care about the truth anymore” [laughter ].

J Exactly [laughter ]. I’m interested in memory, how people tell stories of the past and how creatively they do it. My earliest memory of these is the way my grandma would tell me stories of my granddad, whom I never met. So there’s this expansive freedom: I can’t verify these stories, and they carry a special tone or richness because of it. But community comes into that because you must listen, you know? I’m listening even now,

Previous spread: Julianknxx, encounter?flee (Jolly), 2023 (detail), 35mm film (2K processing), color, sound, approximately 4 minutes © Julianknxx

This page: Phoebe Boswell, And I Love You For All of Your Splashing: An Ongoing Emergence of Nature, 2023, oil on canvas, 63 × 63 inches (160 × 160 cm) © Phoebe Boswell

Opposite: Adelaide Damoah, Nyɔŋma kɛ enyɔ (Twelve), 2023, cyanotype, ink, and gold on cotton rag paper, in 2 parts, 7 ½ × 11 inches (19 × 28 cm) © Adelaide Damoah

going to different cities and just listening to how Black people talk about their experiences and how Blackness performs in different European cities. People see themselves very differently and it’s wild to me, but at the same time, it’s refreshing.

And when I’m presenting the work, I have to show it to my own close community and allow them to push back on it. This is the only way I know how to make work. Community is part of that. I live in that space, where people are questioning and I’m questioning. And in this work specifically, you see question marks at the beginning of each sentence: that’s because I’m questioning what’s before, but also I’m questioning my question.

PB We’ve been taught in a Western way to think about knowledge as this kind of hierarchical pillar, when actually, like Julian, I’m more interested in the wisdom of lived experience. Between my experience and your experience, there’s no hierarchy. Returning to liminality, I think the truth lies in the space between all our different lived experiences. For my installation The Black Horizon: Do We Muse on the Sky or Remember the Sea? [2021], I asked fifty people, including you, Péjú, to talk about freedom and what freedom is. I asked the people I read a lot—Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott—but I also asked a three-year-old kid, and the three-year-old kid probably has a better idea than all of us about what freedom is, right? Somewhere in the middle of the layering of all of your voices, the person who comes into that work has their own experience and brings their own thing into it; they can somehow determine for themselves through that experience what freedom feels like in that moment, which would change the next time

they come in, because then they’d be met with a different set of voices. Community is how we tie together our lived experiences in a way that feels liberatingly kaleidoscopic rather than didactic or binding to any one specific mode of thought.

PO Along these lines, I’d love to get into the dual—or multi—part of your practices. Adelaide, you also have a performance practice; Phoebe, this is a moment in which we are looking at people who are engaging with your written work, and how that can spurn questions around the truth in other ways; and Julian, in your practice with poetry and storytelling, we’re again engaging with inquiry and truth. How do these aspects of your practice provide additional ways in which you might be offering space not just to yourself but to those who are engaging with the work as an opportunity to look at the truth?

PB I’m really interested in the slippage of memory. Whole cultures have been formed around lies and complete memory loss; whiteness is a transmutation of some ideas that some people had that became “truth,” becoming this bind that we all now have to live within, right? So history books are written in ways that make truth out of something that is probably a warped perspective. If you have an agenda around power, then the idea of searching for truth within the rigid lines of a page, or even photographs, and now thinking about AI, with deep fakes—sorry, I’m not even answering your question—everything is up for slippage, which is terrifying . . . and also maybe liberating.

I started writing because I used to want to be superprepped when talking about my work. I’d write artist’s talks, and then I realized it’s kind of a

vibe to sit and think about your work dynamically in this other form. And then the writing took on its own power for me, because it became a place where I could slip between the slippage of my own, restless visual practice. I draw, I paint, I make films, I play with sound, interactivity, animation, space, I play with loops and pull people into the work. . . . I ask the work what it needs and I listen to that intuitively and show up as best I can with those tools. It’s both organic and deeply intentional, revelatory, and I’ve found that writing has become this porous middle space between all the directions my practice is pulling me in, a sort of connective tissue in a breathing, living thing.

J Poetry was my first gesture of self-expression. It was my own private endeavor—just marking or projecting the person I want to be. Over time, I came to realize that what poetry does is condense big ideas. That was appealing, that I can tackle vast concepts with small gestures. Then, if you combine this with the way we tell stories back home— they always come with emotion. If someone’s hosting a funeral, or if they’re hosting a wedding, they break out into songs, they break out into old stories, they’ll break out into some secret that you’re not meant to know about [laughter ]. There are these performances that we do on a daily basis. We take them for granted because people said, Oh, to do such and such you have to do it in this way. Embracing all of these things back home then gave me a space and a freedom to say, Oh, I can stand up and read a poem, I’ll break out into a chorus, I can ask friends to come and join me onstage and sing with me. I’m not being a multidisciplinary artist; it’s just what my grandma did, like, you can’t just

tell a story. Even during the [Sierra Leone Civil War (1991–2002)], we’d be sitting outside and people would just drop a story. We’re all outside, traumatized, and this guy walks past and goes, “I just witnessed so much blood.” And we were all like, Where, and he says, “It’s running down the hill all the way to the center of the capital city.” He said, “There’s been a big accident.” And we’re like what accident, what happened? This guy, with his serious face, he said, “Yeah, a car just ran over a cockroach so now the blood is just everywhere” [laughter ]. And he just went on.

But we needed that. Everyone laughed and then, you know, the next group of people came, they started shooting guns and we all ran, started lying on the floor. These moments, and the way we live our lives as Black people, are as fascinating to me as so much of quote-unquote “high culture.” Or, I was listening to an interview with Arthur Jafa and he spoke about how Black people don’t have to dunk the ball the way we do when we play basketball, but we do it anyways, with flair. It’s like, Why not, you know?

AD I secretly write poetry as well, which slips into my work in the context of performance. Revaluing the Self [2020] was a spoken-word performance. It was a long poem that I wrote, and I made up things, mythologized actual people to create these mythical beings to tell a story that, unless you know me and knew what was happening at the time, just looks like a fictional story, but all of it was based in truth. The Into the Mind of the Coloniser performance [2020] is probably the most obvious one where I was using the truth from a certain perspective. I took the truth from the colonizers’

perspective to bring alive the idea of what was enforced on Africans and other colonized peoples when the whole colonial project was happening: I was reading specifically from the perspectives of these people from texts written at the time. Some of them were instruction manuals of how to colonize people, how to control the natives, so to speak, and as well as very dry truths about how to look after themselves in a tropical environment—the kind of medications to take, the kind of clothes to wear, that kind of thing.

But in addition to exposing truths that most people who were watching the performance would have had no idea about, there was also the presence of myself, a representative of Africa, so to speak, and speaking about the scramble for Africa. I was wearing funeral attire, so it was this mournful expression of a version of truth. We all know that the whole colonial story was a lot more complex than that, but that was one way of exposing one version of truth that most people participating weren’t aware of, and they left feeling shocked. And some people were upset and some people didn’t want to take part. But it was a visceral experience. That for me is really the importance of performance when it comes to trying to tell a story, in that you collapse the space between the audience and the artist to be able to tell a truth, whatever that truth is. It doesn’t have to involve the use of words; it can be just the movement of your body that impacts the audience in a way that’s difficult to get from looking at a static object.

Installation view, Rites of Passage, Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, March 16–April 29, 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Phoebe Boswell, © Enam Gbewonyo, © Femi Dawkins. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

A. C ODOGN AT O

Andrea and A ttilio Codognato

photographed by J uerg en Teller

FASHION AND ART PART 14: EDWARD ENNINFUL

Edward Enninful OBE has held the role of editor-in-chief of BritishVogue since 2017. The magazine’s course under his direction has served as a model for what a fashion publication can do in the twenty-first century: in terms of creativity, authenticity, diversity, and engagement with social issues, Enninful has created a new mold. Here, Enninful meets with his longtime friend Derek Blasberg to discuss his recently published memoir, A Visible Man.

Derek Blasberg: Where are you right now?

Edward Enninful: I’m in London, in my apartment near Hyde Park, staring out the window and talking to you. London Fashion Week’s coming up so we’re all getting very excited. We have lots of young designers, like Nensi Dojaka, who I’m really excited to see.

DB: I haven’t seen you since 2022, which was a surreal year. There was so much to celebrate, including a return to what felt like normal fashion weeks, and the publication of your memoir, which we’ll talk about in a minute. But there were also somber moments, like the passing of the queen. When you look back on the second half of 2022, which was also the year you got married, what moments stand out for you?

EE: It was also the year I turned fifty. Even though age seems like just a number, you can’t help but change the way life looks to you. I got married to a man I’ve been with for so long. You were there when we met, all of twenty-one years ago! I published my memoir because I felt that it was time to really share my story with a new generation, as well as people I knew who didn’t know much about my life and how I got here. I often got a feeling that when people look at careers like yours or mine, they think we were always just here. They don’t see the struggles that got us here. But it’s my failures that got me here as much as the sort of great moments or whatever.

DB: Oftentimes, people think writing a book, or working on a memoir, or turning fifty, or getting married, are therapeutic, cathartic moments. Did you feel that way when you were doing all the things you did in 2022? Was it like therapy?

EE: Honestly, I think I was just being stupid, doing them all at the same time! So yes, it felt like therapy, and a lot of it! But more important, it just felt right. When you hit fifty you start to look at your life. I just felt like it was time to do a lot of things I hadn’t done.

DB: What was the hardest part to write about?

EE: Some of the bits about my family were painful. Most of my friends know about my journey to sobriety, so talking about that stuff was fine. But the stories about my father were always hard to relive. It’s like, you might be fifty, but you’re only a step away from being a child again when you begin to deal with issues that are so personal. But I knew I couldn’t do a book that just said, We went to this party, we went to that party. We do that every month in Vogue ! If I was going to do a book, it had to really be something that was about the struggles we all face every day and how we try to overcome them. I’m not saying I’ve overcome them right now. I’m just staying that every day I try.

DB: For years, you told me you weren’t interested in writing a book. What changed?

EE: Everything? covid . Lockdown. George Floyd. These things really changed all—yeah, changed all of us.

DB: I read the book twice! I read it once in print before it came out, and then, when you asked me to host a book party for you in Paris, I read it again by listening to it on audio. What was it like to read the book?

EE: It was a trip, definitely. It’s like you’re talking about your life, but you’re a step removed when you read it. At moments I’m thinking, Oh my God, is this too personal? Could I have said this better, should I have said more of this? As you know, I’m never satisfied anyway. I’m never happy with the issue of the magazine, I’m never happy—I’m always looking forward, trying to make things better. But with this book, I didn’t even hand it in until the last possible deadline. I think I actually went over deadline! I kept going back and correcting and correcting and correcting. Eventually I had to hand it over, and when I did, I was very happy. I’m very proud of it.

DB: In the book you talk about the intersection of fashion fantasy and real life, and how your styling process has been informed by reading books and going to art museums. How do you think experiencing other forms of art has informed what you’ve done as a stylist?

EE: Experiencing other forms of art is what got me here. Being obsessed with musicians, whether it was Diana Ross or David Bowie, and being obsessed with artists like [Piet] Mondrian, who inspired designers like [Yves] Saint Laurent—that’s what I really loved when I was growing up. I remember standing in front of Monet’s watercolors as a little boy and loving them so much. With my team, I talk about the “big flat,” which is this large space where the worlds of fashion, music, and art all come together. Raf Simons and Sterling Ruby, Kim Jones and Peter Doig . . . fashion and art have always gone hand in hand. [Jean-Michel] Basquiat! Now that’s style. For me, you can’t talk about fashion without talking about other art forms.

DB: Do you remember the first museum you went to?

EE: The first museum I went to was the National Portrait Gallery [in London]. I was a little kid from Ladbroke Grove. I didn’t even know that I’d be welcome in a gallery. It wasn’t my world. It’s easy to think that someone who’s successful in this business must come from a world of privilege, but I was from the wrong side of the tracks in Ladbroke Grove, and I remember going to the National Portrait Gallery as a teenager and being amazed that these things existed. And they’re right there! I studied the history of art and when I was young I wanted to have an art gallery. I thought I’d go into the art world before fashion came calling. I remember seeing all these incredible masters in there, and just how beautiful the women looked, and I was just in love— with art and fashion, really, but I saw art with a fashion eye, I now realize.

DB: I don’t think you ever shared with me that you thought about running an art gallery. But now that you say that, it sort of informs the way you work. In your pictures, you’re telling a story, you’re creating a collection.

EE: For me, styling is like painting a picture. I can’t just go to a studio and shoot a model looking amazing. There has to be a character. There has to be an inner life. Where did this woman grow up? Where does she live? What does she do? Then the clothes come in at the end. If I don’t know who the character is, Derek, I can’t shoot a story. I can’t just take Naomi [Campbell] or Kate [Moss] into a studio and throw on some clothes and create good pictures. There always has to be a sense of a narrative behind it, a sense of a character behind it. And yes, that was informed by my youth going to museums.

DB: Specifically, Kate Moss has told me about working with you and that you help her create a character in front of the camera, which is why she can do stuff in front of the camera that she would be afraid to do as herself.

EE: All the great models love to be characters. So before every shoot, I’ll call them maybe a few weeks ahead and I’ll say, This is the character, here are some books you can read, here are some things to look at. And then when they come to the set, it’s magical. I really don’t have to do anything on that day but just put clothes on, because the research has been done

Above: Edward Enninful, Adut Akech, and Naomi Campbell. Photo: Derek Blasberg

Below: Amber Valletta, Edward Enninful, and Naomi Campbell. Photo: Derek Blasberg

meticulously. Linda Evangelista—she will ask, What books should I be reading? What artists should I be looking at? What music? And she will come to the studio prepared.

DB: As a stylist, you work closely with designers who are often inspired by contemporary art. When you work with a designer, do you often talk about a recent art show that you’ve seen, or a museum show? How do you see the interplay between art and design?

EE: Totally. “The big flat.” I love that phrase. Art and fashion to me are inseparable. I don’t style fashion shows anymore, but when I did, we’d constantly be talking about artists and designs. Right now, in London at Tate Britain, it’s Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. I love all these incredible Black artists like Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates. And for me, the best way to inspire a designer is to say, Let’s go see an exhibition. Sometimes you just go in and you get inspired by the colors, you get inspired by the mood, you get inspired by the period. Who knows? Art transports you. Art takes you somewhere. And sometimes I’ve been to galleries with a designer and they’ve come back to the studio and changed their whole collection. Art is about the times we live in and sometimes certain artists can really cut through a moment.

DB: Do you remember when our friend Mark Morrison lived at the Oxo Tower and we used to wake up after a long night and go to Tate Modern to work out a hangover?

EE: Yes! What a wonderful return to reality, not having to really speak and just looking at beauty. You know, the eye must always be fed. What better way to come alive than to revitalize yourself with art?

DB: In this series we ask everyone this question: Do you think fashion can ever be art? Can we ever call designers artists?

EE: Some designers, yes, create works of art. You can’t look at the greats— John Galliano from Dior—and not see what they do as an art form. True, it might not be exhibited in a gallery—but why not? Making clothes is definitely an art form. You know, you have to deal with colors, you have to deal with shape, you have to deal with textures.

DB: The name that comes up often with that question is your friend Alexander McQueen, an undisputed artist of fashion.

EE: Lee! I loved everything he did. He was so inspired by artists too. You remember, we used to go to so many galleries and it didn’t matter where we went, we’d always end up in some exhibition and he’d pull something out of it and it’d show up in his collections. Art was in his bones. He was obsessed with Joel-Peter Witkin and the guys from the early 1990s, like Jake Chapman, Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn. Lee was part of that whole East London circle. And when you look at his collections, when you see the most beautiful, tailored coat with a horn coming out of the shoulder, how can you not

say that design can be art?

DB: Edward, I had so much fun at your book parties. Of course I thought the best one was the one—

EE: You threw the greatest book party for me.

DB: Ha, that’s what I was going to force you to say!

EE: You and Cynthia Erivo did that dinner at Lauren Santo Domingo’s house in Paris, and it was just the perfect night. At fashion week we’re normally running around, but that night was a moment to slow down and take in a moment amongst friends. There are only a few places where you feel totally comfortable and totally yourself, and I’ve always felt that whenever I go to Lauren’s.

DB: Promoting a book is a full-time job. What was the craziest moment you had on the promotion tour? I saw you on Graham Norton . That must have been surreal.

EE: No, the craziest thing was going to America and doing Good Morning America , doing Trevor Noah, being interviewed by Oprah, doing all these incredible projects with people I’ve respected from afar, and hearing that they liked what I was doing. So the book tour was exhausting, but it was such a great learning experience too.

DB: Since you brought her up, tell me everything about being interviewed by Oprah.

EE: I love Oprah, but wow, that was so nerve-racking. She was the first person I sent it to.

DB: What!? What did she say?

EE: So she was the first person I sent it to, and I hadn’t heard from her for a week or two, and then I was at Coachella, funnily enough, last year, and the phone rings in the morning, and it’s Oprah. My heart was in my stomach because, you know, Oprah is the queen of books! Beyond! And I’m hanging on every word, begging her to give me any crumbs. And she said to me, You’re a visual person, so I suggest you talk more about the

Above: Edward Enninful and Tyler Mitchell. Photo: Derek Blasberg

Below: Editorial from the February 2022 edition of British Vogue. Photo: Rafael Pavarotti, courtesy Vogue

images. Sure enough, I went back there and added the images. She also said she liked the point of it. She wasn’t harsh. I was elated.

DB: It’s kind of incredible to watch you be stopped in the street now and hear from people who were inspired by the book. You know, we were both young kids hustling, and now you’re a role model for kids who are hustling. How does it feel to be an inspiration?

EE: I never set out to be an inspiration, but I knew that I wanted to write a book for young kids, because it’s tough being a young person in this day and age, right? When we grew up, there was no social media. We could just go out and have fun. We were being judged in the club by what we wore, but that’s about it. Now there’s so much they go through and I felt that it was just really important to let them know that it’s okay. Imposter syndrome? It’s okay. Failing? It’s okay. Not the best-looking person? It’s okay to be you. So for me, it was really important that I imparted that message and let kids from all diverse backgrounds know that it might be hard, but if you stick at it, something will happen. Magic happens. When I started, it was just me and Naomi and Pat [McGrath] in the 1990s. We had each other. We had support, as Black people, we had support. I want young people to know that they’re not on their own. Now there are so many great examples—if you’re queer, if you’re Black, if you’re from a background that’s not so wealthy, there are all these heroes for you to look up to. It was very important that I showed the kids that it’s okay to be you, it’s okay not to be perfect, even if social media always try to make you think otherwise.

DB: My last question for you in this interview is that there are now so many people who want to be an editor, who want to be a stylist, who want to be the next Edward Enninful. What’s the one tip you give everyone who comes to ask you how to make it in this industry?

EE: If you’re in it for money, give up! Ha! You’re not going to make money for a long time, and you might not even make money ever. If you think it’s a quick career and a quick buck, forget it. Apart from that, you have to be fearless. You’re going to have so many naysayers and you’re going to come up against so many rejections, and you have to just power through. And be original.

DB: That’s three things, not one.

EE: Three for the price of one!

Left: Linda Evangelista in the September 2022 edition of British Vogue. Photo: Steven Meisel, courtesy Vogue

Above: Rihanna on the cover of the cover of the September 2018 edition of British Vogue. Photo: Nick Knight, courtesy Vogue

Building a Legacy

This ongoing series features conversations with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship who offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. For this installment, Lisa Turvey, editor of the catalogue raisonné of Ed Ruscha’s works on paper, met with Sharon Flescher, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research (ifar), and Lisa Duffy-Zeballos, art research director of ifar . They discussed the complexities of provenance research, the burgeoning of the field in recent years, and the multiple resources available for tracing the ownership history of artworks.

LISA TURVEY ifar has been a leader in provenance research for approximately fifty years. Perhaps we could start with a working definition of provenance, which, especially in recent years, has become a crucial step in the due diligence expected of individuals, museums, and the art market. Is there a loose consensus as to its meaning?

SHARON FLESCHER There’s a short answer and a long answer to that question. The short answer is that provenance is the history of ownership—the word comes from a French word indicating that—but the way it’s used now, it’s much more than that history: it’s the transfer of ownership and the context of the transfer, and it’s the history of the exhibitions, literature, and other factors that can help you trace an object from the artist’s studio to the current day. Particularly with World War II/Holocaust-era provenance issues, the context of the transfer is often in dispute. Forced transfers or transfers under duress are very debated points.

LT Your immensely useful Provenance Guide on the ifar website [https://www.ifar.org/Provenance_Guide.pdf] describes “an ideal provenance.” I was struck by how difficult it is to confirm all the information listed: “a documentary record of owners’ names; dates of ownership; methods of transference, i.e. inheritance, or sale through a dealer or auction; and locations where a work was kept, from the time of its creation by the artist until the present day.”

LISA DUFFY-ZEBALLOS Since we’re dealing with movable objects that are bought and sold, ideal provenances are extremely rare. We typically see unbroken ownership histories with artworks from royal or noble collections or when works have remained

in a family, house, or religious institution. Works by modern and contemporary artists can have gaps in provenance because there are privacy concerns to contend with. There’s a certain level of opacity there that we don’t necessarily have when trying to trace the early history of an old master painting.

SF And Europe has much stricter privacy laws than we do, which also affects provenance research. It’s eye-opening for someone from the United States—even someone like me, who’s fairly well versed in these things—to factor in that you might need permission to mention that a particular work was in a family, which is integral to any provenance.

LT Even in the United States, though, the desire for anonymity on the part of owners is understandable. So too for consignors and buyers at auction.

SF Whether it’s galleries or auction houses, if they’re not willing to share information, or not able because of contractual agreements, that complicates provenance research. You are in a way at their mercy. Most will say, We’ll contact the owner or the consignor and see if he or she will be willing to supply that information. But they’re not obligated to do so. Museums, for all the criticism they receive, are much more open, especially these days, to provide that kind of information: they’re public institutions. But even there, there are privacy concerns. So it’s a tension.

LT It’s an interesting tension, given how closely provenance is tied to authenticity and title. Increased transparency helps keep that record intact.

LDZ Issues of privacy and opacity in terms of ownership history cut across a lot of different topics.

They come up even when you’re discussing blockchains, which are designed to bring greater certainty and transparency to the art market. Nevertheless, at their core is a guarantee of privacy and anonymity for owners. The blockchain companies provide a degree of certainty in the market by issuing a token of verified ownership, but owners’ names aren’t disclosed, and artists and researchers don’t have access to that information.

SF Even when there’s a provenance, it’s not necessarily accurate. Whether through malicious intent or careless research or lack of historical record, errors just get compounded. You can’t rely on a provenance that you see; if the issues are important and you need that information, you really have to do your own provenance research to double-check. Often, mistakes get carried on from person to person, and they take on a life of their own because they’re cited so frequently.

Sometimes errors aren’t even explicable. We once undertook research for the government on a Matisse painting whose initial provenance said that it belonged to a particular collection in 1959, and when it was exhibited at a gallery, the gallery catalogue said it was in that collection. But the gallery itself owned the work at the time and had to know that the information wasn’t accurate. So why was it in there? Was it just laziness or carelessness on the part of the gallery researcher, who may have been a young intern? We couldn’t see any malicious purpose, and it was only when we were doing additional research that we uncovered the error. In fact we learned that there had been two owners in between the owner cited in the catalogue and the owner at the time of the exhibition.

All these parameters and permutations have to be taken into consideration. Not all provenance researchers are good. I hate to say that. I think we are, and Lisa is particularly good, but not everyone is equal in their ability to sniff out leads, to dig and dig and deal with all the other issues—the multiple archives, the different languages, the other things that come up, particularly but not only with World War II–related works.

LDZ Today there’s an imperative for all stakeholders to do provenance research. It’s simply not acceptable to hold loads of unprovenanced antiquities or potentially Nazi-looted art in your collection and pretend you didn’t know it was there. We’re all expected to be doing some of this work. With ifar’s history of promoting ethics in the art world, this is part of our mission, and it fits logically into the kinds of resources we provide. Our Provenance Guide shows people how to research provenance responsibly and ethically and thoroughly. What this looks like depends on the issues involved in each case. If you’re dealing with potential Holocaust loot, you might want to hire a researcher to do some of this. But you want to be able to show that you did due diligence to be a responsible buyer, seller, and holder of these works. That was our motivation for establishing the Provenance Guide, and we’re continually updating it with new information.

SF The Provenance Guide is original to our website. We launched a completely revamped website in 2008 and posted three very different resources that we still maintain. One is the Provenance Guide and the other two relate to provenance research in the broader sense, to scholarly and legal and ethical issues concerning art objects—from attribution and authenticity, to ownership and theft, to looting and restitution.

Our ambitious Art Law & Cultural Property Database provides comprehensive information on, among other things, foreign patrimony laws. Currently we have laws from 131 countries, in both the original language and English translation, together with hundreds of case-law summaries. It was a free resource for the first few years, but it’s been expensive for us to maintain so it’s now subscription based. But people can also use it for a few hours for a very modest cost. At the same time, we launched our Catalogues Raisonnés database, which is still free to everyone. All three are living resources, continuously updated and expanded. They’re still growing and will continue to grow so long as people support us. We’re a 501(c)(3) not-forprofit organization.

More and more archives have been digitized, particularly in the World War II restitution area. During covid and the closure of so many libraries, that became especially important. But not everything has been digitized and provenance research still requires a lot of hands-on research. You may still need to go to that archive and look at those handwritten scribbled notes.

LT In some ways provenance research has gotten easier in recent years, thanks to the online availability of sales records, exhibition checklists, object files, and so on. In other ways it’s gotten harder, due to greater privacy concerns. How has the discipline changed, and what other resources are available?

LDZ The increased availability of digitized resources has been a game changer in the field, and it was a lifesaver for me during covid. I was able to continue working because so much of the material I needed was available online, or could be digitized on demand, which was another thing

that had changed. One of the issues that plagued the field of provenance research, and limited it to specialist researchers, was the difficulty in knowing what materials you needed and what institution held them. You might not realize, for example, that the main scholar who worked on the artist you were researching had donated their archives to their alma mater. But now we have digital aggregating resources like ArchiveGrid [https://researchworks. oclc.org/archivegrid/], the Archives Directory

for the History of Collecting in America [https:// research.frick.org/directory], and the ean [https:// european-art.net], where you can identify institutions—historical societies, municipal archives, or regional collections—that hold archival materials that might be related to your research. Online finding aids are also enormously helpful; they prevent you from wasting time traveling to archives, or trying to make inquiries only to find that their holdings don’t pertain to what you’re working on. Provenance research is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming. Even if you’re hiring a researcher, you’re often paying for their time by the hour. You will want to be efficient and save time, and online resources allow you to do that.

Just getting access to documents is critical, too. Some of the smaller or private archives sometimes only open their holdings to “qualified researchers.” Well, who’s a qualified researcher? This is important because today various stakeholders, including collectors, heirs, and restitution lawyers, need to be able to do provenance research. Digitized sources allow anyone to access at least some of these materials, often for free.

There are other types of barriers as well. You have to be able to read foreign languages, or you might need to study paleography just to be able to decipher the handwriting of older texts. But this too is changing. Some institutions sponsor transcription projects to make the digitized texts machine readable and keyword searchable. So now you may not need to puzzle through that seemingly illegible document written in seventeenth-century German script; it’s been transcribed into a plain text readable format that you can access, and maybe even translate, online. Not always accurately! But these digital tools save you the time of looking through and deciphering less-useful material so that you can focus on more-valuable resources to answer your questions.

SF Apropos your question about how have things changed, in 2000 ifar organized an all-day Conference on Provenance and Due Diligence. People attended from all over Europe and the United States. That was before the digitization of so much of this material. One of the speakers was Greg Bradsher, from the National Archives and Records Administration [nara ]. He noted that we’re used to the Dewey Decimal System, where things are organized by subject in libraries in a very logical way. But archives, and particularly the National Archives, were organized by the donor—e.g., the military division that donated the material. This made archives particularly difficult to navigate. I was one of a group who were invited to a roundtable by the National Archives when they wanted to start digitizing some of their materials, particularly their voluminous World War II materials. We were also led through their archives in College Park, Maryland. It was eye-opening to see that everything was on index cards; you had to literally sift through index card after index card. But now, much of that material has been digitized, so you can do your research from your office if need be.

LDZ During covid I volunteered as a citizen archivist for nara when they were digitizing some of their Holocaust-era claims records. This is a crowd-sourcing project that gets volunteers to read and transcribe documents (I transcribed Czech Holocaust claims) to make them machine readable. Several archives in the United States, including the Archives of American Art, have volunteer transcription projects. Of course, professional archivists vet the amateur translations and transcriptions for accuracy. The end result is that researchers can do keyword searches across an entire archive.

SF These are enormous tasks, and many institutions can’t afford to digitize. Even the National Archives was having the “where do we start” question. So that’s one way the provenance-research world has changed dramatically. In Europe, Germany in particular has invested a lot of money and time and expertise in making records available—museum records, auction records, gallery records. Austria has too. Nonetheless, although some of this is posted bilingually and the second language is usually English, that’s not always the case. It’s very expensive for them to do the translations. We’ve been speaking about World War II–era provenance research, but in recent years there’s been a lot of interest in the colonial aspect of provenance research—the return to Africa of objects from Benin or other places, for example. This research is in some ways similar to and in other ways very different from the research many art historians in the United States are used to doing. The same is true with other cultural heritage and patrimony research. Specialists develop in these different areas; in the case of patrimony issues, archaeologists can be particularly helpful.

So provenance research has become a very broad area. There’s a cottage industry of provenance researchers, many of whom interned or trained at ifar . Years ago there wouldn’t have been that interest; art historians in many grad schools were into theoretical and sociological art history. Provenance is essentially object-based art history, which was out of fashion for quite some time, and it’s interesting to see its resurgence.

LDZ It’s probably helped by society’s interest in stolen and looted art, because that ties into provenance also. That’s another area we’ve been involved in almost since our founding. Some countries—I’m thinking of Chile and Peru—have online databases of stolen works. China is said to be developing one. Tibet has an informal watchdog group that tracks stolen artworks across the market. Provenance research isn’t just for World War II or European art, so we include antiquities and heritage-related sources in the Provenance Guide. How one goes about provenance research constantly changes, since each case comes with its own set of facts and questions and a history to delve into. That’s what makes this research so interesting.

LT It’s also very granular research—just establishing a few solid lines of provenance can take hours. When published, it seems transparent and straightforward, but to reach that point is— SF Absolutely. Checking one fact can sometimes be an entire day’s work or more. And let’s not forget the role of luck—who’s willing to open a gallery record for you, for example.

LT Provenance researchers often encounter what [author] Lynn Nicholas described, in her presentation at an ifar evening in 2021, as “the human reluctance to share information.”

SF No question. And it’s not just for legal

reasons, not just to protect someone; it’s someone’s desire to hold on to their little rose, as in [Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s] The Little Prince [1943], and not share it. But more and more, I think, people are sharing.

LDZ Some special challenges come with working on a contemporary artist and trying to do provenance research for more modern artworks. You’re not necessarily going to have access to private archives or dealers’ records as a regular researcher or collector, which makes having relationships even more important. And of course there are people who are buying art for investment purposes, who may own only a small fraction of the artwork. In this type of arrangement we may never know the names of all—or any—of the owners, which makes tracing provenance extremely difficult.

LT To take your example of an artwork that is fractionally owned by someone, purchased as an investment and sold after, say, a year: what does that count for in a hundred years, when a provenance researcher is researching this object?

LDZ We might need to come up with a notation in our provenance histories for this type of passthrough ownership, as we do for dealers and agents who might have represented the artworks but did not own it. It doesn’t feel like a particularly meaningful category to us today, but it’s part of the history of the work, and in a hundred years researchers may want that information.

LT If you’re researching provenance and there’s no catalogue raisonné or relevant archive—if you’re a living artist who wants to track work after it’s left the studio, for example, or if you’re an estate or foundation attempting to document a body of work

that might have been out in the world for decades— where do you begin?

LDZ Artists and artists’ estates sometimes set up websites, or even catalogues raisonnés in preparation, to encourage people to contact them if they own artworks. Sometimes they’ll put out a list of specific works that they’re trying to locate. There are different types of search mechanisms. Again, think outside the box: if you’re not using archives, maybe you’re doing reverse image searches, or setting up Google alerts and auction alerts.

SF I hope we don’t end without discussing the subject of faked provenance and the unreliability of provenance information. Provenance isn’t always what it seems to be; you can’t simply make an assumption. Whether due to malicious or fraudulent intent, or just lack of knowledge, the materials that you look for when determining provenance, which with paintings are often on the verso—exhibition labels, gallery labels, Nazi-era ERR numbers [Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a Nazi Party catalogue of artworks they had plundered]—are sometimes faked. When you start doing the research, and you call the gallery whose label is supposedly on the back of the painting, and you find out that that particular gallery number belonged to a different work, or that the gallery never sold a work by that artist and never used that kind of label, it changes the entire picture.

Even when genuine, labels are often incomplete; over time, they’re torn, and people read them slightly differently. One of the reasons why institutions and individuals are doing so much provenance research is that they don’t want to end up on the front page of the New York Times in an

ownership dispute over a work they thought they’d acquired legally. The more complicated cases often do end up in court, and you start seeing the experts on both sides disagreeing as to what the labels say and mean. It’s not just the history, it’s the interpretation of that history and those facts. Sometimes there’ll be gaps that won’t be answered and that are subject to interpretation. And then the law comes into play as to which side has the bigger burden of proof.

Documents also get forged. People need to be savvy about provenance research. It’s not just the scholarly digging and the bloodhound sniffing that are important, but the checking of everything, because so much is doctored.

LDZ There’s a dark side of digitization, too. We’ve been presented with documents, letterhead, labels, et cetera, copied from real archival documents that the fakers found online. Provenance researchers need to be questioning and critical; you can’t just accept what’s presented to you.

SF Absolutely. Many years ago, I published an article in our ifar Journal mentioning a couple of galleries that had found that their letterhead had been faked and was circulating, in an effort to make fake works by artists they dealt with appear authentic. I’m sure if I did another article now, I could find a dozen such examples. To repeat: documentation is not always accurate, and it behooves everyone to be extra careful. Most people are honest—rather naively, I actually believe that—but not everyone is, and you need to be sure, whether you’re a gallery, a museum, a purchaser/collector, or a scholar, that what you’re looking at is what it purports to be and is accurate.

People need to be savvy about provenance research. It’s not just the scholarly digging and the bloodhound sniffing that are important, but the checking of everything, because so much is doctored.

— Sharon Flescher

A Wild Wild Wind: Bennett Miller ’s AI-Generated Ar t

Text by Benjamín Labatut

Here we are—Mother Corn said: We must hurry!

For the big Black-Wind is coming, taking everything it meets.

A small herd of bison roams above what used to be America’s largest particle collider. Outside the fences that enclose them, strewn across the grounds of Fermilab, a six-thousand-acre physics complex in Batavia, Illinois, mathematical sculptures of various kinds dot the landscape: an Archimedean spiral, a geodesic sphere, a Möbius strip, and a staircase in the shape of DNA’s double helix. Fermilab is still the world’s premier facility for the study of neutrinos, subatomic ghosts that can pass through our entire planet without interacting with matter, but it is also a relic, since its largest structure—the Tevatron, a colossal atom-smasher—is silent and empty after it was shut down by the US government in 2011, when the Large Hadron Collider, Europe’s high-energy physics lab, rendered it obsolete. What used to be the crown jewel of American particle physics is now an abandoned four-mile-long underground tunnel. Its superconducting magnets no longer carry charge. Its giant detectors, fine-tuned to pick apart the products of protons and antiprotons colliding at close to the speed of light, are blind and oblivious. Its vacuum tubes fade to rust in a nearby rubbish dump. But the bison above continue to graze in silence, swaying their giant, noble heads and sniffing at the wind.

For the past several years, the film director Bennett Miller has been trying to capture an image of the future fast approaching. From 2015 till 2020, he sat down with many of the people who hope to

shape it, men and women who are divining technologies with such fabulous potential to transform the human experience that even their early prototypes—such as the large language model ChatGPT, and digital image-creating systems such as dall· e 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion—are already generating waves of panic among the fearful. Miller interviewed tech gurus, futurists, entrepreneurs, economists, CEOs, venture capitalists, artists, physicists, writers, biologists, computer scientists, poets, social workers, and artificial intelligence experts laboring to accelerate, amplify, or guide the evolution of the tools that will reshape civilization, trying to distill the essence of what society will look like in the coming decades into a six-part documentary entitled A Better World. It is a passionate, fascinating, and deeply unsettling portrayal, but due to one of the legal upsets so common in the film industry, audiences may never get to see it; however, the many questions it raises about the limits of science, the dangers of technology, and the fact that we may create entities that will slowly drive us into obsolescence have become unavoidable. The birth of advanced artificial intelligence, the creation of virtual realities, and the belief (no longer whispered but openly declared as an article of faith by many of the Silicon Valley elite) that our species, smart and wonderful though it is, may be just a step along the way toward a higher form of being are only a handful of the daemons that could soon come to haunt or enlighten us. All of these changes and transformations pose deep philosophical dilemmas that we don’t have answers for, questions that gnawed at Miller as he was trying to finish his documentary. What is the true nature of consciousness? What makes

All works: Bennett Miller, Untitled , 2022–23, pigment print of AI-generated image, 15 ¼ × 15 ¼ inches (38.7 × 38.7 cm), edition of 9 + 2 AP

us human? Can we control our thirst for knowledge? Is there something about creativity that cannot be computed? What will beauty look like in a posthuman world? Can we really be mimicked and replaced by our own artifices? While these quandaries were stewing inside Miller’s head, A Better World hit a wall, and he saw that there was a definite chance that his many years of work could remain trapped forever inside the memory of his computer. At that point he stumbled across a particular type of artificial intelligence system that was completely unknown to the general public but that is now causing a storm, as it will surely have a profound impact on the arts: dall e 2.

What is dall·e 2? I asked ChatGPT, another artificial intelligence program created by the same mother company, OpenAI. The AI responded,

dall e 2 is a neural network-based image generation model. It is capable of generating images from textual input by using a combination of unsupervised and supervised learning. The model is trained on a dataset of images and their associated captions, and it learns to generate images that correspond to a given text description.

Have you heard of Bennett Miller?

I’m sorry, I don’t know any specific person that goes by that name. Bennett Miller is an Oscar nominated American film director, known for his films such as Capote (2005), Moneyball (2011) and Foxcatcher (2014).

I think he is summoning ghosts or wraiths using dall e 2.

As an AI language model, I am not aware of any individual or organization that is using dall e 2 or any other image generation model to “summon ghosts” or “wraiths.” dall e 2 does not have the ability to summon ghosts or any other supernatural entities. It is not capable of performing supernatural tasks such as summoning ghosts or communicating with the future. Such claims are not based on any scientific or factual evidence, and should be treated with skepticism. AI and machine learning models are powerful tools, but they are not able to perform tasks that are beyond the realm of scientific explanation and understanding.

But I’ve seen them. With my own eyes!

The inner workings of dall e 2 are inexplicable to a layman, but its outer shell, the program you interact with, is so marvelously simple and straightforward that using it feels like wielding magic. All you need to do is input text. This can be a random, nonsensical phrase, a line of prose—Charles Darwin’s sentence “In these still solitudes, Death, instead of Life, seemed the predominant spirit,” say—or a specific and meaningful instruction (“a close-up, detailed, full-color realistic portrait of a Templar knight in the style of Gustav Klimt, 9mm lens, 4k”), and dall e 2 will create an image. You can then use the program to edit it, or ask for endless variations. And that is where the rabbit hole opens up and swallows you. Because never before in the history of our species has there existed a method capable of

producing—on demand and in an instant—such a wealth of beguiling imagery: in less than a year, Miller has used dall·e 2 to generate more than a hundred thousand images.

The process starts with an idea. Perhaps it’s of a specific image in mind, but it can also be something vague. How will the AI interpret a particular phrase? How can dall e 2 represent this style or that subject? Those ideas and intuitions must be turned into a written prompt. So in the beginning is the Word. But that is just a starting point. The key, according to Miller, is to arrive at a seed: an image generated by the program which can then be planted back into dall e , and from which the AI might be coaxed to “hallucinate” in some intended direction. It is not a straightforward procedure at all. You can never be sure of what dall e 2 will create, so randomness and chaos inevitably creep in. Miller worked with these seeds, prodding and manipulating the AI by altering them, erasing parts, editing, inputting new prompts and asking for variations, selecting the most resonant ones and seeing them evolve in strange ways.

From the monster horde of imagery that the AI produced, Miller has saved close to twenty thousand. He will exhibit only twenty at Gagosian, but every single one has something that we have rarely seen before in digitally generated images, something also lacking from a great deal of modern art: an undeniable aura. But what is that aura made from? Time. Loss. Pain. Grief and decay. Long-eroded memories. Bleached bones and bison skulls. Old things wrenched from oblivion’s embrace. Feathers. Tears. Butterfly wings.

Forgotten spells, curses, chants. Songs of the scarecrow. Death’s silent stare.

Outside, unseen, beyond the borders of each frame, the wind howls. The wild wind that shamans ride. The voice of Tornado, roaring with a cry so loud and deep it can wake the dead. The body of Whirlwind Woman, beautiful and destructive, pulling us up, connecting the heavens and the earth, twisting away from what we know. The Black Snake Wind that talks to the elders.Hetellsushowmanyliveshewilltakeand how destructive he will be. But he remembers the rituals and the language. Tornado is not evil; he resets the balance in nature.

The gravity of the past lends its weight to these images. It’s as if they’d been pulled out from darkness, conjured from the void with the aid of technology. They feel alien and familiar at the same time, like phantoms from a world that never was, souls caught by a neural net. Is this a horror show? A family album? A nightmare? A dreamscape? Miller’s masked children gaze at us from a long-lost era. Or have they come from the future, with a word of warning that they cannot utter, because their voices, unlike their images, cannot travel backward in time? That would explain their deep sadness: they embody a nostalgia for things that did not come to pass. Gargantuan wooden submarines whispering below the waves. Hot-air balloons rising into a sky still enlivened by the gods. In Miller’s images, even the silent features of the landscape—the yawning chasms of sleeping volcanos, the open wound of a gorge, the hollowed-out canyon dug deep into the earth—are altars that connect us to the cruelty, chaos, and

magic of nature, and the people who used to live in such close proximity to its beating heart. Their melancholy and beauty come from their connection with the invisible realm of the spirit, one in which we no longer believe, but that we cannot live without.

Miller’s artworks are neither painted or drawn nor imagined; they have been invoked by strings of words. By using dall e 2, Miller has somehow managed to capture ghosts. A phantasmagoria of men, women, and children. Dancing shamans and masked spirits, crow warriors jumping from cliffs, and gods both old and new, called down like UFOs. Some look like future phantoms already haunting the present, threatening and enchanting our lives. Some appear to be traces of what has retreated from the world. A few also seem to be a glimpse forward, a look beyond our doom; blurred by speed and distorted by movement, it’s as if Miller’s images were rushing ahead of us, running away from the light that we shine so readily upon ourselves. And yet we are moving forward so fast that we seem to be catching up with them.

Working with dall e 2 definitely feels like interacting with an Other. Its products—which are flooding the Internet—have a disturbing quality that is hard to express. It arises, in some measure, from the AI’s “personality,” the series of quirks, glitches, and errors that it tends to make, and the particular way in which its model interprets the relationship between words and images. It has difficulty with hands, for example, and several built-in limitations, hard-coded by OpenAI to avoid the production of violent or pornographic

images. These are hard to get around and can result in a certain uncanniness, a strange unfamiliarity that Miller, however, has fully taken advantage of in his artworks. But perhaps that weakness is a strength. It may well be the case that dall e 2 and its many sister technologies can, in their profound otherness, be used to bring something back into our lives. Something glorious, powerful, and revelatory: a shamanistic approach to art, one through which we do not toil or sweat but ask and pray for inspiration. dall e 2 is an almost magical tool for so many people who—like Miller himself—are endowed with a rare aesthetic sensibility that they hitherto could not manifest or fully express. By interacting with dall e 2, these individuals are participating in a rare type of collaboration—because the AI does not have a mind of its own. Moreover, its creativity is (at least in part) derivative, because it arises from its training on many millions of images from the past, created by countless artists, photographers, and illustrators. And while this has given rise to criticism, the fact that, to create, dall e feeds on the two things that humanity has developed, above all others, as vehicles to express our inner world—the word and the image—may prove a gift in itself; the head of a path that humanity and AI could walk down together, one where art and beauty become a common language, a shared form of communication that is desperately needed now that the future is so far behind us.

Miller knows that the version of the AI that he used for his show will soon cease to exist, knows it may become a relic. He can already feel it getting away from him. Because the AI is evolving,

and the company that created it is altering the algorithm. But it could very well get worse. Tamer. They may hobble it in many ways, and deprive it of that special thing that Miller has somehow found in it: “This version of dall e will never occur again. In part because the algorithm will ‘improve’, but also because the dataset it trained on is unique: it comes from our past. It is actual history recorded, captured by photochemical processes. Future algorithms, however, will draw from vast oceans of images and data generated by artificial intelligence programs. They will just as likely draw from their hallucinations as from records that have some fidelity to their origin. But I have no desire to preserve this version of dall·e . For me it’s enough that my images survive as artifacts, as a sort of time capsule of this rare moment in history when AI drew from a relatively pure source and took its first awkward steps before crossing the threshold into something unimaginable.”

The particular type of intelligence that film directors possess is one of the keys to understanding this collaborative form of art. To appreciate these strange, centaurlike products of man and machine, we must consider what a director brings to a movie set: not a script or a plan, not even a story, but a vision. That is why a great film—which requires an army of people, each lending a part of their creative energy—nevertheless carries the signature of its director. It is their unique vision, be it crystal clear or ill-defined, that marks the work indelibly. And this is also why the images Miller created with dall e have a spirit of their own—because there is no will in the AI, nothing

inside pushing to get out and take form. The sensibility, the hunger, the unconscious intuition, the drive, the sense of sadness and beauty belong to Miller. But he himself does not feel in control of the finished product. Not because he gives ownership to the AI, but because whatever drove him to create these images arose from a part of himself that he cannot place, and that he is almost unwilling to name, since the only word that human beings have ever used to describe it is now considered anathema for anyone truly modern and awake: the soul. This word, and everything it entails, which has been exiled from science and psychology, should be preserved in art. Soul, spirit, phantom: art is now one of the few vehicles by which we can express and channel the most mysterious aspects of our psyche. We do this in a language that we never really understand, but can only intuit, an ancient, secret language that— contradictory though it may seem—may well be recovered through technology. Because while some consider that tools like AI will only take us farther and farther away from ourselves, Miller’s work proves that this is not always the case. There are currents that flow back in time even as we race forward, there are unknown and unsuspected uses for even the most soulless devices and technologies. Yes, we have raced into the future with our eyes closed. Yes, we feel blinded by our own momentum. Yes, we no longer understand the very tools by which we control ourselves and the world. And yet the bison still roam.

ChatGPT’s responses were edited and cut down for size, but the content was not altered in any other way.

Precious Adesina charts the development of the UKbased nonprofit organization IntoUniversity.

In May 2017, the London-born artist Khadija Saye displayed her work at the Diaspora Pavilion, an exhibition at the 57th Venice Biennale. The show included pieces by nineteen artists at both the beginning and more-established stages of their careers, so that Saye’s creations appeared alongside those of industry stars such as Isaac Julien, Hew Locke, and Yinka Shonibare; it was set to be a career-changing moment for the twenty-fouryear-old. Saye’s friend Sanaz Movahedi remembers her speaking about “how excited she was that one of her idols, artist Lorna Simpson, had come to admire her work” in Venice. “She was so gracious about being there, and so excited about the opportunities it would open up for her career in the art world,” Movahedi wrote in the Guardian . But Saye lived on the twentieth floor of Grenfell Tower, a twenty-four-story block of flats in North Kensington, west London, where a fire that June tragically claimed the lives of over seventy residents, including Saye, in one of the worst disasters in modern British history.

Two years after Saye’s death, painter Nicola Green founded Khadija Saye Arts alongside the nonprofit organization IntoUniversity. Created in memory of the Gambian-British photographer, the program gives young people from modest backgrounds like Saye’s the chance to explore various aspects of the arts. For roughly a decade, beginning when she was seven, Saye was an active member of IntoUniversity, which supports young people facing disadvantage to achieve their goals by helping them to access higher education and other opportunities that fit their aspirations. Since its founding, in 2002, IntoUniversity has opened almost forty

centers across Britain and has helped hundreds of thousands of young people at risk of not achieving their full potential. “We first started IntoUniversity as a small local program running out of a community center in North Kensington to help young people from the area,” says Dr. Rachel Carr, the organization’s cofounder and chief executive. The charity delivers academic support sessions, oneto-one mentoring, workshops, and career development opportunities. “Now we’re celebrating our twentieth anniversary, and many of the young people we first worked with are adults with successful careers.”

IntoUniversity tries to directly counteract the disparity in the prospects of students from different

backgrounds in the UK. “We know that young people facing disadvantage are over four times less likely to attend higher education than their most advantaged peers,” says Carr, noting that the information IntoUniversity has gathered over its twodecade-long existence has proven how vital the organization’s support has been. According to a recent impact report by the charity, two thirds of IntoUniversity’s school leavers in 2021 went on to higher education; across Britain, that number for other young people from similar backgrounds was less than a third. “It’s about helping young people figure out what type of career or role they’d like to do and getting them exposure to relevant opportunities,” adds John Bleasdale, IntoUniversity’s

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assistant director of development.

According to Green, Saye credited IntoUniversity with helping her to jump-start her future. “The barriers to even thinking about the arts as a career, let alone [getting a qualification in art], prevent so many talented children from getting past the first post,” says Green, who mentored Saye. “Khadija told me how IntoUniversity had supported her at after-school homework clubs, introduced her to Carnival Arts, which began her creative journey, helped her buy a camera, and facilitated her scholarship to [the private school] Rugby.” The Carnival Arts program, which Saye joined in 2013, lets children create their own costumes for Notting Hill Carnival, a monumental annual event celebrating British-Caribbean culture that has taken place in London since 1966. “She told me [IntoUniversity] taught her how to seek help, advice and opportunities, which is how we met.”

Green first met Saye in 2014, not long after the young artist had graduated with an undergraduate degree in photography from the University for the Creative Arts, a specialist art-and-design university in Farnham, England. Green selected her work for the Discerning Eye competition, an annual exhibition at Mall Galleries in central London. “I met her at the opening night, with her proud mother Mary,” says Green, noting that it was Saye’s first show and she had taken out a loan to frame her work. “She explained how she was working, like her mum, in a care home and had no prospect of paying off the bank loan for the frames.”

The current financial situation in the UK has only made social mobility harder for many young people. “The recent economic downturn as a result of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis is adding further strain to families and communities that are already struggling,” says Carr. “We’re working with young people from the least privileged backgrounds who don’t necessarily have access to tutoring or have much space or resources at home,” adds Bleasdale. He says that many students at IntoUniversity returned from the pandemic showing very

little progress in crucial subjects. “Literacy and numeracy had not improved, so you had young people in year seven, returning in year nine, after two years of interrupted learning, which created serious learning gaps.” John believes the pandemic further stressed the need for organizations such as IntoUniversity. “Our programs are set up to help young people overcome that.”

Khadija Saye Arts uses the techniques that IntoUniversity has learned over the past twenty years to create more possibilities for young people eager to get into creative industries. “One of the main things that we wanted to address with the arts program is the lack of diversity within the UK arts sector,” says Jade Morgan, IntoUniversity’s arts

program manager, who oversees Khadija Saye Arts. According to a study by researchers at the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, and Sheffield, creatives with parents who have working-class jobs accounted for about 37 percent of the industry workforce in 1981; by 2011, that number had fallen to 21 percent. Additionally, according to the Guardian , an analysis of Office for National Statistics data found that 16.4 percent of creative workers born between 1953 and 1962 had a working-class background, but for those born four decades later, that number had fallen to just 7.9 percent. “It’s poor,” adds Morgan. “It’s not a representation of what the UK stands for.” The British researchers saw creative occupations as “jobs that are considered to be

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Previous spread, left: A student and teacher from an IntoUniversity partner school in Nottingham, England visiting a local art gallery as part of an IntoUniversity Primary FOCUS program

Previous spread, right: Secondary students in Nottingham, England, taking part in a filmmaking workshop as part of an IntoUniversity Creative Arts holiday program

Above: Primary students in Leeds, England, taking part in a poster painting activity as part of an IntoUniversity Creative Arts holiday program

Opposite: Rachel Whiteread with interns from IntoUniversity as part of a three-week internship program with Gagosian, July 2022

Photos: courtesy IntoUniversity

most involved in creating, curating and presenting the culture that we consume,” such as artists, musicians and actors, and people working in the media or museums and galleries.

Khadija Saye Arts tailors its approach to the age of its pupils. With students under the age of sixteen, it incorporates the arts into activities they are already doing with IntoUniversity. In contrast, older students and alums above sixteen who have shown keenness for the creative industries are provided with more practical skills. “I sit in a team called the Student Opportunities Team,” says Morgan. “That’s where we can offer internships, insight days, or even sessions on building portfolios.” Morgan explains that older students at IntoUniversity often have a clearer idea of where they want their life to head, which allows her to be more specific. “We can make it a lot more nuanced and focused.”

Among the things that make the program so valuable is that it allows students to see the arts as a viable professional career. “There’s a misconception about the arts being a hobby,” says Morgan, noting that bright working-class students are often pushed toward stem subjects and careers, a pressure that leads them to see that path as the only way to build a life for themselves. “They have ambition and want to get out of their situation,” says Morgan. “They don’t see the arts as something sustainable that will support their family, so I’m here to oversee the program and ensure that we are doing what we need to do.”

A key way of creating practical support is through partnerships with a variety of organizations that deal with the arts, ranging from Gagosian to the financial institutions BlackRock and UBS. “Before the young people even set foot in these places, there’s a certain level of apprehension,” Morgan says, describing how students often believe they don’t belong in art spaces. “We are there to say ‘No, you do belong here.’ We’re trying to break down those barriers.”

With Gagosian, three students embarked on a three-week internship in July 2022 that included an

application and interview process, a week at King’s College London preparing them for the working world, which included developing student’s soft skills alongside leadership coach Seth Wainwright, and two weeks learning about different areas of the organization. “This hands-on experience shapes them,” Morgan says. “Their minds shifted so much on what they wanted to do [as careers]. It was such an invaluable experience.” Laiba Asif, who had just completed her A-Level exams at the start of the internship, says it introduced the students to roles in the industry they were unaware of, “which was valuable for me as someone trying to envision a career in the art field.” Kaya Forde, who hopes to study illustration at university, agrees: “I have always seen and been involved with the practical side of the art world and did not realize how big the technical, behind-the-scenes side of the art world was. It was really insightful, and I am grateful to have this information going forward in my art journey.”

Increasing diversity within the creative industry isn’t helpful only to people from working-class communities; it benefits organizations too. “Diverse groups engage in ‘creative conflict,’ which leads to better decision-making, introduces new ideas into discussions and increases creativity and innovation,” writes Jill Gould, a researcher at the University of South Australia, on the news website The Conversation , written by academics. “Diverse groups generate hard-to-imitate resources leading to competitive advantage.”

At only twenty-four, Saye was already starting to make her mark on the art world. As the medium for her work she chose the wet-collodion process, invented in 1851, producing photographs with an ethereal quality. “Within this process, you surrender yourself to the unknown,” she said. While Saye may no longer be making art, through IntoUniversity and people who care about her she is providing opportunities for others, in similar positions to hers, to succeed as she did.

Among the things that make the program so valuable is that it allows students to see the arts as a viable professional career. “There’s a misconception about the arts being a hobby,” says Morgan, noting that bright working-class students are often pushed toward stem subjects and careers, a pressure that leads them to see that path as the only way to build a life for themselves.

‘‘TIGHT AND SMALL AND FIGURATIVE’’:

TOM WESSELMANN’S EARLY COLLAGES

Susan Davidson, editor of the forthcoming monograph on the Great American Nudes , a series of works by Tom Wesselmann, explores the artist’s early experiments with collage, tracing their development from humble beginnings to the iconic series of paintings.

Tom Wesselmann’s college experience was interrupted when he was conscripted into the army in 1952. Bored, he occupied his time by drawing cartoons that poked fun at army life. Eighteen months later, when the Korean War ended, he resumed his education at the University of Cincinnati on the GI Bill and enrolled in evening classes at the city’s Art Academy with the intention of becoming a cartoonist. His confidence in this career path soared when he sold a number of cartoons to national magazines, convincing him he was “set for life.”1 In the fall of 1956, without much purpose other than conquering the cartoon market, Wesselmann followed a teacher’s recommendation to enroll in Cooper Union in New York’s East Village. The school’s curriculum focused on the fundamentals of design and drawing in the first year and introduced the essentials of painting in the second. Until then, Wesselmann had never applied paint to canvas and he found himself dispirited by his first endeavors: “When I started painting . . . I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no point of view.”2

The heyday of Abstract Expressionism over the previous decade was waning when Wesselmann arrived in New York. Large-scale, fully abstract canvases by the likes of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock were giving way to such works as Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines , which fashioned an entire galaxy of commonplace imagery, blurring the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Nonetheless, Wesselmann immersed himself in studying de Kooning’s technique in works on view in the city’s museums— Easter Monday (1955–56), for example, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.3

Wesselmann underwent several personal upheavals during his second year at Cooper Union. His marriage was disintegrating and he began to question the Midwestern religious values he had been raised with. Progressive modes of thinking found in contemporary literature by writers such as Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco helped to relieve the profound crisis he was weathering, the consequence being that he quit cartooning in favor of fine art. 4 Wesselmann also reckoned with the realization that he could not achieve the level of de Kooning’s art or even come close to

matching it. He accordingly applied the lessons of the older artist’s work in, initially, an abstract collage format rather than in painting.

As Wesselmann’s work developed over the next two years, his facility as a painter never truly advanced. This may be why he found collage an easier medium. Indeed, his first large collages were his last attempts at mimicking Abstract Expressionism by stapling and gluing torn and found papers with the verve with which de Kooning applied paint to canvas. Riding through Connecticut (1958), interestingly, is more closely aligned to Rauschenberg’s early-1950s work in its use and reveal of newspaper, comics, fabric, and found objects.5 De Kooning’s “line, color, and mass” are more in evidence in Green Camp Landscape (1959), which hints at the still life genre and Pop art sensibility that would dominate Wesselmann’s oeuvre in the 1960s.6 The triangular shape at the collage’s center resembles a cone; the three round collaged elements on top suggest scoops of ice cream. This association is reinforced by the inclusion of a crushed Baskin & Robbins ice cream cup forming the left “scoop.”

By the middle of 1959, though Wesselmann was still working in collage, his subject matter and the scale of his work took a 180-degree turn, from abstraction to figuration and from large to small. “Since I was turning my back on [abstraction], I decided I had to be tight and small and figurative, all the things I’d scorned.” He took “solace in the feeling that I couldn’t be with them or like them, but I could be myself.”7 This attitude adjustment meant that Wesselmann for the first time assumed full ownership of his artistic pursuits: “So I began to treasure being myself. . . . there’s nobody I knew that was painting like me or working like this.”8

Wesselmann resolved that his “subject matter was going to be the history of art.”9 A reproduction of Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1472–75), purchased in the Metropolitan’s museum shop, offered the way forward. The painting depicts a wistful Italian gentleman in whose soulful eyes

Previous spread: Tom Wesselmann in his first studio/apartment at 175 Bleecker Street, New York, in 1960 with a selection of early collage works; clockwise from upper left: Landscape (n.d.), The Lousy Haircut (1959), Little Bathtub Collage #6 (1960, destroyed), and Portrait Collage #9 (1959).

Photo: Jerry Goodman

This page, above: Tom Wesselmann, Riding Through Connecticut , 1958, newspaper, paint, pastel, fabric, and cardboard with paper, wood, metal, foil, sticker, and painted wooden rod on board, 40 ¼ × 46 inches (102.2 × 116.8 cm)

This page, left: Hans Memling, Portrait of a Young Man , c. 1472–75, oil on oak panel, 15 ¾ × 11 3 8 inches (40 × 29 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975

Opposite, above: Tom Wesselmann, Portrait Collage #15, 1959, mixed media and collage on board, 11 5⁄8 × 12 1 8 inches (29.5 × 30.8 cm)

Opposite, below: Tom Wesselmann, Portrait Collage #1, 1959, paper, printed paper, and printed reproductions with pencil, pastel, unidentified green pigment, and leaf on board, 9 5 8 × 10 7⁄8 inches (24.2 × 27.7 cm)

Wesselmann identified his own loneliness, having recently divorced his wife and living alone for the first time. The Northern Renaissance iconography of a figure seated before a window with a distant view to a landscape beyond, coupled with the panel’s intimate scale, provided inspiration for his first group of small collages. In a humorous nod, he ironically titled the series Portrait Collages (1959–61), although no identifiable individuals are depicted. To reinforce the works’ anonymity, each was titled with a number following the series’ generic title. 10 This practice, which would become the artist’s methodology for titling his serial artwork until the 1980s, follows the numbering convention used by Abstract Expressionist artists such as Pollock as a means of neutralizing any sense of the artwork’s content. 11 The artist suggested that the small scale of his early collages was determined by the confines of his studio, an eight-by-ten-foot room on the ground floor at 175 Bleecker Street, between MacDougal and Sullivan streets, where he lived and worked from the summer after his graduation from Cooper Union, in 1959, until January 1963. This studio would be the cauldron for Wesselmann’s full-fledged arrival as an artist as he feverishly worked to develop his style.

Beginning in the summer of 1959, Wesselmann produced twenty-nine homogeneous Portrait Collages . He set a determined program, collapsing the picture plane by establishing a shallow space for each composition, whose collage elements were tightly arranged. The series almost exclusively depicts imaginary women with either brunette or blonde hair, seated bust length in profile in an elaborate patterned interior. 12 The Portrait Collages establish the artist’s fascination with domestic interiority and reflect a connection to the subject matter of French painters such as Édouard Vuillard. All but four are horizontal. 13 Upon completion, the artist often framed these intimate collages in simple wooden strip frames, a standard convention of the day.

Working as an urban flaneur, Wesselmann combed the streets, finding treasures where others only saw trash. “I always started them with a piece of found wood. I didn’t like to work on just anything. . . . I’d find it having a nature all its own.” 14 Unencumbered by the collage material, the exposed wood in Portrait Collage #1 (1959), for

example, becomes a woman’s dress, or in Portrait Collage #15 (1959), her arms. Wesselmann augmented the found wood with postcards, cuttings from wallpaper pattern books, stickers, fabrics (whether velvet, checkered, or striped), cigarette packs, religious cards, dollhouse parts (such as miniature rugs), packaging from his favorite Brooklyn bakery (doilies, chocolate or cupcake wrappers, box-lining paper), and even organic material (the leaf of greens from a Trader Vic’s soup in Portrait Collage #1 giving way to leaves fallen from trees in later collages). The Joseph Cornell–type inventory he assembled, though more commonplace and less erudite, provided ready components for his gluing pleasure. The small format necessitated precise hand work for cutting and applying the materials; rarely are traces of glue visible.

Wesselmann’s sense of humor emerges from these deadpan caricatures despite their somber disposition and gravitas, which differentiates them from the exuberance of Wesselmann’s later Pop works. The sitters are awkward in demeanor, evoking eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American limner painting. Whether Wesselmann was aware of these untrained itinerant artists, who sought portrait commissions from a rising mercantile class, is unknown, but connections are apparent. Similarities between Wesselmann’s anonymous portraits and the limners can be drawn in the poses of the figures, their dress and attributes, the interior settings, and especially the naïve flatness of their rendering.

The vignettes of daily life in the series draw on Wesselmann’s engagement with cartooning. As a whole, the series suggests a comic strip format. 15 The tension generated between highbrow and lowbrow would become a chief characteristic of Wesselmann’s art. Mostly, the “Americanness” of the series, in its materials and kitchen-sink settings,

This page, below: Tom Wesselmann, San Francisco Nude with Green Wall, 1959, pastel, fabric, painted paper with printed reproduction, unidentified black pigment, and dried flowers on board, 6 5⁄8 × 9 ¾ inches (16.6 × 24.5 cm)

This page, right: Tom Wesselmann, Portrait Collage #19, 1960, mixed media on board, 11 ½ × 7 ½ inches (29.2 × 19 cm)

Opposite, above: Tom Wesselmann, Nude with Leg Up on Cushion, Purple Wall, 1960, paper, printed paper, printed reproduction, and fabric with paint, pastel, pencil, and unidentified rustcolored pigment on board, 6 3⁄8 × 10 3⁄8 inches (16.4 × 26.4 cm)

Opposite, below: Tom Wesselmann, 14th Street Nude #1, 1960, paper, fabric, printed reproductions, and printed paper with pencil, paint, and pastel on board, 4 ½ × 5 ¼ inches (11.5 × 13.1 cm)

Artworks by Tom Wesselmann © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/VAGA, New York

Photos, unless otherwise noted: Jeffrey Sturges

anticipates the concept of the Great American Nudes , which Wesselmann would begin in 1961. Yet these collages are decidedly neither modern nor avant-garde in either term’s meaning at the time. When Wesselmann declared he had to “scorn” de Kooning, he really meant it. 16

In the fall of 1959, Wesselmann introduced into his collage repertoire another art-historical subject: the nude, a theme he would later take up in his Great American Nude series. His interest in the topic arose from live-model sketch classes that he attended at the Village Art Center in Greenwich Village after graduating from Cooper Union, and from his delight in the relationship he had begun with Claire Selley, who would become his second wife in November 1963. Wesselmann worked on this group of collages concurrently with the Portrait Collages , producing twenty-eight examples. His engagement with it was based more on his interest in the art-historical motif and less on the physicality of the subject. The nude would become a dominant element of his practice, occupying him throughout his career.

Departing from the anonymity of Portrait Collages , Wesselmann based the Small Nudes on specific models: Selley, their friend Judy Tersch (later Teichberg), and an unnamed woman with a “very voluptuous body.” 17 The works’ small scale and horizontal format follows that of the Portrait Collages , though again with occasional vertical and one tondo example. 18 The Small Nudes are given descriptive titles—one of Wesselmann’s few series of the 1960s that does not follow his numerical titling convention.

Each woman in the Small Nudes assumes one of four positions: lounging, resting, or sprawling on her back, with knees bent, as in Nude with Parrot #1 (Purple Wall) and Nude in Brown and White Striped Bed (both 1960); reclining on her side with legs closed, as in San Francisco Nude with Green Wallpaper (1959); lying on her stomach with one leg bent and the other extended, as in 14th Street Nude #1 and Red Wall and Blanket Nude (both 1960); and seated in a chair with knees drawn up, as in San Francisco Nude with Yellow Wall (1959–60). A few nudes assume distinctly erotic poses with splayed legs, as in 14th Street Nude #2 and Nude with Leg Up on Cushion, Purple Wall (both 1960). Sexual

explicitness would become a characteristic feature of the Great American Nudes by 1964; at this early stage, however, Wesselmann treats the nudes modestly.

Still life elements such as fruits, bottles of alcohol, and vases of flowers are more pronounced in the Portrait Collages than in the Small Nudes . This may be attributed to the fact that the nude’s dominance of the picture plane left less room for the elaborate background patterning of the Portrait Collages . Moreover, Wesselmann’s focus with the Small Nudes was the subject itself, whereas the Portrait Collages may be considered part of the artist’s attempt to master perspective. As Wesselmann’s Pop work developed, especially in the Great American Nudes and in the Still Life paintings he began in 1962, arrangements of seemingly bizarre or outof-place cut-and-pasted common objects gained importance.

The first glimmerings of what would soon become Wesselmann’s signature pictorial space, with an interplay of flattened planes and squashed perspectives, appear in these early collages. Ironically, his use of the view-through-a-window motif was intended to provide perspective in an interior setting. In many ways, it was a brilliant solution that masked his artistic insecurities at the time. His fiddling with perspective in these works also produced illusionistic confusion for the viewer; one cannot immediately tell the painted elements from the collaged. Visual puns of source and scale appear throughout: paper doilies become lace tablecloths in Portrait Collage #7, #9, and #17, a dog perches on the edge of a perpendicular rug in Portrait Collage #18 , a parrot lands on the nude’s hands in Nude with Parrot #1 (Purple Wall) (1960).

Objects depicted as flat surfaces create odd perspectival displacements, as seen in Portrait Collage #19. Wesselmann simply stacked (or rather pasted) the elements on the same plane without diminishing scale, a feature too of his Pop paintings to come.

Another compositional device introduced in these early collages, one that would become a regular feature in the Great American Nudes , is art-historical reference. Populating the rear walls of the spaces in both series are simulated-silver-or-gold-framed miniature reproductions of

well-known paintings, ranging from canonical Renaissance, Baroque, and nineteenth-century works to the twentieth-century artist who would become Wesselmann’s greatest touchstone, Henri Matisse. 19 In many respects the inclusion of these artworks is Wesselmann’s private endorsement of his preference for traditional subject matter. Inviting these masterpieces into his work, he shows both unabashed appreciation and humorous self-deprecation.

As Wesselmann’s art developed in the next decade into its classic style, the art market’s thirst for Pop art pushed his early collages aside. 20 Their inherent playfulness may be considered an artistic remnant of Wesselmann’s initial devotion to cartooning. Most important, they represent a blueprint for his entire oeuvre as it unfolded in various series, different materials, and multiple formats across the arc of his forty-five-year career. Not just his subject matter is predicted in these delightfully folksy artworks, but also compositional devices and formats, whether square, rectangular, or tondo. Wesselmann’s reliance on the tenets of art history as seen through the lenses of still lifes, nudes, and interiors, all of which would become their own major series in the 1960s, are also in evidence. Even the method of application— collage—is how Wesselmann crafted his artworks at least through the mid-1960s, when he began to experiment with more modern materials, such as vacuum-formed plastics. There is no question that the Portrait Collages and Small Nudes harvested Wesselmann’s unique artistic vocabulary—a language that would take center stage on a significantly grander scale with the Great American Nudes , beginning in 1961.

1. Slim Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann (New York: Abbeville Press, 1980), 11. The book is written in the third person but “Slim Stealingworth” is a pseudonym for Tom Wesselmann. The artist published his cartoons in national magazines such as 1000 Jokes Magazine , True , Cavalier, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Evening Post . Michael Lobel examines his cartoons in relation to his 1960s work in “Another Wesselmann,” in Tom Wesselmann , exh. cat. (New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2016), 100–121.

2. Wesselmann, in Irving Sandler, “Oral history interview with Tom Wesselmann, 1984 January 3–February 8,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 4.

3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased the painting from Willem de Kooning: Recent Paintings , Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, April 2–28, 1956. In addition to the Met’s acquisition, the Museum of Modern Art owned three de Kooning paintings in the 1950s: Painting (1948), Woman I (1950–52), and Woman II (1952), the last of which Wesselmann could have seen at the museum in Recent American Acquisitions , March 14–April 30, 1957. Wesselmann also identified MoMA’s Robert Motherwell painting The Voyage (1949) as the first aesthetic experience that produced a “visual excitement in his stomach.” See Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann , 12.

4. Wesselmann’s work, however, especially in the 1960s, possesses a strong sense of humor. The artist would return to writing, but not publishing, jokes in the mid-1980s.

5. The New York Times masthead from Friday, November 28,

1958, is easily discernible in the painting’s lower-left quadrant. Wesselmann recognized the similarities: “I took a slide of a collage I’d done . . . an imitation Rauschenberg, a total imitation, so much so I was embarrassed [when] I look[ed] back on it not much long after.” See Wesselmann interviewed by Billy Klüver and Julie Martin for their “Art and Artists: 1945–1965” project, February 5, 1991, New York, tape 180b. I would like to thank Martin for generously allowing me access to this unpublished interview.

6. Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann , 13.

7. Wesselmann, in the Klüver/Martin interview., January 21, 1991, tape 180a.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. The numbering that the artist assigned to this series, and indeed to all of his early artworks, does not accurately reflect the order of their fabrication. Wesselmann did not start his registry book (the inventory of his artworks recorded as they were made) until April 1962. Those Portrait Collages not dated on the artwork itself he dated based on his memory; Portrait Collage #20, for example, is ascribed to 1961, while Portrait Collage #23 is ascribed to 1959. See TW Registry Book, Estate of Tom Wesselmann Archives.

11. “That’s why I title things with numbers because the works were fraught already with all kinds of poetic possibilities that you could . . . read things into it.” Wesselmann, in Sandler, “Oral history interview with Tom Wesselmann,” 27.

12. By contrast, Portrait of Jimmy (n.d.), Self-Portrait Collage (1960), Dad in Boat (1960), and Ann with Strawberries (1961) identify their sitter. With the exception of Ann with Strawberries , these are the only Portrait Collages that depict men with the addition of an unidentified male sitter in Portrait Collage #23 (1959). The only work in the series that is not a portrait is Porch (1960).

13. Portrait Collage #3 and Portrait Collage #19 are vertical and Portrait Collage #7 and Portrait Collage #26 are tondos.

14. Wesselmann, in the Klüver/Martin interview, tape 180b.

15. This idea was suggested by Don Quaintance, email exchange with the author, February 25, 2021.

16. Stealingworth, Tom Wesselmann , 15.

17. Wesselmann, in the Klüver/Martin interview, January 21, 1991, tape 181a.

18. Judy Putting on Stockings , Standing Nude with Black Hat and Stockings , Judy Undressing , Judy Putting on Stockings , Red Fish on Table Judy Trimming Toenails Yellow Hair After Matisse (all 1960), and Starry Night Nude (1959) are vertical and Judy (Oval) (1959) is a tondo.

19. Wesselmann’s art-historical references include: Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) in Woman with Interior ; Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (1503–7) in Portrait Collage #16; Titian’s Rape of Europa (1551–62) in Blue Nude ; Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait (1660) in Portrait Collage #18; Goya’s Third of May 1808 (1814) in Portrait Collage #17; Degas’s Woman Seated by a Vase of Flowers (1865) in Portrait Collage #14; Ingres’s Madame Jacques-Louis Leblanc (1823) in Portrait Collage #7; and Renoir’s Theater Loge (1874) in Judy Dressing at Night, NYC Matisse’s Woman in Blue (1937) appears in both Portrait Collage #21 and Judy Trimming her Toenails (Yellow Wall).

20. The early collages were first shown in Exhibition: Marc Ratliff Paintings / Tom Wesselmann Collages , Judson Gallery, New York, May 8–31, 1960. Wesselmann remarked, “Luckily I kept half the show—the only smart thing I did. . . . It was such an interesting, to me, body [of] first work. . . . Someday I’ll get them all to a museum and we’ll deal with the whole body.” In Klüver/Martin interview, tape 180a. These early works would not be seen publicly again until 1974 in the exhibition Tom Wesselmann: The Early Years, Collages 1959–1962 , at the Art Galleries, California State University, Long Beach. Parts of the series were revisited in a later exhibition, The Intimate Images , at the same venue in 2003. Since then the works have been included in exhibitions and discussed in the literature with greater frequency. Most recently, a focused presentation was presented at the David Zwirner Gallery, London, in 2016.

Parts of this text will appear in the first chapter of Susan Davidson’s Tom Wesselmann: Great American Nudes , to be published by Gagosian and Almine Rech in 2024.

THE AFRICAN DESPERATE

Artist and filmmaker Martine Syms teamed up with writer and poet Rocket Caleshu to create the 2022 film The African Desperate. Starring the artist Diamond Stingily as Palace, the film received rave reviews for its honest and unflinching portrayal—and parody—of the art world. Mixing genres and proceeding according to Syms’s singular aesthetic vision, The African Desperate leads audiences through a twenty-four-hour period in Palace’s life and into questions about education, romance, race, and more. Syms, Caleshu, and Stingily met with Fiona Duncan to discuss the film’s creation.

FIONA DUNCAN How were the Independent Spirit Awards?

DIAMOND STINGILY It was everything I expected and everything I didn’t expect at the same time. I’d never been to something like that before. I’ve been to art galas.

MARTINE SYMS It was really nerve-racking, honestly. You start to be, like, “What if they call my name and I’ve got to get up there?” I don’t want to be one of those people that’s like, “Oh, I didn’t prepare anything—oh, this is so crazy, I didn’t think this would happen … ” But then you also don’t want to be like, “Yeah, we knew … ” [unfurls scroll ]

ROCKET CALESHU We had more fun once we weren’t chosen for the award. The quality of the hang got looser and it was easier to appreciate how bizarre it was.

FD Did you watch the Oscars?

DS Not really. It was on but I didn’t really participate in watching it. There was one movie that I’d never heard of that was winning a lot of awards—

MS All Quiet on the Western Front?

RC The German war movie?

MS Best Foreign Picture.

DS I said that I want me and [the actor] Bobbi [Salvör Menuez] to be in a war movie together. We could play two soldiers. Bobbi would be the hotheaded one and I’d be the one who’s like, I told you not to go out onto the field this time of night.

FD I asked about the awards because I’m curious what it’s been like to come from the art world and interact with the film industry. Do you think that people who watch The African Desperate from more of a film background or no culture-industry background know that you’re all established, celebrated contemporary artists? Do they understand this context?

MS From what I’ve heard, I don’t think people know that offhand, it’s more of a secondary thing that comes up, which is fun. I like that the movie’s embedded in our community of artists. Even if people don’t recognize everyone, they can tell there’s a group of friends or a sense of community around the film.

RC It seemed like nonart people were really into comparing it to their industry.

FD Before making this movie, did you have any background in or fantasies about set life?

DS I was on a TV show. Set life can be mundane when you’ve got to wait on the crew but each time I’ve been on set, I’ve felt like I was making something really important and special, so I’m very geeked up and happy to be there, even if I’m playing Candy Crush for a few hours.

MS I worked as an extra when I was a kid. My brother acted a lot and my mom had this thing where whatever interest one of us had, all of us would go do, because we were homeschooled. Those were the first sets that I was on and I really liked asking about how stuff was made. I like being on set—it’s exciting to me. Something’s happening everywhere you look. There’s a flutter. I miss it right now, actually.

RC If you’re on the production side, there’s not a lot of waiting around. It’s always going. If you can saddle up, then it’s really fun.

FD I have friends who make films and are addicted to set life. Weird analogy, but it’s like how some people describe having multiple babies—you know those people who get that super MDMA-like flush after childbirth and just want to have more and more babies to get back to that high?

DS Yeah, I’m a product of that, actually.

MS I’m also a product of that.

DS There’s a lot of Stingilys running around…

MS “Didn’t you love when we had a threemonth-old?”

FD What was the first scene you shot?

MS The first scene we shot was Fern chasing after Palace.

RC We were at this huge abandoned IBM campus. We were getting our bearings in an alternate universe.

MS Tech City is like four square city blocks and hadn’t been used since 2001. That was where our campus was. On the first day of shooting, you want to choose something achievable that’s not too crazy and gets everybody in the groove.

FD What was the wildest scene to shoot?

DS For me, that would probably be the sex scene.

MS I was going to say the driving scenes.

RC I was going to say when an extra’s dog went missing. For me personally, emotionally, with my sense of responsibility, that was the wildest day.

DS Shooting the party scenes, the wildness was so subtle that it was sometimes like, What is even happening? I’m not going to put anyone on blast but

this one extra kept dancing. He would not stop dancing. There would be no music—

MS No one was even shooting.

RC I don’t think he could stop dancing if he tried.

FD This one is for Rocket and Diamond: What’s Martine like as a director? What’s her leadership style?

DS Martine is open to letting the actor do what they want—but stick to the script. If there’s clear communication, there’s room to try new things. Martine’s good at communicating what they need and want and they’re a go-getter. They get stuff done. That’s a good director to have.

RC Something that was really exciting for a lot of people in making this movie was this idea that there’s no one else who knows better than you know, like, “It’s you, you do your bit.” That level of accountability made it way more exciting than some standard hierarchical system in which everyone answers to someone above them. I think the clarity of Martine’s vision is the most important piece in making this work because it makes room for participation in that vision.

FD I wanted to flip the question on Martine and

ask you about your leadership style.

MS My style is to be really prepared so when I’m on set, I can play. Let’s see if I can remember this phrase from my guitar teacher many years ago—he said it in a very pithy, cool way that I can’t remember right now—but it was basically, “You don’t practice so you don’t forget, you practice so you can do whatever you want.” Improvisation becomes possible.

Communication is also really important to me. I try to check in and be talking with everybody to make sure we can bring our best. I kind of have a babysitter vibe, like, “Hey, are you hungry? Do you need this? Are we good? Are we feeling great?” It’s not that I’m babysitting people but I was a babysitter for a long time and I’m always doing that with myself. I could say I’m like a coach.

FD Rocket and Martine, what was the cowriting process like? When did the script come into the process? Was Diamond already cast? Were there story contours?

MS The role was written for Diamond. It emerged from a conversation we had where she was joking about what it would have been like if she’d gone to Bard, and that really sparked my mind. Rocket and

I had been working on another screenplay the previous year. We were in the format and had been writing a lot.

RC The idea was always to make a twenty-fourhour movie; it was going to be a last day at Bard that involved not-going and then going to a party with a lot of drugs. We had a long conversation with Diamond that we transcribed and that gave us more context. Pieces were figured out before the writing started and then the script came together super quickly.

FD I love that there’s a book of the script published, because in the film some of the dialogue moves so quickly, little references and jokes can slip by you. I also liked discovering differences between the shooting script and the final edit. There aren’t many differences—there’s the sex scene.

MS With the sex scene, the first time we shot it, it just wasn’t working. It’s a really important scene, the emotional crux of the film. Luckily we had a very talented lead actress who was able to improvise— DS Martine said it wasn’t working. She’s like a coach in this way where it’s like, “Get your water, like we’re doing it over . . . ”

MS When I say something wasn’t working, it didn’t feel real. I didn’t buy it. We all have really high standards and we were going to keep each other accountable to an emotional truth that we were trying to get across.

FD I love the sex scene so much. I love that [spoiler alert] the love interest gets penetrated. You could say it’s a failed hookup but it’s a complete onscreen sex scene because he gets fisted in the mouth. I don’t know how I’ll transcribe the face Diamond is making right now but I want it on the record.

MS In the original script, I wanted it to be a cuter moment, but that honestly was feeling really fictional. I’ve had cute moments, but not in a time and place like that. So many people have come up to me and can’t even speak because they feel so seen by that scene. It’s true to a feeling. Also that character is supposed to be a parallel to the art world in a way. There’s something about his desiring gaze that feels wrong to accept. We were trying to resolve that tension when we were writing, and then when we were shooting, we realized it wouldn’t resolve.

FD How did you cast the love interest?

MS I actually had a photo of Aaron Bobrow in my

original treatment. After I came to New York to start putting the film together, I was talking through the casting with Bridget [Donahue, Syms’s gallerist, who cameos in the film] about the different people I was considering for his role. It could be this person, that person . . . I showed her Aaron’s picture and said, “I’m really looking for somebody like this.” And she said, “Why don’t you just get him?” I coldcalled him and the rest is history.

FD Did you give him that haircut?

RC He came that way.

MS That was all him, baby.

DS That was method acting, actually.

RC That’s method.

FD Speaking of method, Diamond, did you take acting classes?

DS I haven’t taken an acting class. But in Chicago, artists would make videos and I would be in those.

MS You study films, though.

DS I do. I watch a lot of movies. Sometimes I’ll read a script while I’m watching a movie. I’ll rewatch movies until I know them by heart. I watched [John Cassavetes’s] Opening Night [1977] every night while we were filming upstate, I think that helped set the

tone for me. Talking to the director also helps a lot, just having clear communication with the person who’s making the film and making sure you’re doing it the way they want you to do it.

FD You’re very amazing in the movie. It’s everybody here’s star vehicle, but it’s especially Diamond’s star vehicle. Are you getting sent scripts?

DS Yeah, I got some scripts.

FD A lot of authors and books are mentioned in the film: Sylvia Wynter, Colette Thomas, Fred Moten, Édouard Glissant, Isabelle Graw, that mushroom book [Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World , 2021], [Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s] Women Who Run with the Wolves [1992]. How did the curriculum emerge?

RC It’s period 2017. What were people in this particular milieu using as templates for how they were thinking? Those were big ones then. It’s also about embedding ourselves with thinkers we have connected to and have strong relationships with.

It’s not meant to be a joke, it’s earnest, and then its earnestness also eats itself a little bit and becomes funny, like the way Diamond played the scene where there’s a character reading Fred Moten’s The Undercommons [2013] maybe a little late to the game. Like, “Sorry, I read that in 2015.” It’s not even shade, there’s just a particular kind of humor in that.

DS Artists like to do that. Like, “Oh, you’re reading this book? I’m reading that book. Oh, you’re just starting to read that book? I read that book last summer when I was in Turks on the beach.” You don’t have to be going to art school for those conversations to happen—people like to top each other like that, like, “Oh, you’re intellectual? Let me tell you how many books I’ve read.”

RC Yeah, it becomes a form of currency—it’s valuable.

MS I always tell people that if I’m trolling anyone, it’s myself. Like clearly I’ve read all those books. They were really important to me. It’s fun to have Easter eggs in the film.

DS If you’re into Easter eggs, if you know my work, you’ll be like, Oh, Colette Thomas—Diamond has done a show based off of [The Testament of the ] Dead Daughter [1954].

MS Self-reflexivity is something I’m interested in, creating these breaks between fiction and the reality where somebody might be like, “Wait, what? That’s real. That’s fake. . . . ” The thing they think is fake is

real, the thing they think is real is fake. I’m always going to try and find ways to sneak that in.

FD Is that a Birkin bag in the background on your shelf, Diamond?

DS It’s a fake Birkin bag.

FD I like it. One Easter egg I thought of was the “Mental Slavery” sticker that’s in different locations in the film. It seemed like an intentional set piece. MS It was very intentional. I made it. It references “Redemption Song” [1980] by Bob Marley. That song and that phrase kept coming up for me. It’s one of those things that’s so cheesy but then at the same time really profound and meaningful. I liked having someone, especially a white person, with a sticker that said “mental slavery” on it. It’s really funny to me.

FD Do you remember what the days and weeks after shooting were like? I’ve heard a lot of people talk about the summer-camp effect of sets, the intensity of this social bubble and then the postpartum that can sometimes happen when you’re delivered back into the world after.

DS As the actress, I was just waiting—waiting to see the trailer, excited to see how it would be edited. My energy was like, “Shit, I made a movie. I starred in a movie.” It takes a lot to make a movie and I was just grateful to have been a part of it.

MS Immediately upon coming back was such a weird feeling. You spend an insane amount of time with this village of people and then. . . . Let me think, September 2021 . . . I just slept. When I’m working on a project I don’t sleep well—it’s so cliché, but I honestly hadn’t slept. The second we stopped shooting, I was catching up on sleep. Then I was excited to start editing, I love editing, so I was really eager.

RC There was also this thing like, You thought shooting was a lot of work? Well, post is a lot of work. Postproduction makes principal photography look really fun and easy.

FD So what’s next for everybody?

MS Something’s coming pretty soon, but I can’t talk about it yet.

DS We’re in film now, we can’t talk about a lot of stuff.

MS Yeah, sorry! We’re in the biz now—we’ve gone to the Spirit Awards. It’s all under wraps now.

FD I’ll get the scoop. I’ll get Hollywood Reporter on you.

Previous spread: Still from The African Desperate (2022), directed by Martine Syms; pictured: Diamond Stingily. Photo: courtesy Dominica, Inc.

Above: Still from The African Desperate (2022), directed by Martine Syms; pictured: Erin Leland and Diamond Stingily. Photo: courtesy Dominica, Inc.

Opposite: Martine Syms on the set of The African Desperate (2022). Photo: Brent David Freaney

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ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS PAINT

A Conversation between Katharina Grosse and Sabine Eckmann

The exhibition Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions premiered at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, in September 2022. It continues its tour with presentations at the Kunstmuseum Bern, through June 2023, and the Kunstmuseum Bonn, opening in April 2024. To mark this momentous survey, the show’s curator, Sabine Eckmann, met with Grosse to discuss the evolution of her practice.

SABINE ECKMANN I’d like to start our conversation— which will jump back and forth between past and present, between your work and your interests, and between the ups and downs of life—with a simple question: what was it that made you want to become a painter in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Were there artists, theoretical interests, or experiences that led to this?

KATHARINA GROSSE In my youth I saw Wolf Vostell’s Fluxus Train , with its wolves with knives protruding blade-up from their stuffed bodies, at the Rothe Erde station in Aachen; I saw Pina Bausch’s dancers flinging their hair as extensions of their bodies; from Master Ma I learned tai chi and that strength comes out of the ground; and I first understood the Baroque through Bernini. As a child I went constantly to all kinds of plays with my parents and did not understand a thing, but then when I was seven I saw Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice : Shylock wants to carve a pound of flesh from the merchant’s breast, and suddenly the rest of the story becomes irrelevant—only this moment remains. I listened to a ten-second passage from [Igor] Stravinsky’s Firebird twenty times in succession, right in the same groove. I did that over and over again for weeks. And I clearly remember climbing in the Austrian mountains: how alone I was with the feeling that all these animals’ eyes were focused on me, with the sound of every falling stone ringing crystal-clear in my ears. At some point I realized that painting can bring everything together in a single moment. SE Were there artist myths or role models that influenced you? The interesting thing about artist myths is that their connotations, of course, are entirely male.

KG Perhaps that’s why there were no role models, for I identified with all of the protagonists, of either gender. Even my childhood drawings show people in the center of the arena, as protagonists, with boxers and bullfighters photographed and spotlighted. I have never made a distinction between me and, say, the pianist Martha Argerich, but I identified with her and closely observed how her presence made the piano disappear and how the sounds just came forth from her identification with her instrument.

Ulysses and Edvard Munch were in any case of major importance to me—it was because of them that I traveled to the arctic circle on a cargo ship to see the purple shadows and the outsize granite cliffs. The goalkeeper in the 1974 West Germany–Holland World Cup soccer final was important, and so was the painter Walter Dahn, the guy in his underpants in the cold loft in Mülheim. I was always completely and relentlessly in the midst of it all, in the stadium, on the stage, in the film, at the concert—even though I can never agree with anything or anyone.

SE What made Dahn, of all people, matter so much to you?

KG I come from the Ruhr region of Germany, which was rebuilt in the 1960s, with construction sites all over the place. So as a kid you would spend the whole afternoon in a muddy puddle. Then I

discovered this Walter Dahn character, who was looking for a role outside the society of his own culture—the wild man out in the provinces. That seemed to me like the artists who traveled to see the Hopi tribe, except it was on the outskirts of Cologne. Today I take a different view of all that, but back then I thought it might be a starting point for me—setting out from nothing, as if I had grown up in the forest like Parsifal, never having seen a Mona Lisa, and inventing something completely new.

SE Do you think this interest in an untainted new start at this point in time had anything to do with the historical situation in Germany?

KG Our legacy is National Socialism. It is our basis, which each and every one of us relates to, and which determines every social position we take. The fact that I started to produce abstract paintings was not some political message—it just happened. I wanted to get rid of the obstacles so I’d have more freedom to move. But this had nothing to do with the basis; it was something quite different.

At the academy in Düsseldorf, my teacher, the painter Gotthard Graubner, once told me I should look very carefully at what was happening within

Previous spread: Katharina Grosse, Untitled , 1998 (detail), oil and acrylic on canvas, 78 ¾ × 116 1⁄8 inches (200 × 295 cm), Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany. Photo: Jens Ziehe

This page: Katharina Grosse, Untitled , 1998, acrylic and oil on canvas, 110 ¼ × 81 1 8 inches (280 × 206 cm), Private collection, Switzerland.

Olaf Bergmann

Opposite: Katharina Grosse, Untitled , 1999, acrylic on canvas, 114 ¾ × 80 ½ inches (291.5 × 204.5 cm). Photo: Olaf Bergmann

Photo:

the picture field—what I was doing with it, and what could then be seen of my actions—and take responsibility for it. I should not look away from it, and that struck a chord in me. Indirectly it can also be read politically, though I didn’t do so at the time. I didn’t focus on what was expected of me.

SE In the 1990s, Germany was clearly facing up to its past and renegotiating the present—a reunified Germany—in the light of this. In the 1980s, so much was unreflected—a throwback to the ’68 generation but without any real politicization. There was a detachment from political debate, though of course many artists thought of themselves as political artists.

KG I don’t see these developments so much as historical sequences but as a simultaneous whole: Cézanne’s incredible inventions, dividing houses and trees up into planes and reconnecting them, even making them interchangeable, with local colors; [Joseph] Beuys’s La rivoluzione siamo noi [We are the revolution]; Baroque painting; Bernini’s figures in Saint Peter’s Baldachin, with eye sockets so deep they stare out at you from the darkness. I think I began looking for gaps in which you can perhaps first experience yourself from the outside of society and conventions and you don’t have to take a fixed position straight off.

SE But in Germany such strong individualism can of course also be seen as a kind of politicization, a reaction to the ideological collectivism of the Third Reich.

KG As a child I played in Bochum’s youth symphony orchestra so I gradually got to know another kind of collective action. At the rehearsals we learned to hear the roles of the other instruments and how the most varied, often conflicting voices overlapped and interacted. We also performed pieces by Charles Ives, with parts of the orchestra let loose to play among the audience. Ives really fascinated me. There’s a story that as a little boy he was sitting with his father in a church tower, listening to four brass bands that were converging on them from all four directions, each playing a different rhythm.

I was also amazed by John Cage’s experimental, collective approach, merging into other people’s works. When he set his concert piano down at a New York intersection and played nothing at all for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, his composition fused with the community. He could simultaneously hear imagined silence and the volume of urban sound, and he invented as a symphonic concept the paradoxical overlapping of large, shared spaces, of sounds and movements that were not flowing in the same direction.

SE You received your training as an artist in the last decade in which Germany was still divided—a period marked by the peace movement, the sluggish end of the Cold War, and fear of the rearmament of Germany, including with nuclear weapons. Could you already sense the historical upheaval that would lead to German “unity”? Would you say in retrospect that it shaped your artistic career?

KG Right then I was about to set off for a place I didn’t yet have any experience of. I was already turning my back on Germany. So I observed reunification as I was moving out, out of the corner of my eye, in a blur. I didn’t really think about it till much later, and that confrontation was one of the reasons I decided to begin teaching at an art school in the former East Berlin in 2000.

SE What part did your teachers play in your artistic development?

KG My first teacher was Hans-Jürgen Schlieker,

the head of the Musischen Zentrums at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. I was nineteen, and he said anything could happen in a painting. Johannes Brus advised me to work only with the material I had gathered together within the painting—to be economical. Reiner Ruthenbeck recommended Transcendental Meditation and humor. Norbert Tadeusz told us wonderful stuff about Joseph Beuys, his friend Blinky Palermo, and Tintoretto, and said the object in the painting should “stand in your way.” Graubner said you shouldn’t speculate, in art or in life. He basically said there were no choices other than complete surrender to your own predisposition. He admired talent and believed in masterpieces. At that point I could no longer go along with him. The teachers were all very authoritarian. What I enjoyed were conflicts and power plays. There was only one teacher I never tried to question; personal elements were relegated to the background, so the question of whether I accepted his authority never arose. That was my aikido teacher.

SE Who did you study with in Düsseldorf?

KG If I think now about all the people who were there back then, it may seem crazy that I didn’t get on that bandwagon, but I didn’t—out of disdain for the art market, out of awe, maybe even out of boredom. In 1991, I went to Marseille. There I could start over. I didn’t run into anything of myself—no roots, no paintings I had gotten started on, no friends. I began developing my paintings more systematically from color and physical movement—recognizing that color can appear anywhere, is placeless. It was on my way from Marseille to Florence, at the Villa Arson in Nice, that I first saw large, glossy, brightly colored wooden panels laid out on the floor and obliquely reflecting the slanting daylight. The Swiss artist Adrian Schiess had gotten the panels straight from the store, in standard sizes, and had had them painted by an auto-body shop. Through the Galerie Conrads in Düsseldorf I came into contact with the Radical Painting group—with works by Marcia Hafif, Joseph Marioni, Herbert Hamak, and Rudolf de Crignis. All of this was new to me. And then through the Galerie Mark Müller in Zurich I got to know artists who had emerged

from Constructivism, such as John Nixon and Olivier Mosset.

SE What about Color Field painting?

KG I didn’t have any clear strategic attitude to pictoriality—I didn’t meticulously organize the painting, the way Robert Ryman or Hafif and the like do. I had the idea that a painting should be present, meaning, should have a physical presence. I thought the materiality of the paint would do it. That’s why [Henri] Matisse’s very earliest works mattered so much to me, more than Ryman’s. In Matisse you can still see the weave of the canvas as well as the structure of the ground, but at the same time also the thick brushstrokes, with the physical paint as an element in its own right. This fascinated me, even in Matisse’s later work, when he applied the paint so thinly that you keep seeing gaps that expose the ground. He never ruled things out. This territorial meshing of colors and their changing effects interested me. You’ve got a blue patch of color and you paint a red one over it; this reduces the blue one, but it can still be seen, and it changes the presence of the red one. The sequence of choices and decisions that occur during the painting process suddenly allowed for experiences I couldn’t have imagined before.

SE So from the outset it was all about process and experimentation?

KG My thinking in terms of process started when I began rearranging the color planes in the painting. For instance, I’d paint orange here and blue and green and yellow there, all with a thick brush. Then I’d remove the orange here and the green there, and then use a bricklayer’s trowel to put the two colors back in the opposite places. I kept on doing that with all the colors until the paint got smudgy—the painting became a mess. The colors kept changing places, and the more they changed, the more the traces of the changes were there. That was the first time I had used such an organized process when painting. It made me start thinking in terms of sequences. I had previously tried to paint everything in one painting.

SE You said that for you it was first primarily about the physical materiality of paint.

KG Yes. I eventually realized that there had been raw color in my paintings pretty early on, before I got to art school. When I painted a portrait I immediately saw orange, purple, green, yellow, and red in the face, rather than some flesh tone. And when I was doing this kind of “underpainting” I was so absorbed in the process that I realized that for me there was no background anymore—just ground.

In a recent conversation the philosopher Ludger Schwarte told me that I see the artificiality of color, that my use of color draws us into what he calls “something you can’t quite yet imagine.” And this something is precisely what is deadened by the images that surround us, that overflow us and determine our thinking. In those, color cannot be itself. He said I had given color a new power through which we can see images and perceive the world.

SE Were you trying to explore the basic elements of painting in order to generate new form?

KG After leaving art school I began looking more closely at my basic elements, and I realized that nearly all of them had changed over the years; only my use of artificial industrial paint remained. I’ve taken that further, omitting any notion of subject matter, relevance, conceptuality, or reference to a medium, using the unblended colors from the manufacturer’s palette as my starting point. I attached thick housepainter’s brushes to sticks and used them to paint large canvases in simple downward movements. I painted, going from left to right and back again, in a kind of endless wave movement. I started to get emotionally involved in the overlapping of the color movements. I felt like an arbiter called in to settle territorial disputes between

This spread: Katharina Grosse, Untitled , 2001, acrylic on canvas, 84 ¼ × 152 ¾ inches (214 × 388 cm), Lenbachhaus, Munich, permanent loan of the KiCo Collection. Photo: Franz Schachinger

Following spread: Katharina Grosse, Untitled , 2002, acrylic on canvas, 106 × 80 inches (269.2 × 203 cm). Photo: Christopher Grimes Gallery

yellow and blue. In the process of overpainting, or, in other words, when eliminating the existing layer, I developed ways to bring the underlying paint into contact with the upper layers, through overpainting, for example, like when you’re combing hair. Painting with a long stick also meant I could keep my distance from the painting and paint beyond the boundaries of the actual canvas. I could transmit movement to the brush from my whole body rather than just my wrist. The whole body’s momentum produced curves rather than straight lines on the canvas. And then what I saw was subordinated to adaptive invention—for instance, tonal value mattered more than what I could see figuratively, like a nose or an eye.

SE So you weren’t interested in something like Jackson Pollock’s allover approach, but rather in the complex and to some extent interlocking relationships between layers. Again and again, you focused on these complicated, unexpected interactions between layers of paint, reversals of surface and subsurface, and the autonomy of colors and their optical effects. But at first did you also paint figuratively?

KG I came to Düsseldorf with big, unfinished self-portraits, only the head, 98 7⁄16 by 70 7/8 inches. Then I painted and painted; the colors grew more and more intense and the image of the head vanished. As I overpainted and erased, I grew more and more involved in the actual brushstrokes, and I began to apply the paint in these really thick layers, like some weird [Alberto] Giacometti-esque kneading of the face. In fact I often navigated my way through Giacometti’s spatial drawings, in which all the lines reconverge as in a bulge on the face—his frugality, the anticolor, the clayiness in his work. . . . I once also spent a summer painting trees like Cézanne. It was constricting; it required lots of control on all levels to find out what drew me to his pictorial idea and what involuntarily controlled me. The question that came into focus for me at the time was, What is the power structure in which we act and create, and to what extent can we break free from it?

SE Cézanne also worked with patches of color.

KG Yes, I could especially sense him touching the canvas, swapping locations and distances in his paintings. Something far away comes closer to you and yet remains unclear, as if you’re looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Cézanne familiarized me with the unfinished painting, the proposal that may claim consequences. With Munch and Lovis Corinth, the vehemence of touching the canvas is unconcealed and liberated. The effect of their pictorial interventions juts out into space and is disconnected from the painting. Lucio Fontana was also important for me—his early ceramics, but above all his Concetti spaziali , in which he made slashes in the canvas.

SE I can also relate to your interest in Fontana, since you’ve painted these canvases with successions of really thin lines.

KG I was fascinated by the sense of inevitability that Fontana achieved with so little effort.

SE With him it is also about space, which he created by slashing the canvas. Of course, you can also create space by juxtaposing two different colors. Did that interest you?

KG Never. Not at all. In my work, spatial perception has to do with the negotiation of what leads to the painting and into the pictorial plane. In my blue-and-yellow paintings from 1992 and 1993, the yellow pushes in from the side, and afterward only this tiny slash of blue is left, so the painting is a

passage, a flow. The curvature of the surface created through the movement of the brush extends beyond the border of the painting, or penetrates it from the outside. That my painting came to occupy the spa ce beyond the canvas was my first accomplishment in Italy. I started the painting with the goal of shifting it into real space, and for the first time I felt that I was working in an area that felt right to me. The painting extending into reality is just as present as the man in a suit standing in front of the work, whose shadow is just as present as he is

As a child I always played a game with myself in which I had to remove all the shadows before getting up in the morning. I invented an invisible brush to paint them out on the windowsill or the bedside lamp. It became an obsession. Looking at the world has always been associated in my mind with simultaneously doing something in it, with it, or on it.

When pictorial space encounters plastic space, common principles normally repelled by each other become interlocked, for instance when I overpainted the five-mile rail corridor in Philadelphia [ psychylustro—The Green Passage , 2014].

SE Your focus shifted to the interweaving of color and space. Did you have anything particular in mind?

KG My point was that you can’t evade the painting, that it comes really close to you, like it’s right there in your eye. You aren’t hindered by describability, which creates distance. Painting is not some reference or derivation—it enables you to see reality in the raw. You’re confronted with a sense of reality that’s not a secondary version of a more “real” reality, or a story thereof.

SE In your grid paintings of 2006 and 2007, were you trying to achieve something other than perceptual vibrations, the optical spatializations that are intentionally much more pronounced in Op art?

KG I wanted the overpainted and underpainted colors to be interwoven. I wanted to let you see into this mesh of colors. This led me to the simultaneity of all colors, with the manufacturer’s palette restricting my choice of colors. Painting allows the simultaneity of imagining and acting in an unusual way, because there’s no transmitter between me and my tools. When you’re painting, you get clusters that cannot be read in a linear or causal way. They create a paradoxical experience, for layers appear in the painting, but there is no beginning and no end, no duration, no cause—for the viewer, there is only absolute simultaneity. Only painting provides these opportunities to view it at once. These are now the main conditions for my way of working.

SE Were you trying to undermine traditional structures (painting is often explored in relation to time) or hierarchies (foreground and background), or were you more interested in testing painting, or the properties of colors and their relationships to each other, over and over again? Did you want to transcend accepted boundaries?

KG Boundaries are constantly re-created negotiation spaces. My paintings provide models for thinking about border areas in which mutually exclusive vital interests often meet. Places of crisis . . .

SE Are the grid paintings a break with your previous work, or a further development of it? You used to relate patches of color to each other. In the grid paintings you tried to make the interweaving of colors visible. Do they make boundaries porous?

KG Yes. Precisely. While painting the grids I walked around on the canvas and stepped in the

Artwork © Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany 2023

wet paint, redissolving the grid. Suddenly there was a simultaneity of the grid and the marks of my steps. I had shoes made specially, with rubber plates attached to the soles, so I was stepping into the wet paint but nevertheless leaving no footprints.

SE Was it the dissolution of boundaries in your painting, as you have described it—during your stay in Italy—that led you to your spray paintings?

KG In the grid paintings I was walking into the painting from outside—from the world into pictorial reality. The painting is ground down by the world, and vice versa. While spraying I realized that I can make something in space that’s quite different. I end up in between the world and the painting, without the canvas as a partition. I can use the spray gun to move nimbly past obstacles into our world and our social fabric. Color is atopic, not bound to a particular surface or place. It can end up anywhere. The paradoxical simultaneity of painting and the world becomes possible—something I first tried out when I painted over everything in my bedroom [Das Bett (The bed), 2005]. And I ask myself how painting can become present in a specific place—as an intimate expression, as an expression of an individual position that can be ascribed to a body and whose process of emergence is nevertheless unconditionally permeated by the needs of the community.

SE The social anthropologist Julia Eckert recently described very precisely this expansion of your painting into the social fabric [“The Given and the Possible,” in Katharina Grosse: It Wasn’t Us (2020)]. To her, looking at a painting also means seeing suggested solutions. The picture plane claims the same value of the real as lived reality and thus can suggest solutions. What confronts us in your work is the assertion that it is possible to create new things within what exists and to pursue what has never been imagined before. The world looks different in your works, and we can see it differently. The old boundaries remain visible but lose their relevance; they are no longer boundaries per se, for they can no longer direct our observation, no longer channel our action. So your painting can be seen not only programmatically but also as method and methodology—as a practical way of exploring what is possible in what exists.

You have also used spray paint for canvas paintings. The different steps in the painting process can no longer be retraced. I’d like to know to what extent this was accidental or deliberate—or didn’t you care?

KG A stencil creates a hole; it functions as a gap in the act of painting. Using a stencil is the opposite of smudging. So you get a crack, a fault, and an unconfined space that you can get into from anywhere. In Saint Louis the large-scale, in situ painting I did in 2016 in the Gary M. Sumers Recreation Center, for instance, intersects with the architecture of the building, i.e., with the big picture, and this in turn with the mirrors, i.e., with a slightly smaller picture, and with the glass of the display cases. And this even smaller picture intersects again with the bridge, the main entrance, the office doors, and the bushes outside.

SE Can it also be described as a fracture that destroys homogeneity?

KG Yes, it can.

SE In the paintings you exhibited at Gagosian in New York in 2017, such fragmentations are very clearly elaborated. The viewer just cannot retrace how the painting was developed. At the start of your career, perhaps until the tondi [from 2005]

first appeared, your work was transparently procedural or processual and so more or less traceable. But this does not apply to your current paintings, which makes them all the more alien and complicated.

KG Not being able to retrace them also means there’s something I’ve failed to grasp. It’s something strange that I have to confront, but the real point is that I overload the surfaces to see how far I can multiply them within a small initial field. That’s quite different from painting outdoors, where the visual field is stretched out, as in slow motion.

SE In this connection I’d like to discuss the moment of absolute simultaneity you mentioned before. Without chronological time, without a recognizable process, there are consequently no utopias for the future but also no comprehensible past. Would you agree?

KG Yes, you’re right. The layers of time are interchangeable, but they open up hitherto unimagined possibilities.

SE Yet time sequences play a part in your paintings. That’s a very dynamic working process. On one hand there is this theme of retracing and untraceabilty, and on the other this flexible, nongoal-oriented method that can be strictly analytical and is paradoxically unpredictable.

KG Through various revisions as I paint, I find myself in a role I cannot help abandoning. So you have both: getting bored with your own reiteration, and wanting to leap into the unknown. I give it a try, and at first it may look like an illustration, but then, six months later, there really is a painting. What I certainly never do is develop an idea and then try to visualize it.

In the philosopher Simon Critchley’s book about soccer [What We Think about When We Think about Football (2017)] there’s a chapter with the amazing title “Repetition without Origin.” In it he quotes Hans-Georg Gadamer’s comment that it isn’t the players who play the game, but the game that plays the players.

SE I was also thinking of Bruno Latour and his actor-network theory, in which color itself becomes the actor.

KG I would agree. Everything is an actor: color, time, the machine, all the elements.

SE So there is no passive counterpart?

KG No, there is no counterpart; all the players are equal.

SE Although of course you influence them.

KG That’s totally variable. Sometimes one element has more influence on the other, and sometimes it’s the other way around. That means the experiment is defined by a really tiny percentage of the experimentation; the field of the experiment is open to worlds whose course is unknown to you.

SE That’s so interesting. Has this openness played the same part in your work from the beginning? Did you always simply let what happens on the canvas unfold?

KG I determine the beginning and the basic conditions very exactly, and then the developing chain of decisions can lead to openness—a process that involves matching up my inner and outer orientations.

SE I think all openness in the artistic process is also controlled, as is what some would call “chance.” But you have to make room for this openness or else the whole thing becomes dogmatic, formulaic.

KG There’s a point where something tips, where you’re aware of a change in tension. And suddenly what you had in mind is no longer visible but a

blind spot, and what you did not want has become all too uncannily visible. And I also include what can’t be related to the original idea. That’s why I think it’s pretty misleading to define my work as abstract. I think it’s more about a tipping or reversal point, at which one form is encapsulated in the other so that we aren’t talking about either/or but about a paradoxical simultaneity—about forces that seem mutually exclusive emerging at the same time, like the architectural space and the superimposed pictorial space in the green corner at Kunsthalle Bern [Untitled/o.T., 1998]. They don’t eliminate each other.

With this paradoxical simultaneity I’d like to achieve a reorientation. There has to be a space where you can finally begin to talk and to think beyond binaries and conventional categories and definitions. Back in the time when I did not yet see this so clearly, I focused on questions of pictorial development, and on tradition, which has no readymade role for me. Can expressions of interest arise without being tied to definitions?

SE Of course, it also depends on the context in which you see yourself. That’s not always easy. It would be dogmatic to say you’re a woman and because of that there are now no examples or models for you to follow.

KG Sam Gilliam said, As an artist I’m not a Black artist, but as a social subject, of course I’m Black, male, and Sam.

SE You can see yourself in an artistic context, and also in a sociopolitical one, and yet sometimes the prevailing sociopolitical context doesn’t matter so much. For instance, while Germany was reunifying, you were on the move and being exposed to quite different contexts.

KG Or I may have deliberately avoided them, because I had relatives in Leipzig and Dresden, in the former East Germany. I was often there as a child; I remember sending them parcels, and my relatives also lived with us. Perhaps I felt I knew all that—and I preferred Italy.

SE That’s why it matters how much you acknowledge your own context, which doesn’t always have to match the predominant story. In your case there are some fairly striking discrepancies—for instance, you were interested in someone like Dahn, instead of focusing entirely on the art of Rosemarie Trockel. KG What attracted me, and what didn’t? I was fascinated by virility, and shocked that as a characteristic it could not apply to me as a woman, it excluded me. Such exclusion is unfair, a prohibition, a massive rejection. All I wanted to do was paint. As a female painter I had to work in a field whose proponents saw me as an intruder, and in which I had to remain unnoticed. The resistance you can sense in this rejection riles me and irritates me. I always want to see what’s possible in what exists. Your question also shows how narrowly the boundaries can be drawn in the artistic context, while in reality our everyday lives are marked by many other contexts and follow social logics other than those of boundaries. Boundaries deny what is possible; they generate fear, and they sever the entanglements within which we live.

Translated from the German by Kevin Cook.

Originally published in Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, Three Decades: Returns, Revisions, Inventions (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag; Saint Louis: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2022).

AMERICAN ARTISTS AND REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE

Salomé Gómez-Upegui traces the history of visual artists’ involvement in the fight for reproductive rights in the United States.

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade , a landmark decision that had protected the federal right to abortion since 1973. Overnight, although a wide majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal, millions of people who can get pregnant were stripped of their reproductive rights. 1 Thirteen states have fully banned most abortions, five states have imposed strict time limits between conception and abortion, and many other states are pushing for legislation to block women’s right to choose. 2

“The striking down of Roe should come as a

surprise to no one. And if it does, they haven’t been paying attention,” the American artist Barbara Kruger said after the court’s regressive decision.3 Indeed, feminist activists have been warning about the probability of this devastating blow to reproductive rights in the United States for years now, especially since 2016 and the election to the White House of Donald Trump, whose appointment of conservative justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court changed the ideological makeup of the highest judicial body in the land.

Like Kruger, many artists in the United States, including Laurie Simmons and Judy Chicago, have expressed their disgust with the Supreme Court’s decision. 4 Even before then, perhaps intuiting the impending attack on women’s basic human rights, many more have stood up to advance the cause of choice, revealing the importance of art in raising not just awareness but often critical funds, and in

significantly affecting pivotal elections as well.

Still, at least in the Western art canon, this clear stance in favor of reproductive justice has historically been uncommon. While works idealizing motherhood and virginity are omnipresent, those depicting or exploring abortion, such as Frida Kahlo’s lithograph El Aborto (also called Frida and the Miscarriage or Frida and the Abortion , 1932), are rare to the point of nonexistent in the first half of the twentieth century, not to mention before then. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, though, with the emergence of the feminist art movement in the United States, the overwhelming silence on women’s rights in the country’s art world began to fade. In its place, powerful bodies of work by artists such as Marilyn Minter and Miriam Schapiro emerged to advance women’s liberation. Between 1967 and 1971, for example, Schapiro created a series of computergenerated works, including Big Ox (1967) and Keyhole (1971), riddled with symbolic imagery alluding

to female reproductive organs. “For once in the history of art, it was not the penis that was praised, not the ubiquitous phallic symbol, it was a woman’s hymn to her body. At last, one could acclaim that component of the female anatomy,” Schapiro famously said about these pieces.5

Hannah Wilke was one of the first artists to turn to vaginal iconography during this period, with acclaimed works such as S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–82). She denounced women’s status as second-class citizens through a performance and resulting photograph series in which she posed with pieces of chewed gum, shaped to resemble miniature vulvas, on her naked body. And in the 1980s, Chicago created her renowned Birth Project series (1980–85), an expansive set of textile works that honored and explored women’s ability to bring life into the world. In 1983, Chicago donated Birth Trinity Quilt Batik (1983), a piece from this series, to benefit Planned Parenthood of the Rocky

Mountains, Denver, Colorado.

Regardless, while critical questions around womanhood, sexuality, and bodily autonomy began to be raised in the late 1960s, works unequivocally addressing the subject of abortion remained, with notable exceptions, few and far between. One such exception is Juanita McNeely’s Is it Real? Yes it is! (1969), an enormous nine-panel painting that recounts McNeely’s experience of illegal abortion in the 1960s. The piece was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2022. In its ninety years of existence until then, the museum held no paintings explicitly dealing with abortion in its permanent collection, a fact that speaks volumes about the magnitude of this taboo in the American art world.6

Kruger was one of the few artists who defied the status quo and unabashedly created pieces tackling issues of reproductive justice when almost no one else dared to do so. During the 1980s, when Roe

v. Wade was already the law of the land, a resurgence of antiabortion laws resulted in numerous prochoice protests and demonstrations around the country. Against this backdrop, Kruger created the now iconic works Untitled (How come only the unborn have the right to life?) (1986) and Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989).7 The latter, which she designed for the 1989 Women’s March in Washington, DC, has appeared continuously in feminist protests demanding the right to abortion and birth control; in 2020 it was widely used by Polish feminists protesting a government ban on abortion in that country. Speaking about the troubling continued relevance of works such as this, Kruger has said, “It would be kind of good if my work became archaic.”8

An all-text poster by the feminist art group Guerrilla Girls, Guerrilla Girls Demand a Return to Traditional Values on Abortion (1992), was another rare artwork that openly addressed the

unthinkable: it reads, “Before the mid-19th century, abortion in the first few months of pregnancy was legal. Even the Catholic Church did not forbid it until 1869.” More than thirty years after it was produced, the piece is still commonly spotted at protests today.

Beyond the United States, Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego was in a category of her own for her now acclaimed series of pastels and etchings portraying illegal abortions. She began these pieces in 1998 after Portugal staged a referendum on legalizing abortion, which failed to pass. As Rego said of one of the etchings, it “highlights the fear and pain and danger of an illegal abortion, which is what desperate women have always resorted to.”9 The artist considered these works some of her best “because they are true, and they were effective in helping to change the law in Portugal.”10 Abortion was legalized in Portugal after a second referendum in 2007.

The timidity of American artists and institutions in addressing abortion has increasingly dissipated in recent years. One remarkable example was the expansive exhibition Abortion Is Normal , which opened at Project for Empty Space, Newark, New Jersey, in 2019 and later moved to venues in New York. Curated by Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol and coorganized by Minter, Simmons, Gina Nanni, and Sandy Tait, this trailblazing show was backed by the political action committee Downtown for Democracy and sold works by over sixty artists to raise funds to advance women’s reproductive rights. Standout works in the show included queer activist Viva Ruiz’s Thank God for Abortion (2015– ), extracted from a multiplatform art project, and Minter’s CUNTROL (2020), a triptych featuring three provocative photographs of a woman behind a steamy glass.

Minter, who has been outspoken about getting an abortion at Planned Parenthood in her early

Previous spread: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989, photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 112 × 112 inches (284.5 × 284.5 cm).

Photo: courtesy the artist, The Broad Art Foundation, and Sprüth Magers

This page, left: Frida Kahlo, Frida and the Miscarriage (El Aborto), 1932, lithograph, 12 ½ × 9 ¼ inches (32 × 23.5 cm) © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Schalkwijk/Art Resource, New York

This page, below: Miriam Schapiro, Ox , 1968, collage, 29 3 8 × 23 ½ inches (74.6 × 59.7 cm) © Estate of Miriam Schapiro/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

of

adulthood, has been at the forefront of prochoice activism in the United States for decades. In 2015 she helped organize Choice Works, an initiative that auctioned works of art to fund Planned Parenthood programs at the local and national level. In 2016 she was honored with Planned Parenthood’s prestigious Woman of Valor award. And in 2020, looking to sway voters in that year’s presidential election, she again collaborated with Downtown for Democracy to produce My Vote (2020), a short video featuring actress Amber Heard that commences with a powerful quote by by Louis Brandeis, often referenced by Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.”

The year 2022 was momentous for art addressing abortion in the United States. In May, after the news website Politico leaked a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade , Minter published an op-ed in Artnews , anticipating Kruger’s comment after the decision was formalized:

Photo: Newark Museum

Art/Art Resource, New York

“This is a hard moment to process, although if you’ve been paying attention, you knew it was coming. . . . The violence and shattering of any sense of safety as a woman is not an unfortunate by-product. It is the point.”11

Earlier that year, Dallas-based artist Alicia Eggert partnered with Sarah Sandman, creative director of advocacy at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, to create OUR s , a large pink-neon-light installation that cycles through the phrases “our bodies,” “our futures,” and “our abortions” to quite literally illuminate the matter of abortion access. Symbolically, the piece was initially displayed outside the Supreme Court and then traveled across the United States. Eggert has said, “The reason that I work in signage is because of how quickly and effectively it can grab peoples’ attention. You can’t not see it. You can’t not read it. . . . Our bodies, our future, our abortions—you can’t have one without the other.”12

Another public-art project that made waves last year was Vote for Abortion Rights , a billboard campaign led by Swedish-American artist Michelle Pred with the Brooklyn-based nonprofit SaveArtSpace. The project set public artworks across twelve states. The billboards, selected from more than 400 open-entry submissions, bluntly advocated for abortion with phrases inspired by the language usually used in political ads. Holly Ballard Martz’s, for example, read “Abortion is healthcare,” and Lena Wolff and Hope Meng’s read “Vote! for reproductive freedom.”

Also in 2022, Brooklyn-based A.I.R. Gallery collaborated with the National Women’s Liberation group to show Trigger Planting (2022) at Frieze New York. This was a fascinating installation by the art collective “how to perform an abortion”

(Kadambari Baxi, Maureen Connor, and Landon Newton), which has been studying herbal abortifacients since 2017. Using plants commonly used

for contraception and abortion, the group created a forty-five-foot-tall herb garden that mapped the American states with the most stringent antiabortion laws already on the books when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Without Roe , these laws, also known as “trigger laws,” went into effect, producing instant abortion bans. 13

The examples don’t stop there. When the Supreme Court officially released its decision to strip millions of women of their reproductive rights last June, artists continued to speak up and stand up. The conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, for example, sold an NFT to benefit organizations fighting for reproductive justice. The work showed a screenshot from the right-wing late-night Fox News talk show Tucker Carlson Tonight , with a chyron reading “making an informed choice regarding your own body shouldn’t be controversial.” The chyron had appeared in the context of an attack on vaccine mandates; it does of course apply just as logically

Marilyn Minter, My Vote, 2020 (still), election advertisement video, starring Amber Heard, produced by Downtown For Democracy in support of Planned Parenthood.

Photo: courtesy the artist

to the abortion debate, although Carlson would be unlikely to use it there. Louise Bonnet’s striking painting Red Study (2022) shows a conical stream of blood emanating from between a woman’s legs. “It could be her period, a miscarriage, or an abortion, or indeed another medical situation—it’s ambiguous. [But] she’s not victimized,” Bonnet has explained. 14 The artist donated the proceeds from the sale of the painting to Planned Parenthood.

Last fall, Miami-based artist and Planned Parenthood board member Antonia Wright set up an exhibition at Spinello Projects, Miami, entitled I Came to See the Damage That Was Done and the Treasures That Prevail —a quotation from a poem by Adrienne Rich. The show presented a series of works that Wright had created in response to the crisis in reproductive rights. The standout Women in Labor (2022), a sound piece, uses an algorithm to create sounds that map the increased distances that women will now have to travel to access

reproductive healthcare. Echoing the feminist slogan “The personal is political,” the sounds Wright used in the piece were sourced from her own home birth experience in 2015, as well as from others that she collected by partnering with midwives.

Also expanding on her personal background, Ethiopian-American artist Tsedaye Makonnen uses her experiences as both a mother and a doula to make works that shed light on the acutely important issue of reproductive-healthcare inequalities faced by Black women in the United States today. In the ongoing Crowning Series (2017– ), which includes performances, sculptures, and photography, the artist delves into themes of abortion access and “the womb as wound.” The artist has said, “My use of pelvic bones [in The Crowning Series ] . . . is about reproductive health, which includes abortion. Why is it that Black women have the most womb issues of all people? What the fuck is that about?”15

Less than a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade , the future of reproductive rights in the United States is riddled with dread and uncertainty. In March 2023, a series of works about abortion was removed from an exhibition at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, citing a state antiabortion law enacted in 2021 that forbids using state funds to “promote abortion” or “counsel in favor of abortion.”16 Among the works censored was With all my pleas with doctors they won’t do anything (2023), by Chicago-based artist Michelle Hartney, a text-based piece that quotes a letter received by feminist activist Margaret Sanger in the 1920s from a woman desperately seeking to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. A century later, her cry for help still seems terrifyingly current. And while the artists mentioned in this essay—which is far from an exhaustive review of the subject—have stood up and made important statements, the need for artists to address abortion and reproductive

how to perform an abortion (Kadambari Baxi, Maureen Connor, and Landon Newton), Trigger Planting, 2022, herbs, soil, vinyl, site-specific installation, 19 × 45 feet (5.8 × 13.7 m), The Shed, New York, supported by A.I.R. Gallery in partnership with Nation Women’s Liberation for Frieze New York.

Photo: Casey Kelbaugh

This page, right: Tsedaye Makonnen, The Crowning Series: Nsukka Market I, 2018, performance, Nsukka, Nigeria © Tsedaye Makonnen. Photo: Emeka Egwuibe and Eze Chineye. This series was supported by the artist’s mentor El Anatsui during a summer residency studying sculpture at his studio in Nsukka, Nigeria

This page, below: Alicia Eggert, OURs, 2022, LED neon, aluminum, paint, acrylic, 76 × 120 × 40 inches (193 × 304.8 × 101.6 cm), created in partnership with Planned Parenthood; installation view, Supreme Court Building, Washington, DC. Photo: courtesy Planned Parenthood and Hignite Projects

justice unashamedly and from an intersectional perspective is more urgent than ever.

1. See Christine Filer, “With Supreme Court Poised to Reverse Roe, Most Americans Support Abortion Rights: POLL” ABC News, May 3, 2022. Available online at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ supreme-court-poised-reverse-roe-americans-support-abortion/ story?id=84468131 (accessed March 14, 2023).

2. See New York Times , “Tracking the States Where Abortion Is Now Banned,” February 10, 2023. Available online at https://www. nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html (accessed March 14, 2023).

3. Barbara Kruger, quoted in Angelica Villa, “Legendary Artists Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Nan Goldin Respond to Roe Draft Opinion: ‘A Surprise to No One,’” Artnews , May 4, 2022. Available online at https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/barbarakruger-jenny-holzer-nan-goldin-artists-respond-to-roe-supremecourt-draft-opinion-1234627508/ (accessed March 14, 2023).

4. See ibid.

5. Miriam Schapiro, quoted in Maddy Henkin, “Miriam Schapiro’s Feminist Artwork Finds New Life in 2022,” L’Officiel , November 27, 2022. Available online at https://www.lofficielusa.com/art/miriamschapiro-feminist-artist-womens-reproductive-rights (accessed March 14, 2023).

6. See Deborah Solomon, “After Decades of Silence, Art about

Abortion (Cautiously) Enters the Establishment,” New York Times , September 10, 2022. Available online at https://www. nytimes.com/2022/09/10/arts/design/art-abortion-whitney-javitsmuseums-galleries.html (accessed March 15, 2023).

7. See Alexander Schneider, “Your Body Is a Battleground: Artworks by Barbara Kruger and Edward Kienholz on Abortion,” Unframed (LACMA), May 18, 2022. Available online at https:// unframed.lacma.org/2022/05/10/your-body-battlegroundartworks-barbara-kruger-and-edward-kienholz-abortion (accessed March 15, 2023).

8. Kruger, quoted in Carolina A. Miranda, “As Roe vs. Wade teeters, Barbara Kruger’s ‘Your body is a battleground’ takes on urgency,” Los Angeles Times , May 3, 2022. Available online at https://www. latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-05-03/roe-vs-wadesupreme-court-decision-and-barbara-kruger-your-body-is-abattleground (accessed March 15, 2023).

9. Paula Rego, quoted in Lanre Bakare, “Paula Rego calls US anti-abortion drive ‘grotesque,’” Guardian , May 31, 2019. Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/ may/31/paula-rego-calls-us-anti-abortion-drive-grotesque (accessed March 15, 2023).

10. Rego, quoted in Margaret Carrigan, “Paula Rego’s influence will live on—here’s why her market will too,” Art Newspaper, July 28, 2022. Available online at https://www.theartnewspaper. com/2022/07/28/paula-regos-influence-will-live-onand-hermarket-will-too (accessed March 15, 2023).

11. Marilyn Minter, “Artist and Activist Marilyn Minter on Roe Leak: This Is ‘What Minority Rule Looks Like,’” Artnews , May

5, 2022. Available online at https://www.artnews.com/art-news/ news/artist-and-activist-marilyn-minter-on-roe-wade-supremecourt-leak-1234627748/ (accessed March 15, 2023).

12. Alicia Eggert, quoted in Villa, “Legendary Artists Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Nan Goldin.”

13. See Sarah Cascone, “At Frieze, a 45-Foot Herb Garden Is an Unlikely, and Highly Effective, Visualization of the Threat to Women’s Reproductive Rights,” Artnet News , May 19, 2022. Available online at https://news.artnet.com/market/frieze-how-toperform-abortion-2117877 (accessed March 15, 2023).

14. Louise Bonnet, in Freja Harrell, “Louise Bonnet: On ‘Red Study’ and Supporting Reproductive Rights,” Gagosian Quarterly February 1, 2023. Available online at https://gagosian.com/ quarterly/2023/02/01/interview-louise-bonnet-on-red-study-andsupporting-reproductive-rights/ (accessed March 15, 2023).

15. Tsedaye Makonnen, in Ayanna Dozier, “Tsedaye Makonnen’s Art Addresses Reproductive Healthcare Inequalities Affecting Black Women,” Artsy, May 6, 2022. Available online at https:// www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-tsedaye-makonnens-artaddresses-reproductive-healthcare-inequalities-black-women (accessed March 15, 2023).

16. See Brian Boucher, “An Idaho College Removes Artwork About Abortion, Citing a State Law,” New York Times , March 13, 2023. Available online at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/arts/ design/idaho-abortion-lewis-clark-college.html (accessed March 21, 2023).

Contemplations of the status quo are prone to gross generalizations, woozy sentimentalism, or red-faced frustration—the latter being all too common. Weyes Blood evades all the above. In a powerful yet delicate testament to the times, Weyes Blood’s crafted melodies abstract the climate crisis and the onslaught of information. The low, sullen voice offers a kind of neo-folk, neo-Americana melody inlaid with serene austerity, thereby an alluringly vintage yet all too prescient soundscape. Perhaps that is why this California-born, Pennsylvania-raised musician doesn’t entirely identify with the genres of soft rock or indie rock ascribed to her. Imbibing the past, imbibing nostalgia, the honeyed tracks have a soft yet tenacious grip.

In a black half-zip sweater, Natalie Mering, the indie musician who performs as Weyes Blood, speaks from a Montreal hotel room from which, at one point, she shoos a cleaning lady who mistakenly wanders in.

Mering sits in a chair below a standard portrait of a suspension bridge, legs bent below and beside her, long hair falling across her shoulders. Despite being on the road, crisscrossing countries and states to play multiple shows in any given week, her expression is reserved and stoic.

During the first weeks of 2023, Weyes Blood’s “In Holy Flux” tour brought with it to Europe the new record And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. The tour will continue around the world until November, when it’s set to close in the United Kingdom.

“I felt like people were really open to the vulnerability of the meaning of the album,” says the singer songwriter, referring to the first shows in Europe. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is internal and introspective. In the dark, cavelike environment that Weyes Blood summons by song, “The glow of your soul, of your humanity or whatever is left of it, would be the guiding force.” She has strong feelings about the idea of loss of soul, and of the dark night of the soul: “It’s been this very deepseated loss of identity that leads to being at the bottom and not knowing how to get yourself out, to being helpless.” In Glasgow and Dublin this vulnerability hit a particular chord: “My music is very soothing and mid-tempo but people [in Glasgow] were really cheering and going crazy like it was a big rock show. I guess people were that excited about the meaning of the music.”

Mering’s previous record, Titanic Rising of 2018, brought critical acclaim. Though distinct from each other, the two records share not only the collaboration of Jonathan Rado of Foxygen but also a melodious dread belonging to a continued thought.

“Titanic Rising is kind of sounding the alarm, a little bit of a warning signal. In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is more of living amidst the blare of the alarm.” Mering equates the recent record to a postmodern plunge into “a subterranean river of Hades” in which one must confront the ghosts of intimacy and isolation.

This was not her first European tour. In earlier years she toured Europe multiple times, bringing the total number of tours to the teens. Those early shows, however, braved a youthful sense of abandon:

They were really scrappy. Just me with my instruments on a train with a Eurail pass, training to really small DIY shows across the continent and playing for like ten people. Because the shows are so much bigger now and the schedule is so much more demanding, there are moments where I give a little bit more than I have. When I was younger, I had unlimited resources. Now I have to be very measured about how much I give. It does take a lot out of you, versus going on stage and no one knowing who you are, and you’re just doing your own thing.

In sparse words, Mering speaks about René Magritte and French Symbolism. She mentions a pastel by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Le Silence (1895), before pivoting to the work of Joseph Beuys, then the happenings of Fluxus, naming the KoreanAmerican artist Nam June Paik. I look closely at the photo of Le Silence that appears in the video call’s chat box: a hooded figure against a starlit night presses two fingers in a V over their mouth. The haunting and dismal quality of the portrait confounds a gesture that in today’s lexicon is considered to be somewhat erotic. “For whatever reason,” she says, “it feels like my music.”

There is a hardness to Mering’s words, an assiduous formidability. She speaks slowly until something seems to catch her and sweep her forward. One such topic is the status of intimate relationships in the United States. “Everyday,” a song on Titanic Rising , poses the question, “Is this the end of all monogamy?”

When I ask her how the question has weathered the past few years, she admits her embarrassment.

That was before the pandemic. I think nowadays monogamy came back in vogue because of the lockdown. In a place like America, I would say that monogamy has become more difficult based on the fact that everybody is in this endless cycle of illusion about reality. The pandemic kinda

squashed that and made people a little bit more scared of being alone and unattached. I’ve noticed the pendulum swinging way more towards a conservative perspective where people really feel like they really missed out on marriage or childbearing after being fed some narrative about free love that isn’t actually possible.

Later she observes, “I don’t think nonmonogamy is something we’ve totally cracked. I’m a big fan of commitment and trust and I don’t know if everyone is built for polyamory. I think that that’s the myth.”

Mering links today’s buzz about nonmonogamy in part to the nihilistic way in which Gen Xers were raised. “They may have accidentally created this myth that everything structured is pointless.” This linkage, although grand, is not an accusation or a conclusion, but her attempt to make sense of the present. “I’ve been trying to pinpoint when marriage and childbearing became so painfully out of style.”

In the music video for “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” Mering dances a duet with an animated and embittered smartphone on a stage of death and destruction. Recalling her nostalgia for times past, reported in The New Yorker and elsewhere, I ask if personal phones and digital culture, too, will go out of style. “I think that we were all kind of hoping for that, but I think that because everyone is addicted, it makes it less likely. I also notice that there’s no growing desire for privacy. If anything, there’s a growing desire for less privacy and more fully merging with the idea of yourself as a public persona.” Referring to social media, Mering says, “I see it as we haven’t cracked the code on what it’s done to us, and so how could we possibly crack the code on what to do with it. . . . We’re kind of attention harvesting each time we’re on there. It’s become a more treacherous place. It’s less of this fun utopian digital social idea than it was in the ’90s.”

Yearning for shared cultural movements or experiences, Mering laments the stark American individualism that undermines them.

Despite this, with her clear vision, she prefers to maintain Weyes Blood as a one-woman band. That, however, does not preclude collaboration: “I’m down. But everyone is just so . . . ” —heavy silence—“busy. I find that people are genuinely kind of calculated in a way that’s not artistic.”

Mering isn’t the first American artist (and won’t be the last) to be enticed by Europe. On a visit to Italy

Mike Stinavage profiles Weyes Blood after

last year, she found herself admiring the ease with which people socialized and the pride and gratification that arose through talking about quotidian activities. “In America, you’re just chiseling away at everyone’s impossible schedule and trying to squeeze in as much as you can. In a very hectic environment, there’s just not a lot of space created for the relaxed and open social engagement. But I still think there are places in the US where people are proud of where they’re from. They’re not moving to cities and talking about it. They’re staying where they are.”

The double punch that Mering packs in Titanic Rising and In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is less a representation of American culture than an interrogation of it. There’s a melancholic, warping quality that seems to bend time, dashing her music into past decades. But as the style reverberates, the lyrics stand concretely in the present, thoughtfully crafted from an America entangled in a climate and digital-culture conundrum. And in her experimentation, she’s bypassing the noise to make rich and thoughtful melodies.

Toward the end of the interview, I ask Mering if she can recount a dream from the European tour. “Yeah,” she says with a tempered grin. “I had a really weird dream that I was eating glass. I was chewing on it, and I really wanted to rinse my mouth out, but I felt like I had to get rid of the box of glass shards first, so I was wandering around a garage looking for a recycling bin. My mouth was really hurting and when I put the glass down, I was like, ‘Huh, I should really go rinse this out.’ Then I woke up.”

“I think that was a dream about numbness,” she offers next. “I was coming out of my numbness. During the pandemic, not really being able to tour or play shows, I had become a bit numb to what I do. Doing the tour, I woke back up to the meaning and purpose of what I do because so much of it is that generative experience of seeing the songs unfold live. I love making records and recording but it’s very abstract. There’s something very immediate about playing a show.”

Just before recollecting the dream, she speculated, offering a glimpse into the future: “Maybe the third record in the trilogy would be more about redemption, kind of what happens after all of that. Rebirth and awakening.”

Perhaps there’s a third punch on its way.

the musician’s recent tour of Europe with a new record.

Photos: Neelam Khan Vela

Harry Thorne reflects on Brian O’Doherty’s recording of Marcel Duchamp’s heart.

I like living, breathing, better than working . . . my art would be that of living.

—Marcel Duchamp, in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 1971

D’ailleurs c’est toujours les autres qui meurent (Besides, it’s always the others who die).

—Epitaph on Marcel Duchamp’s tombstone, Rouen, France

Beat 1

On April 6, 1966, Brian O’Doherty and his wife, Barbara Novak, hosted a dinner for Marcel Duchamp. Invitations were extended to Teeny, Duchamp’s wife; Parmenia Migel Ekstrom, a ballet historian and author; Arne Ekstrom, an art dealer and Parmenia’s husband of thirty-three years; and the gallerist Richard Feigen. But it was Duchamp who, figuratively at least, was seated at the table’s head. In his honor, Novak brought down a copy of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking , volume 1 ( 1961), and assembled a suprêmes de volaille aux champignons , a rich dish of chicken and mushrooms

swimming in a cream sauce. Unsympathetically, she followed this with an English trifle. “Duchamp looked at this high-cholesterol extravaganza and demurred,” O’Doherty would recall. “He may have thought it was an attempt on his life.”1 (Duchamp ate everything.)

Once the plates had been cleared, O’Doherty invited Duchamp into the bedroom and asked him to remove his shirt—a questionable request fulfilled without question. Duchamp was then instructed to remove his shoes and socks, hike his pants to his shins, and lie on his back. “If I had said I was going to take out his heart,” O’Doherty later wrote in an account of the evening, “I suspect he would have been mildly curious as to how I was going to go about it.”2 With his patient in place, O’Doherty applied an electrode gel to his wrists and ankles, attached to them the cold metal leads of a rented electrocardiograph machine, and proceeded to take a series of readings of Duchamp’s heart. As the machine’s inked needle juddered its recordings onto an unfurling reel of gridded paper, the pair observed in silence. Duchamp lay unmoving, still, as the procedure ran its course. “How am I?” he asked, as O’Doherty gathered his readings,

his proof of life. “Thank you,” he followed up, buttoning his shirt, “from the bottom of my heart.”3

Beat 2

An electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) records the heart’s electrical activity. A single heartbeat appears as a wave, a swift burst of energy that, when scrutinized, reveals three smaller bursts collectively termed PQRST. Each PQRST segment corresponds to a different part of the contraction cycle. The P wave, which on a recording reads as a shallow lift, shows the depolarization of the heart’s upper chambers, or the atria. The QRS complex, often the most dramatic upward spike on a reading, represents the subsequent depolarization of the left and right ventricles, while the T wave, a second slight elevation, shows their repolarization. As we move through the P and QRS waves, we open up our hearts. With T, they slam shut once again.

ECGs are an old technology—the first electrocardiogram, conceived by the Dutch scientist Willem Einthoven, was constructed in 1911; it weighed 600 pounds and required a team of five operators—but they remain in constant use today. The

Previous spread: Victor Obsatz, Portrait No. 29 (Double Exposure: Full Face and Profile), 1953, gelatin silver print, Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Jacqueline, Paul, and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother Alexina Duchamp © Victor Obsatz.

Opposite: Michel Sima, Marcel Duchamp, 1957 © Michel Sima/Bridgeman Images

This page: Brian O’Doherty, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp: Mounted Cardiogram , 1966/2012, ink and typescript on paper, 11 × 8 ½ inches (27.9 × 21.6 cm).

Lohse,

heart contracts in a specific and orderly fashion: one chamber followed by the next, and the next, to ensure the smooth passage of blood. These contractions are organized by an electrical flow, one regulated by the opening and closing of sodiumand potassium-ion channels. If you attach leads to the extremities of the body and to the chest wall, you can track the direction of this electrical flow. Placing these leads in different positions around the body allows you to view this flow from various perspectives. If electrical activity is surging toward the lead, the reading will carry a positive inflection. If it is retreating, the inflection will be negative. ECGs allow us to glimpse every angle of the heart’s beat, to hear every tone of its voice.

Beat 3

O’Doherty completed a medical degree at University College Dublin in 1952 before relocating to Boston in 1957 to study at Harvard. In 1958, shortly after receiving his MSc, he abandoned science and became the writer and host of Invitation to Art , a local public-television show, as well as an artist and critic. He would later become an art writer for the

New York Times , editor-in-chief of Art in America , and, for nineteen years, director of the film, radio, and television section of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1967, O’Doherty commissioned Roland Barthes’s key poststructuralist text “The Death of the Author” for issue 5+6 of Aspen magazine, which took the form of a conceptual-exhibition-in-a-box and also included Susan Sontag’s “The Aesthetics of Silence”; in 1976, he wrote Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space , an era-defining essay on the commodification of art that fundamentally altered our thinking around the sociology, economics, and aesthetics of art galleries.

But from his earliest years in the United States, O’Doherty actively pursued Duchamp—as many have, as many will. (“I went from Boston to hunt him down,” he later said, validating the predatory edge of this sentence.) 4 At that point, in the late 1950s, Duchamp was not a household name. John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns were familiar with his work and were supportive, but he had yet to achieve the status of trickster god, of art world immortal. Indeed, in 1965, having left the New York Times for Newsweek, O’Doherty pitched

an article in which he made the then audacious claim that, following Pablo Picasso, Duchamp would be remembered as the most significant artistic figure of the twentieth century. The article was rejected, deemed hagiographic in the extreme. O’Doherty resigned his post in protest.

The pair’s early interactions were tense, tentative. During their first meeting, at Duchamp’s home in New York in 1959, O’Doherty attempted to persuade him to appear on Invitation to Art “Words,” Duchamp responded, with perceptible glee, “words don’t do anything.” He continued, relishing his own digression: “We are in the bath trying to explain the bathwater. We can’t tell ourselves from the bathwater.”5 Despite the pointed inscrutability of this statement, the pair became friends. Duchamp was, to O’Doherty, fascinating, impregnable, untouchable. He was uniquely skeptical of the purported sanctity of art. He was a fellow chess devotee. He was one of few who in O’Doherty’s eyes reached the dizzying level of James Joyce—“a brilliant man, for a writer.” “I felt that Duchamp is redhot,” O’Doherty said, in a rare foray into the figurative, “and if you touch him, you get burned. So white-hot is, perhaps, better.”6

Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York

Photo: Joerg

courtesy the artist and Simone Subal Gallery, New York

Beat 4

What did he want to see, when he peered into his friend’s heart? What did he want to find, record, tend to? On December 3, 1967, in Cape Town, Christiaan Barnard completed the first humanto-human heart transplant, transferring the heart of a twenty-five-year-old woman fatally injured in a car accident into the chest of a fifty-three-yearold grocer who was dying from chronic heart disease. O’Doherty, like Duchamp, was fascinated by the encroachment of the machine into the realm of man (or vice versa). For him, Barnard’s groundbreaking surgery claimed dominion over the beating heart, and, in doing so, reanimated the ageold conflict between poetry and science, between mystery and method. (Between what John Keats, Charles Lamb, and Benjamin Haydon drank a toast to in 1817: “confusion and mathematics.”) 7 “In the light of the transplantable heart,” O’Doherty wrote in 1969, “does not the history of poetry, as Keats would have suggested, become strewn with ruined metaphors?” He persisted: “We find Dr. Barnard’s scalpel separating two ages from each other, and calling the specters of what we might call identity past and identity future to confront one another across a division called consciousness.”8

Duchamp’s heart represented more, to O’Doherty, than a convenient battleground for these specters. This heart had tales to tell. “A picture,” Duchamp mused with frequency throughout his

life, “a work of art, lives and dies just as we do . . . it lives from the time it’s conceived and created, for some fifty or sixty years . . . and then the work dies.”9 (At his most fatalistic, he gave it just twenty years to live.) For Duchamp, a work existed while it was coeval with its audience. When said audience—and, by association, the lived context and conditions of that work’s creation—passed, so too was the work relegated to the archive of art history. (And as he reiterated, wisely or otherwise, “art history is not art.”) 10 For Duchamp, the museum was a palliative-care ward, a comfortable space for ideas not long for this world, an inevitable death under sympathetic lights. “As a drug, it’s probably very useful for a number of people,” he said of art’s momentary release, “but as religion it’s not even as good as God.”11

O’Doherty distributed Duchamp’s ECG into sixteen cardiogram readouts, preparatory drawings, and homemade oscilloscopes, which he collectively titled Portrait of Marcel Duchamp and exhibited periodically for years to come. In hanging (symbolically and literally) the still-beating heart on the whitewashed walls of the gallery—Duchamp’s purported mausoleum—he offered a pointed, poignant, and irrefutably funny rebuttal to the notion that artworks are mortal beings. His portrait would not condemn its subject to some fifty or sixty (or indeed twenty) years, but rather enact a magical stretching of time, drawing out Duchamp’s body, his place, his moment, and ensuring that he would exist in

Opposite: Anonymous,

and as more than one thing at once. A fragmentation, a redistribution, a protraction—a safeguarding against the inexorability of human mortality. “He had given me my readymade,” O’Doherty recalled of his companion’s sacrifice, “his heart had made a readymade. . . . But that wasn’t good enough. I wanted him live. I wanted him alive.”12

Beat 5

Both Duchamp and O’Doherty were shape-shifters. In their lives and their respective practices (if it is responsible to separate the two), they each took great pleasure in contradiction, disintegration, and self-reinvention in the face of convention.

(“Nothing fits a priori into a fixed context,” Michel Sanouillet wrote of Duchamp; “poor zeitgeist,” O’Doherty once teased.) 13 And so too did their identities slip and fall with sumptuous ease. In 1972, Duchamp found a second self in his beloved alter ego Rrose Sélavy, a pun on “Eros, c’est la vie ” (Sex, that’s life). O’Doherty was intermittently the linguist Sigmund Bode, the art critic Mary Josephson, and the poet William Maginn, a name shared by a character in his novel The Deposition of Father McGreevy (1999), for which he was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Most faithfully, he was the artist Patrick Ireland, an identity he adopted in 1972 following the murder of fourteen Ulster civilians by the British army on what would become known as Bloody Sunday. O’Doherty pledged to

This page: Brian O’Doherty, The Burial of Patrick Ireland, Wake, 2008. Photo: Fionn McCann, courtesy the artist and the Irish Museum of Modern Art

Multiple Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1917, gelatin silver print, 3 3⁄8 × 5 ½ inches (8.7 × 14 cm), Musée National d’Art Moderne/ Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Photo: CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand-Palais/Art Resource, New York

retain this unambiguously symbolic name until the British withdrew troops from Northern Ireland. On May 20, 2008, in recognition of their evacuation, he attended his own funeral, burying Patrick Ireland “with the hatred that gave rise to him.”14

There is no one true self : no pure being. We are all, to our own extents, Duchamp and O’Doherty, discovering and discarding our selves as we go. (“Most people are other people,” Oscar Wilde wrote, with knowledge of the topic.) 15 One should not misconstrue Portrait of Marcel Duchamp as an act of homage alone. But in peering into Duchamp’s chest, in attempting to locate a lambent charge that could not be concealed or confused or made wholly new again, O’Doherty betrayed a desire to capture, for want of a better word, an essence. To get to the heart of things —not as a means to disavow or discredit what occurred externally, but to understand it. To know it, with clarity and care. To be with it, just for a beat. “I studied that heartbeat,” O’Doherty said, with such delicacy. “I drew the first lead, with its big T bump, very carefully. I wanted to become intimately acquainted with it.”16 But that wasn’t good enough. I wanted him live. I wanted him alive.

Beat 6

O’Doherty and Duchamp never discussed the heartbeat, nor the lives that it lived beyond its donor’s chest. But during the private view of O’Doherty’s first exhibition, at the Byron Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1966, which included a cardiogram and a series of accompanying drawings, Duchamp turned up. O’Doherty watched as the show’s muse crossed the threshold, crossed the room, and paused in front of his own heart. (“I was reminded,” O’Doherty said, “that Eugène Delacroix apparently said he hadn’t understood [J. M. W.] Turner’s paintings until he saw John Ruskin looking at them.”) 17 And he watched, still, as Duchamp turned, pondered a nearby illustration of

a chess problem, and left. O’Doherty may have perceived Duchamp’s reserve as disinterest—or, more damning still, distance. But unbeknownst to him, Duchamp held on that evening to a small piece of paper folded in his pocket. It read, as his tombstone in Rouen would read just two years later, D’ailleurs c’est toujours les autres qui meurent (Besides, it’s always the others who die). 18

“Did he realize,” O’Doherty asked once the namesake of Portrait of Marcel Duchamp passed, “that [the work’s] true existence would begin when he had departed?”19 And did O’Doherty, when he himself departed in 2022, realize that this question—of life, death, and its supporting cast; of remembering and forgetting; of portraiture—would reach farther still? When Duchamp died, O’Doherty calculated the allocated quota of heartbeats in his lifetime. Connecting an oscilloscope to a small motor purchased on Canal Street, he reduced their speed, slowing them to a mere seven beats per minute. “When you divided seven into the number of lifetime heartbeats,” he wrote, “I could make him live two hundred years.”20 How to make our loved ones live one, two, three hundred years? How to make our loved ones live—not again , but on? Look into them. Trace their hearts. Hang them on the wall. “I felt that I had Duchamp’s secret,” O’Doherty said to an assembled audience in 2009. “And in a curious way, I felt that he had brought me to reveal much of my own.”21

1. Brian O’Doherty, “Taking Duchamp’s Portrait,” 1966, in Collected Essays (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 244.

2. Ibid.

3. Marcel Duchamp, quoted in ibid.

4. O’Doherty, in ibid., 241.

5. Duchamp, quoted in ibid.

6. O’Doherty, in James W. McManus, “Oral history interview with Brian O’Doherty, 2009 Nov. 16–17,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2009. Available online at https://www. aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-brianodoherty-15746 (accessed February 26, 2023).

7. See O’Doherty, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Heart Transplants,” 1969, in Collected Essays , 99. If O’Doherty’s belief

in the equal merit of science and art was ever in doubt, his subtle misquoting of this fabled toast alters its original meaning to support his view. The assembled group of Romantics, which also included William Wordsworth, were scornfully discussing Isaac Newton, who, Lamb believed, “had destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.” Their glasses were raised not to “confusion and mathematics” but, facetiously, to “Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics.”

8. Ibid., 105–6.

9. Duchamp, in Jean Antoine, “Life is a game; life is art,” Art Newspaper, March 31, 1993. Available online at https://www. theartnewspaper.com/1993/04/01/life-is-a-game-life-is-art (accessed February 26, 2023).

10. Duchamp, in George Heard Hamilton, Richard Hamilton, and Charles Mitchell, “A 1959 Interview with Marcel Duchamp: The Fallacy of Art History and the Death of Art,” 1959, Audio Arts, 1974, transcript in Artspace , February 21, 2018. Available online at https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/qa/a-1959-interviewwith-marcel-duchamp-the-fallacy-of-art-history-and-the-death-ofart-55274 (accessed February 26, 2023).

11. Duchamp, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “Not Seen and/or Less Seen,” The New Yorker, February 6, 1965, 40.

12. O’Doherty, in McManus, “Oral history interview with Brian O’Doherty.”

13. Michel Sanouillet, Introduction, in Duchamp, The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 9; O’Doherty, “Strolling with the Zeitgeist,” Frieze no. 153 (March 2013). Available online at https://www.frieze.com/article/strolling-zeitgeist (accessed February 26, 2023).

14. O’Doherty, in “Brian O’Doherty with Phong Bui,” Brooklyn Rail, June 2007. Available online at https://brooklynrail.org/2007/6/art/ doughtery (accessed February 26, 2023).

15. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (London: Methuen, 1905), 83.

16. O’Doherty, “Taking Duchamp’s Portrait,” 244.

17. O’Doherty, “Strolling with the Zeitgeist.”

18. See McManus, “‘Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 3 Leads’ by Artist Brian O’Doherty, Face-to-Face Talk,” National Portrait Gallery, podcast, July 7, 2009. Available online at https://podcasts.apple. com/us/podcast/portrait-marcel-duchamp-3-leads-by-artist-brianodoherty/id312570523?i=1000056408414 (accessed February 26, 2023).

19. O’Doherty, “Taking Duchamp’s Portrait,” 248.

20. Ibid., 249.

21. O’Doherty, speaking at the symposium “Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture,” National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, July 17, 2009.

��REEN TIME

INTERNET _ ART

BY �SHLEY O VERB EEK

ASHLEY OVERBEEK SPEAKS WITH OM �R KHOLEIF

�BOUT THEIR NEW BOOK

INTERNET _ ART: FROM THE BIRTH OF THE WEB TO THE RISE OF NFTS.

ASHLEY OVERBEEK Omar, it’s great to be able to chat with you about your new book, Internet_Art, published by Phaidon this spring. Since so much of my own work focuses on the relatively recent advent of crypto art, I’m excited to look back at the beginnings of the internet art movement with you. Could you tell me a little about the book’s title?

OMAR KHOLEIF Thank you, me too. The underscore between “internet” and “Art” is crucial in that the book is very much about how the internet has grown to underscore all aspects of artmaking, and, indeed, of cultural production. The artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan once asked me, Is the internet the electricity of our time? To a large extent, my answer is yes. It is a medium, i.e., it is a thing, but it is also a space, and a concept, that has engendered its own set of possibilities— aesthetic, social, political, and otherwise.

AO You describe the internet as “a connective tissue that binds and fragments us as humans.” Given a concept as broad and seemingly paradoxical as the internet, how does one wrap a definition around internet art? Do we look to subject matter or medium? Or perhaps we should be thinking in altogether different terms?

OK I like the way you frame this question. Precedent isn’t always useful when attempting to decode something, particularly the history of such a mutable context. The internet is expansive, as you suggest, but it is also very specific. One could reduce it to “the mains,” or “the network of all networks,” or simply a set of wires and cables that connect to other wires and cables. But the possibilities engendered by those wires and cables, and the attendant technologies, in turn produce specific cultural movements that I’ve been interested in ever since I began learning how to use a computer.

I’ve spent the better part of two decades attempting to constellate knowledge around this field. In 2013 I published an anthology, You Are Here: Art After the Internet, that demonstrated the thirst of multiple publics for this kind of writing. It also revealed the necessity for a live, critical, and insider take on what was happening to art with all these technological shifts occurring. The internet was becoming used as a metaphor—but why? And why a metaphor that didn’t necessarily seem to make sense? Artists were tinkering with the parameters of the internet as a field and expanding it as a concept, learning new languages that seemed alien to the general populace. Someone had to try to mediate this, and that journey is what I’ve sought to narrate.

The way I decided to structure the book in turn was as a

social history—a historical record told through the memoir form. The book maps the key changes in my life and career against the seemingly chaotic realm of art and culture that emerged in relation to the internet. What I believe I’ve put into the world, or hope to have anyway, is a historical document that we can learn from. A way to claim firsthand experience observing and decoding the present in order to comprehend the broad ocular shifts in art and society today.

AO Of course, we can’t talk about internet art without referencing the pioneering artist Nam June Paik, who is credited with coining the phrase “electronic superhighway” as early as 1974. As we reflect on the many works within his Electronic Superhighway series, it’s uncanny how prescient the themes of technology-facilitated human interconnectedness have been.

OK Nam June Paik has been a pivotal figure for me ever since I was a child. Partly because, like me, he was a nonwhite immigrant living in the so-called West who was exploring the limits and parameters of technology. My new book even begins with his saying “The Future Is Now,” which was also the title of a conference on Paik’s legacy that I convened in 2012.

My interest in Paik is mapped out in Internet_Art, as well as through the many journeys and returns across my career. The 1974 paper, commissioned by the Pew Charitable Trusts, in which he coined the term “electronic superhighway” created the framework for an exhibition I curated at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2016, which has now been dubbed “pathbreaking” and which traveled the world. The show was called Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966): From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art After the Internet. Presented in reverse chronological order, the exhibition sought to create a connective tissue between the activities of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), in which Paik was deeply involved and which began one year before the internet was first realized as an idea by arpa [the US Advanced Research Projects Agency] in 1967, and the present day of hypermedia saturation and hyperlinked consciousness.

It was widely argued that Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966) was the first museum exhibition to narrate the expanse of this history, and this was certainly the show’s goal. It succeeded in spreading awareness of Paik’s influence but also in reorienting contemporary discourses into the realm of a longer genealogy of art history, which also included Paik’s collaborations with the likes of Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Charlotte Moorman, and many others. A key point that I wanted

June

Opening spread:

AO In what ways have later internet artists reinterpreted and broadened this idea of technological connectivity? OK It really depends on what you mean by “later.” I have closely examined but also lived this history of art on, with, and through the internet. And the artists who walked in Paik’s or in Andy Warhol’s footsteps, for example, were making work while both of these figures were still alive. None of these practices emerged in a vacuum. What occurred is that artists with different skill sets and aesthetic sensibilities came to the fore seeking to expand the possibilities of the field. In 1998, for example, Shu Lea Cheang famously created Brandon, a web-based artwork and installation for the Guggenheim in New York, which sought to explore different facets of how social justice and LGBTQI+ histories could be explored, narrated, and presented. Collectives such as dis returned us to Warhol’s Interview magazine and Keith Haring’s Pop Shop while creating a network of community-oriented actors around them, exploding the parameters of art and culture. Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin expanded the hyperlinked contours of video and cinema, while Jordan Wolfson has confronted us with the moral and ethical implications of robotics and virtual reality. Pivotally, all of these things are indeed connected to one another. They all form part of a spiral of history that continues to loop.

AO Cyborgs represent a literal combination of humanity and technology. Your book discusses several internet artists— Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mireille Porte (orlan), Neil Harbisson, and Wafaa Bilal—who have approached this concept of hybridity, though in very different ways. Could you expand on each artist’s approach?

OK Growing up, I was obsessed with the movie Blade Runner [1982] and the concept of replicants. We have now passed the year 2019, the future in which the film had been set over thirty years earlier, so I went to one of the locations where it was shot, the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, to reflect and write the final chapter of my book. It was in the midst of the

Previous spread:

Nam June Paik, Chinese Memory, 2005, video sculpture © Estate of Nam June Paik. Photo: Rob McKeever

This page, top: Heather Phillipson, RUPTURE NO 1: blowtorching the bitten peach, 2021, video and sculptural installation, installation view, Tate Britain, London © Heather Phillipson. All rights reserved, DACS 2022. Photo: Tate, courtesy the artist.

to make with the exhibition was that the internet was not born in a day. And neither was the WWW [World Wide Web], which Tim Berners-Lee dreamed up and announced while working at cern [the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire] in 1989. Indeed, a decentralized and networked world has been a dream for many for generations. But how does this technology come to be? And what can we make of it? At the Whitechapel I exhibited several works by Paik but anchored the show with his landmark 1994 installation Internet Dream. I had discovered this work when I was curator at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool, where I was involved in Paik’s first survey since his death, in 2006.

I also recently curated My Life in the Metaverse, at Manarat Al Saadiyat, near the Louvre Abu Dhabi. I began the exhibition with one of Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha sculptures, precisely because they too were first produced in 1974 and because they foreshadow the selfie culture of today. The work was a sensorial obsession, especially for younger visitors, and I am delighted and honored to be able to have helped to bring it to one of the UAE’s significant public collections for posterity’s sake.

Nam

Paik, Internet Dream, 1994, video sculpture, installation view, Tate Modern, London © Estate of Nam June Paik. Photo: Andrew Dunkley © Tate

pandemic and a strange incident occurred that is narrated in the book—a power cut that left hundreds of people struggling to move up and down the floors of this tower. What I realized in this moment was that we have all somehow become replicants, interdependent with networked devices that have affected our consciousness, fostering a heightened state of anxiety. The artists you refer to were exploring these contours and limits early on, fostering discourse that is only truly being understood and examined for its significance today.

AO Could you tell me more about the exhibition Art in the Age of Anxiety ? You curated it during the covid -19 pandemic, when we were all collectively forced to confront the advantages and limitations of technology.

OK This was the third of a trilogy of exhibitions that began with Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966) and continued with I Was Raised on the Internet at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Art in the Age of Anxiety was commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, and was the largest exhibition of its kind in the region. I was living and working in the United Arab Emirates full-time at that point, and I was in love with the cyberpunk city before me but also constantly fretful, teetering on the edge.

I wanted to create an exhibition that explored how the internet and its attendant technologies had fashioned a hyperconsciousness, what I call an “age of feeling,” propelled by the possibilities of these technologies. To create the scenography for the exhibition, I invited architect, author, and former Yale professor Todd Reisz to conceive of a cellular architecture that I said should make you feel like you’re being funneled down a fiber-optic cable. The show was designed in dozens of shades of gray and luminescent surfaces that mirrored cable coverings. The walls were rarely straight, and artworks were staged to be encountered in a singular and confrontational way whereby one would be made to feel complicit in the context and making of the show. Through artworks by the likes of Tabor Robak and Siebren Versteeg, I used Art in the Age of Anxiety to reveal how news headlines spoon-feed us the necessary emotional feed that we desire. Through installations by Eva and Franco Mattes, Jeremy Bailey, Antoine Catala, and many others, I examined the embodiment of digital aesthetics, such as memes.

As we were installing the show, rumblings grew that something was literally in the air. Artists asked if they could postpone their flights; eventually every single artist canceled their visit. I was so worried—I wanted to be with my family, but I was told that it was incredibly unlikely that nearby Dubai International, the busiest long-haul airport in the world, would simply close without warning. The day the show was meant to open to the public, in March 2020, Dubai International allowed its last plane to take flight and the covid lockdown began.

I was panicked. The related publication, which was ready to go to print, required revising, and all of the contributors began to proffer reflections from isolation. In the end, it became a living and responsive aspect of the exhibition. In late June 2020, the show was the first contemporary-art exhibition in the UAE to welcome visitors. It was hugely popular. Many thought I had prophesied something of the future through the title, but what emerged was seemingly always inevitable if we merely looked at the work that artists were making all along.

AO You lowercase the word “internet” in your book, which follows contemporary conventions. In some crypto circles, however, users posit that “internet” should remain capitalized. They argue that the internet is a place—albeit a virtual one— and this belief has and continues to underscore the utility of digital currency and assets. What do you think about this perspective?

OK I always say it’s about context. “Internet” was historically capitalized and then a younger generation argued

ORLAN,

This

that this was incorrect as the internet was more than just a space, it was and is a concept, an aesthetic, an idea, a dream, a possibility, and so much more. Over a decade ago, I published an article on whether to capitalize or not to capitalize the word. I surveyed more than 100 artists working with creative technology, and the argument was to use lowercase to suggest and argue that the internet is a decentralized, open, porous space, as opposed to being monolithic. I am very supportive of this idea, but in the end, the word is capitalized in the book’s title! And it also depends on what one means by “crypto circles”: “crypto circles” span gamers to financiers to those who are purely aesthetically inclined, and all of these individuals, I’ve found, have a different worldview and set of linguistic preferences.

AO Artificial intelligence and AI-assisted art has been around for a while but has recently reentered mainstream discourse with the launch of ChatGPT. Is an AI-assisted future something to be wary or optimistic about?

OK I always profess to be a digital, internet-aware centrist. I believe that so long as we understand the technology we are using and persist in keeping up with the mutable nature of language, we can make informed decisions about how we choose to experience and see the world.

Opposite page, bottom: Joshua Nathanson, Is it late yet?, 2015, acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 84 × 61 inches (213.4 × 155.1 cm), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Photo: courtesy Various Small Fires

page:

Whites virgins with plastic bubbles clouds, 1983, color photograph, 63 × 47 ¼ inches (160 × 120 cm). Photo: ORLAN Studio

LEONORA McCRAE

A VERA TATUM NOVEL

PERCIVAL EVERETT

The compound came into view. There were a few people standing around in the parking lot. They appeared lost, directionless. Opie walked Vera to her door and said goodbye.

Vera entered to find Lisa, still in pajamas, at the little kitchen table. “Where the hell were you?”

“I went for a walk.”‘

“Are you crazy? Was that Andy?”

“Opie.”

“Kinky,” Lisa said. She sipped from her mug of tea. “I was worried to death. Where did you go?”

“I walked over to the bridge.”

“Is help coming?”

Vera shrugged. “Why don’t you get some clothes on so we can go grab some breakfast.”

One of Lisa’s friends joined them at their table. She was a tall woman from Albuquerque named Melissa Begay. Vera studied the once-blonde, blue-eyed woman. Like so many there, she had adopted the Santa Fe style, Georgia O’Keeffe chic.

“Isn’t ‘Begay’ a Navajo name?” Vera asked.

Melissa nodded. “My first husband was Navajo. I kept his name because I liked it better than my own.”

“What is your last name?” Lisa asked.

Vera wanted to say to Lisa, If she didn’t like it why make her say it, but she didn’t.

Melissa looked at her powdered eggs and fake bacon. “Crump,” she said.

“Oh,” Lisa said.

“‘Begay’ is a nice name,” Lisa said.

Jerry fell to his knees. “She’s dead,” he said. “She’s dead.”

“Who?” Harv asked. “Jerry, who?”

“Back there, back there,” Jerry cried. “She’s in pieces.”

Andy ran up the trail. Vera ran after. She didn’t know why she was running after him but it seemed the right thing to do. Maybe the woman was alive and needed help. She realized that running to the trouble was for her as much a function of fear as running away was for other people. At the first fork, Andy and Harv split up. Vera followed Andy up the left trail. At the next junction she caught up to him.

“We don’t even know which way to go,” Andy said. It was in fact Andy. She could tell now, she thought.

“Should we split up?”

“No way,” he said. “We don’t know what’s out here. Harv.” He headed back the way they had come.

Harv had decided to come back also. “I couldn’t find anything,” he said. “We’re going to have to get Jerry to show us where.”

“Good luck with that,” Andy said. “Did you see him? I doubt he can find his cabin right now.”

“That’s if he wants to find his way back,” Vera said. The men looked at her.

“I mean, maybe it was so horrible that he can’t think. Or maybe—” she paused.

“Maybe what?” Harv asked.

“Maybe he killed whoever it is. What was he doing out here?” Vera felt bad for saying that.

“We’d better get back,” Harv said.

The three of them laughed.

Vera stopped laughing when she glanced out the window and saw again the taped-over cabin that had been Tori Lockwood’s. She wondered how people could be so frightened and uncertain and yet sit, talk, and even laugh. There seemed to be a constant presence of a couple of people standing in front of Dishti nine, as if they were taking turns making certain no ghost escaped.

“I used to be a hippie,” Melissa said. “I mean a hard-core hippie. Lived in a yurt and grew pot, the whole nine yards.”

Vera nodded.

“I went to Woodstock,” Lisa said. “Never made it to the concert. Spent the whole time on the road.”

“How many years have you been here?” Vera asked.

“Four.”

“Did you know Tori?” Vera asked.

“Not really. I don’t know why everybody was so upset with her. You know that What happens in Kachina stays in Kachina line? Well, that’s all about bed-hopping.”

“I figured,” Vera said. “I guess she hopped into the wrong bed.”

There was a scream outside. Vera looked out to see people running. Those in the cafeteria moved to the doors. Vera was still pulling on her coat when she got to the place where the crowd had stalled.

Jerry the composer was walking toward them. His tan down-filled parka was soaked in what appeared to be blood. He was wailing, crying. He was carrying in his left hand what appeared to be a severed human arm. A woman fainted. Several people screamed and ran away, some into the cafeteria, some back to their cabins. Andy—Vera believed it to be Andy—, Harv, and Vera ran toward Jerry and the arm.

Back at the compound a few people had had the same thought as Vera. Jerry had been tied with an electrical extension cord to a chair in the lobby of the main office. A crowd stood outside. Vera stood just inside the door and studied the three men and two women who were watching over Jerry.

“Why do you have him tied like that?” Andy asked.

“What if he’s the killer?” Tad Gibson said.

“First of all, we don’t know if anyone’s dead,” Harv said.

“Tori’s dead,” a woman said.

“Anyone else,” Harv corrected himself.

“He was carrying an arm,” Gibson said.

“Where is the arm?” Andy asked.

Gibson pointed. The arm had been placed on a nest of plastic garbage bags on the sofa. Vera looked at it. There was a bracelet, a bracelet with turquoise stones, and she remembered having seen one like it.

“Sparrow,” Vera said aloud.

“What?” from Harv.

“She had a bracelet like that one.”

“Are you sure?” Harv asked.

“I’m not sure,” Vera said.

Harv went to the door. “Is Sparrow Stephenson out there? Has anyone see Sparrow Stephenson?”

Everyone looked around. “I haven’t see her,” from Melissa.

“Me neither,” another woman said.

“We’ve got to find whoever it is,” Harv said. “She could be bleeding to death out there.”

Jerry looked up. “She’s dead, I tell you.”

“Where, Jerry?” Andy asked.

“Up the trail,” Jerry cried.

“How far up the trail?” Andy asked.

“Which trail? Which fork?” Harv asked.

“I don’t know.”

“It was horrible,” Jerry said. He tugged at his restraints.

“Can you take us there?” Vera asked.

Harv looked at her, then repeated the question. “Can you take us there, Jerry?”

“Did you see anyone else up there?” Vera asked. “Any animals?” She recalled her experience in the gorge.

“Blood,” Jerry said, shaking his head. “I can’t go back out there.”

“He can’t help us,” Harv said.

“Or doesn’t want to,” Gibson said.

“I’ll go back and search the trails.” Andy zipped up his coat.

“I’ll go with you,” Vera said.

Andy looked at her and then at Harv. “Okay. Better than being alone,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The two of them walked through the crowd and ignored questions. Did Jerry do it? Was it Sparrow? Where are you going? Where are the police? What are we supposed to do? Andy and Vera didn’t try to answer any of them but tried not to appear as if they were ignoring them. “We’re going to search the trail,” Andy said. No one volunteered to join them.

This time they walked, and going slow like that allowed Vera to see a couple of drops of black in the trampled snow. “This might be blood,” she said.

“Could be,” Andy said. “We don’t have anything else to follow.”

So they searched for drops. At the first fork they went left, the way Andy had gone. The trail through the woods became easier to see now that they knew what to look for. They walked up about two miles and found a sweater and a jacket, a blood-soaked jacket.

“I’m pretty sure that’s like the one Sparrow was wearing,” Vera said.

Now they were not only searching the trail but to either side of it. Vera was looking for anything with color and especially for movement. Another hundred yards and Andy grabbed her arm to stop her. Her elbow was still sore.

It looked like a mess of leaves in the snow, rags tied together, but it was matted hair. They approached slowly and their fears were realized. Other than her husband, Vera had never seen a dead person before, much less a severed head. She nearly vomited. Andy tried to turn her away, but she wouldn’t.

The face was turned down into the snow. Vera grabbed a long stick from the side of the path and reached toward the head. Andy took the stick from her and turned the head over. The face was contorted, twisted, confusion, perhaps fear, stamped onto it.

“That’s Sparrow,” Vera said. “Do we take it, her, back?”

They hadn’t come prepared to return with anything. No box, no bag.

“Go get her jacket,” Andy said.

Vera ran back and picked up the coat. Andy had gotten a few sticks under the head so he could move it. He was trying not to touch it with his hands.

Vera realized that her breathing was shallow and that she was feeling faint. She fell back, sitting on her butt in the snow.

“Vera?”

She tried to put her head between her legs.

“Are you okay?” Andy’s hand was on her back now. “Breathe.”

She did. She closed her eyes and tried to slow everything down. She thought of all her years with the horses and the dogs. There had been blood and dead things and danger. She breathed deeply.

“Take your time,” Andy said.

“I’m okay,” Vera said. “I just need another minute.”

Andy said nothing.

“I’m okay,” she repeated.

“I can’t believe this,” Andy said.

“I know,” Vera said. She sat straight. “Help me up.”

He did. Then he opened the coat and rolled the head onto it with the sticks. He closed the coat around Sparrow’s head, tied the arms, and used his belt to secure it.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They walked.

“Jerry didn’t do this,” Vera said.

“How do you know?”

“A human couldn’t do something like that.”

“You’d be surprised at what humans can do,” Andy said. “I was in a war. People can do anything an animal can do and better. Or worse. Do you know Jerry?”

“No. I met him. Do you think he did this?”

Andy didn’t answer. He was carrying the bundle by the belt, holding it away from his body. Vera could tell it was heavier with every step, but was not going to offer to help. Andy switched arms and Vera moved to his other side.

“This is fucking weird,” Andy said.

Vera found it difficult to speak. She hadn’t actually seen Tori Lockwood. She was shaking, and not from the cold.

“I hate this,” Andy said. “I made it back from a war to do this?”

A number of minutes later, Vera said, “You know, we can’t take that in there for everybody to see.”

“Yeah,” Andy said. “We’re going to have to go around. All the way around and come up past the staff quarters. We can put it in my cabin.”

They did go the long way around. Beverly was outside the rear of the cafeteria talking to the kitchen workers. They were quite obviously alarmed. Beverly saw Vera and Andy come through the trees. She changed her position so that the workers would be looking toward her and away from the forest.

Andy opened his door and they stepped into the cabin. He put the head down in the sink. He leaned there. “Christ.”

Beverly came into the cabin. “What is that?” she asked, looking at the sink.

“It’s Sparrow,” Vera said.

“It’s her head,” Andy said.

Beverly fell back against the wall, slid over to the sofa and sat. She dropped her face into her hands. If she was crying, Vera couldn’t hear it. Beverly looked up, blank faced. “What do you mean, her head?”

“As in the rest of her is someplace else,” Andy said.

Vera could hear anger in Andy’s voice. She understood it.

“Where is the help?” he asked Beverly. “Why don’t you have a fucking radio up here?”

“Nothing like this has ever happened,” Beverly said.

“Nothing like this has ever happened any-fucking-place,” Andy said.

“Somebody needs to go for help,” Beverly said.

“Opie has already gone,” Andy said. “He left a while ago.”

“We can’t show this to anybody,” Andy said. “They will freak out. I mean freak the fuck out. Hell, I’m freaked out.”

Beverly looked at Vera. “Are you all right?”

Vera nodded. “No.”

Beverly looked at the sink and then out the window. “Well, we have to get Harv over here.”

“It can’t be either one of us,” Andy said. “If Vera or I go over there it will be nothing but questions.”

“I’ll go over there,” Beverly said. “I’ll find a way to get him over here.”

“They’ve got Jerry tied up over there,” Vera said. “They think he might have killed Sparrow.”

“Do you believe that?”

Andy shrugged.

Vera sighed. “I think it’s an animal.”

“What kind of animal?” Beverly asked.

“I don’t know. I heard something this morning when I was down on the creek. If Opie hadn’t been there . . .”

“You’re lucky you weren’t hurt down there,” Beverly said.

“How is your elbow?” Andy asked.

“It’s okay,” Vera said.

Beverly stood and looked out the window at the kitchen staff. “I can’t believe this. What do I tell them? All they want to do is get back to their families. Do I tell them there’s a head in here? Not to venture outside, not to go to the bathroom alone?”

“How do you get weather reports up here?” Vera asked.

“We had a radio but it stopped working. Not a two-way, just a radio so we could hear the weather reports. Harv didn’t even want that thing up here. We call down to the ranger’s station for weather reports. They call us if something bad is coming.” Beverly looked embarrassed.

“What happens if you don’t call or they can’t reach you?” Vera asked.

“I don’t know. Sometimes we don’t have contact for days.”

Andy looked out the window. “Well, the weather’s not going to make them worry about us.”

Beverly turned and walked out, muttering to herself.

Vera looked at the sink. “I can’t stay in here with her there.”

Andy said nothing. He walked over to the stove and started to build a fire.

Vera hadn’t realized how cold it was inside the cabin. Out of the sun she shivered as she hadn’t on the trail.

“We can’t just leave her here,” Andy said.

16

“You think she’s going someplace?” Vera asked. She stared at the sink. “That’s a human head. There’s a human head in that sink.”

“Are you all right?”

“Are you kidding? That’s a head.” She pointed. “There’s a human head over there.” She began to shake.

“Vera.” Andy stood and walked to her. “Vera.” He embraced her. “I’m scared, too.”

“I can’t stay in here,” she said.

“Let’s go outside.” He took her by her sore elbow and led her out. A couple of kitchen staff were still outside. They were smoking and staring over at them as if they knew something was going on.

Vera tried not to pace, but did anyway. She had always been a pacer. She looked at her watch. It was lunchtime. She wasn’t thinking about food, but if most of the retreat was in the cafeteria maybe she could get unnoticed into her cabin. She started walking.

“Where are you going?” Andy asked.

“To my cabin. I’m not going back in there. What did they do with Tori? Is she still strewn about that room like so much trash?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Harv was going to take care of it. Of her.”

Vera looked over to see that the staff had gone inside. She felt Andy right behind her and turned. He was so close.

“I don’t want you to go,” he said. He put his arms around her. At first she thought he was trying to comfort her and then she thought he was the one who needed comforting. Then she was astonished to realize that he held her a beat too long and a bit too tightly.

“Are you kidding me?” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She turned and walked on. Inside her brain, she was shaking her head. She was confused, perhaps angry. She was embarrassed to think, at a time like this, in the face of all that was going on, that she was actually flattered by that kind of attention. She hated herself for that.

She walked well wide of the cafeteria and past a couple of people she didn’t know at all, between cabins and into her own. She was more than a little relieved that Lisa was not there.

She imagined that Opie must have been halfway to the county road, maybe farther. That was if he hadn’t encountered a lion or bear or whatever she had heard and felt coming toward her in the gorge. Perhaps he was larger enough that the animal would have no interest. Predators never wanted a fight, just a meal.

Vera ventured out and to the back of the cabin and collected wood for the stove. She thought about showering, but was afraid that being naked would make her vulnerable. She took a steak knife from the kitchen, wrapped it in a dish cloth, and stuffed it in her pocket. She made some tea, remembered she hadn’t eaten, and put on some oatmeal.

She was startled by a knock at her door. It was Harv.

“Can I come in?”

Vera stepped aside to let him in.

“I’m really sorry about all this,” he said.

Vera looked to see if anyone was with him, closed the door. “It’s not really your fault, Harv.”

“Have you talked to anyone?” he asked.

“You mean like a live person?’

“Yeah.”

“No. They’re hard to find around here.” She wasn’t sure why or what he was asking. She was so angry.

Harv looked at her.

“What’s being done?” she asked.

“Opie left this morning. You know that, of course. But we haven’t heard anything from him. Frankly, I don’t expect him to be back until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. But we found the phone.”

Vera looked up.

“It was in pieces.”

Vera reconsidered her belief that the killer was an animal.

“It was in the trash bin behind the cafeteria.”

“When is the garbage collected?” she asked.

a vera tatum novel by leonora mccrae by percival everett

“Eight days from now. After everybody’s gone.” Harv listened to his own words. “Has gone home.” He looked at the fire behind the screen in the stove. “You can’t tell anybody what you saw.”

Vera agreed, but still asked, “Why?”

“Don’t want to scare everybody.”

“Don’t you think that ship has sailed?” She decided to back off. “I’m sorry. I’m taking this out on you.”

Harv nodded. “I’m scared, too. What do you think we should do?”

Vera sat on the sofa and stared at the ceiling. “I have no idea.”

Harv sat beside her.

“Is it true what Andy told me about Tori?” she asked.

“What did he tell you?”

“He said that she was torn apart. Was she decapitated too?”

“Yes.”

Vera smelled something burning. “Shit,” she said and leaped up. It was her oatmeal. She had forgotten all about it. She took the saucepan off the heat and dropped it in the sink. As she did she recalled Sparrow’s head in another sink.

“Is Jerry still tied up over there?”

“Yes.”

“Can’t you just lock him in a room or something? I hate the idea of somebody tied up like that.”

“I agree,” Harv said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“What did you do with Tori’s body?”

Somewhat shamefacedly, Harv said, “We left everything where it was. I’m sure that’s what the police would want.”

“I guess we should have left Sparrow out on the trail.”

“You couldn’t have done that,” he said. “I wonder if we should try to

find the rest of her.”

They looked at each other, remarking without words about the absurdity of it all.

“I can tell you one thing,” Vera said, “I’m not going back into those woods. I don’t care if somebody did destroy the telephone, there’s something out there and it’s not a person. What person can tear someone apart?” Everything she was saying was rhetorical and Harv was smart enough to know that. “Can I help?” A ridiculous question.

“I’m going to go count heads,” Harv said.

Vera laughed.

“Sorry.”

“There are forty-five of us here, including the staff. I want there to be forty-five when Opie gets back with the police.”

“A couple of people out there looked in pretty bad shape,” Vera said. “I’m one of them.”

“You’ve been great,” he said. “We’ve done this for almost ten years and nothing has ever gone wrong. We had a woman break her leg climbing a tree one year while drunk, but nothing else.”

“Why the isolation? No phones. All that?”

“Well, we had a phone. First year there was a pay phone, but those are gone everywhere now. No cellular service anywhere on this mountain. No Internet and no phones is one of our draws. That bridge was updated three years ago. It was always creaky, noisy, but sound.”

Vera nodded.

Harv looked at his watch. “Everyone is supposed to meet in the cafeteria now.”

“Okay.”

Vera grabbed her coat and followed him out.

The big room was crowded and loud. The room stank of body odor and cologne. Vera hung back as Harv wended his way through to the microphone set up by the kitchen door. Everyone was immediately silent.

“Let me start by apologizing to all of you,” Harv said.

“You should be sorry,” a woman called out.

“And I am. I know as little as you all. I have to report that we believe that Sparrow Stephenson is missing.”

“Except for her fucking arm,” a man shouted.

“Okay, okay. We believe that she is dead and out there somewhere. So I don’t think I have to say it, but I’m going to say it anyway: please, no one go out into the woods.”

“Tori wasn’t in the woods.”

“And,” Harv said, “don’t be alone. Find a buddy or buddies and you all stay together all the time. Opie left this morning to hike down the mountain and he should be back with help tomorrow afternoon. Maybe earlier if they come back with a helicopter.”

“That’s not happening,” a man said. “We’re in the forest. Where would they land it?”

“Tomorrow afternoon then,” Harv said.

“Did Jerry do this?” a woman asked. “I don’t think he did.”

“He was carrying an arm,” another woman said.

“We don’t know,” Harv said. “He’s still pretty rattled. It’s hard to get anything out of him. Does anyone know if he takes medication?”

No one knew.

Harv looked over at Vera. Vera received his glance and understood that he was asking her to find out. She scanned the room and found Andy not far away from her. She made her way to him.

“Come on,” she said. He followed her out.

“Vera, I’m sorry about earlier,” he said. She waved him off the subject. “Which one is Jerry’s cabin?”

“Dishti eight. Next to Tori’s.”

“Really?”

Andy nodded.

“We’ve got to go look through Jerry’s stuff.”

“What are we looking for?”

“We need to find any medications he might need.”

Andy unlocked the door and Vera followed him inside. He switched on the bright overhead light. Vera walked to the bathroom. Andy opened a dresser drawer. In Jerry’s toilet kit Vera found a bottle of Enalapril. She knew it was a heart medication because her husband had taken it for a while, before he switched to something else. She put the vial in her coat pocket. She also found a container with Donepezil. She didn’t know what that was. She put that in her pocket also.

“Nothing else in here,” she said.

Andy had moved on to Jerry’s roller bag.

“Find anything?” she asked.

“Viagra and some magnum condoms,” he said. “Jerry.”

“Trying to kill himself,” she said. “Bad heart and Viagra sounds bad to me. Do you know what Donepezil is?”

Andy shook his head. “No idea.”

Vera looked at the music paper on the desk. “I guess he was really planning to work up here,” she said. She moved the papers around and turned over a magazine. It was a porn magazine and she pulled her hand

quickly away. “What the hell,” she said.

“No Internet up here,” Andy said. “He had to go old school, I guess.”

“Let’s go.”

“Vera, I really want to apologize for earlier,” he said.

“Okay, you apologized.’

“It’s that I like you.”

“I’m flattered. Let’s go.”

Vera and Andy entered the main office through a side door. Harv and Beverly were sitting at different desks with their heads down. They sat up. Harv looked out the window at the front entrance and the parking yard.

“Jerry’s in the utility closet. He’s really out of it.”

“Well, he needs this,” Vera said. She fished the vials out of her pocket and held one out to Beverly. “It’s heart medication. Says take one daily and as needed.”

“Shit,” Beverly said.

“What’s that one?” Harv asked.

“Donepezil. I don’t know what it is.”

“It’s for Alzheimer’s,” Harv said. “My father takes it for confusion.”

“No wonder he’s not talking,” Andy said.

“Is he tied up?” Vera asked.

“No,” Harv said. “We cleared out the closet and put a mattress on the floor. He’s really out of it. I looked at his hands. I don’t see how he could have done any of this.”

“What about his hands?” Vera asked.

“His nails,” Harv said. “If he had done what we saw, there’s no ways his nails would be clean.”

“Maybe,” Andy said.

“We need to give him his meds,” Beverly said.

They walked down the hall to the door. Harv sifted through his keys and found the right one. He turned the key and waited, turned the knob and waited. He opened the door a crack, tensed, ready for something to happen. He opened the door all the way and they saw Jerry face down on the mattress.

“No,” Harv said.

Vera was the first to Jerry. She turned him over and recoiled at the sight of his open eyes. Andy knelt next to Jerry and pressed his fingers to his throat. He put his eye to his chest.

“No,” Harv repeated.

“Fuck,” Andy said. “He’s dead.”

“I can’t believe this,” Harv said, paced away and came back to look down at Jerry. “My God, three dead people.” He leaned against the doorjamb. “Okay, this one we can’t tell anyone about. If they find out there’s another dead person, I don’t know what these people will do. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Was it his lack of medication?” Andy asked.

“God, I hope so,” Harv said.

“Where do we put him?” Beverly asked. She was very businesslike. “They’re piling up. We can’t put them in the freezer with the food.”

“Put everything in Tori’s cabin,” Vera said.

The other three looked at her, surprised by her input.

She cleared her throat. “I mean, it’s got to be freezing in there. And you say it’s already a bloody mess.”

“She’s right,” Beverly said. “How do we get them in there?”

“When everyone is at the dinner meeting, I’ll put him in there,” Andy said.

“He must weight 200 pounds,” Harv said.

Andy looked down at the dead man. “Somebody would see me for sure. Especially going into that one. It’s right across from the cafeteria.”

“And it’s taped up,” Beverly said.

“Is there an empty cabin?”

“Pranayama one is empty and it’s on the edge of the campus,” Andy said. “The door even faces the woods.”

“That’s good,” Harv said.

“I’ll help you move him,” Vera said.

It felt strange to Vera that she was now in the middle of all of this. It had always been her way to stand off in the periphery. But she had never been passive and she wouldn’t be now.

The cafeteria at dinnertime seemed more harshly lit than normal. Maybe it was. With everyone in there at once, there really wasn’t much room. Luckily, with the lights on like that, there was little anyone inside could see outside. Vera and Andy stood over the dead and somewhat stiff body of Jerry. Vera thought to herself that now Jerry was a de-composer, and she wanted to cry for having thought it.

“How do we do this?” Vera asked.

“I guess I’ll take his shoulders. You take his feet.”

“I wish we had a wheelchair,” she said.

“Wouldn’t be able to push it through that slush out there.”

Vera got her hands under the dead man’s boots and tried to lift them. “Jesus.” She dropped them. “I’m not sure I can do this.”

Andy got his arms under Jerry’s shoulders and sat him up. “I think it will easier if I drag him anyway.”

“If we put him on a tarp we can both drag him,” Vera said.

“I know where one is,” Andy said. “I’ll be right back.”

Andy ran off and there was Vera, alone in a utility closet with a dead man. Jerry didn’t look alive at all and somehow that was a relief. She tried not to review the past days at that moment. She closed her eyes and listened. She could hear the din from the cafeteria. She heard the

scratching of a mouse or rat in the ceiling. She had lived in the woods long enough that that sort of sound didn’t faze her. She could hear the distant hum of one of the generators that powered the compound. She thought she heard something in that sound and then that sound stopped and with it the lights. Vera heard screams from the cafeteria. She was frozen in the pitch dark. She wasn’t even sure of her orientation in the windowless room. Where was the door? Jerry was on the floor. She didn’t want to scream but she wanted to disappear. She backed up and leaned against the wall. Her breathing was shallow and she wondered if that was a good thing.

“Andy,” she called out, weakly.

There was another scream, from somewhere other than the cafeteria. There was a woman’s scream, a scream that broke off, ended as quickly as it had been issued. She couldn’t remember where she was in the building. There was no light anywhere. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she said. Then she called out for Andy, again. For anybody. She knew she had to get out of there. She put her hands on the wall and felt her way to the adjacent one. She took the long way around and tripped on the dead man, pulled herself past cluttered shelves until she found the doorframe. A sliver of wood found and worked its way deep into her palm. She winced and

cried out, but she could not see to remove it. Removing it didn’t occur to her. She needed to find her way outside. She walked through the blackness toward what she believed to be the main office. Then she heard the breathing, a breathing from deep in a chest. Fuck fuck fuck. She plastered herself against the wall and did not move a muscle. The screaming from the cafeteria settled down. Perhaps they had found candles. Some of them no doubt had flashlights. Light was such a calming thing, she thought. Steps. There were footsteps in the darkness near her. And then, like in her dream, she felt the cat, near her, moving through her. She felt something akin to an orgasm and it made her angry. At the far end of the hallway she saw a light. She became suddenly afraid to call out. The light hit her and she let out a short scream.

“Vera?” It was Andy.

“Andy.” She was so relieved. Just having the light land near her helped her breathe.

“Vera.” He was next to her, holding her. “Are you all right?”

“It was here,” she said.

“What was here?”

“That cat. I don’t know. What happened to the lights?”

“I need to go check the generator,” he said.

“I’m going with you.”

“Of course.”

Andy lit their path down the hall away from the main office and out a side door. There was scant moonlight so there was only dark and darker outside. At the generator station behind the cafeteria, Andy pulled up a small plastic cover and aimed the beam at the control panel. He flipped a switch, held his finger on a button, there was a thump, and the motor began to rattle, then hum.

“That was it?” Vera said.

“Yeah. It was just turned off,” he said.

The lights of the compound flickered and then stayed on. Andy turned off his flashlight.

“You mean someone turned it off?”

“I mean, that can happen, but usually I have to pull the switch to off and then back on. It was already on off.”

A man’s scream split the night. Vera ran behind Andy around the cafeteria toward the front. Some people were pushing and clawing their way back into the cafeteria. Some were crying and being held by others. A few, Harv and Beverly among them, could not look away. Vera came to a halt in the muddy snow and saw the headless body of a woman in the middle of the parking yard. The woman’s clothes were drenched in blood, so there was no describing them. Vera looked away. She looked at her Bronco. How she wanted to just get in it and take off.

“Who is it?” Andy asked.

No one spoke. No one knew.

Harv ordered everyone back into the cafeteria. He walked over to Andy and Vera and just looked at them.

“We didn’t get to move Jerry,” Andy said.

“That’s doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

“I guess not,” Andy said.

Harv looked through the windows of the cafeteria. “Looks like I need

to call roll and see who’s not here.”

Inside, people were rightfully terrified and agitated, less rightfully angry, Vera thought. She didn’t envy Harv. She thought he was handling the situation remarkably well. He stood behind the mic.

“Is Jerry still tied up?” someone asked.

“No,” Harv said.

“What?”

“I’m sorry to say that Jerry is in the clear.”

“What’s that mean?” Tad Gibson asked.

“Jerry is dead,” Harv told them

That was repeated through the crowd. Jerry was dead.

“Yes, Jerry died.” Harv waited for them to settle down a bit. “We think he died because he didn’t have his medication.”

“But you don’t know,” someone said.

“No, we don’t know.”

“This is bullshit,” a man said.

Beverly handed Harv a couple of sheets of paper. “Please respond when you hear your name. Please listen up.”

The room fell quiet.

“Laura Ackerman.”

“Here.”

“Fiona Archer.

“Here.”

He went through the names. Ray Baker. Melissa Begay. Rachel Clark. Here. Here. Here. “Lisa Hardy. Lisa Hardy?”

Everyone looked around.

“Lisa Hardy.” Harv looked at the page. “Rich Iverson.”

“Here.”

“Lisa Hardy,” Harv repeated.

Vera searched the room. The names rolled by. She looked for Lisa. Could it have been Lisa? She studied every face again.

“Vera Tatum,” Harv said.

Vera was sifting through the faces in the large room. Andy nudged her. “Here,” she said.

“Tad Gibson.”

“Here.”

Harv folded the paper and looked at everyone. “Lisa Hardy? Is Lisa here?”

Vera felt her eyes well up. She had tried so hard to keep Lisa at arm’s length. She felt guilty and sad and, now, angry like the others.

“We’ve got to get her out of the yard,” Vera said. They had all rushed inside and left her friend sprawled in the mud.

“I’ll do it,” Andy said.

“We’ll do it.”

Vera didn’t understand. Lisa would never have walked outside alone. She was certainly in the cafeteria with everyone. She would have been nowhere else. So how did this beast cull her from the herd? And now more than ever Vera believed it was an animal. A lion, perhaps, a big cougar. A bear, but not a black bear, a rogue grizzly from far away. A rogue grizzly that knew how to turn doorknobs and switch off generators.

Knowing that the body was Lisa’s made the gruesome task even more so, if that was possible. She helped Andy lay flat the tarp, but she stepped back and let him roll the headless woman onto it. Then they rolled it up like a carpet, secured it with twine, and carried her to Pranayama one

at the edge of the compound. A headless Lisa was much lighter than a complete Jerry so they managed easily enough.

“Why isn’t this cabin used?” Vera asked as they put the body on the kitchen floor.

“Stove doesn’t work,” Andy said.

Vera nodded, pulling her coat tight against her chest as she looked down at Lisa all wrapped up.

“Everyone is spending the night in the cafeteria,” Andy said. “I think it’s a very good idea.”

“Me too.”

“Lisa was your friend, wasn’t she?”

“She talked me into coming here.”

“I’m sorry,” Andy said.

“It’s all so crazy.”

“Did she have family?”

“A daughter. Your age.”

“We should go. I still have to move Jerry.”

“I’ll help you,” Vera said

“We tried that. Harv will help me.”

“I really wish I could have some time alone,” Vera said.

“Not a good idea.”

“I hate the idea of sleeping on that floor with all of those people around.”

“I’ll go to your cabin with you to get what you need.”

“Can’t I just lock my door and stay in my cabin?”

“I don’t think Harv will allow that. Listen, Vera, I don’t think I can allow that. There’s something bad going on here.”

“Do you think Harv is qualified to be making decisions for all of us? I mean, he’s just a camp director.”

“I don’t know,” Andy said. “I don’t want to make them. I don’t think anybody else does either.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

She followed the man out of the cabin and back toward the center of the campus, across the yard, and to the door of her cabin. Andy entered behind her and stood by the door.

“I don’t even know what to take,” Vera said.

Andy cleared his throat. “You know it’s possible that Harv would let you stay here if someone was with you.”

Vera looked at him from the kitchen.

“Who did you have in mind?”

Andy smiled. “No funny business. I just think that I’m not going to be comfortable in that cafeteria with them.”

“No funny business?” she said.

“Too tired. Even if you were feeling funny.”

Vera was made nervous by the idea, but she really didn’t want to go into that bright space with all of those people. And Andy, she thought, could protect her perhaps. She wouldn’t be asleep anyway: she was remarkably exhausted but also, understandably, wired, tense, terrified. Intellectually, she recognized that she needed rest, sleep. It was necessary

to be sharp and alert.

“Do you think we should sleep in shifts?” she asked.

“That sounds right,” Andy said. “Four hours?”

“Okay,” she said.

“You first,” Andy said. “I’ll get wood.” He turned and walked out.

As soon as he closed the door and she was alone, Vera was more terrified than ever. Her stomach felt like ice and she tensed up so tightly that her back began to spasm. She wondered if she should lock the door. She hated that she felt she needed a man to protect her but found some consolation in thinking that he, too, wanted someone with him for safety. She looked at the spot where Lisa had chosen to make her bed. She would sleep in her clothes, she resolved.

The doorknob turned—Vera jumped. Andy walked in with far more wood than she could have carried. He dumped it onto the other logs by the stove. Then he went back and locked the door.

“I’ll get this going while you get ready for bed,” he said.

“I’m already ready,” Vera said.

He looked at her. “Of course,” he said. “Once I get this fire going, at least you won’t have to sleep in your coat.”

Vera walked into the bathroom and closed the door. She peed, then stood at the mirror, stared at her face for a while. She told herself that she would survive this. She brushed her teeth and returned to the room. The fire was roaring already. The mere sight of it made her feel warmer. Maybe even a little safer.

Andy stepped into the bathroom and Vera realized, standing in the studio alone, just how vulnerable she was. She tried to hold her hands still but she couldn’t. She could feel herself on the verge of crying but she wouldn’t. She did not like the fact that this man was sleeping in her space, but even though he was only as far away as the next room, she felt alone and unsafe. She sat on the edge of her bed and removed her boots, the only thing she would be removing. The edge of chill was gone from the room. She went to the fire, poked it to kick up the flames, and added another small log.

Andy came out of the washroom. He had removed his jacket and shirt but he still wore his undershirt. He seemed unusually muscular to Vera. She looked away and felt weird for doing so. The man was not near to being undressed. She was saying more about herself than she was about him.

“Well, I’ll be sitting on the sofa over here,” he said.

“Four hours,” she said.

He nodded. “I’m thinking it’s going to take you three to fall asleep.”

“Probably,” she said.

He sat and peered out the window.

His prediction was incorrect. Vera lay back and when her head sank into the pillow, so did she into sleep.

The sleep was much needed and felt sweet. How far into her sleep she began to dream she did not know, but the dream was the kind wherein she knew that she was dreaming. In it Lisa was still alive, moving, cheerful, making tea in that very cabin. She was whistling a tune that Vera recognized but could not place.

“You just go rest and I’ll make lunch,” Lisa said.

Vera said okay and lay on the bed facing the ceiling. “This is a beautiful place,” Vera said. She closed her eyes and listened to Lisa’s kitchen noises. A pan landed roughly in the sink and then there was no noise. But in the dream Vera did not open her eyes. Perhaps even in her dream

she fell asleep a second time and dreamed again of that tickle, just shy of clawing at her ankle. The sensation moved up her leg to her thigh, bare in the dream, traced a triangle around her vagina, once, twice. It was something close to pleasure. She raised her hips to meet the pressure of the claw. She thought she heard herself moan softly, but perhaps it was not her own voice. It was low, hollow, not loud but suggesting that it could be. Then the feeling of that cat moved through her, from the soles of her feet through her middle, steady and hot. She felt penetration and then Vera climbed out of one sleep into the next. She moved with the body on top of her, while inside her brain she was trying to rise to the

surface of something. She was sweaty and panting. She had the covers pulled tight around her still-clothed body. She looked over to see Andy asleep on the sofa.

“Andy!”

He awoke with a start.

“You were asleep,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Someone, something, was in here,” she said.

He jumped up. He checked the door. “Still bolted,” he said.

She swung her feet around to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay, I know you’re exhausted. You come sleep now. I’m awake.”

“I can’t take your bed,” Andy said.

“If I stay in it, I might fall asleep.” Vera stood. She watched Andy put another log in the stove. “I’ll have some tea.” She walked to the sink and began filling the kettle.

“Okay.” Andy walked to the bed and lay down. He turned on his side and faced away from her. “I’m sorry.”

“No worries,” she said.

She took her mug of tea and sat on the sofa. She looked out and fixed immediately on the spot where Lisa had lain. She turned around and faced the fire. She could still feel a slight tickle on her thigh and she shivered. She liked the window and the night behind her, so she got up and sat on the floor in front of the stove.

“Vera?”

Vera sat up and let out a short scream.

Andy jumped back. “It’s morning,” he said.

Vera looked and saw it was fully light outside.

“You were sleeping so deeply,” Andy said. “It’s time to go to the cafeteria. They’re going to miss us and panic.”

“Some guard I am,” she said.

“You and me both.”

“So did we get killed in the night?” she asked.

“I think we’re okay,” he said.

“I’m going to wash my face.”

Some people were still sleeping in the cafeteria. Others were up and taking bagels and muffins from the table near the kitchen door. No one really noticed Andy and Vera entering together and they certainly didn’t care. They apparently hadn’t even noticed that they were absent through the night. There was a long queue at the unisex restroom. Harv and Beverly were standing at the window staring at the lane.

“Hey,” Andy said.

Harv nodded hello.

“Sorry, we slept in Vera’s cabin,” he said.

“I wasn’t worried about you,” Harv said.

“I hope Opie is back soon,” Beverly said, stiffly. “I don’t think anyone can take more of this.”

“It’s even colder,” Vera said.

Harv looked at the sky. “I think we’re going to get more snow. That’s the last thing we need.”

“Shit,” Beverly said.

There was commotion from the far wall. “Winnie?” a woman called. “Winnie?”

Someone called into the restroom, “Winnie? Is Winnie in there?”

“She’s not in the restroom.”

“Has anyone seen Winnie Murdock?”

Harv stepped to the mic, switched it on. “Winnie Murdock?” he called. “Has anyone seen Winnie Murdock?”

“Oh my God,” someone said.

“What do we do?” Harv asked Andy.

“I guess I’ll go look for her. Maybe she went to her cabin for something.”

Harv turned to the mic. “Andy’s going to go check her cabin. Please, everyone, remain calm.”

“Should he go by himself?” Vera asked.

“I’ll be okay,” Andy said. He smiled at Vera. ‘Thanks.” He walked out through the kitchen.

Three women came to the front. Melissa Begay led them. “We’re going out to look for Winnie. We feel safe together.”

Harv said, “I won’t try to stop you.” In fact he stepped back to the mic. “Everyone, if you want to form a group of three or more you can assist in the search for Winnie. Just let Beverly know who’s together and check in

with us when you return.” He looked at Beverly. She nodded. Vera turned to Melissa. “May I join you?”

Melissa said yes.

Vera walked with them out into the yard. Along with Melissa were Fiona Archer and Paula Stone. Melissa looked around the campus. “I have no idea where to start.”

“The cabins?” Fiona asked.

“Keys,” Vera said. “We don’t have keys. We could walk up the trail.”

The suggestion clearly terrified all of them, Vera included.

“There are four of us,” Vera reminded them.

“Let’s go,” Vera said.

They walked out to the trail that Vera knew as snow began to fall. Vera looked at the sky. She had lived in New Mexico for a while, on a mountain not so different from this one, and she didn’t like the look of things. There was no edge to the weather. It was a hard cold. The wind was stiff but not crazy. This would be a significant storm. Away from the traffic of people there was more of the last snowfall left. Vera looked at the boots they all wore. Hers would keep her feet reasonably dry, same for Fiona and Paula, but Melissa’s were barely better than moccasins.

“We can’t go far,” Vera said. “Your feet are going to freeze.”

Melissa looked down. She didn’t disagree. “We walk on a short way and I’ll be okay,” she said.

They hiked on, took the first left fork. About a hundred yards up the steep trail, Vera was about to tell them they had to turn back. She could see that Melissa was stepping gingerly. But then Fiona stopped.

“What’s that?”

Vera walked toward a mound of snow that was just off the path. It was a person. The body was covered with snow but it was clearly lacerated, torn up, ripped up. One might have thought the left arm was folded under the body, which was chest up, except that there was clearly a hole there. The arm was not there. The head was not there.

“I think it’s Sparrow,” Vera said. She was looking at the concho belt at the waist of the long skirt. “What was Winnie wearing?”

“Pants,” Fiona said. “Jeans.”

Vera observed Melissa shifting her weight from foot to foot. “Come on, let’s head back.”

The snow was falling much harder now. It was becoming difficult to

see the trail at all. Vera picked up the pace, but when she looked back she saw that Melissa Begay was having trouble.

“I’m sorry,” Melissa said. “My feet.”

“It’s not far,” Vera said. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

Vera felt it before any of them heard it. Through snow, as if on the wind, came a long low growl.

“What the fuck was that?” Fiona asked.

“Keep moving,” Vera said. She went to Melissa and let the woman lean on her. “Come on, come on. One step at a time.”

The sound found them again. Vera could almost feel the growl vibrating in her own chest. It was so hard to see anything. It had become a blizzard so quickly, a whiteout. The snow burned her face. It was falling so hard now that it was difficult to keep up with Fiona and Paula. “Everybody stay close,” she said. “Fiona?”

“I’m right here,” Fiona said.

“Put your hand on my back,” Vera said. “Paula?”

“Paula,” Melissa called out.

Fiona called her too.

“What the hell!” Vera shouted. “Paula! Paula!”

They stopped and called out, the three of them.

“Goddamnit!” Vera tried to see through the snow.

“Paula!” Melissa shouted again. “Where the fuck are you?”

“We can’t see,” Vera said. “Paula, follow us if you can!” She pushed them on.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Melissa kept saying.

“Please follow us, Paula!” Vera shouted.

Vera could barely see the fork. She led them right. She shuffled her feet, trying to mess up the snow enough that Paula could follow. “This way, Paula,” she screamed, but she knew that Paula wasn’t with them.

“Keep your hand on me, Fiona.”

“I’m right here.”

“You okay, Melissa?”

“My feet are numb.”

“Keep moving.” Vera couldn’t believe this. Four of them together. A blizzard. Was Paula behind them? She knew that she wasn’t. Maybe she had wandered ahead of them. Vera didn’t believe that.

Melissa was really hobbling when they were back near the buildings. “Help!” Vera called. Her own feet were becoming numb so she could only imagine what Melissa was feeling.

Fiona called out for help too.

No one could hear them. They made it to the cafeteria, fell into the big room. Harv, Beverly, and Tad Gibson ran to them.

“Melissa’s feet,” Vera said.

Harv looked down at the soaked boots. “Jesus,” he said. “Get those shoes off her and get her by the baseboards.”

Tad Gibson picked up Melissa and carried her to the electric heater. They got Melissa’s socks off. The wet socks clung as they released her toes. The woman was crying, near ready to pass out.

Vera turned to start back out into the snow.

“Where are you going?” Harv asked.

“We lost Paula out there. We heard something and we couldn’t see and then we couldn’t find her. We lost her.” Vera was shaken.

“You’re not going back out there,” Harv said.

“The snow came on so fast,” she said.

“I know, I know.” Harv steered her away from the door. “Get your boots off and get near the heat.” He turned to Beverly. “Turn it up.”

“Paula is out there,” Vera said.

Harv ignored her. “We need to call roll again,” he said.

Harv did not call Paula’s name as he read the roll. Nor did he call Winnie’s. Vera saw Andy appear through the kitchen doors as Harv started the S’s. He spotted Vera and made his way straight to her. Vera broke down, cried.

“What is it?” He looked at her bare feet. “Are you frostbitten?”

“We lost Paula,” she cried. “We lost her out there in the snow. I heard it, Andy. I heard some animal. You heard it, didn’t you, Melissa?”

“I heard it,” she said.

Vera looked at Melissa’s feet. Some color was coming back, but the two smallest toes on her left foot looked alarmingly dark.

“Get a pan of warm water,” Andy called out. “Pull your feet away from the baseboard,” he said to Melissa. “Still numb?” he asked.

“Yes,” Melissa said.

Andy put his hand near the heater. Tad Gibson walked carefully with a pan of water. Andy set Melissa’s feet into the water. “If you can’t feel the heat you might burn yourself,” he said.

Vera pulled her feet away from the heat.

“Are your feet numb?” he asked her.

“No.”

“Okay. You’re okay.”

“Andy, Paula is out there in that blizzard.” With a quieter voice, she said, “With that thing.”

“I’ll find her,” he said.

“No,” she said. “You can’t go out there by yourself.”

“Nothing wants to eat something as smelly as I am right now,” he said. He walked over, had a few words with Harv, and then left again

via the kitchen.

Vera reached over and put her hand on Melissa’s shoulder. “Does that feel better? Can you feel your toes?”

“A little,” she said.

Vera got up and walked barefoot across the room to where Harv and Beverly stood before the windows.

“No Opie?” Vera asked.

“Not yet,” Beverly said. “This storm has changed everything. I can only guess what the road is like. And no bridge? How the hell can they get up here?” She yawned. She was exhausted.

Vera looked out into the yard. The snow was crazy.

Vera played the names in her head. Tori. Sparrow. Lisa. Winnie. Paula. And Jerry, under different circumstances, but still.

The snow had slowed significantly. Vera could now see across the parking yard. The yellow tape with black-written Caution on it stood out on Dishti nine. Some participants had manned the kitchen and allowed the staff to be served for a while. Vera liked that. She didn’t help with the cooking but she did pour coffee and bus the tables. It was three in the afternoon and there was still no sign of Opie and help. Andy had been gone for several hours. A couple of people had checked on Melissa and there seemed to be general agreement that she would not lose any toes. Some good news, anyway.

Vera sat beside a kitchen worker. “I’m Vera,” she said.

“Paola,” the woman said. “Scary.”

Vera nodded.

“Where do you live?” Vera asked.

“Questa,” the woman told her.

“That’s not so close.”

Paola shook her head. “A good job. I do this every summer.”

Vera looked at Paola. She might have been thirty or fifty, she thought.

“A bunch of us come. Mr. Harv sends a van for us.”

“Does he pay well?” Vera asked.

Paola nodded. “Pretty well. The hard part is being away from my kids.”

Vera nodded.

“Also the good part,” Paola laughed. Then they were silent for a while.

“It’s scary about the dead people,” Paola said. “I have been praying nonstop for them.”

“I want to get out of here,” Vera said.

“Me too,” Paola said. “But I have been praying for the dead people. They are the ones that need help.”

Vera nodded. “I guess you’re right. Aren’t you scared for yourself?”

Paola lifted her apron and showed Vera a shiny cleaver. “I wish somebody would come for me.” Paola nodded as she said it.

“I’ll stay near you,” Vera said.

“You stay near me.”

Vera looked at the mug of coffee that had gone cold sitting in Andy’s hands. She took it from him. “I’ll take that,” she said. “Do you want something to eat?”

“No, thanks.”

Vera sat there, silent. She looked at her watch. It was 6:30. Some people were actually looking to bed down for the night. Vera got it: get to sleep so tomorrow would come, so that the world would be light again and at least appear safe.

Andy reached over and put his hand on the backs of hers. They were warm now. Very warm. She turned her hand over and pressed her thumb onto his knuckle.

“Sorry, I couldn’t find her,” he said.

“Thank you for trying.”

Andy looked down at her bare feet. “Want to find your shoes so we can go back to your cabin?”

“Yes.”

This time they were noticed as they left. Rumors were afoot, Vera thought, but she didn’t care. She wondered why she would ever have cared what anyone else thought. The fragility of life had become all too clear to her, painfully clear. She hated the thought that she had to leave the stares and enter a night that frightened her. She stayed close to Andy as they crossed the yard. He stood, his back to her, watching out as she unlocked the door. Inside, he set to building a fire while she went directly to starting tea. It felt so routine.

“You must be exhausted,” Vera said.

“I’m really sorry about your friend.”

“I didn’t know Paula,” she said. “Not that that makes a difference. But I feel responsible. She was with us out there and we lost her.”

“You didn’t lose her. She got lost.”

“I hope your brother is okay.”

Andy paused, then struck the match. He set it to the kindling and watched the flames grow. “Yeah, me too.”

At five it was dark and though the snow had let up, there was no help. Andy finally came back, this time through the front door. Vera ran to him, surprising herself by her relief to see him, a strange feeling given that she was eager to find out what he knew about Paula.

“Anything?” she asked.

Andy shook his head.

Vera didn’t know whether he was shaking his head to say that he had found no sign or that Paula was dead. Before she could ask for clarification, Harv was there.

“Andy?”

“I couldn’t find her,” he said. “Or Winnie.” He paused, seemed to want to speak, but didn’t.

“What?” Harv asked.

“There was some blood on the trail, way up. It was fresh. But it could easily have been an animal’s blood.”

“You don’t think it was,” Vera said.

Andy said nothing.

“Get by the heat and get warm,” Beverly said.

Andy sat by the blowing baseboard, his elbows on his knees, his head hung.

“I’ll get you some coffee,” Vera said. As she poured the last of a pot into a mug, she looked outside and couldn’t believe they would be spending another night there. She wondered where she would be sleeping.

“This is the worst thing I have ever lived through,” Vera said.

“I promise I’ll do a better job of standing guard tonight.”

“We’re here, aren’t we? Anyway, I doubt I’ll sleep at all.”

Andy looked at her, watched her put the kettle on the electric burner. “You’ll sleep. You’re tired. You have to be. Plus, this is no time to be sleep deprived. Sleep is necessary to stay alert. I learned that in the service.”

“Stupid us,” she said. “We left without eating.”

“My jacket pocket,” Andy said.

Vera walked to his jacket and found two muffins wrapped in napkins. “Blueberry and bran, I believe,” he said.

“My hero.”

“The great white hunter.” He put a small log into the stove. “Except, it seems, I couldn’t find an ant at a picnic.”

“Well, we’ll have a picnic right now,” she said. She held up the muffins and grabbed two plates from the cupboard. Soon the tea was poured and they were sitting at the table. “Bran or blueberry?”

“You choose,” he said.

“I’ll take the bran. That’s what old people eat.”

“Don’t say that,” Andy said. “You’re not old.”

“Okay,” she said.

He looked down at his shirt. “Sorry, I should have showered before our meal.”

Vera smiled. “After,” she said.

They ate in silence for a while.

“How long did you know Lisa?” Andy asked.

Vera was surprised by the question, surprised that he would bring up the current situation at all. “Maybe ten years. She was a friend of my husband.”

Andy looked up.

“He died six years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

Vera took a bite of muffin. “Are we going to get off this mountain?”

a vera tatum novel by leonora mccrae by percival everett

she asked.

“Yes.”

Andy showered first. Vera sat on the sofa, tense and feeling very alone. She checked the lock a couple of times. She was nursing a third cup of tea when he came out. He was buttoning his shirt but she could see his muscular chest.

“It feels strange putting dirty clothes on after a shower,” he said.

“Think of cowboys bathing in a creek,” she said.

“Right.”

“Anyway, my turn.”

“I fogged it up pretty good in there.”

Vera slid by him and stepped into the bathroom. She closed the door and looked at the fogged-up mirror. She could just barely see herself. Fitting, she thought. She remembered that she had clean clothes in the other room. When she opened the door she saw that Andy’s back was to her, his shirt off. He stretched out his arms. He looked like a body builder, so much larger than he seemed in his clothes, especially where his neck moved into his back.

“Excuse me,” she said.

He turned, perhaps with a start, but his movement was smooth, athletic.

“Just grabbing my clothes.”

He pulled on his shirt.

Vera took her clothes from the dresser and returned to the bathroom. She undressed and piled her dirty clothes beside the sink. She stood na-

ked and brushed her teeth. It felt like days since she had last cleaned them. She turned on the shower and then sat on the toilet, wondering if she had turned on the water first to mask the sound of her urination. She laughed at herself. She needed to laugh at something.

She stepped into the shower and let the water beat her muscles, which were sore from tension. The water felt good on her head and on her face. It felt good everywhere. She closed her eyes and let the water transport her.

She heard something. Was it from the other room? Then she thought she felt the curtain move. As if from a draft. As if from the brush of a hand. She held her breath and listened. She switched off the water. Stood still. Then she whipped back the curtain to reveal an empty room.

She dressed as quickly as she could, dried her hair with a towel, leaving it wetter than she would have liked. She stepped into the studio to find Andy asleep on the bed. He was lying on his side on top of the covers, facing away from her, fully dressed, even his socks. She was slightly alarmed that he hadn’t been watching out, but she understood that he was exhausted. He rolled over to his other side.

Vera poked at the fire and decided it did not need another log. It was almost too warm in the room. She sat on the sofa and felt afraid of being so close to the door, so she walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. Her back was to Andy as she faced the door. She listened. She watched.

She was so tired. She lay down with her back against Andy’s. It had been so long since she had shared a bed with a man. She could feel his breathing, hear it, a slight rattle in his chest. The vibration of it spread through her. Without meaning to, without wanting to, Vera fell asleep.

24

The breath on her neck was warm, almost hot. She could smell it, slightly sour, rich, strange. She knew she was in a deep sleep. She was floating, resting on eiderdown maybe, wrapped up, swaddled, but feeling no restraint. Cool air landed on her toes, only her toes, and the feeling was sweet. A gentle pressure found her lips and a tongue found hers. She pushed against it but didn’t fight it. She was kissing like she hadn’t kissed since the early days of her marriage, before lust was replaced by trust. She was wet. She was surprised, weirdly thrilled. There was soft hair on the face that was kissing her, that she was kissing. The tongue was gentle but slightly scratchy, in a way that made her seek it. The scratching tongue lightly dragged down her naked chest. How had she become naked? To her breasts, where it lighted on her nipple. A charge ran through her body. She bit her lip and tasted her blood. The kissing mouth returned and tasted her blood also. A hand, so large, so strong, so warm, settled between her legs, barely touching her at first, but slowly pressing down, pressing down. She raised her hips up to meet the pressure. She felt a stirring inside, a warmth that spread through her middle and out her limbs. And her legs began to tremble in a way she couldn’t control. She felt her breath, her voice moving from her diaphragm toward her mouth, toward open space, open world.

Vera opened her eyes. She was suddenly terrified. She glanced down her body and was relieved to find that she was still dressed. She was doubly relieved to find that Andy was still sleeping beside her, that the rhythm of his breathing was unchanged, that he was still dressed, that there was no one and nothing else in the room with them. She looked at the door, could see that it was still bolted. She felt spent. Her legs trembled slightly. She reached down into her jeans to see if she was wet. She was. She was warm. She was confused.

She looked again at sleeping Andy. It had been a dream, but what a

dream. She sat fully up and kicked herself for falling asleep at all. She was supposed to be alert, guarding them.

A hand on her shoulder made her jump. She let out a short scream.

“I’m sorry,” Andy said.

“You scared me,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to.”

“I know.”

“I guess I just conked out,” he said.

“No wonder.”

He looked at her eyes. “Vera?”

She looked back. “Yes?”

He leaned forward and lightly kissed her lips. “I’ve wanted to do that for a while.” He leaned in again and she did not pull away. The kiss was soft, slow. She had to stop to catch her breath.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said.

“Then don’t think,” he said.

Vera undid the first button on his shirt.

Andy pulled her onto the bed and kissed her deeply. Vera softened to him, kissed him back. He smelled familiar, safe. She became lost in what they were doing, even as she wondered what they were doing. What a bad time, what a difficult situation—but wasn’t that what she had always heard, read, that crises were fuel for passion. But she was thinking again. She put her hands on his bare chest. No thinking. No thinking. He was so strong, so young. He certainly wasn’t thinking. She grabbed his face and kissed him fully. He buried his face in her neck and she pulled his hair. She had the fleeting thought that they should be watching the door, but it was gone as fast as it had come. His hand was between her legs. Her hand was between his. The smell of him. So familiar.

Naked, she lay beneath him, staring at the ceiling that had gone un-

a vera tatum novel by leonora mccrae by percival everett

noticed. His weight felt perfect, she thought. He was inside her, not just down there, but everywhere. His breathing was steady in its rhythm, matching the strokes that pushed her somewhere else, to another place. Then it was like a dream, like the dream, and the cat was moving through her. Her legs began to tremble and she grew afraid. She wanted to slow down, to stop, but she was being pushed. Into sleep? Where am I going? She thought. And then she was gone. Gone.

Vera woke naked in her bed. She jumped, grabbed the blanket, and wrapped herself. It was light out. What had happened? Andy was not there. Where was he? Had it been Andy on top of her? Was it a dream? But she was naked, completely naked. She touched herself, thinking that

perhaps she could tell. She wasn’t sore, but she knew, she knew. So many years without, she should have been sore. Of course it had happened. She had wanted it to happen. She had started out present and then, and then . . .

The door swung open and Andy burst in. He carried a tray with bagels and coffee. “Hey, sleepyhead,” he said.

“You left me?” she said.

“I could see the door the whole time from the cafeteria.”

“You left me?”

“I knew you’d be hungry. I tell you, I was watching.”

Vera grabbed her clothes from the bed and floor and ran into the bathroom.

Fuck fuck fuck. Vera looked at the mirror. “What was I thinking?” she asked her reflection. Fuck fuck fuck. Of all things. She sat on the toilet and held her head in her hands. She was overreacting, she told herself. It was not a big deal. It was just sex. Why not? She enjoyed sex. Maybe she had enjoyed the sex last night, but she couldn’t remember it. Had she been drugged? Something in the muffin? No, everything was clear. Clear until she couldn’t remember. She stepped into the shower and washed. What a cliché, to stand under a shower now. She laughed at herself but found nothing funny. She dried, dressed, and stepped out into the room.

“Are you all right?” Andy asked. His concern seemed so genuine, so remarkably kind, so polite.

“Yes,” Vera said. She was trying not to have her head down, but it was.

“Last night was beautiful,” he said.

“Was it?” She looked at his face and she actually did trust him. “I’m sorry, Andy. It’s been a very long time for me.”

“I should have taken things slower,” he said. “I pushed you.”

She recalled the first kiss, how she had wanted it. “No, no, you didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just new at this, new again at this. Trying to reacquaint myself with things, you know?”

“I know.”

To his credit, she thought, he didn’t move in for a hug or kiss. That made her trust him more, again.

“What’s that?” Andy said. He stood motionless, listening, cocking his head like a dog, looking at the ceiling.

Vera listened also. There was a faint sound, she thought. Andy ran outside. He stood in the center of the yard, only feet from where Lisa’s body had been found. Now others came out of the cafeteria, perhaps because they saw Andy looking at the sky, perhaps because they heard something too. Then the sound was more evident. It was a helicopter. It came out of the low clouds and hovered above them. It was a Forest Service helicopter. A man leaned out and dropped something that fell crazily until its small parachute caught the air. It caught in a nearby fir tree but managed to fall on through the branches to the ground. Harv ran to it. It was a walkie-talkie.

“Andy!” Harv called.

Andy ran over and took the brick-sized unit. He looked at it, switched it on, and spoke into it. Because of the helicopter Vera could not hear what was being said. Harv and Andy pushed their faces together to hear.

Harv spoke into it. Andy gave a thumbs-up to the pilot and the machine flew away.

Everyone ran to Andy and Harv. Harv faced them. “They said the crew is having trouble getting equipment up here to fix the bridge. I told them we have injured and dead and that we need the police.”

“When can we leave?” Melissa Begay asked.

“Another storm is coming,” Harv said.

Everyone became upset.

“He said it won’t be huge, but they can’t fly in it.”

A woman started crying.

“We have to get off this fucking mountain,” Tad Gibson said, near tears.

“I’m sorry,” Harv said. “I guess we just huddle together for another day.” He looked at the kitchen staff. “I’m so sorry.”

“When is this storm supposed to start?” someone asked.

“This afternoon, I guess.”

“What about Opie?” Vera asked. “Did they say if Opie’s all right?”

“He didn’t say,” Harv said. “I didn’t ask.”

Andy spoke into the radio. “This is Kachina camp calling the Forest Service chopper, come in. This is Kachina calling anyone.”

A scratchy response came through. “We read you, Kachina. Over.”

“We really need the sheriff. Emergency. Over.”

“Understood. Will relay.” Then there was nothing.

Andy looked at the device in his hand. “This thing must be fifty years old.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” a man said.

“More snow,” Melissa cried out. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Let’s go in so I can call roll,” Harv said. He was so obviously exhausted. He looked to be on the verge of a breakdown. Beverly rubbed his back as they walked back into the cafeteria.

Vera felt bad for how things had gone with Andy that morning and for how he must have been worried about his brother. She reached for and took his hand as they walked into the building.

Before Harv could begin to read the roster, Tad Gibson yelled out, “Did you tell them that someone is killing us down here?”

The room was silent. Harv looked at the page in his hand. “Laura Ackerman.”

Part II of IV

Text ©

Percival Everett

BY PERCIVAL EVERETT BY LEONORA

MCCRAE A VERA NOVELTATUM

COPYRIGHT TARYN SIMON AND RACHEL CUSK

Novelist Rachel Cusk responds to artist Taryn Simon’s Sleep (2020–21), exploring the fraught relationships between motherhood, artistic practice, mortality, and repetition.

When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, and why? The photographing of children is a contemporary fetish, as though, in the person of their baby or child, the parent has been presented with their own self in objectform, which image they will record to the maximum degree offered by technology. Most people are not creators, so this externalization of themselves in an object brings with it a spectrum of emotions, from the ecstatic to the intolerable. The baby or child is a created work whose agenda and autonomy remain a mystery to its creator. How can one’s existence in an object outside of oneself be tolerated? In the photographing of children, another picture involuntarily emerges, not of the baby but of the person looking at it, and of the condition of parenting itself.

The photograph serves two purposes: it offers an outlet for the narcissism of parenthood, and it concretizes or “proves” the child, so that the child’s existence as an object can be verified. The representational value and purpose of the photograph are minimal by comparison. Yet in the act of photographing, the parent aspires to represent. How can the child be expressed in a way that will cause others to recognize in it what the parent recognizes? Having created the child, the parent belatedly encounters the moral and technical difficulties of creativity. The parent’s instinct is that the photographic act ought to be selective, recording only what the parent-photographer wishes be seen and remembered. The result, despite its ambition to “show” or prove the object-value of the child, is that no one else would ever want to look at it. The photograph is only a half-truth because it has excised large portions of reality. The attempt to convey something of the child, to express more broadly what the parent sees and feels in looking at it, to universalize those feelings, does not generally speaking succeed. The parent can have thousands of such photos, just as a failed artist can have a roomful of unwanted canvases that can find no place in the world. The child’s personal value—the thing the parent-photographer hoped to transform into a universal value, into an object others would recognize—has only been increased.

An artist, in the consideration of her material, likewise confronts the difficulty of liberating it from the conditions of her own existence. The material has to be excised from her in a way that will leave it capable of living independently in the world; before anything, she has to consider whether it has that capacity for independence. Conversely, a baby is already an independent being: despite its many

needs, it doesn’t exist solely as a condition of the mother. The baby is already important, but not in a way that the mother can necessarily see or find acceptable. The baby is important in spite of its mother, not because of her; to damage the baby is a verifiable crime. When she tries to express her baby or child in photographs or stories or biased actions, the mother-as-artist is attempting to change the basis of its importance, to reattribute the material to herself. Thus “her” child is more important than other children. The mother-as-artist enters into an unending battle in which the ground of truth will be repeatedly desecrated, attempting to prove that this is the case.

The artist-as-mother, forewarned of the difficulties of creation, confronts in the fact of her child a different kind of test. Her process, whereby the self is used as a kind of lens—a tool for both seeing and verifying, something both carefully and pitilessly handled—automatically engages with the material of the child in search of its truth. But there is a problem, not in her ownership of the material but in the conditions of her access to it. Uniquely, the roles of witness and author have been reversed: in her child she is witnessing that which she has authored. The overwhelming subjective bias of parenthood— whether her own or other people’s—makes the task of representation virtually impossible. In any representation of her child, she will deliver an affront to the parent-viewer, who believes their own child to be the “important” one. Also, her success as an artist would signify her failure as a mother: to see her child objectively—as she would have to in order to create art—would be to jettison the whole psychological mechanism whereby the mother renders the child’s existence tolerable to herself.

Taryn Simon’s Sleep instead proposes parenthood as a state of copyright: a custodianship and right of access that will expire after a given time. Her images engage immediately with the central enormity of the child’s being: its mortality. In the fact of the child’s body lie also the facts of loss and nonexistence, as well as the innumerable possibilities of danger and harm. The child embodies the risk of being alive. The parent-photographer, too, circles the implications of corporeality, attempting incessantly to “capture” the child’s body and thereby ensure or immortalize it. Importantly, this transaction usually requires the child’s attention or participation. The child is asked to smile or look at the camera, to collaborate in the photograph’s counterillusion of positivity, in which the child’s aliveness negates the prospect of risk. By collaborating,

Previous spread:

Taryn Simon, Sleep (2020–2021), 2021 (detail), archival inkjet prints, in wood frame, 98 1⁄8 × 63 1⁄8 × 3 inches (249.2 × 160.2 × 7.6 cm)

This page:

Taryn Simon, Sleep (2020–2021), 2021, archival inkjet prints, in wood frame, 98 1⁄8 × 63 1 8 × 3 inches (249.2 × 160.2 × 7.6 cm)

Artwork © Taryn Simon

the child appears to agree with the parent’s point of view and with their ownership of the child’s narrative. To photograph a nonattentive child is immediately to see their vulnerability and aloneness, to see them as they are.

In Sleep, the children are not only nonattentive, they are inaccessible, sealed into the privacy of the unconscious mind. By photographing in the dark, seeing only afterward what the camera has seen, Simon regains the objectivity of the artist and puts it into correspondence with the child’s own objectivity. For the artist-as-mother this is a fear-facing exercise, for she is relegated to the role of bystander and prevented from shaping the image or story of the child to suit herself and make her fears tolerable. It might be felt that the child is being in some sense breached or invaded by the situation, since the collaborative signs of the parent-photograph are absent; the child’s usual participation in its mother’s narrative being more or less compulsory, what the images in fact show are the possibilities of the child’s freedom. Here the child is temporarily oblivious to and unreachable by the parent’s artistic and moral control.

A parent quickly learns that “seeing” entails the danger of something unwanted being seen, and of the story being ruined or compromised. The act of seeing is therefore rigorously controlled, so that the parent’s private knowledge of the child is separated from its “image,” which has been prepared for others to see. In Sleep this control, and the intentions behind it, have been abolished, and the mother shares her true powerlessness, admits the dreadful nature of her own fears and responsibilities and her private knowledge of what the child is and represents. Here, this private knowledge has been gained by her as witness, not as author. It has been gained only by virtue of her being there, and seeing things—through the lens—that she is unable to control or alter. In this knowledge, therefore, lies the truth, and a set of moral responsibilities that are entirely different from the responsibilities of parenthood. Here she is representing the child not as her property or as an object of overwhelming personal importance, but as an autonomous—almost an anonymous—human.

The world of forms in Sleep obtains a mesmerizing aesthetic: twisted in blankets and bed linen, the bodies at first resemble death. Their entanglement appears to represent the end of resistance, a sort of drowning. The visual spectacle of their surrender immediately arouses our painful knowledge of mortality and of the ways in which we are forced to make this knowledge tolerable to ourselves in our daily lives. The bedclothes by turns shroud and reveal this knowledge, acting as a kind of frame or narrative structure, so that we are led deeper into the knowledge rather than rejecting it out of hand. The bedclothes represent familiarity and care: we recognize them, recognize what the act of covering signifies. A body is covered for the sake of modesty, of privacy—in waking life, in sleep, and in death itself. In Sleep the bodies have frequently fought free of or lost their covering; through this act of unconscious assertion—or of specific loss—a new definition of the autonomy of the body emerges. In their entanglement the children’s bodies lose their unity, which is to say their identity. We see a limb, a hand or foot, a stretch of torso: the horror and beauty of these sights is offset by the bedclothes as medium, swathing or swaddling the identityless limbs so that they regain a different kind of coherence. Like a domestic Sistine fresco, this swirl of bodies posits the spectacle of fleshliness against

the intangibility of meaning. Instead of the miracle of identity and consciousness, we are offered the miracle of the body itself, its engineering and functionality, its ineradicable yet mysterious status as the domain of the self.

Having created it, does the parent “own” the child’s body? Who, likewise, owns an artist’s work? The notion of copyright is helpful in understanding the way time creates and then destroys the illusion of possession. Having removed the question of identity—not just through the confusion of limbs but through the cropping away of faces—the images in Sleep return to this notion of ownership. The component parts of the child, and their altered meaning when divorced from the whole, offer the key to understanding the child’s self-possession. Looking at these images, we acknowledge that the limbs must “belong” to somebody. What is a child’s leg, taken separately from the child? What would it mean for us to own it? We would never, for instance, photograph the leg—for the photograph, we must have the whole child. In this way we come to realize that the child is separate from ourselves and cannot be reintegrated into our creation of it. Its body can’t be broken up, however much its parents—in acrimony, for instance—might want to divide it. Likewise a work of art suffers from an inviolable integrity that separates it from its creator.

We begin to look for other signs of identity in the images, the nightwear we presume the child has had some hand in choosing, the occasional object they have taken to bed with them. One of them has drawn something on its own stomach: are they, in fact, beginning to collaborate in their own way with this nightly recording of their image, speaking back to the lens by exerting some choice in the matter of what it sees? Yet the mystery of sleep is as dense for them as it is for us: each morning they will wake up not knowing where they’ve been or what they’ve been doing. The camera can offer some evidence, some clues, but in the end it only deepens the mystery further. It is a child’s question—where do I “go” when I sleep?—that is also our own unanswered question about mortality.

But it is in its portrait of time itself that Sleep is most unnerving and revelatory. The images convey a stark fact: the basis of maternal time lies in repetition. The mother’s days and nights represent an accumulation that is barely perceptibly an advance; it is as though she is living the same moment over and over again. Her vigil, her tormenting attentiveness—occurring in the strange prison of love—is the extraordinary sacrifice that nature exacts from her. Her children’s nightly escape from that prison in sleep is the foretaste of a greater desertion: one day, having taken what they need from her, they will leave her. Summoned away into the night, they are accruing the growth and power that will make that transition possible, while she roams the abandoned landscape of her care of them. Time no longer exists for her in that place of repetition; in her confinement there, however willingly undertaken, she is no longer time’s subject. Just as the lens has no story to tell, no agenda beyond its mere presence, so her own story—her experience—lacks even the most rudimentary illusion of progression. Yet Simon, in documenting that state, has also located its rare and valuable privilege: the opportunity to acquire a selfless knowledge. The mother, should she choose to take it, has the chance to escape the bounds of ego and perception and arrive at a new truth. What she does with that truth, when her children have gone and her copyright has expired, when time begins to flow again through her life, is as yet unwritten.

But it is in its portrait of time itself that Sleep is most unnerving and revelatory. The images convey a stark fact: the basis of maternal time lies in repetition. The mother’s days and nights represent an accumulation that is barely perceptibly an advance; it is as though she is living the same moment over and over again.

Waiting for Clarice

I just haven’t found anyone to report back to. Or have I? Since I’m reporting back to you right here.

—Clarice Lispector, Água Viva , 1973

I’m no expert on Clarice Lispector. I wish I could read her in the original Portuguese, though as far as I can tell the English-language New Directions translations of all her texts are comprehensive. But no, I despise expertise. May I always be an amateur, like the painter in Água Viva who writes, “This is the word of someone who cannot.”1 I write this as a humble someone, an “It”-being who fell inevitably into the orbit of Clarice. 2 Friends have seen me tote around a tome of her collected columns, but this means nothing, for the more I read Clarice, the less I know her. Her gist escapes me. Maybe this is the secret: we start in the fallen state of apple-derived Knowing, then gradually shed ourselves of the nasty need to pin down and nail. We connect, ultimately, to the power of unknowing. Silence. Gaps. The desire for knowledge, stripped down, is simply the desire to be barred from the

act of performing knowing. For to perform is to know, and those who know are performing. This is the Clarice lesson par excellence: “I write out of my inability to understand except through the process of writing.”3

In her alienness, she is familiar. Even after reading a biography of her (Benjamin Moser’s Why This World , 2009), “knowing” that she was born in Ukraine in 1920, that her family fled in the aftermath of war, that they resettled in Brazil when she was two, that she published her first fiery novel, Near to the Wild Heart , in 1943 at the age of twenty-three and was overnight dubbed “Hurricane Clarice” by the Rio literary jet set, that she kept writing short stories and novels and newspaper columns and children’s books until her death, from ovarian cancer, in 1977, at the age of fifty-six—“knowing” all that, to me she remains removed. As right she should. She has been a Brazilian national treasure for three generations now, but she has only recently started to make a bigger impression in the United States thanks to Moser’s

vast project of translating her work into English for the publishing house New Directions. Now, through a newly reintroduced Clarice, we know how much we don’t know.

Even through the poise that she maintained, she had about her a lurching/knowing aura of the senselessness of existence. From 1944 to 1959 she was married to a Brazilian diplomat, Maury Gurgel Valente, and lived in Bern, Switzerland and Washington, DC; she said of that life that she “wasn’t much at ease in that milieu. . . . I hated it, but I did what I had to do. . . . I gave dinner parties, I did everything you’re supposed to do, but with a disgust.”4 She maintained a lifeline to the rawness of life through friendships with some of the great creative luminaries of the twentieth century, including the writer Lúcio Cardoso and the composer Antônio Carlos Jobim. She was translated into English by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, her neighbor when both lived in Rio; in a letter to the poet Robert Lowell, Bishop said that Clarice was “the most non-literary woman I’ve ever known,

Carlos Valladares marvels at the life and work of Clarice Lispector, the prolific and peerless Brazilian author.

and ‘never cracks a book,’ as we used to say. She’s never read anything, that I can discover—I think she’s a ‘self-taught’ writer, like a primitive painter.”5 Yet she loved Katherine Mansfield (“[‘Bliss’] is me!”),6 Spinoza, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. She felt a particular affinity for the poetry of Emily Brontë: “How well she understands me. . . . It’s been so long since I read poetry, I felt I had ascended to the sky, to the open air. I even felt like crying but luckily I didn’t because when I cry it soothes me, and I don’t want to be soothed, neither for her sake, nor for mine.”7 Perhaps, though, as Moser points out, Bishop was making not a literal but a poetic point: Clarice sought a knowledge beyond knowledge, a wisdom that left wisdom behind.8 As she wrote in a 1945 letter regarding her traipse as a diplomat’s wife, “At the end of it all you end up ‘educated.’ But that’s not my style. I never minded being ignorant.”9

As I amble through Clarice’s words, especially near sleep, I dream up variations on her unsettling scenes: a girl sucking and lapping up the blood of a cooked chicken while she remembers how much she loved its uncooked form, a boy wondering for eternity how a rabbit escaped its cage, two bookish want-to-be-in-lovers not meaning what they say or saying what they mean. 10 The situations are strangely familiar to me. Emphasis on “familiar”: when Clarice writes that her desire is to “photograph perfume,” that’s, I realize, the goal of my “I” as well: to access what was passed down to me, secretly, by the women who formed me (my mother, my grandmother, my sisters and aunts and cousins), by the movies that shaped my unconscious, by the works I wish I’d written by now. To photograph the perfume of my mothers. Yes: confronted by all Clarice represents, I am unfit to write of her,

to conjure even part of her image up. I would rather hear what you, her readers, have to say.

I first heard Clarice’s name in a class on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. A friend, Sofia, had mentioned something about a story concerning a chicken and a hen and an egg. I read “A Hen.” Interesting. Then I took a class on Bishop, who was an advocate of Clarice’s stories (though not of her novels, interestingly) and had translated her story “The Smallest Woman in the World.” I still remember the shock of reading certain rushes of paragraphs in that story of what happens when a white explorer discovers the smallest woman in the world in the jungles of the eastern Congo. I was particularly taken by the narrator’s description of the small woman’s laughter as she soaks in not only the alienness of a white man gazing at her, not only the explorer’s boots, but also the state-of-not-being-devoured:

There is an old misunderstanding about the word love, and, if many children are born from this misunderstanding, many others have lost the unique chance of being born, only because of a susceptibility that it be me! me! that is loved, and not my money. But in the humidity of the forest, these cruel refinements do not exist, and love is not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange color of a man who isn’t black, is to laugh for love of a shiny ring. Little Flower blinked with love, and laughed warmly, small, gravid, warm. 11

The love of the unknown is humanity’s sole redemption—and the doom of the most hearted of us. I’d never encountered language that conveyed this fundamental truth so starkly and complexly,

Previous spread: Clarice Lispector in Naples, 1944 © Paulo Gurgel Valente

Above: Claudia Andujar, Clarice Lispector, 1961, collection of the artist. Photo: courtesy Galeria Vermelho

yet with cool serenity. As if it were all a mere afterthought. Now I was entranced. Of course I love Bishop to this day, but I was doubly curious as to the woman she translated: Well, who is this “Lispector” when she’s at home?

I’ve never written about Clarice before and it frightens me. So I will focus on the three books I treasure the most: two novels, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1967) and Água Viva (1973), and a collection of her newspaper columns, Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas (1967–77). What are the fundamental questions of existence? How to love ( Apprenticeship ), how to work ( Água Viva), and how to live (Crônicas). The Clarice I unconsciously admire the most, it seems, is the Clarice of a period of great political and personal turmoil—the late 1960s, a time of civil unrest, student uprisings, and right-wing dictatorship in Brazil, but also a time when Clarice was recovering from the greatest physical catastrophe of her life: in September 1966, she had nearly died after she fell asleep holding a lit cigarette. The resulting fire left her with third-degree burns all over her body and badly burned her writing hand. The material that finds its way into both An Apprenticeship and Água Viva stems from the newspaper columns that Clarice published each Saturday in the Jornal do Brasil , Rio’s leading paper, between 1967 and 1973. Through these texts emerges the struggle of life: how to live each day, what the painful process of loving is, why one should pick up a pen and respond to indignity in the first place.

Perhaps I’m most attached to An Apprenticeship because it teaches me how to love. And how love lies in spaces. In waiting. The fright of staying still is what my nervous “I” aspires to; too often, the “I” is mired in the agony and energy of capricious Passion. Not for nothing are the two could-be lovers in An Apprenticeship teachers: the woman, Lóri, teaches the fundamentals of math and letters to primary school kids while the man, Ulisses (named after, not James Joyce or Homer, but an ex-psychoanalyst of Clarice’s who had fallen in love with her), philosophizes to university students. 12 Is it Lóri who is being taught, or is it Ulisses? In the book as in love, the lines blur. For though language can feel solid after a given period of time, inevitably it must give in to the flux-blur, those in-between states that refuse the coherent, adoring instead the asymptotic, the never-quite-here. To be finished is to be on the side of death. And though Clarice no longer “lives,” more than when she was present (for that is love’s linger), what she is “writing to you goes on. Which is good, very good. The best is not yet written. The best is between the lines.”13

Yet we craven humans demand the lines. We want a plot, a straightforward path (the hubristic “I know where I’m going”), or else prepackaged and glossily labeled sentiments that signify, weakly, Existence: a hot selfie, a confession watered down by the cold blue heart emoji, a public story. In our faith in the image, we daily kill the mystery of the nothing and the God. If those strange words “the God” make your skin crawl, well, same: I’m not particularly religious. And though Clarice came from a faith-based Jewish family, the traditions and rituals of religious institutions appear only fleetingly in her texts. You could say that she and “the God” had a secret affair. What that “the God” signifies, to me, is the limit of language and the visible: mystery, the mystical, the eruptive force of the contingent. And in that I surely believe.

What do we do after we’ve made our way through desire’s fragments? Love can feel, in retrospect, like

a fever dream, an invention of the mind. Is there no way to collect evidence that what has happened has truly happened? And inform others of what the other side is like? Yes, we have the final crystallization of being: art. And a text like Água Viva is a shining result of such posttraumatic crystallization. Plot: a painter. What else do you need?

The painter wants to say something. To go somewhere with her canvases. But she doesn’t know how to start. Nor how to achieve clarity of expression. So, briefly retiring hues and curves, she says an “m,” and then an “e”: she writes. The ending: she writes an “I,” and then a “t”: she sees herself in everything. From the process of clearing her throat emerges a bewitching, jewellike eighty-eight pages unlike anything in modern literature. Água Viva baffles and inspires me as much as the 3,000 pages of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913–27). The Brazilian singer Cazuza read Água Viva 111 times. Each word of the book lands with the sweet force of a blade: “May the God help me: I am lost. I need you terribly. We must be two. So that the wheat can grow tall. I am so earnest that I’m going to stop.”14

But the texts I return to most regularly are without a doubt the Crônicas. They were only published in their entirety in English, as a 733-page set, in October 2022, yet I have already treasured them for what feels like a lifetime. Clarice thought of her columns, or so she publicly claimed, as afterthoughts to her writing, which already hum in a profoundly afterthoughtish zone. But no: they are the hierophantic chronicle of a life being daily lived.

Clarice had only barely survived the fire that nearly killed her in 1966. She badly needed money to support herself. In 1967, Rio’s Jornal do Brasil approached her to start a column for its Saturday-morning newspaper. She could write about anything. The lengths of the columns could be variable. Sometimes she serialized short stories over a period of weeks; sometimes she wrote as short as a sentence. (Here’s the full text of her column for July 13, 1968, published under the title “My Own Mystery”: “I am so mysterious that I cannot understand myself.”) 15 She often seemingly wrote from the top of her head. Too Much of Life is an extraordinary collection of fragmented, essayistic, fictive thoughts, as vast, playful, and volcanic as Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (1982). Fragments from the columns make appearances in both Água Viva and An Apprenticeship What draws me to them is their nearness to the raw material that powered Clarice’s gift of seeing and being. Certain columns I have scored in pen to hell and back, returning to them again and again. 16 One paragraph from “The Cry” could stand in for all of them:

I know that what I write here cannot really be called a crônica or a column or even an article. But today I know it is a cry. A cry of exhaustion. I am so tired! It’s obvious that my love for the world has never stopped wars or deaths. Loving has never prevented me from weeping tears of blood inside. Neither has it prevented fatal partings. Children bring a lot of happiness. Yet I suffer birth pangs every day. The world has failed me and I have failed the world. Therefore, I no longer wish to love. But what then is left for me? Living on autopilot until my natural death arrives. But I know I cannot live on autopilot: I need a refuge, and love is that refuge. 17

From a refusal to do the very task she had been assigned, to accepting the void of the task, to swiftly

rejecting the void, to finishing the task, then starting all over again in the next paragraph: Clarice lived for this ebb and flow.

There is something in Clarice’s voice that I have never encountered before: the hyperelegance of being unable to speak. I was reared to write clearly, neatly, with the express purpose of being understood; here is someone who knew this was a lie. Attention, though: one must be careful not to gorge on Clarice all at once. I made that wretched mistake. Don’t—or you, too, will feel the acrid bitter when faced with oak-solid truth as she describes it in The Chandelier : “actually what she was feeling was just a difficult taste, a hard and persistent sensation like that of insoluble tears too quickly swallowed.”18 Avoid the quick. We are fed enough of that. Clarice is best picked up at an interval of desert thirst and weakness. Then she should be forgotten, until suddenly she rematerializes like a ghost, her vicious, untidy, yet crystalline words coursing through the veins once more: “I who come from the pain of living. And I no longer want it. I want the vibration of happiness, I want the impartiality of Mozart. But I also want inconsistency.”19 Her novels generally begin with a strong narrative thread but quickly devolve into the viscous, milky-silvery matter that defines her unstylish style. We may begin with a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown (The Passion According to G.H., 1964), or a painter struggling to spill something on her canvas ( Água Viva), or a man struggling to tell the socially conscious story of a poor woman who survives on hot dogs (The Hour of the Star, 1977)—but we don’t stay in this territory for long. For Clarician sentences are like the sun. They cannot be stared at for too long. One loses sight itself.

1. Clarice Lispector, Água Viva , 1973, Eng. trans. Stefan Tobler, ed. Benjamin Moser (London: Penguin Classics, 2014), 27.

2. Unusually for both myself and most American publications, I will refer to Lispector by her first name throughout this text, since that is the standard in Portuguese-language discussions of her work. In Brazil, one writes of “Clarice’s novels” or “Clarice’s style.” To call her “Lispector” would be akin to writing “Ciccone’s [not Madonna’s] song ‘Papa Don’t Preach.’”

3. Clarice, “Adventure (4 Oct 1969),” in Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas , Eng. trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, ed. Moser (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2022), 271.

4. Clarice, quoted in Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 213.

5. Elizabeth Bishop, quoted in ibid., 227.

6. Clarice, quoted in ibid., 143.

7. Clarice, quoted in ibid., 158.

8. See Moser, Why This World , 228.

9. Clarice, quoted in ibid., 228.

10. Respectively, the 1969 short story “A Tale of So Much Love,” in The Complete Stories , Eng. trans. Katrina Dodson, ed. Moser (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2018); the 1967 children’s book The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit , in The Woman Who Killed the Fish , Eng. trans. and ed. Moser (New York: Storybook ND, 2022); and the 1969 novel An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures , Eng. trans. Stefan Tobler ed. Moser (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2021).

11. Clarice Lispector, “The Smallest Woman in the World,” Eng. trans. Elizabeth Bishop, in Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (New York: Library of America, 2008), 307.

12. She later named her dog Ulisses. See Moser, Why This World , 172.

13. Clarice, Água Viva , 87.

14. Ibid., 35.

15. Clarice, Too Much of Life , 136.

16. My most-underscored columns are “Discovery of the World,” ibid., 132–35; “Writing,” 156; “Perfumes of the Earth,” 152; “Feast and Famine,” 156; “How Do You Write?,” 188; “Learning to Live,” 200; an interview with Pablo Neruda, 232–38; “The Unknown Book,” 266–67; “Humility and Technique,” 272–73; “Quietly Weeping,” 313–14; the May 2, 1970 column, 326–29; “All Because They Weren’t Distracted Enough,” 387–88; a three-part interview with the bossa nova composer Antônio Carlos Jobim, 458–67; “Darel and Psychoanalysis,” 605; and “Things Pedro Bloch Told Me,” 629. This, to me, is the mere tip of the iceberg.

17. Clarice, “The Cry,” in ibid., 86.

18. Clarice Lispector, The Chandelier, 1946, Eng. trans. Magdalena Edwards and Benjamin Moser, ed. Moser (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2018), 228.

19. Clarice, Água Viva , 10.

Out of Bounds: Marcia Tucker

Raymond Foye speaks with Lisa Phillips, the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum, New York, about Out of Bounds: The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker, a comprehensive anthology of New Museum founder and curator Tucker’s writing. The book was edited by Phillips, Johanna Burton, and Alicia Ritson, with Kate Wiener.

Text by Raymond Foye

Like a lot of books published in 2019, Out of Bounds: The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker seems to have been lost in the covid shuffle. It’s been something of a sleeper publication. But this time of dizzying change is an appropriate moment to reflect on the remarkable career of the founder of the New Museum, one of the art world’s greatest mavericks.

A classically trained art historian, Tucker earned her master’s degree at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she studied with such formidable figures as Erwin Panofsky and Peter von Blanckenhagen. Tucker referred to von B (as he was affectionally called by his students) as a ribald nineteenth-century aesthete who had stepped out of the pages of Proust. Von Blanckenhagen wedded art history with archaeology, and his painting course began with ancient Egypt—to give a sense of perspective. Panofsky established the field of iconography, an elaborate system of classification of the myriad elements embedded in a work of art: gesture, symbol, myth, botany, astronomy, mathematics, et cetera—essentially the entire panoply of the visual field. An interdisciplinary approach, it was a forerunner of semiotics.

This was an era when art-history books still regularly influenced wider intellectual thought, and Tucker belonged to the last generation of art historians to experience firsthand this rarified lineage of European scholarship. Exacting and exclusive, it was also domineering and chauvinist. Tucker’s graduate advisor was Robert Goldwater, a pioneer in the study of African tribal arts, who assembled the core of the African and Oceanic collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Customs dictated that

mostly silent wives accompanied their husbands to faculty lunches, as did Goldwater’s wife, an unknown sculptor and Sorbonne graduate named Louise Bourgeois. Tucker recalled that the standard textbook, H. W. Janson’s History of Art , did not mention a single woman. 1

Fortunately this was the 1960s, and Tucker was also hanging out in Greenwich Village folk clubs, riding a BSA motorcycle cross-country, and reading Zap Comix. Her friendly neighbors on 8th Street were the Hawks, later known as the Band. This alternative education would both compete with and complement her academic training, and the tension between the two would play itself out delightfully throughout her career. In 1984, Audre Lorde famously titled a manifesto on institutional power “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”; Tucker, in her student years two decades earlier, carefully learned the tools, the trade, and how to dwell in this house, then in time tore it down and rebuilt it in her own vision and through her own devices.

Tucker always said that feminist discussion groups and community organizing set the course for her career. In 1969 she began attending the Redstockings, a radical feminist group cofounded by Ellen Willis—a brilliant essayist who wrote as incisively on the Velvet Underground and Janis Joplin as she did on abortion rights, pornography, and Orthodox Judaism. This blend of high and low culture would be a constant in Tucker’s work. Later, Jane Gallop’s Reading Lacan (1985) was an oft-cited book for the way it illuminated the patriarchal biases of Freudian thought—showing how ideas as all-pervading as repression, neurosis, and the subconscious were from the start imbued with sexism. These are things that, once seen, are seen

everywhere: “Feminism changed the way I wrote about art and art history and what goes into museums, and offered new ways of thinking about exhibitions. It provided possibilities for different readings of art history and a broad social context for individual interpretations. It encouraged alternatives to the traditional, textual forms of interpretation, such as oral histories, personal narratives, interactive strategies, and fictions.”2

Excluded by the ruling powers, the women who founded their own “laboratory” spaces for art and performance left a remarkable legacy. One hesitates to make a list for fear of leaving people out: in New York City alone one thinks of Alanna Heiss at the Clocktower and P.S.1, Janice Rooney at the Alternative Museum, Martha Wilson at Franklin Furnace, Linda Goode Bryant at Just Above Midtown, Anita Contini at Creative Time, Trudie Grace at Artists Space, Jeanette Ingberman at Exit Art, Philippa de Menil and Helen Winkler at Dia, Dee Dee Halleck at Paper Tiger Television, Corinne Jennings at the African-American alternative art space Kenkeleba House, and Ellen Stewart at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Nurturing and noncorporate, most of these organizations ran on an entirely different set of principles, and an entirely divergent culture was born.

Out of Bounds is structured in three parts. Part one contains seven classic monographic essays, on Bruce Nauman, Pat Steir, Joan Mitchell, Richard Tuttle, Terry Allen, Mary Kelly, and Andres Serrano. Part two includes six catalogue essays from strategic thematic exhibitions: Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969), which introduced a generation to a new formal and conceptual order through the works of twenty-two artists, including Lynda

Benglis, Eva Hesse, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra,

and Keith Sonnier; “Bad” Painting (New Museum, 1978), which challenged notions of “high art” and “good taste,” predicting much of what would take place in the 1980s; The Other Man: Alternative Representations of Masculinity (New Museum, 1987), which examined “how differences of race, gender, class, and sexual preference affect the ways in which we produce, experience, analyze, interpret, and present works of art”; A Labor of Love (New Museum, 1996), which questioned the segregated categories in art, such as craft, folk, and outsider art; and two more. Part three of Out of Bounds , “Institutional Change,” focuses on feminism, race and gender, and the museum as institution, and includes a highly prescient 1994 essay on how the Internet will influence art. These texts are primarily lectures, where fierce critique is tempered by mordant wit.

Tucker focused on the trivialization of the art object by consumer culture well before Banksy’s film Exit through the Gift Shop , of 2010. She also understood the limits of formal analysis of works of art. About Tuttle’s 3rd Rope Piece of 1974, she writes, “Some works, like this one, you just can’t explain in formal terms, and you may just have to fess up and admit that it’s just a piece of rope—thereby putting your life in danger.” (Indeed, although showing Tuttle works such as 3rd Rope Piece at the Whitney did not put her life in danger, it did embroil her in controversies that led to her departure from the museum.) Tucker’s language is readable and straightforward, and she never plays the expert, which of course she was. She is intent on maintaining her amateur status, standing on the outside of a work of art, like every other viewer. She includes us in her doubt and bewilderment: “I once told someone that my motto was ‘Act first, think later—that way maybe you’ll have something to think about.’ That could be a recipe for disaster, unless you don’t mind making lots of mistakes. . . . That’s why I’m suspicious of expertise; experts are people who are deeply involved with what they already know, and I don’t want to be one of them.” This humility leads her to always put the artist first, and to eschew the role of artistic power broker.

In gathering different objects to make a show, the curator is not unlike the artist, who is likewise assembling and integrating. The difference is that one is organizing and the other is actually creating. Tucker understood this difference and never

Previous spread: Marcia Tucker, c. 1973.

Photo: Carlus Dyer, courtesy The New Museum

Opposite: Richard Tuttle and Marcia Tucker installing Richard Tuttle, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 12–November 16, 1975. Photo: Roni Feinstein

took the next step of curator-as-artist arrogance. Her essays propose questions, not answers. When she left the New Museum, passing on the leadership to Lisa Phillips, she took to the lecture circuit. A natural entertainer, she enjoyed sharing her love of art with audiences of all sorts.

In her last decade before she died, she was raising a child, working as a freelancer, and struggling with the cancer that took her life. She wrote a play about the art world, started a musical group, and did stand-up comedy. She was also studying Tibetan Buddhism and Zen with the same humility and insight that she had brought to her career as a writer and curator. In her last essay—“No Title: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art,” published in 2004 (two years before her death)—she explores the themes that had drawn her to the works of Nauman, Mitchell, and Tuttle three decades earlier: emptiness, awareness, ephemerality, and presence. In this, her final meditation on art, she reveals the secret behind all her insights: compassion.

Above: The first New Museum exhibition: Memory at C Space, 81 Leonard Street, New York, curated by Marcia Tucker and the New Museum, 1977. Photo: courtesy The New Museum

Below: New Museum staff members John Jacobs, Ned Rifkin, and Marcia Tucker, 1982. Photo: courtesy The New Museum

Tucker’s career was a critique of the power structure that surrounds and simultaneously degrades art. She was among the first to explicitly understand that museums were as much about wealth and power as about art. In enumerating the many social injustices on which these institutions were based, she predicted the coming storm that would engulf the museums of today, to an extent that might have surprised even her. A full twenty-five years ago she wrote in the New York Times , “When I was a child in the 1940s, the idea that an art museum could be the target of controversy was like imagining a threehundred-pound ballerina as the lead in Swan Lake Yet today, just fifty years later, contemporary art museums have become nearly synonymous with pitched battles over the nature, value, and financing of art.” Ultimately her message is one of hopefulness. When she writes that “every act of making displaces an act of unmaking,” Tucker understands that art is one of the few viable forms of optimism left us. No one who cares about art can afford to be ignorant of what she accomplished.

1. Marcia Tucker, Preface, in Art Talk , ed. Cindy Nemser (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), quoted here from Andrew Perchuk, Foreword, in Tucker, Out of Bounds: The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker, ed. Lisa Phillips, Johanna Burton, and Alicia Ritson, with Kate Wiener (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute; New York: New Museum, 2019), viii.

2. Marcia Tucker, A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008), 88.

Michael Snow,

An Interview with Lisa Phillips

RF She is so prescient about, well, practically everything.

LP Everything. I have kept trying to channel her over the last few years. What would Marcia do? What would Marcia say?

RF I wanted to ask, Do you do that?

LP I do. Especially now, when there’s so much change going on in the world. When I started at the New Museum, she had just retired, and we got quite close. She was a wonderful mentor and spent time with me; we had regular meetings. She gave me lots of advice.

RF Such as?

LP “Don’t let this job kill you!”

RF Was she intimidating? You were very young when you started out working with her at the Whitney.

LP I didn’t know her very well at the Whitney, I just admired her from afar, and I certainly found her intimidating then, but she really wasn’t. She was just intense. And accomplished. And young. She was still in her early thirties and doing amazing work at the Whitney, and I was in my early twenties.

RF Did she focus on you at all?

LP No, not really. But I did work in the Richard Tuttle show—I was stationed in the galleries to answer the questions of perplexed and often angry viewers, who demanded to know “Where is the art?!” The walls looked bare at first, but then his subtle interventions became apparent. At that point I was still figuring everything out, and I thought, Oh, she’s doing something courageous here and making a difference. I understood that women could do something important in museums that was worth aspiring to. She was definitely a role model, but we weren’t close then. I knew her and I observed her in action. Then when I came to the New Museum she couldn’t have been more generous with her time and her experience. Really funny, open, not at all intimidating.

RF She’s extremely funny—that comes through

in the book, especially in the lectures section, which balances the book in a different way from the writings. Is it true she did stand-up comedy?

LP Yes, she did. The lectures that she staged for donors at the museum were really performances, and they were just hilarious. She brought that humor and performance to everything she did. I can’t think of another person in the museum field who behaved like that, always bringing humor and the unexpected and the performative to everything she did. Gallery talks, board meetings, whatever it was, it was just so refreshing and great. She always pushed herself to do things out of her comfort zone. She loved music, loved to listen to it and wanted to sing, but she had a terrible voice. So she joined an a cappella group and got so much pleasure out of that. In taking on these challenges she also questioned what’s terrible and what’s beautiful. She was constantly inverting our expectations about values: embracing bad painting, bad girls, et cetera, as positives.

RF I think people sometimes forget that there’s a certain amount of showmanship in organizing an exhibition, be it at a gallery or a museum. People who understand that just seem to do a better job.

LP She really made a virtue out of the questions “What am I doing here? How did I get here?,” and turned those expectations upside down through humor. I think that was part of her brilliance.

RF I imagine she had to fight for space at the Whitney, like every curator?

LP Yes, but she was very good at claiming these interstitial spaces, like in the basement between the café and the restrooms, where she mounted a show about tattoo artists and another about body builders. Those are good examples of how a lot of Marcia’s interests that seemed very “out of bounds” at the time became mainstream. She was always paying attention to artists and art forms that were disparaged or overlooked.

RF Were there frustrations you had working with her later on at the New Museum?

LP No, and I never really worked closely with her. She’d already left before I arrived. She had one last show at the New Museum that opened while I was there, The Time of Our Lives , which was about aging, and she was very graceful in how she exited. She had moved everything out of the office and then just came by and said, I’m available to provide whatever support or resource you might want or need, I don’t want to impose myself. She was very happy to see that the New Museum was going to continue on, she was very proud of that, and she was ready to let go. She had been fighting a serious illness for several years and wanted to spend her energy differently. It was a natural transition for her. She was just so gracious and kind to me, and gave me a lot of sage advice—she was definitely like a mentor and a big sister. At that point I was already in my forties and I’d had quite a bit of experience myself, but she knew the New Museum better than anyone.

RF Did she have a difficult time with patrons or with her board?

LP I don’t know, because I wasn’t there. I think they really loved her—she was a pied piper, she always had a strong following. But I’m sure it wasn’t always easy.

RF After the Tuttle show at the Whitney and her

departure, did you ever have any doubt that she could pull off the New Museum?

LP Well, it was such a tiny place when it started out, it was one room. The first location, in 1977, was at 105 Hudson Street, where Artists Space was. She opened it within about a week of leaving the Whitney, with about $15,000 and three part-time volunteers, and she was unpaid. Of course we all went there. I knew people who worked for her, like Allan Schwartzman, who had also been an intern at the Whitney—he went along with her, he was about nineteen years old. In 1977, Vera List provided room at the New School for Social Research for the New Museum, and in 1984 the museum moved to Broadway near Houston, to a building that had no roof, so obviously the ceiling leaked. It was a time when people were starting their own organizations left and right, so the New Museum didn’t seem out of the ordinary or strange because it was an alternative space, it wasn’t a big institution. Yes, it had a big ambition, being called a museum, but it was a very small space. At the time that didn’t seem odd at all.

RF The decision not to have a collection—was that just practical and financial, or was there a political dimension to it?

LP That’s an interesting question. The New Museum did have a “semipermanent collection.” Her idea was, How can we collect and do it in an unconventional way and in a way that keeps it contemporary? So she said, Let’s collect and then sell the work after ten years and buy new work. That didn’t work out particularly well, because artists don’t like their work to be sold, number one. What happens if the market for an artist’s work is weak and it doesn’t sell? Collectors didn’t love the idea either. It was an interesting concept but hard to put into practice. I think Marcia felt that not having a collection was probably the way to go, to stay more rooted in the present moment.

RF In the Collected Writings one gets the sense that she was thinking on her feet all the time and adapting to new situations as they arose.

LP Exactly. But always bringing to bear the seriousness of museum practice and of scholarship.

RF She strikes a great balance in her writing, because she does believe that art is for everyone, but she’s never dumbing it down.

LP One thing about Marcia is she spoke about art in very plain language, and that comes through in the book. There’s no academic jargon or artspeak, it’s very direct and readable. That’s something we should all strive for.

RF She’s also somebody who can really call out bullshit when she sees it, and there’s nothing like that.

LP I know, and that’s when I really want to hear her voice these days. What would she say to some of the things that we’re experiencing right now? How would she respond? She was very outspoken and direct, as you know.

RF As radical as her approach was, she also seemed to believe in working within the system, to create institutional change from within, and I think she was criticized for not being radical enough, right?

LP That’s right. It’s important to remember she had her own struggles, too. She wasn’t always in a position of power. We’re operating inside a culture

that has certain values and structures, so what are you going to do? Either you choose to blow it all up or you’ve got to work within it somehow. Marcia often said, “The only way I could be a museum director was by starting my own museum.” Women simply were not hired for the top positions in those days. Also, she was increasingly troubled by the corporate direction she saw museums taking. But in time what she created became an institution and the market also caught up to it—an irony that was not lost on her.

RF Reading this book, you realize that if you can’t write, you really are at a big disadvantage as a curator. Think of all the great curators we’ve known, and how many of them didn’t write. That’s what’s great about this book: it memorializes Marcia Tucker not just as a writer but as a curator and thinker. So many museum curators aren’t remembered for just how interesting they were.

LP Increasingly that’s a challenge many young people face. The Internet and social media don’t really encourage good long-form writing.

RF I think we’re all a bit amazed at the transition we’ve seen the Whitney go through in our lifetime. And if you look back at exhibitions like AntiIllusion , Marcia had as much to do with this change as anyone.

LP Absolutely. Her radical vision changed the Whitney permanently. I started working there in 1975, so Marcia and I overlapped by several years. Back then, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s daughter Flora Miller and granddaughter Flora Biddle were in the museum daily. It was still a family operation in many ways.

Just to set the record straight, Marcia was not fired from the Whitney because of the Richard Tuttle show. The implication that the work was too radical for the museum was definitely not the case. She just had a really fundamental clash of style— and perhaps values—with the then new director, Tom Armstrong, and things became untenable. It was disappointing to some that the catalogue didn’t come out until after the show. Marcia wanted a publication that would include installation views and all of the critical reaction to the exhibition as part of the catalogue, but that meant there was not much for the public to read to learn about this quite mysterious figure who was making extremely minimal work.

RF It’s an interesting concept, that the catalogue needed to contain the responses of viewers and critics, as if that completes the artwork in some way.

LP Responses to art are shaped by social considerations and cultural conditions and those things were very important to her. Her ideas were courageous and unconventional, and maybe they didn’t always work out in every situation, but she always said you had to be prepared to fail. Clearly she was moving beyond a traditional institution and felt increasingly stifled there. Her feminist consciousness and commitment made it hard for her—it was a tough time for women in any institution at that point. So I take very seriously what she said about needing to start her own place in order to have a position of power. Most of the alternative spaces that were started around that time were founded by women, and that’s not lost on me either—that generation of women who started their own institutions paved the way for my generation to have other options. Many options.

RF What was the evolution of the book from the editorial side?

LP After Marcia’s death, in 2006, her husband, Dean McNeil, handed me a folder and said, “This was a project Marcia was working on. Would you see it through to completion?” Johanna Burton and I read through all the materials and all of Marcia’s notes. Alicia Ritson did a lot of the subsequent research with Kate Wiener. They both spent a lot of time at the Getty Research Institute, where her papers are. The book had a long evolution and we tried to be respectful of how Marcia thought it should be structured. Johanna and I worked closely together, reading through everything. We made several trips out to the Getty and then eventually edited the selections down to what we thought would make a strong presentation of the different themes that Marcia had laid out.

RF The last essay in the book, “No Title: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art,” is a beautiful summation of so many important themes in her work: attentiveness, demateriality, and the value of experience over information.

LP I think her interest in Buddhism started before her illness, but then she took it to a whole other level. That was probably during the last decade or so of her life. I remember hearing about these retreats that she would go on that sounded great. I think she had a fair amount of tension in her life that she had to contend with, whether it was financial pressures, her illness, or family situations—things we all contend with. And you think, Yeah, this woman can handle anything—she’s a powerhouse and a force of nature, she can handle it all. But she struggled like everyone else does and found solace and a path through Buddhism.

Marcia and I are very different people. We never really worked closely together but we became closer in those last ten years of her life. We both had our children at the same age, and there was a lot that we shared and struggled with as professional women and working mothers. I love reading her writing and I feel very grateful that I had the opportunity to bring this book to fruition, and I hope people will read it and it will inspire future generations of women. And other people, not just women.

Opposite: Richard Tuttle and Marcia Tucker installing Richard Tuttle, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 12–November 16, 1975. Photo: Roni Feinstein

Above: Marcia Tucker taking New Museum members on a tour of William Copley’s studio (Copley at far right), c. 1978. Tucker included Copley in her 1978 exhibition “Bad” Painting. Photo: courtesy The New Museum

Below: Marcia Tucker, 2000. Photo: courtesy The New Museum

BA

BA SELITZ NACKTE MEISTER

Rachel Feinstein in Florence

June 9–September 18, 2023

Curated by Sergio Risaliti and Stefania Rispoli

Sarah Sze : Timelapse

Through

Global Partners

Work in progress by Sarah Sze, 2022. © Sarah Sze. Photo: Courtesy Sarah Sze Studio

In New York, Thinking of You

Part I: April 1 – 29, 2023

Jordan Casteel, JadŽ Fadojutimi, Rachel Feinstein, Louise Giovanelli, Jenna Gribbon, Sally J. Han, Hilary Harkness, Lubaina Himid, Arghavan

Khosravi, Sahara Longe, Gisela McDaniel, Aliza Nisenbaum, Aurel Schmidt, Finnegan Shannon, Robin F. Williams, and Lisa Yuskavage

Part II: May 6 – June 3, 2023

Cecily Brown, Julie Curtiss, Yuan Fang, Natalie Frank, Lubaina Himid, Shara Hughes, Danielle Orchard, Anna Park, Hiba Schahbaz, Finnegan

Shannon, Antonia Showering, Jeni Spota C., Lesley Vance, Hana Ward, Anna Weyant, Issy Wood, and Hiejin Yoo

Photography by Mark Blower

6 May – 30 July 2023

Ground Floor Galleries

A free exhibition for all Exhibition supported by Howard and Roberta Ahmanson And other donors Sponsored by

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GAGOSIAN BUILDING LIBRARIES

Douglas Flamm, Gagosian’s rare book specialist, has established an advisory service for clients aiming to curate their private libraries, whether they are building a reference collection from the ground up—for a new home, perhaps—or enhancing an archive they have already established. Douglas conducts individualized consultations, working to produce and acquire bespoke lists of titles. Anyone interested in books and libraries as still-unmatched repositories of knowledge and tools for in-depth research will appreciate this service.

About Douglas Flamm

A twenty-five-year veteran of the field—and Gagosian’s inhouse rare books expert since 2016— Douglas has significant experience in developing and maintaining library collections. He boasts unparalleled know-how in sourcing scarce and important publications, from catalogues raisonnés and museum exhibition catalogues to monographs and artist’s books, including rare and out-of-print titles as well as newer releases. Focusing on a broad range of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century artists and movements—from Picasso through Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism, to the full spectrum of contemporary practices—Douglas can also locate modern design and architecture books on such subjects as Art Deco, the Bauhaus, and Modernism.

Please contact Douglas Flamm for more information at dflamm@gagosian.com or +1 212 744 2313.

Family room designed by Nicole Hollis, featuring library curated by Douglas Flamm. Photo: Douglas Friedman

GAME CHANGER: DOROTHY MILLER

Scholar Wendy Jeffers is working on a comprehensive biography of Dorothy Miller, the groundbreaking curator who joined the Museum of Modern Art in its early years, building, over the course of decades, an innovative and remarkable program promoting contemporary American artists. Here, Jeffers recounts some key moments from this extraordinary life.

“These are the sixteen artists most likely slated for oblivion,” sniffed John Canaday, chief art critic for the New York Times , when Dorothy Miller’s exhibition Sixteen Americans opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959. Sixteen Americans introduced the work of Jay DeFeo, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Jack Youngerman, and nine others to a museum audience for the first time. When the show opened, Miller had been pioneering the Americans , a series of groundbreaking exhibitions of contemporary art, for over fifteen years. Her exhibitions were newsworthy because no other curator was doing anything like them. The art historian Robert Rosenblum recalled that the series as a whole “had something of the excitement and glamour, the sense of near-divine judgment we might associate with the Oscar and Pulitzer Prizes. There was endless speculation and gossip beforehand about who was in and who was out, and no less controversy afterwards. . . . [Miller] wrote a major history of those incredible years . . . through the most uncharted and thrilling seas the New York art world has ever known.”1 Reviewing Sixteen Americans in the Saturday Review , Katherine Kuh observed, “This show does not pretend to reflect the present as much as foretell the immediate future.”2 Conversely, Emily Genauer dismissed the show in the New York Herald Tribune with the statement that “Frank Stella is unspeakably boring.”3 After the opening, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA’s founding director, turned to Miller and said, “Congratulations, Dorothy, you’ve done it again, they all hate it!”4 By 1959, however, Miller had become inured to vitriolic criticism.

Dorothy Canning Miller was the first professionally trained curator hired at the Museum of Modern Art, which she joined in 1934, joining in a staff of thirteen (including a receptionist, a switchboard operator, and a man at the front desk who sold postcards and catalogues). In a field dominated by men, Miller’s rapid evolution into America’s first museum curator of contemporary art was not without setbacks, but she persevered: at MoMA she became the pivotal curator of her generation, championing American artists at a time when few curators were paying any attention to them. Opening in New York and then touring across the country, the Americans series introduced several generations of American artists to a skeptical and often openly hostile audience. In 1958, Miller organized The New American Painting , an exhibition of seventeen artists and eighty-one works of art that toured European capitals for a year.

Miller’s ability to identify new talent was simply unparalleled. She counted many artists as friends, and they in turn introduced her to the cutting-edge work of their colleagues. Her calendars were littered with appointments for studio visits, and if the artists lived and worked out of town, they would send their work to the museum for her to see. Her practice was not New York–centric: “It seemed desirable to include a larger proportion of newcomers to the New York scene,” she wrote in the foreword to the Sixteen Americans catalogue. “Six

through the filter of their own work, but they also look at art as a process rather than a product. They may occasionally look with a jaundiced eye, eager to steal ideas or spot trends, but they still look for the underlying structure of a work, be it physical or philosophical, particularly when it is a radical departure from anything they have seen before. When artists talked with Miller, they talked about the process of making art. As a result, she understood their work at a foundational level, well in advance of the critics and pundits.

of the sixteen have not yet had one-man shows in New York and several others have shown but once or have held shows not truly pertinent to their present work.”5 Highlighting the diversity she was seeing in the galleries and studios, Miller developed an exhibition layout for the Americans shows that became known as the “Dorothy Miller format,” a carefully choreographed sequence in which each artist had separate galleries, often demarcated by walls painted different colors. Describing the result as “a series of small one-man shows within the framework of a large exhibition,”6 she believed that this gave a “broader and more effective view of individual achievement.”7

Artists look at art differently from the general public: first and foremost, of course, they see it

As a curator, however, Miller had other criteria to consider: was an artwork a lasting contribution? Was it original? Did it change the way we look at things? Had the artist’s work matured enough to show in the whitehot spotlight of the Museum of Modern Art? Miller often tracked an artist’s progress over many years before showing it, if the work interested her, and though she couldn’t show all the artists she was tracking, she often helped them to find dealers and collectors, as well as writing countless recommendations for grant applications. Artists as diverse as James Lee Byars, Forrest Bess, and Cy Twombly benefited from her advice and support, although she never exhibited their work. When she declined to recommend an artist, her response was gracious and supportive: “It would be better if you didn’t use my name as a reference. I do hope you will understand my reasons for saying this, knowing that I wish you all success. There are several other painters whom I have promised to recommend and about whose work I feel I can speak with greater personal enthusiasm.” 8 Miller rarely used the word “important”—a commercial rather than an aesthetic description—but I often heard her use terms such as “significant” and “emotionally compelling.” Because she was in the trenches— alongside the artists—she didn’t follow the nascent art market, nor was that necessary except when making recommendations for museum purchases. In 1948, for example, Miller encouraged MoMA to buy a black-and-white painting from Willem de Kooning’s first one-person exhibition, at the Charles Egan Gallery; it was the only work he sold.

I was still in graduate school when I met Miller, who had just crossed MoMA’s threshold of mandatory retirement at the age of sixty-five. She planned to take on five or six major projects and invited me to work alongside her part-time, which I did for almost twenty years. Slowly, she began to tell me stories about her life and career.

Miller’s first Americans show was in 1942, and one of the artists she included in it was Morris Graves, whom she had discovered on the West

This page: Irving Penn, Eight American Artists & Dorothy Miller of MoMA, New York, 1958 © The Irving Penn Foundation Opposite: Soichi Sunami, Dorothy Canning Miller, ca. 1936, Dorothy C. Miller papers, 1853–2013, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Coast. Graves was very shy, and reluctant to exhibit, and Miller remembered that he threw a group of his works on paper into the back of his pickup truck in order to meet her in the basement of the Seattle Art Museum. MoMA bought nine of his gouaches, Miller herself bought two, and during the show she sold more than thirty-five of his works to various trustees and staff members at prices she had established with Graves, who did not yet have a dealer. When he received the check for his sales, he was elated and wrote her that now that he was able to pay off all his debts, he could walk through town with his head held high. Fifty years later, Graves visited Miller at her apartment in New York and after carefully studying her collection, he asked her, “Who is going to tell the story of how you helped so many artists?” Dorothy, who was by that time in her mid-nineties, leaned toward him and in a loud stage whisper said, “Wendy will tell them.”

On a curator’s modest salary and buying on installment, Miller assembled a remarkable collection of contemporary paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints, and photographs, as well as Native American and folk art. When she died, in 2003, more than half of her collection was donated to museums and the remainder was sold at auction for $13,000,000. Several pieces broke records primarily because she had selected and owned them. She belonged to the first generation of collectors of American folk art: able to purchase these works at very modest prices in the 1930s and ’40s, she collected dozens of weathervanes, paintings, theorem pictures, and chalkware figures. When Graves visited her apartment, he was enchanted with her folk art collection, particularly a watercolor of a watermelon. He turned to me and said, “I could sign this one.” He walked past the works by Nevelson, Stuart Davis, and Franz Kline hanging in her apartment, but he stopped and looked carefully at the work of Loren MacIver.

Miller’s shows often plunged her into controversy, occasionally to the point of threatening her position.

Fourteen Americans , which opened at MoMA in September 1946, included works by Arshile Gorky, David Hare, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, and Mark Tobey, but also by lesser-known artists such as MacIver, David Aronson, Ben Culwell, Alton Pickens, and Honoré Sharrer. (Sharrer and Pickens had never had solo shows and Culwell had exhibited only in his native Texas.) Miller considered including Jackson Pollock but decided that his work had not matured sufficiently. The exhibition won generally good reviews; Robert Coates wrote in The New Yorker, for example, that he was particularly “impressed . . . with the work of Ben L. Culwell, a young Texan . . . [his work] combines Abstraction and Expressionism in a way that produces a maximum amount of emotional intensity.”9

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (SSV), however, viewed Culwell’s work quite differently, notifying the museum that it objected to the reproduction of his Figment of Erotic Torture in the exhibition’s catalogue. The publication had been “brought to their attention by way of a complaint as

to its indecency.”10 MoMA was forced to reprint the catalogue without the offending image.

Founded in 1873 by Anthony Comstock to protect the American public from pornography, the SSV wielded considerable legal and financial power; its dubious accomplishments included preventing birth control literature from being distributed through the mail and barring the publication and distribution in the United States of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), and novels by Oscar Wilde and Frank Harris. MoMA’s trustees were upset— Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, one of the museum’s founding trustees, wrote the staff, “the inclusion of ‘Erotica’ [sic ] . . . has greatly shaken my faith in the judgment, taste and integrity of standard of the staff of the Museum”—and Miller almost lost her job. 11 But her colleagues rallied: René d’Harnoncourt, then the museum’s director of the curatorial departments and later its director overall, wrote Mrs. Rockefeller that “the subject matter and its treatment has many classical precedents and can be found in works by Matthias Gruenewald, Hieronymus Bosch, Martin Schongauer and other old masters in the great museums of the world.” He added that going forward, a new committee would review works to be included in temporary exhibitions “with a view to their effect on the public.”12 Mrs. Rockefeller died shortly thereafter, the SSV shut down in 1950, and the museum’s review committee, which was rarely mobilized, quietly folded at the same time. Miller, however, continued to court criticism, but it now came from audiences and critics.

That a woman raised in an austere Victorian environment, one that emphasized modesty and service, became the world’s leading curator of contemporary American art is an enigma worth examining. All her adult life, Miller lived in Greenwich

Village, surrounded by younger friends and colleagues, and her youthful curiosity never left her. Her long career spanned several generations of artists, which is rare; many curators have difficulty staying current by embracing new stylistic trends—in a phenomenon called “period eye,” they tend to focus on only one art-historical generation, and if they are curators of contemporary art, that generation is often their own. Born in 1904, Miller belonged to the generation of the Abstract Expressionists—de Kooning was born the same year—but after she showed their work, she began to look at the work of younger artists. A number of the older artists had difficulty with the newer work she showed and expressed their disdain.

While she often conferred with trusted colleagues, Miller knew what she liked and why she liked it. Writing to Smith College to recommend MacIver for an honorary degree, she observed, “For some fifteen years, from the mid-thirties until about 1950, Loren MacIver was, in my opinion the best American woman painter, though that distinction went at the time to a much older and more famous lady [Georgia O’Keeffe]. It was only within the decade of the fifties and the movement known all over the world as abstract expressionism that other women painters of real quality developed.”13 Miller continued to look at young artists until she was too old to navigate the long flights of steps leading up to the SoHo lofts; she continued to visit galleries well into her nineties. She avoided overidentifying with any generation in part because she chose not to write interpretive essays for her Americans catalogues, instead asking the artists to write statements about their work, a practice that allowed her to stay nimble as she studied the diverse artistic trends that were occurring simultaneously in a rapidly changing field. Characteristically, when asked about her incredible track record of discovering new talent, she demurred and said, “I was lucky to be alive—it was the artists who were making the incredible contributions.”14

1. Robert Rosenblum, exh. brochure for A Curator’s Choice: A Tribute to Dorothy C. Miller Rosa Esman Gallery, New York, 1982.

2. Katherine Kuh, “Fine Arts: The Contemporary Canvas of the American Canvas,” Saturday Review, January 23, 1960, 40.

3. Emily Genauer, New York Herald Tribune , December 16, 1959.

4. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., as reported to the author by Dorothy C. Miller.

5. Dorothy C. Miller, “Foreword and Acknowledgment,” Sixteen Americans , exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 6.

6. Ibid.

7. Miller, Foreword, in Fifteen Americans , exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1952), 5.

8. Miller, letter to Walter Kamys, 1958. Department of Painting and Sculpture Artist Records 1.143, Museum of Modern Art Archives.

9. Robert Coates, “The Art Galleries: All-American,” The New Yorker, September 21, 1946.

10. New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, letter to the Museum of Modern Art, March 5, 1947. Rockefeller Family Archives, NAR III 4.L Box 137, Folder 1345, “Fourteen Americans.”

11. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, letter to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., John Abbott, René d’Harnoncourt, and Monroe Wheeler, February 21, 1947. Nelson Rockefeller papers, Rockefeller Archives, RG III.4.L.

12. René d’Harnoncourt, letter to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, February 24, 1947. Nelson Rockefeller papers, Rockefeller Archives, RG III.4.L.

13. Miller, letter to Gwendolyn Carter, Committee on Honorary Degrees, Smith College, December 23, 1960. Dorothy Miller papers, MoMA Archives, III.3.a.i Museum matters correspondence.

14. Miller, conversation with the author.

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