Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2024

GAGOSIAN & DANCE

ALVIN AILEY

REID BARTELME

MOEKO FUJII

LA(HORDE)

HARRIET JUNG

RENNIE MCDOUGALL

THOMAS NAIL

AMIT NOY

JACKIE SIBBLIES DRURY

ROSS SIMONINI

Gagosian

Quarterly, Winter 2024

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

Cover

Peter Doig

Founder Larry Gagosian

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Published by Gagosian Media

For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries

Advertising@gagosian.com

Distribution David Renard

Distributed by Magazine Heaven

Distribution Manager Alexandra Samaras

Prepress DL Imaging

Printed by Pureprint Group

Contributors

Miriam Bale

Reid Bartelme

Jessica Beck

Joanna Biggs

Derek C. Blasberg

Rosalind Brown

Ken Burns

Michael Craig-Martin

Sarah Crowner

Aria Darcella

Daria de Beauvais

Eli Diner

Peter Doig

Simone Farresin

Mark Francis

Moeko Fujii

Michel Gaubert

Zoë Hopkins

Arinze Ifeakandu

Harriet Jung

Pavel Kolesnikov

David Jacob Kramer

Alison McDonald

Rennie McDougall

Thomas Nail

Amit Noy

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Jenny Odell

Ashley Overbeek

John B. Ravenal

Scott Rothkopf

Michael Schmelling

Richard Shiff

Jackie Sibblies Drury

Ross Simonini

Sarah Sze

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Colm Tóibín

Andrea Trimarchi

Samson Tsoy

Jeff Wall

Lawrence Weschler

Thanks

Richard Alwyn Fisher

Julia Arena

Lisa Ballard

Mike Barnett

Priya Bhatnagar

Will Buckingham

Michael Cary

Serena Cattaneo Adorno

Vittoria Ciaraldi

Charlotte Dozier

Maggie Dubinski

Jill Feldman

Paatela Fraga

Hannah Freedberg

Hallie Freer

Bruno Fulcrand

Hilliary Gabryel

Brett Garde

Eleanor Gibson

Lauren Gioia

Darlina Goldak

Delphine Huisinga

Sarah Jones

Shiori Kawasaki

Léa Khayata

Bernard Lagrange

Lauren Mahony

Kelly McDaniel Quinn

Parinaz Mogadassi

Olivia Mull

Elizabeth Mullaney

Nu Nguyen

Samora Pinderhughes

Stefan Ratibor

Helen Redmond

Olga Rosen

Kathleen Ryan

Jasper Sharp

Rose Sheehan

Caitlin Sweeney

Putri Tan

Harry Thorne

Natasha Turk

Kelsey Tyler

Timothée Viale

Lindsey Westbrook

Felix Wimmer

HIGH JEWE LRY

DIOR AM A RÉ SI LLE DORÉE NECK LACE

Ye llow gold, pi nk gold, diamonds.

WINTER 2024 FROM THE EDITOR

In this issue, Peter Doig, whose Night Playground (1997–98) appears on our cover, speaks with Richard Shiff about The Street (1933). Balthus’s surreal scene is the centerpiece of an exhibition in New York this November, curated by Doig and featuring paintings that have been touchstones for his own work over the years.

We connect with the legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns as he turns his attention to Leonardo da Vinci, whose insatiable curiosity and endless pursuit of knowledge produced discoveries that were centuries ahead of his time. And we look at three standouts from the Venice Film Festival with Miriam Bale.

Our “Gagosian&” supplement, edited by Gillian Jakab, focuses on dance, with features on the French collective la(horde), the art of costuming, the philosophy of movement, and more.

We enter the world of music and fashion in a conversation with Michel Gaubert, who has long worked on the music behind runway shows around the world. And we discuss the cross-pollination of music and art with pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy.

We see new paintings in Jonas Wood’s studio ahead of a London exhibition. Sarah Crowner shares her latest works with Jenny Odell before a show in Athens. Jessica Beck surveys the career of Rudolf Stingel. Longtime friends Rirkrit Tiravanija and Sarah Sze discuss thriving in chaos, experiences in time, and their latest projects. We track Kathleen Ryan’s sustained and evolving engagement with sculpture and its depiction of the temporal.

For our Bigger Picture series we focus on the Healing Project, a multidisciplinary art nonprofit founded by composer, activist, and artist Samora Pinderhughes.

This summer we lost Dorothy Lichtenstein, whose grace and generosity touched many of us. Scott Rothkopf remembers her as a dedicated philanthropist, a steward of the legacy of her husband Roy, and a person you always wanted to sit next to at dinners and whose generosity will benefit many generations to come.

Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

42 Game Changer: Kasper König

Mark Francis remembers his late friend, the indefatigable and radical curator Kasper König.

46 The Street: A Conversation between Peter Doig and Richard Shiff

A New York exhibition conceived and curated by the artist Peter Doig takes as its point of departure Balthus’s 1933 painting The Street , in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Ahead of the show, Doig and art historian Richard Shiff met up to look at Balthus’s painting together in person.

52

Leonardo da Vinci by Ken Burns

The fascinating life of Leonardo da Vinci is the subject of a new film by Ken Burns. The legendary filmmaker sat down with the Quarterly ’s Alison McDonald to discuss Leonardo’s insatiable curiosity, his passionate enchantment with nature, and his endless search for universal truths.

WINTER 2024 TABLE OF CONTENTS

58

Fashion and Art, Part 20: Michel Gaubert

Michel Gaubert, the Paris-based music supervisor behind iconic runway shows across the globe, meets with the Quarterly ’s Derek C. Blasberg to discuss his first engagements with music and fashion, his fateful meeting with Karl Lagerfeld, and discovering sounds in unexpected places.

62 Kathleen Ryan: Sculpting Time

Art historian, curator, and writer Daria de Beauvais tracks the artist Kathleen Ryan’s sustained and evolving engagement with the temporal, the memento mori, Americana, and ecology.

70

Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy

Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy are pianists, composers, and cofounders of Britain’s Ragged Music Festival. Lawrence Weschler speaks to the duo about the influence of visual aesthetics on their music, their engagements with Pop art and the work of Joseph Cornell and Richard Serra, and music’s ability to be infinitely specific.

74

In the Studio: Jonas Wood

Eli Diner visits Jonas Wood in his Los Angeles studio as the artist prepares for an exhibition of new paintings in London.

82

Venice International Film Festival: Three to See

Miriam Bale considers three films that made their debut in Venice earlier this year.

86

Rudolf Stingel: A Trace

Jessica Beck surveys the career of Rudolf Stingel, noting his sustained engagements with painting, environment, and memory.

96

Bigger Picture: The Healing Project

Zoë Hopkins reports on the Healing Project, a multidisciplinary arts organization founded by the composer, artist, and activist Samora Pinderhughes in 2014.

100

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: FormaFantasma

For the fourth installment of 2024, we are honored to present Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, founders of the research-based design studio FormaFantasma.

102

Sarah Crowner: Meeting in Time and Place

This past summer, Jenny Odell made a visit to Sarah Crowner’s studio in Red Hook, New York. Amid a series of new paintings that Crowner is making for an exhibition in Athens this November, the two discussed embodiment, honing attention, and what it means to enter vertical time.

108

Gagosian & Dance

This installment of the Quarterly ’s themed supplement dives into dance with features on the French collective la(horde), the art of costuming, the philosophy of movement, and more.

110

Michael Craig-Martin: Image Object

130

The Last Resort: The House That David Lee Hoffman Built

David Jacob Kramer and photographer Michael Schmelling take us to the Last Resort, the home and surrounding buildings created by David Lee Hoffman since 1973.

136

Art on the Coast

Ashley Overbeek takes us through the history, the contemporary culture, and some of the people of a coastal Uruguayan town that hosts worldclass museums and art installations.

Previous spread, left: Kathleen Ryan, Bad Melon (Laid Back), 2020–24 (detail), cherry quartz, rose quartz, carnelian, agate, jasper, rhodonite, rhodochrosite, citrine, pink opal, glass, cast iron flies, brass flies, steel pins on coated polystyrene, and aluminum Airstream, 26 ½ × 29 ½ × 23 inches (67.3 × 74.9 × 58.4 cm) © Kathleen Ryan

Previous spread, right: Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Angel of the Virgin of the Rocks , c. 1478–85, by permission of MiC-Musei Reali, Biblioteca Reale. Photo: Ernani Orcorte

Above: The Last Resort, Marin County, California, 2024. Photo: Michael Schmelling

Below: Jonas Wood in his studio, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo: Laure Joliet

Michael Craig-Martin’s sixty-year career is the subject of a retrospective at the Royal Academy, London, on view through December 10, 2024. Ahead of the exhibition’s opening, the artist met with his longtime friend, the novelist Colm Tóibín, to discuss his materials and the generative inquiries at the heart of his practice.

116

Rosalind Brown: Practice

Rosalind Brown discusses her debut novel, Practice, with author and senior editor of Harper’s Magazine Joanna Biggs.

120

Artist to Artist: Sarah Sze and Rirkrit Tiravanija

Sarah Sze meets with Rirkrit Tiravanija to discuss thriving in chaos, making room for experiences in time, and her materials.

126

Travelogue: The Books of Louis Vuitton

Aria Darcella ventures through the history of the French house’s bibliophilic engagement with travel, publishing, and art.

140

Prosperity’s Long Song Part IV: Battle Formations

We present the final installment of a four-part short story by Arinze Ifeakandu.

146

Jeff Wall: Before the Image

Jeff Wall explains the stories and literary allusions behind two photographs of his that will appear in an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, in November.

150

Hidden in Plain Sight

In the second part of a two-part essay, art historian John B. Ravenal considers Jasper Johns’s continued engagement with the motif of woodgrain.

166

Game Changer: Dorothy Lichtenstein

Written by Scott Rothkopf.

Miriam Bale

Miriam Bale is a writer and film programmer based in California.

Aria Darcella

Aria Darcella is a fashion and culture writer based in New York. Photo: Zachary Headapohl

WINTER 2024 CONTRIBUTORS

Arinze Ifeakandu

Arinze Ifeakandu is the author of God’s Children Are Little Broken Things , which received the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize, the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize. He was also a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, the Kirkus Prize, and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction. Photo: Bec Stupak Diop

John B. Ravenal

John B. Ravenal is an independent curator and art historian based in Cambridge, Mass. He is the former executive director of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, in Lincoln, Mass., and previously served as curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

Jenny Odell

Jenny Odell is the author of the New York Times bestsellers How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Saving Time: Discovering a Life beyond the Clock , both of which have been translated into numerous languages. Odell has been an artist in residence at Recology SF (otherwise known as the dump), the San Francisco Planning Department, and the Internet Archive.

Daria de Beauvais

Daria de Beauvais is a Paris-based art historian, curator, writer, and lecturer. Senior curator at the Palais de Tokyo, she teaches at the PanthéonSorbonne university and is cohead of a research seminar at the École Normale Supérieure. She has curated exhibitions in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Romania, and the United States.

Photo: © François Bouchon

Zoë Hopkins

Zoë Hopkins is a writer and critic based in New York. She received her BA in art history and African American studies at Harvard University and is currently working on her MA in modern and contemporary art at Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Artforum , the Brooklyn Rail , Cultured , and Hyperallergic

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist is the artistic director of the Serpentine, London. He was previously the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell

David Jacob Kramer

David Jacob Kramer is a Los Angeles–based writer. His most recent book is Heads Together: Weed and the Underground Press Syndicate, 1965–73 (Edition Patrick Frey).

Eli Diner

Eli Diner is a Los Angeles–based writer. His work has appeared in publications including Artforum , Book Forum , Frieze , and Texte zur Kunst . He has a gossip column in the Los Angeles Review of Books . His book The Renaissance will be out in 2025 from Apogee Graphics.

Jessica Beck

Jessica Beck is a director at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. Formerly the Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, she has curated many projects, notably Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body, the first exhibition to explore the complexities of the body, through beauty, pain, and perfection, in Warhol’s practice.

Photo: Abby Warhola

Peter Doig

Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959 and grew up in Trinidad and Canada before moving to London to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art and the Chelsea School of Art. Since 2002 he has divided his time between London and Trinidad. His work is represented in major public and private collections worldwide.

Richard Shiff

Richard Shiff is Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at the University of Texas at Austin. His Sensuous Thoughts: Essays on the Work of Donald Judd (2020) collects his writings on the artist over a twentyyear period. Many other essays on recent art appear in his Writings after Art (2023). For Gagosian he recently published “Haunting,” a text for the catalogue of David Reed’s exhibition of new paintings in 2020. He has published on Peter Doig on several occasions.

Sarah Crowner

Sarah Crowner lives and works in Brooklyn. Her diverse practice incorporates two- and threedimensional works across a variety of media (painting, sculpture, installation, and set design). Crowner’s work points to an expanded field of painting, investigating the relationship between the element and the whole, and how parts build an entirety. In September 2023, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation opened Sarah Crowner: Around Orange , an exhibition of three new site-specific artworks responding to the architecture of the Pulitzer’s Tadao Ando building and Ellsworth Kelly’s monumental wall sculpture Blue Black . Other significant recent projects include a 2023 exhibition at the Hill Art Foundation in New York and a 2022 solo exhibition at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico.

Lawrence Weschler

Lawrence Weschler, a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz, was for over twenty years a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award and was also a recipient of Lannan Literary Award (1998).

Ross Simonini

Ross Simonini is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician. His work includes paintings, drawings, essays, dialogues, musical composition, performance, and fiction.

Thomas Nail

Thomas Nail is a distinguished scholar and professor of philosophy at the University of Denver and the author of numerous books, including The Figure of the Migrant , Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion , Theory of the Image , Theory of the Object , Theory of the Earth , Lucretius I, II, III , Returning to Revolution , and Being and Motion . His research focuses on the philosophy of movement.

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, where he continues to live and work. He has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Tate Modern, London (2005); the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007); the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2014); and the Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany (2018). Photo: Miro Kuzmanovic

Sarah Sze

Since the late 1990s, Sarah Sze has developed a distinct visual language that challenges the static nature of art. Widely recognized for expanding the boundaries between sculpture, painting, video, and installation, Sze uses a complex palette of materials, both analog and digital, to question how we mark time and space. Her work ranges from immersive installations that scale architectures to abstract canvases that explore a constantly evolving visual world. Sze was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and a Radcliffe Fellowship in 2005. She is a professor of visual art at Columbia University.

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Rirkrit Tiravanija is known for a practice that overturns traditional exhibition formats in favor of social interactions through the sharing of everyday activities such as cooking, eating, and reading. Creating environments that reject the primacy of the art object and instead focus on use value and bringing people together through simple acts and environments of communal care, Tiravanija challenges expectations around labor and virtuosity. He is on the faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators.

Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin depicts everyday items with a nuanced simplicity that exposes the tensions between objects and their representation. Distinguished by exceptional draftsmanship, vibrant color, and uninflected line, his work is intensely visual and rooted in an exploration of the relationships between perception, language, and meaning. Photo: Caroline True

Rosalind Brown

Rosalind Brown grew up in Cambridge, England. She is the author of Practice , which was published in June by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Photo: Dougie Evans

Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Ireland, in 1955. He is the author of eleven novels, including The Master, Brooklyn , The Testament of Mary, Nora Webster, House of Names , and The Magician . His work has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times and has won the Costa Novel Award and the IMPAC Award. He has also published two collections of stories and many works of nonfiction. Photo: Reynaldo Rivera

Joanna Biggs

Joanna Biggs is the author A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again , which was published in paperback in August. Photo: Hillery Stone

Ken Burns

Ken Burns has been making documentary films for almost fifty years. Since making the Academy Award–nominated Brooklyn Bridge of 1981, Burns has directed and produced some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War, Baseball , Jazz , The War, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea , Prohibition , The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, The Vietnam War, Country Music , The U.S. and the Holocaust , and, most recently, The American Buffalo Future film projects include Leonardo da Vinci , The American Revolution , Emancipation to Exodus , LBJ and the Great Society, and others. Burns’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including seventeen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and two Oscar nominations.

Ashley Overbeek

Ashley Overbeek is the director of strategic initiatives at Gagosian, where she has the pleasure of working with artists on digital projects. Overbeek is also a member of the advisory board of the Art and Antiquities Blockchain Consortium, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and a guest speaker on the subject of art and technology at Stanford and Columbia University.

Mark Francis

A director at Gagosian since 2002, Mark Francis was formerly founding director and chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. He has been a curator at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England.

Alison McDonald

Alison McDonald is Chief Creative Officer at Gagosian and has overseen marketing and publications at the gallery since 2002. During her tenure she has worked closely with Larry Gagosian to shape every aspect of the gallery’s extensive publishing program and has personally overseen more than 500 books dedicated to the gallery’s artists.

Amit Noy

Amit Noy is a choreographer, dancer, and writer who lives in Marseille, France. He makes performances (which often involve multiple generations of his own family), dances for the choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan, and writes obsessively on dance for publications including Artforum , bomb , and the Brooklyn Rail

Moeko Fujii

Moeko Fujii is an essayist and critic whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books , the Criterion’s Current , Aperture , and elsewhere. She currently writes a column on film for Orion Magazine

Scott Rothkopf

Scott Rothkopf is the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, where he previously served as the Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. He joined the Whitney’s staff in 2009 and has curated and cocurated many exhibitions there, including Jasper Johns: Mind Mirror (2021), Glenn Ligon: AMERICA (2011), Wade Guyton OS (2012), Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (2014), America Is Hard to See (2015), Open Plan: Andrea Fraser (2016), Virginia Overton: Sculpture Gardens (2016), and Laura Owens (2017).

FormaFantasma

FormaFantasma is a research-based design studio investigating the ecological, historical, political, and social forces shaping the discipline of design today. The studio was founded in 2009 by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin. Its aim is to facilitate a deeper understanding of both our natural and our built environments and to propose transformative interventions through design and its material, technical, social, and discursive possibilities. Working from studios in Milan and Rotterdam, the practice embraces a broad spectrum of typologies and methods, from product design through spatial design, strategic planning, and design consultancy. Trimarchi and Farresin also head the GEO–Design department at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, where they explore the social, economic, territorial, and geopolitical forces shaping design.

Jackie Sibblies Drury

Jackie Sibblies Drury is a Brooklynbased playwright. Most recently she worked on Illinoise with Justin Peck, based on the album by Sufjan Stevens. Her plays include Marys Seacole (Obie Award), Fairview (Pulitzer Prize, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), Really, Social Creatures , and We Are Proud to Present a Presentation. . . . Presenters of her plays include Soho Rep, Donmar Warehouse, the Young Vic, LCT3, New York City Players, Abrons Arts Center, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine

Rennie McDougall

Rennie McDougall is a writer based in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail , frieze.com, Guernica , T Magazine , the Village Voice , and other publications. He received an Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2018. His first book will be published by Abrams Press in 2026.

Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme

Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme met in 2009 while pursuing fashion design degrees at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. They started designing collaboratively in 2011 and have focused their practice primarily on costuming dance. They work often with Justin Peck, Pam Tanowitz, and Kyle Abraham, and have devised costume-centric performances for commissions from the Museum of Art and Design and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. They made their Broadway design debut in 2023 with Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ and in 2024 designed Peck’s Broadway musical Illinoise . Jung and Bartelme have completed research fellowships at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy

Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy have been living and working together since their early student days. For both artists, space and setting is a crucial element in their music-making. During the pandemic they performed Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen at a former multistorey car park in London, while in the summer 2023, they brought back concerts at Aldeburgh’s historic Jubilee Theatre. Other presentations include Prokofiev’s Cinderella in the Muziekgebouw loading bay and performances in galleries across Europe. In 2019, Kolesnikov and Tsoy co-founded the Ragged Music Festival, which provides a strippeddown environment for artists to explore a dialogue between music, architecture, and visual arts. In 2024 the duo debuted at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Michael Schmelling

Michael Schmelling is the author of eight photo books, including The Plan , My Blank Pages , Your Blues , and Rise & Fall . Schmelling’s commissioned work has appeared in GQ , The Atlantic , the New York Times , M Le Monde , and Zeit Magazin .

Derek C. Blasberg

Derek C. Blasberg is a writer, fashion editor, and New York Times best-selling author. He has been with Gagosian since 2014, and is the executive editor of Gagosian Quarterly

IN SEASON

Gagosian Quarterly presents a selection of new releases coming this winter.

City of Angels

Alex Israel × Louis Vuitton: Ocean BLVD

Louis Vuitton unveils Ocean BLVD, a collaboration with artist Alex Israel that transforms the Cologne Perfumes collection into a vibrant, immersive experience. This two-meter sculpture, inspired by California’s coastal charm, features contemporary architecture reflecting the spirit of Los Angeles and pays homage to Israel’s colorful aesthetic. Each scent embodies a unique stop along an imaginary boulevard, from the invigorating Pacific Chill spa to the nostalgic City of Stars cinema. Crafted by twenty artisans, this piece showcases luxurious materials and meticulous detail, celebrating the intersection of fragrance and art in a tribute to the Californian lifestyle.

Monograph Urs Fischer: Monumental Sculpture

This extensive monograph gathers nearly sixty large-scale sculptures and installations made by Urs Fischer over the past twenty-five years. The nearly four-hundredpage volume groups works under thematic headings such as “Holes,” “Lines,” and “Intersecting Objects,” illustrating how the Swiss artist has explored and returned to specific sculptural problems over decades, and how his approaches have changed with technology.

Artful Apparel

Oscar Murillo: Arepas y Tamales Shirt

Oscar Murillo’s Arepas y Tamales printed shirts feature emblems from drawings the artist collected from schoolchildren’s desks around the world for his Frequencies project. The shirts were worn for the first time by the musicians of the Mar, Río y Cordillera group, from the Valle del Cauca region of Colombia, where Murillo was raised, when Murillo invited them to perform at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in the summer of 2023. Available in one size and ten different designs, the oversize, structured dress shirts are made of heavy cotton and feature mother-ofpearl buttons. Each has a label noting the country from which its drawing originates. In this one, a drawing of an ovoid green soccer field, surrounded by tiny red and blue houses, covers the shirt’s back.

From left to right:

Photo: courtesy Louis Vuitton

Urs Fischer: Monumental Sculpture (Gagosian, 2024)

Photo: courtesy Arepas y Tamales

head in the sky, hand in the water

On the Nose

Bottega Veneta Fragrance Collection

This fall, Bottega Veneta unveils its debut fragrance collection under creative director Matthieu Blazy, capturing the essence of Venice. Inspired by the city’s rich tapestry of trade, each of the five fragrances weaves together global ingredients, reflecting the brand’s signature Intrecciato. From the sun-kissed Colpo di Sole to the sultry Déjà Minuit, these scents promise an evocative journey. Each bottle is a masterpiece of Murano-inspired design, emphasizing tactile pleasure and making these fragrances a treat as much for the hands as for the senses.

Bottom right: Wave of Blood (Divided Publishing, 2024)

On the Table Masa Designs: To - jinbo - Cliffs Hachi

Inspired by the To - jinbo - Cliffs of Fukui Prefecture in Japan, this hachi , or bowl, was designed by legendary chef Masayoshi Takayama, known as Masa, to serve as an ice basin for keeping an open sake bottle cold. It may also be used as a salad bowl. Each piece is unique in color and shape. Following the seven principles of the Japanese aesthetic concept of shibusa —simplicity, implicitness, modesty, naturalness, imperfection, everydayness, and silence—the Masa Designs collection is crafted to improve the aesthetics of everyday life. Markings and coloring will vary due to the unique nature of the production and firing processes.

Pearls of Wisdom Tiffany Titan by Pharrell Williams

Tiffany & Co. has unveiled the Tiffany Titan by Pharrell Williams collection, featuring high-luster freshwater pearls. Inspired by Poseidon’s trident and Pharrell’s roots in Virginia Beach, the collection embodies fearless individuality with its spearlike motifs and soft, curved links.

Illuminations Wave of Blood by Ariana Reines

An epic poem, a memoir, a mystical transcription, a wild howl for honesty and diligence: Ariana Reines’s latest book defies categorization. Through a sustained engagement with the heart and with the powers and limitations of language, the poet asks nothing short of how to care for our souls in a world filled with grief and rage.

Left: Photo: courtesy Bottega Veneta

Right: Photo: courtesy Masa Designs

Below:

Photo: courtesy Tiffany & Co.

Rhythm of the Night The Wickedest by Caleb Femi

From the author of Poor (2020), this kinetic poem pulses, drops, climaxes, and carries the reader through one night in South London at a house party called “The Wickedest.” Femi’s euphoric approach imbues traditional poetic forms with new life, while exploring the power of the dance floor in sustaining community.

Below, left to right: Photo: courtesy

Photo: courtesy Vacheron Constantin

Photo: courtesy Cartier

Form

Donald Judd Furniture

Donald Judd Furniture presents a selection of Donald Judd’s furniture in wood, metal, and plywood. In this new volume, more than 100 designs are presented through perspectival drawings organized by material in six chapters. Both newly commissioned and archival photographs explore the placement and function of furniture within Judd’s living and working spaces in New York, Texas, and Switzerland. These designs, spanning from 1970 to 1991, exemplify the directness of form and presence for which his work is celebrated.

New Space Balenciaga Greene Street

Balenciaga has unveiled its latest flagship on Greene Street in SoHo, Manhattan. This two-story space, covering over 9,800 square feet, carries on the brand’s Raw Architecture concept, blending art and fashion in an “in-progress” aesthetic with elements reminiscent of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s original Paris atelier.

Keeping Up with the Times Vacheron Constantin × Ora ïto

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its Patrimony collection, Vacheron Constantin introduces a limited edition self-winding timepiece in collaboration with designer Ora ïto. This vintage-inspired watch features a 40mm yellow-gold case and a toneon-tone dial adorned with concentric circles. Limited to just 100 pieces, it showcases the house’s watchmaking expertise and timeless aesthetic, perfectly complemented by Ora ïto’s marriage of simplicity and complexity.

On the Prowl Cartier’s Nature Sauvage

The latest jewelry collection from Cartier takes its cues from flora and fauna: turtles, flamingos, leopards, zebras, leaves, crocodiles, and more. Expertly designed and crafted, this series of necklaces, rings, and bracelets articulates the form and energy of the natural world with the finest materials.

Left: The Wickedest (MCD, 2024)

Right:

Donald Judd Furniture (MACK, 2024)

Balenciaga

GAME CHANGER KASPER KÖNIG

Mark Francis remembers his late friend, the indefatigable and radical curator Kasper König.

It is a vivid indication of the meteoric trajectory of Kasper König’s career that his first experience of curating a museum exhibition was for the artist Claes Oldenburg, at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, in 1966, when König was only twenty-three years old. And he topped this a couple of years later when he organized an Andy Warhol exhibition, also at Moderna Museet, in 1968. He had proposed to Pontus Hultén, then the director of the museum, a popular exhibition that would cost almost nothing, and this was happily approved. Then he went to Warhol to suggest that they make the exhibition in Stockholm itself, rather than send works from the artist’s studio in New York: hundreds of Brillo Boxes (1964) and Silver Clouds (1966) would be fabricated on site, Cow wallpaper (1966) would be pasted to the museum’s exterior walls, and Warhol’s early films, such as Sleep (1964), would be projected in the galleries. It was a revolutionary way to present an artist’s work, entirely in the spirit of Warhol, and it proved highly successful: the museum claimed to have sold over

250,000 copies of the catalogue, a kind of artist’s book featuring the photographs of Billy Name.

König was born in 1943 in Mettingen, near Münster, Germany. In his late teens, still at school in Essen, he saw a Cy Twombly exhibition at Rudolf Zwirner’s gallery and briefly became an intern there. He soon moved to London, working for the gallerist Robert Fraser, and then on to New York, where he immersed himself in the downtown art, dance, and music worlds, meeting artists such as Oldenburg, Richard Artschwager, On Kawara, and Dan Graham, dancers Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, and many others.

In 1969, following the two precocious and well-received museum exhibitions in Stockholm, König somewhat mysteriously moved back to Europe and spent a year in Antwerp, becoming close to Marcel Broodthaers and Fluxus artists such as Robert Filliou and Addi Koepke. And then another move, to become the publisher of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s series of books with artists—

Bernhard Leitner’s The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1973), Yvonne Rainer’s Work 1961–73 (1974), Donald Judd’s first Complete Writings (1975). He connected different strands of the avant-garde and became an essential conduit between the New York and European art worlds, especially those of Düsseldorf and Cologne.

For Harald Szeemann’s documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1972, König presented Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum as a single-artist museum within the larger exhibition. It should have been obvious by this point that König was one of the most brilliant and dynamic young curators in Germany, but he was notoriously never invited to curate documenta in the following years. Instead, he organized the first iteration of the Skulptur Projekte exhibitions in the town of Münster in 1977, coinciding with, and rather overshadowing, the documenta of the same year. It became his defining project, which he repeated in 1987 and expanded each decade until his final version, in 2017. Despite having no academic background and no institutional position, he independently curated the revisionist exhibition Westkunst. Zeitgenössische Kunst seit 1939 (West-art: Contemporary art since 1939), with the art historian Laszlo Glozer, in the trade fair halls in Cologne in 1981. The show was seen as provocative at the time, including overlooked work such as late paintings by Vasily Kandinsky and René Magritte’s Vache (Cow) paintings (1947–48), and it explicitly acknowledged the competitive hegemony of Western Europe and North America in the postwar period.

In 1984, König followed this enormous project with another, Von hier aus—Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf (Up from here—Two months of new German art in Düsseldorf), a survey of contemporary

German art. Only in the 1990s did he take a professional position, becoming the director of the Städelschule in Frankfurt, which rapidly became a dynamic art school, and founding Portikus, an associated Kunsthalle where he could present exhibitions of established and younger artists alike. One of the first, and most significant, was the exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s 18. Oktober 1977 series, made in 1988, which addressed the highly charged subject of the deaths in custody of members of the revolutionary group the Red Army Faction.

Then, in 2000, König became the director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, a final vindication of his distinguished status both nationally and internationally. He remained open to new ideas and to younger artists and became a mentor and supporter of the next generation of curators, such as Okwui Enwezor and Hans Ulrich Obrist. His energy was prodigious and he participated often in advisory committees, panels, and seminars.

Among my experiences over our long friendship, when I cocurated the Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1991 with Lynne Cooke, we invited Kasper to be on the jury for the Carnegie Prize. He insisted that On Kawara be awarded the prize, a decision not widely popular at the time, but certainly prescient and daring.

Kasper died in August. I last saw him in December in Berlin, where he lived after retiring from the Museum Ludwig and where he still had an office in the artist Douglas Gordon’s studio complex. We met at the Nationalgalerie, newly restored by David Chipperfield, and he had characteristically acute comments on the concurrent exhibitions of work by his old friends Richter and Isa Genzken. Kasper loved art and artists, and he retained his humor and anarchic spirit until the end.

Kasper König, 2006. Photo: ullstein bild/Getty Images

Kashima. Michel Ducaroy Made in France

This puzzle, written

CROSSWORD

by Myles Mellor,

brings together clues from the worlds of art, dance, music, poetry, film, and beyond.

1 Modernist sculptor who created Head

4 Mark Grotjahn painted a series based on this Italian island

9 Plastic Band, formed in 1969

10 Nancy , American sculptor and installation artist who works with salvaged objects

11 Empire star

13 Young lady

15 Roe , postmodernist photographer known for exploring the plastic nature of photography

18 “Earned it” singer the

19 Access requirement, often, abbr.

20 The Basket of by Salvador Dalí

22 Director of The Beach Bum , Korine

25 Gordon, artist known for luminous and hyperrealistic paintings, often featuring herself

26 Diving Boy I creator Richard

28 Country singer Tillis

30 Derrick , painter of Who Can I Run To (Xscape)

33 Conceive something in a different way

35 Ernie Barnes acrylic The Shack , later used as a Marvin Gaye album cover

36 Artistically unusual

38 Character in the musical Evita

40 Cereal grain

41 Poet’s evening, for short

42 Sistine Chapel ceiling figure

43 Hawaiian crooner Don

Solution

Down

1 Helen , painter whose vibrant works echo her travels to Greece, India, and Morocco

2 Crystal ball, e.g.

3 Very long time

4 Data-storage device

5 Cigar, to George Burns

6 Theaster Gates’s Black Corporation

7 Always Afternoon artist Howard

8 Lucinda Chua’s “Hold a ” song

12 Subject for an art historian in relation to artworks

14 Former SNL writer and cast member Samberg

16 Damien , painter of Veil of Unfolding Life

17 British installation artist and filmmaker Sir Julien

20 Manet work A at the Folies-Bergère

21 Confused expressions

23 Brokeback Mountain director, first name

24 First name of the artist known for paintings of subjects with big eyes

25 “Love Song” Grammy winner, first name

27 Creator of Marilyn Diptych

28 Richard , creator of the “Nurse Paintings”

29 Artist who has written obituaries for living celebrities, Adam

31 1973 Rolling Stones ballad

32 One of the collectors who supported and popularized Matisse, Stein

34 Van Morrison’s “ the Mystic”

35 Take a tour of

37 American artist who contributed to the Dadaist and Surrealist movements

39 Cut down

THE STREET

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN PETER DOIG AND RICHARD SHIFF

A New York exhibition conceived and curated by the artist Peter Doig takes as its point of departure Balthus’s 1933 painting  The Street , in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Ahead of the show, Doig and art historian Richard Shiff met up to look at Balthus’s painting together in person.

RICHARD SHIFF From conversations over the years, I know that many people really like this painting. But to think of it in relation to your art specifically: the figural quality reminds me of your work, as does the complexity of the urban environment. These figures are iconic. They’re frozen in gesture, and the gestures are precise and enigmatic and meaningful all at once.

PETER DOIG That’s the mystery of the painting, and that’s why it has such a lasting resonance, because it presents a puzzle. It has a mixture of the real world, the world of painting, and the world of painting in the real world. When The Street was made, pretty much all shop fronts and their corresponding signs would have been hand painted; there would have been no photographic signage, et cetera. And I think Balthus was obviously aware and in some ways inspired by this painted world.

RS These figures have the character of the type of Renaissance painting that is defined as linear, where the shape of the body is very distinctive and essentially geometrical.

PD It’s as though he had absorbed almost everything that happened in painting from the Renaissance up to the Bauhaus. There’s an earlier version of this painting that Balthus made when he was twenty-one and that feels quite different, almost impressionistic, in the way it’s made.

RS Honestly, this work has always reminded me, vaguely but insistently, of Seurat’s [ A Sunday on ] La Grande Jatte [1884]. It’s a similar size. The figures are stiff. They’re very clearly outlined. But I’m also impressed by how it’s crisp and blurry at the same time.

PD It’s not afraid to look like a sign painting.

RS Yeah.

PD Fifteen years later, Balthus famously made a painting called The Mediterranean Cat —a cat sitting at a table with a fish on its plate, a rainbow over its head, and the sea behind it. It was like a painting you’d see in a restaurant. It has a similar sense of directness. In fact I think it was painted for a restaurant.

RS Yeah, now that you say that.

PD In a way, he was making a painting that wasn’t about being an expert painter. A lot of painters at that time would have thought The Street was, let’s not say amateurish, but a bit callow in its making. Not callow in its subject, though. And let’s not forget that he was in his twenties when he made this, he was a very young painter.

RS That’s right, but it doesn’t look like a young person’s painting. It’s too ambitious.

PD Yeah, it’s very ambitious.

RS There’s a figure on the left that resembles a signboard figure, the mannequin with the tall chef’s hat. All that’s missing is the menu. And the gesture of the central figure—

PD He looks like a bandleader, maybe of a marching band.

RS Except the other members of the band aren’t there. We simply have a bandleader. I just noticed that the curbing on the left side of the canvas disappears as it recedes into space behind the figures. It doesn’t turn the corner—a little bit of a liberty there. But Peter, in your painting—not to belittle what’s going on by calling it artful, but you’ve got artful remains of underpainting in your paintings, and that’s true here as well.

PD Well, I do enjoy that. Not just in this painting but in other artists’ paintings as well.

RS Why do you gravitate to this picture? It seems like you’ve been fascinated with it for a while.

PD I’m not the only one, by any means. It’s just a painting that I find endlessly beguiling. It needs to be seen. You feel like you’re witnessing something unfold before your eyes. It’s a kinetic painting that required a lot of decision-making on Balthus’s part. There’s a certain geometry to the painting as well, the underpinnings of a grid. You almost feel the presence of a T-square in its construction. A bold painting to have made, a street scene full of incidents from life both witnessed and imagined.

RS Compositionally, it’s full of geometric relationships. The girl’s elbow is virtually a right angle. And the shadow on the white pants of the

worker carrying the wood, that’s a geometric curve. And the tilt of the hat on the boy being carried, and the scarf of the nurse against the check pattern on her blouse. It’s rendered somewhat indistinct, because she’s in the background, but it’s a pretty skillful thing.

PD The hands are also very important. Every figure’s hands, except for the mannequin, remain active.

RS Yeah, they’re all gesturing or pointing in some way.

PD In looking at the green detailing that carries across the awning of the building on the center left, above the figures, you can see evidence of little spheres that he then painted out with one gestural stripe. And further down he hasn’t painted them all. They just cease to exist.

RS As if that’s a way of indicating depth. Or maybe he just stopped. There are lots of areas of incompletion that don’t seem to damage the painting, though you can’t see what’s being described there. It’s a bit of genius to put the pink in that green sign as a diagonal above the boy being carried, and it fits with everything else that’s happening on that side of the picture.

PD I had the opportunity to see the earlier version of this street scene this morning, which is compositionally similar but painted in such a different way. There’s so much more brushwork in that version. And it looks as though Balthus used the same brush to describe the boy’s face in the foreground as he did to paint a horse that’s in the background. He still allows himself quite a bit of looseness in this version, however; I guess because of its more ambitious scale, he wanted to turn this into more of a formal painting. The sketchy elements in the previous version are congealed into dark forms and silhouettes. Possibly the mostdescribed passages in the painting are the two heads on the far left.

RS Yeah. It’s interesting to think about taking out the elements that would be too sketchy to get away with at this scale, but leaving everything

very sketchy in the background, which matters less at this scale. By the way, what is this main figure wearing?

PD Looks like very high-waisted moleskin trousers.

RS Balthus produced a torso and legs in that figure with a minimal amount of articulation.

PD Almost the same color as the piece of wood.

RS Yeah. The wood is better described. That’s good sign painting, so to speak.

PD To be viewed from a distance.

RS There are all kinds of choices being made. For instance, the way a hand appears, the articulation of the fingers, seems to be a device to make the painting interesting in that place.

PD There seem to be a lot of devices used to make the painting, to make it right, as it were, to tie it together, to make it feel like it’s done. It’s a very open painting. It’s not pretending to be anything else.

RS Yeah. But I mean, we say the same about what you do.

PD I would hope so. There was an exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris recently, I don’t think Balthus was in it, but it included figurative artists he was associated with, such as the Berman brothers, Christian Bérard, and others. It was called Neo-Romantics: A Forgotten Moment in Modern Art 1926–1972 . There was a movement in figurative painting at the time that resisted the flow of modernism, and while Balthus was very much his own person, he remained connected to some of these other artists. He was part of the avant-garde, but he didn’t jump on any bandwagon. It was a great period for painting.

RS He’s a bit like Alex Katz is to us now, in terms of producing large-scale reductive and abstractive representational paintings.

PD I was in the National Gallery the other day in London to see this fantastic little show they had based around Degas’s Miss La La [at the Cirque

Fernando, 1879], you know, the acrobat, and they had gathered all of these studies, lots of really interesting works. Also on view was a small display of David Hockney’s responses to Piero della Francesca, specifically his Baptism of Christ painting [c. 1437–45]. There’s a figure in the background of the Piero painting that’s quite similar to the figure in the Balthus painting of the man carrying a piece of wood. In Piero’s painting, the man is bathing in the background, and he appears almost timeless. He looks like he’s wearing contemporary underpants, and then there are formal oddities— the reflection just doesn’t really make any sense at all. But the picture as a whole sings. There’s nothing realist about it but there are enough signs for us to believe it and want to enter it. And I think the Balthus painting has a very similar quality.

RS There was a real interest in Piero amongst British painters in the ’40s and ’50s, and I remember from my early art-historical education that a couple of generations before me, people I was instructed to read when I was a student, they were comparing everything to Piero. I mean, every modern painter had some connection to Piero. And there were certainly statements that connected Seurat to Piero. Some of it seemed tenuous to me, but the sensitivity was so strong that everything got compared to Piero or Poussin, one or the other, or to both. Do you think The Street could have been made by a British artist?

PD I don’t think so. It’s too French in the way it’s made—not just the scene, because British artists have painted Paris and all sorts of other places, but it feels like the painter is connected to France.

RS Too studied, maybe. Too logical. The way it’s organized.

PD I mean, this is an ambitious painting. It’s an ambitious scale. And he must have been thinking about contemporary paintings that he was seeing, perhaps ones made by the likes of Picasso and Matisse and Bonnard, who he was connected to.

Previous spread, and opposite: Balthus, The Street , 1933, oil on canvas, 76 ¾ × 94 ½ inches (195 × 240 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2024 Balthus/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York

This page: Peter Doig, Night Playground , 1997–98, oil on canvas, 78 ¾ × 108 ¼ inches (200 × 275 cm) © Peter Doig

He would have been motivated by the size of those paintings. He wasn’t going to resign himself to make paintings to hang above mantelpieces, let’s say. And I think the writers that he’s connected to, Georges Bataille among them, the kind of writing that was being published in their circles and being published in magazines like Minotaure —he wasn’t going to be making paintings that were tame or restrained.

RS You’re making me think that, of course, Surrealism is all over the place in this year, and this is the surreal of the commonplace, of the ordinary street, including the salacious scene of adolescent sexuality at the left.

PD The surrealism of The Street is maybe more surreal than that of Yves Tanguy or Max Ernst.

RS Exactly. More enigmatic because it isn’t fantastical. Because these are real people, but they don’t look real.

PD It’s not contrived in that respect.

RS So it’s Surrealism that’s more interesting than doctrinaire Surrealism.

PD I think he tried for and achieved a sense of timelessness with his work. What he was doing, which is clever, is looking at and taking cues from paintings he admired from the past and then tweaking aspects of them to use in his own work. And this made them believable in his time.

RS Yeah, some of those figures certainly look like they’re coming out of a nineteenth-century French painting, not a twentieth-century French painting. He returns to this scene in the early 1950s in Le Passage du Commerce Saint-Andre

PD Yes, that work is hanging at the Fondation Beyeler [in Riehen, Switzerland]. It’s often called his masterpiece but I actually prefer The Street

RS Why?

PD I find it more mysterious. It feels more filmic. More connected to the world of theater or dance rather than that of “pure” painting. I heard Federico Fellini was a huge admirer of Balthus and

actually wanted to make a film about him.

RS Well, he was a bit of a Fellini character. The people around him, also.

PD Something I read connected this work to his interest in [Lewis Carroll’s] Alice in Wonderland [1865].

RS When I first read that, I thought, yeah, that makes sense. Other scholars seemed to reject it, though. And there’s also his remark that this is all about children, right?

PD Well, the adults have either got their faces hidden or are walking away. The only faces you see are the faces of children.

You know, he altered this painting. The two figures on the far left were originally more provocative. Balthus changed the position of the boy’s hand at the request of the owner, who later donated the work to the Museum of Modern Art. And apparently he had no reservations about altering it. In response to being asked to make the changes to the painting, he said something along the lines of, When I was younger, I wanted to shock, but with the passage of time, that urge subsided.

It seems that, at this point in time, he wasn’t afraid to invent a way of depicting figures. They don’t seem particularly natural, which is similar to the way that I draw, actually. He was quite content with finding a figure that acts as a stand-in for his idea, for instance his chef figure, who, as you suggested, might be a mannequin outside a restaurant. It feels very worked out, almost as if he used silhouettes or cutouts to form the figures, which interests me and is something that I like to do.

RS You often reproduce, or take as a subject, sign painting or somebody painting on a wall.

PD Or sometimes I even pay homage to sign painters.

RS Maybe it’s in the literature somewhere, but the little girl on the lower left is a dwarfish figure,

which connects her to Velázquez. The complexity of this image is not only in Poussin and Seurat, it’s also Velázquez.

PD What about Oskar Schlemmer? Balthus spent time in Germany when he was a teenager. He claimed that he took no influence from German artists, but he would have been aware of them because of the circles he moved in and the people who came to the house.

RS As a painter, what do you think about the way Balthus made the painting?

PD I love the way it’s made. I love how open the painting is. The window frames and the signs, for instance: there’s a shoddiness to the way they’re rendered, but it’s very, very effective. He uses paint in a luscious way. I like what happens when he makes the paint quite thin, sort of bloodlike, like in the stripes on the pink-andwhite awning. To me that’s very exciting. It seems that what’s most important for him is not making a perfect painting, like Christian Schad, for instance, whose work I also like very much, but it’s so much more refined. This is like a pub sign as a fine-art painting.

RS He’s playing with transparency and opacity quite a bit, and there’s only enough opacity in there to produce a set of rhythmic highlights. There’s a spectrum that goes from opacity to transparency, different grades of it all the way through.

PD He wasn’t afraid to use devices. The highlighting on the little girl’s collar is irreverent in the way it’s made, in that he does attempt to conceal that it is in fact a device.

I think ultimately what’s interesting about this painting is that although he’s aware both of the history of art and of his contemporaries, Balthus paves his own course. It’s his own myth that possesses its own poetry. I think people will continue to try to decipher its many mysteries. And that’s why it still has life after so many years.

Balthus, The Street , 1933 (detail), oil on canvas, 76 ¾ × 94 ½ inches (195 × 240 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2024 Balthus/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York

The fascinating life of Leonardo da Vinci is the subject of a new film by Ken Burns. The legendary filmmaker sat down with the Quarterly ’s Alison McDonald to discuss Leonardo’s insatiable curiosity, his passionate enchantment with nature, and his endless search for universal truths.

ALISON MCDONALD Your films tend to explore America’s greatest stories. What prompted you to make a film about Leonardo da Vinci?

KEN BURNS To be honest, I didn’t want to do it at first; as you mentioned, I’m an Americanist. But I’ve never been so inspired. My friend Walter Isaacson, who wrote a biography of Leonardo, made the suggestion. I mentioned it to my daughter, Sarah Burns, and her husband, David McMahon—we’ve worked on films together about the Central Park Five, Jackie Robinson, and Muhammad Ali. They were enthusiastic and thought a film on Leonardo would be great. While making this film, Sarah and Dave moved to Italy for a year with my two oldest grandkids.

AM Your films feel effortless for the viewer to engage with, but they are enormously complex puzzles that you layer together. And this must have been a bit of a different experience for you—while there are many notebooks, writings, and sources by and on Leonardo, it must have been a challenge not to have photographic or film sources from the period. How did you put this puzzle together?

KB It actually wasn’t that different from our other films—process is process. We had different materials to work with under different circumstances, but our approach was the same. As with any project, we arrived at it with preconceptions and quickly become aware of how little we actually knew, which is always a humbling experience. And then we just started building. Sarah and Dave wrote the script, so they were wrestling with the distillation, not just of all the visual material, but also with what we were going to say. To get [the Italian actor] Adriano Giannini to read the script was such a treat.

At some point we realized that, because of Leonardo’s capacious mind, we could keep a similar style—we could explode all the visuals, have split screens, and a single score. There’s one composer for the entire film, Caroline Shaw. And with Leonardo you can show video of rocket ships taking off and solar systems and beautiful images of nature.

AM How much did what you learned about Leonardo surprise you?

KB Every single day was a revelation.

AM Throughout all of Leonardo’s studies—painting, mathematics, physics, engineering—there’s a focus on nature. In the film, he is quoted saying, “The best gift that was given to me by the universe was the chance to question it.” His curiosity about nature was insatiable and he examined it often on both a macro level—water, wind, gravity—and on a human scale: skeletal structures, muscle movements, the way an eye works. Why do you think his fascination with nature plays such a central role in his thinking?

KB Leonardo was seeking a key to the cosmos, a way of better understanding all of human experience and knowledge. He studied the perfection of nature and he saw it as his primary teacher, as

LEONARDO DA VINCI BY KEN BURNS

Opposite: Leonardo da Vinci, Self-portrait (blood on white paper), c. 1515, by permission of MiC-Musei Reali, Biblioteca Reale. Photo: Ernani Orcorte

This page: Leonardo da Vinci, Fetus in Utero, c. 1511, Royal Collection Trust/ © His Majesty King Charles III, 2024. Photo: Bridgeman Images

Below:

Opposite: Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, c. 1508–17, Musée du Louvre.

essentially the manifestation of God. For Leonardo it was a human responsibility to give nature life in a new way. We see him as a scientist, writer, inventor, theorist, painter, scholar, but he saw no division of labor: for him they were all one thing. He wanted to interrogate the universe. That was his divine duty. He asked the universe to yield up its subjects, to yield up its truth, and he was able to bring back so much to us in all of these various disciplines.

AM His discoveries are fascinating, especially considering that he was observing with only the human eye. He was way ahead of his time in examining and diagraming how blood pumps through heart valves, for instance.

KB He was 450 years ahead of his time in so many things. He studied the way heart valves work and his analysis wasn’t verified until we had MRIs, in the 1970s. He had no telescopes and no microscopes. He didn’t have calculus, which would have helped him with a lot of his mathematical stuff. Versing himself in mathematics, he was coming up with stuff about gravity well before Galileo (who didn’t have calculus either), before Isaac Newton (who did), and before Albert Einstein. He was getting to extraordinary places about gravity and fundamental principles of physics. He was an experimental physicist, a surgeon, an anatomist, a botanist. There’s this restless curiosity that’s able to synthesize knowledge and realize that knowledge is not enough. I went to Hampshire College in Massachusetts, and the school’s Latin motto was Non Satis Scire (To know is not enough). It means that you have to take something and put it into motion and practice it and synthesize that knowledge into something bigger that we might call understanding. And what you get when you spend time with Leonardo is just a sense that this may be the most incredible human being, having this gift of revelation in all these different areas.

AM In Florence at this moment, during the Renaissance, the arts were flourishing, there was a rediscovery of classical philosophy and literature, painters and sculptors were celebrated and in high demand. The Christian doctrine that had pervaded European art up to that point had been followed by humanism; it was an era of enlightenment when painting and culture were celebrated as the pinnacle of influence. If Leonardo had lived in a different era, do you think he would have been known as a painter or more celebrated for his scientific pursuits?

KB It’s such an interesting question. One we can’t answer. But let’s think about how he’s one of the great painters of all time, with only twenty works, half of them unfinished. Still, he made the most famous painting in the world today—a painting of the twenty-four-year-old wife of a well-to-do Florentine silk merchant, a woman who had had five kids by that age. And Leonardo never delivered the portrait. It’s unclear whether he ever considered it finished.

Giorgio Vasari, after describing the face in the Mona Lisa [c. 1503–06], drops down to the neck and says, I can see the blood flowing through her veins. I can see her heart beating. He’s rhapsodizing over the anatomy and the hair and the background and the mist and the texture of the skin and the sfumato technique that just, you cannot believe it when you get up close, what he’s doing with the translation between light and shade and gradations of various colors.

AM It’s interesting that there are so few paintings, because he made so many drawings and sketches, and articulated so many plans with illustrations.

Left: Leonardo da Vinci, A study of women’s hands , Royal Collection Trust/ © His Majesty King Charles III, 2024. Photo: Bridgeman Images

Leonardo da Vinci, The skull sectioned , c. 1489, Royal Collection Trust/ © His Majesty King Charles III, 2024. Photo: Bridgeman Images

Photo: Art Resource, New York

KB There are thousands of pages of codices and nearly all of them have some sort of illustration, some as simple as a Matisse or a Picasso, with only a couple of gestures. And in that gesture he has captured an emotion. Others are incredibly precise drawings in anticipation of even more complex paintings. And let’s not forget that he abandoned so many things because he’d already moved on from the problem. Still, he created what we believe is the first landscape drawing in Western art. He made the first experimental painting in his abandoned Adoration of the Magi [1481]. And you could also say that the Mona Lisa is a great work of science and that the drawings of embryos and anatomies are great works of art.

AM Patronage then had a completely different type of structure from the patronage we have today. How did shifts in patronage and politics impact Leonardo’s life, his scientific investigations, and the art he created?

KB As far as patronage, King Francis I of France offered Leonardo the best patronage of all, late in Leonardo’s life, which was by allowing him to study whatever he wanted. To be Aristotle to Francis’s Alexander.

AM Leonardo was born out of wedlock, which at that time meant that he could never attend university. He felt this was a blessing as it meant that his mind was totally open, his perspective wasn’t narrowed. And his notebooks, which he left for future generations to study, clearly connect directly with his thinking and provide insight into what preoccupied his mind.

KB That’s right. And there’s something organic about this. Adam Gopnik says that Leonardo was trying to crack the code of organic form—that’s where the study of nature came in. But you also have to understand the principles underlying all of this: they could be philosophical, could be spiritual, could be physical, could be architectural, could be all of these things—he felt determined to know everything. He wasn’t a scholar trapped in the ideas they teach at school.

AM What do you think sets his paintings apart and makes them stand the test of time?

KB When he died, his most famous painting was out of sight in the dining room of a monastery. And to me, he invented film with the Last Supper. He invented cinema, right? It’s not a frozen moment, the way painting is expected to be; there’s dynamic motion, it’s happening and it’s so spectacular. He took these familiar scenes and did them the way no one else ever has. Just look at Virgin of the Rocks [1483–86]: every painter is making their version of the Madonna and Child, but Leonardo’s is filled with the complex tension between a mother’s natural maternal instinct, a very humanist proposition, and the fact that she’s known through all time that she’s to bear the son of God and he’s going to be killed. There are two opposing forces: here’s John the Baptist to tell him of his future Passion, and there’s Jesus as a baby, accepting it. John is a baby and she’s trying to pull John back and trying to reach for her son with her other hand. But there’s an angel in the way. God gets it. God sees this. The fact that Leonardo could make such a complex painting relatively early in his career, and here we are marveling at it 550 years later . . . not just that he pulled it off, but that it’s moving.

AM I was looking at a painting with a scholar and an artist recently, and one of them said that the difference between a good painting and a great painting is that in a great painting, every detail holds time. It’s all there for a reason, and people in the future will continue to look at it and have it hold time, maybe

in a different way, from a different perspective, but it will be there and it’ll be active. One of the things that’s so remarkable about your film is that you make the viewer connect to him as a human. He’s not perfect. But also you bring in contemporaries of his who are, by the way, pretty exceptional artists themselves. Early on, Leonardo was an apprentice in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, who had trained many of Florence’s most celebrated artists. Returning to Florence after almost twenty years in Milan, he overlapped with Michelangelo. After that he was invited to join the Vatican court, where he encountered Raphael. These are just a few examples.

KB Yeah. I mean Raphael and Michelangelo, please.

AM And you explore the dynamics between them, which is compelling.

KB Well, there was some jealousy about Michelangelo’s David . Leonardo realized that David was great, but he wanted to put it behind a wall. And the Signoria, the town government, did not agree, so instead it was placed prominently outside, in front of everything. It was so spectacular. But Leonardo said no, the muscles look like a bag of walnuts, he’s not drawing them right. And Michelangelo himself was not an overly nice guy, whereas Leonardo was apparently very well liked, his jealousy notwithstanding. He had a great sense of humor and a protean intellect.

AM And he was so generous with his step-siblings after they behaved selfishly over and over again.

KB Yes, his step-siblings cut him out of various wills, but he still left generous sums to them in his will.

AM It’s rare to find that kindness.

KB It reminds me of a film I made many years ago about the Shakers. The Shakers discovered that their poorer neighbors were stealing their crops at night. They were master agriculturalists and their crops were blooming when others’ were not, so their poor neighbors were stealing their crops. You know what the Shakers did? They planted more crops. They said, We plant some for the Shakers, some for the thieves, and some for the crows—thieves and crows have to eat too. Magnanimity only makes you bigger and egotism makes you smaller.

AM That’s a wonderful anecdote. Do you feel closer to Leonardo now that you’ve made the film?

KB I love him. I feel like I know him, but I also feel like he’s unknowable. Last night I saw the film with an audience and I started to cry at scenes that I’ve watched hundreds of times. He gets you every time.

AM Did you expect to feel that sense of closeness when you started the film?

KB Well, I’ve always known that I was an emotional archaeologist. And I’m interested, not in nostalgia or sentimentality, but in higher emotions that may be produced. The difference between the whole and the sum of the parts. There’s a kind of emotional dynamic to all of that. This is a human story. It’s universal to all human beings.

AM He was such a unique and remarkable person.

KB He wakes you up and makes you want to be better. I mean, he wrote backwards in a mirror. Every single line of those codices—thousands and thousands of pages—are written backwards. Every time he picked up a pen to scratch, even a grocery list, he wrote backwards. Just think about what that means, the intentionality in every moment. He’s a citizen of the world and he’s virtuous and he’s always pursuing ever more knowledge. He’s doing a whirling dervish on about seven different planes of stuff at once, and he’s writing it all down backwards. I mean, come on. It’s just so great.

Leonardo da Vinci, Landscape drawing of the Arno Valley, c. 1473, Gallerie degli Uffizi

FASHION AND ART PART 20: MICHEL GAUBERT

Michel Gaubert, the Paris-based music supervisor behind iconic runway shows across the globe, meets with the Quarterly ’s Derek C. Blasberg to discuss his first engagements with music and fashion, his fateful meeting with Karl Lagerfeld, and discovering sounds in unexpected places.

DEREK C. BLASBERG: My first question is about how I should ID you, Michel. I’ve called you a DJ, a sound designer, an audio architect. When you’re filling out your customs forms, how do you identify yourself?

MICHEL GAUBERT: Nowadays it’s “music supervisor.” I know “supervisor” is a bit strong as a word, but I do that because I work for commercials and films, and basically when I choose music for any event I work on, even the fashion shows, I’m really directing where the music should go. I’ve been called many things, but that sounds great to me.

DB: It’s like a conductor except you’re not in front of an orchestra.

MG: If you say “DJ,” it’s limiting because people think it’s me behind two turntables. If you say “sound engineer,” it’s another one thing. “Music supervisor” is a more global term, and I can do lots of things.

DB: Where did you grow up?

MG: I’m from Bougival, which is near Versailles, west of Paris.

DB: To an American that sounds incredibly exotic: “I grew up near Versailles.”

MG: Well, it’s very pretty. My mother still lives in Bougival and it’s beautiful. It’s only twenty minutes from [where I currently live in Paris] and you have the feeling you’re in the countryside, in Normandy or something. It’s very serene.

DB: When you were growing up, were you an arty kid? What was your childhood like?

MG: I was definitely into music. That started very early, maybe when I was five or six. It was something I had in common with my father, who loved Serge Gainsbourg and Billie Holiday. My mom owned bookstores and she was very into fashion. So I made my own little world, where I discovered I loved music, mainly from watching all the music shows on TV. I remember when the big British wave arrived, like the Stones and all that kind of stuff, I was into that right away. I liked the way they dressed. Specifically, I liked the fact that they used their style and their persona to highlight their music. Early on, I realized that they were made to be each other—the image and the sound were to be one thing.

DB: The look and feel of a band were related to the sound?

MG: Totally. There was this program in France that had a huge impact on me, Dim Dam Dom. I don’t know if you ever heard of it but if you haven’t you should try and find it, it’s incredible. It was on Sundays during lunchtime, and it was one of the first TV shows that showed music, art, fashion, cinema, all these kinds of things together. And a lot of it was made by artists like William Klein, who was there, Serge Gainsbourg, and there was Brigitte Bardot or Romy Schneider presenting the full collections, and all that kind of stuff. It was filmed in a very modern way, getting away from the old clichés of the ’60s. That really had a big influence on me.

DB: Did you have jobs as a kid? When did you discover that music could be a profession?

MG: In the early ’70s, when I was sixteen, I went to America for a year as an exchange student, and when I came back I worked with my mom in the bookstore. That was great for me because I could see all the books I wanted, and the magazines too. I had very easy access to all of this. Eventually I worked in a record shop called Clementine. In those days, specialty music shops in France had to import records, and we would get things that no other people had. At the end of the ’70s, when disco was going out, I went to work at Champs Disques on the Champs-Elysées, which was a milestone in Paris nightlife. It was a shop that was open eighteen hours a day, and it imported all kinds of important music, and basically it was supplying all the clubs of France and abroad. It understood the importance of dance culture and music being discovered as a joyful thing, something to share. And I was in charge! I had a lot of responsibility in that store, and we had a lot of people coming to the store, and that’s the first time I met Karl [Lagerfeld].

DB: Did you know who he was?

MG: Even then, he was already a collector. We all knew him as one of the biggest clients, in this case of records.

DB: I’m excited to talk to you about Karl, since he was the one who introduced us. But when we talk about the end of the ’70s and the early ’80s, I should also ask about designers like Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler, who were huge cultural forces in your early days. I think sometimes that era is glamorized and young people today feel nostalgic for those clothes. As someone

who was there, was it that great?

MG: I don’t know if I’m nostalgic for those days. I had a good time, but it was very different: there was no Internet, no cell phones, no nothing. The sense of time was different and everything felt less pressured. We had more time to go and have fun, go and do things. There weren’t a hundred shows in fashion week; there might have been thirty. And I feel like people retained a kind of openness because we didn’t have so much information coming at us all day. If we were going to a club or to a movie, we were more receptive, because we didn’t see a bunch of reviews and posts and hear a bunch of other people’s opinions about it.

DB: Did you ever go to one of those legendary Mugler shows?

MG: Mugler liked to be superextravagant and very bold, and there was a sense of humor about what he did, a sense of occasion. I didn’t work for him yet, but I saw one of his shows in 1984, and when I walked out of there, I said, “I want to do that. I want to do music for fashion shows.” It was incredible.

DB: There’s an element of performance art in that type of show. I watch those shows now on YouTube when I can’t sleep, and there are models coming out of the ceiling, models dressed as motorcycles. It was incredible.

MG: With Mugler it would all be sketched—each girl would have a specific light, specific music, specific hair. Every dress would be a whole production. And those shows lasted forever! Some were an hour long. As I told you earlier, attention spans were different back then. Now people at a show start to look for the exit after ten minutes.

DB: You worked with Karl for three decades, creating the music for his fashion shows. How would you guys share music tastes? Was it phone calls, text messages, emails?

MG: He was the king of faxing, don’t forget.

DB: I still have some of his faxes. I think after he passed away, everyone in fashion finally got rid of their fax machines.

MG: All of it was very complementary. I knew music he didn’t know and he knew music I didn’t know. In the beginning we’d just meet each other. On the first show I did with him he gave me this record by Malcolm McLaren called “House of the Blue Danube” and said “That’s what I want.” He turned me on to a lot of classical music and he was very, very savvy. For me he was a mindopener, because I realized early on I’d love everything he was showing me. In a way he was my teacher, which was what I liked. But then I was a good pupil, because I was responding to him with other things. My job was to find a way of mixing all this music together and making sense out of it.

DB: He collected so much stuff. He collected art, but also books, furniture, iPads. Do you collect anything?

MG: Yeah, I collect everything. But with Karl the passion was different. He would have an obsession. Like when he was in Biarritz, he was crazy about Ciboure pottery, and I think he bought everything that was available in the world. Basically there was none left for anybody else. Another time he went through his Memphis [design] era. He would devour, not like a collector but like an ogre.

DB: Was this hard to work with?

MG: In the beginning it was more instinctive, but then after maybe four or five years, we knew exactly what to expect from each other. We would share

Previous spread: Michel Gaubert, Los Angeles. Photo: © Karin Catt. Above: Michel Gaubert, Frederika Levy, and Steven Brinke

ideas all the time and it was incredible. He would pull out everything from his ideas and his briefs and his resources, and he would share them very, very easily. And then I would answer, “Oh, look at this movie, because it reminds me of this,” and then we brought everything together. I would do little demos of music on movies and show him what I thought it should be like. It could be a mixture of Busby Berkeley and a little Alain Resnais and a video clip from Siouxsie and the Banshees. It was very much a traffic of influence.

DB: I like “traffic of influence.” That should be the name of your book, Michel. MG: I like that too. Maybe it will be!

DB: I know you’re still working with Chanel, and you often work with Jonathan Anderson at Loewe. Who else are you working with now?

MG: Everybody! I work with Sacai, a Japanese brand that I adore; Dior with Maria Grazia [Chiuri], who I like to work with; I also do Nensi Dojaka, a young designer who won the LVMH Prize a few years ago.

DB: What’s the process when you work with a designer? I imagine it’s different for everyone, but do you look at the collection, or do they send a mood board or something?

MG: It all depends. Everyone is a different thing. When I worked with Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga, it was decided well in advance, maybe three months before the show.

DB: That’s a long time!

MG: Which was good for me. It would give us time to listen to a lot of things, see what we loved, and then funnel it down. Sometimes we would start with ten tracks or ten moods and finish with one. With Karl it was different because, after he started working at the Grand Palais, the decor was very important, as you know, so the music tone was often decided by the mood of the set.

DB: I’ve been to shows where you’ve created the music and I’ve heard spoken words, the sound of teeth being brushed, traffic. You’ve had what many would call nontraditional sounds. What do you think is the craziest thing you’ve put into a fashion-show soundtrack?

MG: I did one show with Raf Simons at Jil Sander and it was all about Lara Croft. She was the muse. Basically the show music was a soundtrack with all kinds of sounds generated from Tomb Raider. There was no music, basically. It was pretty wild. Some people loved it; some people thought, What the hell? That was a weird thing. I love working with Jonathan at Loewe, and we once

did a show that was very dark, very cold. So it began with the sound of air conditioning that turned into audio from the film Sunset Boulevard [1950], and then a piece of techno for thirty seconds that turned into something else.

DB: I know this is an annoying question but I’ll ask it anyway: Is there a show that was the most memorable for you?

MG: I’ve had a long career. So it’s a tough one to—

DB: I mean, you did a Fendi show on the Great Wall of China!

MG: The Great Wall of China was amazing, sure. But I have a very good memory of the Chanel show in Cuba, because of the experience there. We worked with local musicians, hiring more than 120 of them to do the soundtrack, the show, and the party. I had to go there twice before the show and cast people, and we had some drum sessions in the backyards of houses to choose the ones we liked, and the people were just fantastic, they were so proud and happy to be part of such an event.

DB: In addition to shows, I know you work on other sound projects. I remember when you created the sounds for the Colette shop in Paris. What else do you work on?

MG: I spend time on commercials and campaigns now. And a lot of what I do has become digital. I’m working on a book that should come out in January. I don’t know what it’s called yet but I’m looking for a name. And I’m working on a documentary about Karl.

DB: I miss Karl.

MG: I miss him too, every day.

DB: What I miss most is his wit.

MG: Also, Karl was not afraid. He said what he meant and it was always fascinating.

DB: Michel, is it annoying when people ask you for music recommendations?

MG: Yes and no. I like to share with them, but I’m so into my world of music and I don’t listen to music the way a regular person does. So it’s hard when someone asks me, “What are you listening to now?” For the past two days I’ve been working on a specific project, so I’m in a tunnel of music that’s not on everyone’s Spotify.

DB: Is it easy for you to go to a party when the music is bad?

MG: Listen, I’m very open when I go to a party, and if it’s music I don’t like but it works on the crowd, I’m fine with it. But if it’s music I don’t like and I know the party would be better if they did something else, it’s really upsetting. Sometimes I go to restaurants and the music is obnoxious. What’s irritating to me is that people don’t understand the value and power of music and that they could do a better job with it.

DB: I would be intimidated to have you over, Michel!

MG: I enjoy hearing what other people are listening to because it’s like being a psychoanalyst. Tell me what you listen to and I’ll tell you who you are.

DB: What’s the most unexpected place you’ve discovered music?

MG: One of the first times I went to Miami I was taking a taxi on a long ride and the cabdriver was playing an audio recording of an autopsy report. It was very strange, but it really struck me. The way the person was speaking was so factual, and I said, “Oh my God, this is something I should do.” Not talking about an autopsy, but the kind of diction, the very methodical way of speaking. I still remember it. Imagine you’re on the freeway in Miami, the sky is blue, it’s warm and everything, and you’re in the air-conditioned taxi, and you hear this kind of thing. It was completely surreal. And I like when things become surreal.

DB: In every interview we ask, Do you think fashion can be art?

MG: Fashion is an art form. For me, the difference is that most of the time, it’s meant to be sold on a mass level.

DB: Do you think music is an art form?

MG: Yeah, music is an art form. In the same way, music can be made to be sold to millions.

DB: Which of the three is the most pretentious: music, fashion, or art?

MG: To me, music is the least pretentious because everyone can do it very simply. And it’s more spontaneous, and has existed for a long time. Art and fashion are on the same level. It just depends how you market it. You know what I mean? Art can be very pretentious, and so can fashion, as we all know.

But it’s easier to give fashion a bad name than art.

DB: Last question for you. What song do you listen to to get yourself excited? For me, it’s “Freedom!” by George Michael. When I’m getting ready to go out at night, that’s what I listen to.

MG: I have to think about that one. I’ve been in a good mood recently, so I mean, I like a lot of Robyn’s stuff.

DB: “Dancing on My Own.” Classic.

MG: Also, an eternal classic for me is “Big Fun” by Inner City.

DB: That sets a good tone.

MG: Musically I like the late ’80s. It wasn’t a perfect time, of course, but going out was about having fun. I love that.

A drawing for Michel Gaubert by Karl Lagerfeld

Kathleen Ryan Sculpting Time

Art historian, curator, and writer Daria de Beauvais tracks the artist Kathleen Ryan’s sustained and evolving engagement with the temporal, the memento mori, Americana, and ecology. The artist was the recent subject of a survey at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (May 17–August 11, 2024) that saw thirty of her sculptures from the past ten years brought together.

Previous spread: Kathleen Ryan, Bad Lemon (Old Money), 2023, installation view, Kathleen Ryan , Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, May 17–August 11, 2024.

Opposite, above: Installation view, Kathleen Ryan , Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, May 17–August 11, 2024.

Opposite, below: Installation view, Kathleen Ryan , Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, May 17–August 11, 2024.

Artworks, left to right: Untitled (Chandelier) (2015), Bacchante (Spilling) (2015), Satellite in Repose (2018), and Trivalve (2018). Photo: © Stefan Altenburger

The American sculptor Kathleen Ryan invites us to reflect on time, its perception, its representation, its memory. Overturning the distinctions between “high” art and “low,” Ryan’s practice highlights the importance of the handmade, of the intimate relation between the artist, the materials chosen for each work, and the layers of meaning they carry. Sculpture gives meaning to matter and Ryan inscribes herself in a long history of sculpture, from classical marbles to the “finish fetish” Minimalism of the US West Coast. Playing with form, line, scale, weight, and equilibrium, she pays great attention to detail. Carefully crafted, her works are full of contradictions: heavy/light, natural/artificial, constructed/readymade, seductive/ repulsive. Humor dialogues with collapsology; some works are willingly imperfect while others, including the most recent ones, are flawless in surface. Composition and luminosity—notions traditionally associated more with painting than with sculpture—are important for this artist.

Ryan has long been interested in the figure of the bacchante, a recurring character in Western painting and sculpture: a priestess of Bacchus, the Roman god of agriculture, wine, and fertility, equivalent to the Greek Dionysus. Her first sculpture by that name, Bacchante (2015), was inspired by Hendrick ter Brugghen’s Bacchante with an Ape (1627), which she saw at the Getty museum in Los Angeles. In that painting a bacchante leans toward the viewer, smiling and squeezing a bunch of grapes. Her position and seminudity suggest drunkenness. The process of transforming grapes into wine was seen as symbolizing rebirth and regeneration, and Ryan’s Bacchante seems to have metamorphosed into a bunch of grapes—which, though, look like balloons and are made of concrete, giving them a heavy, minimal, monochrome aspect. A utilitarian material, but with a lush aspect. Yet though the work seems on the verge of collapse, it defies gravity and evokes a cornucopia of both abundance and decadence, not to mention eroticism.

Other works refer to fallen civilizations. In The Rise and Fall (2014), four handmade glazed ceramic columns conjure up antique temples, be they Greek or Roman. An homage to ancient societies that rose to power and sophistication before falling apart, this work is a metaphor for the decline of civilizations and shows how contemporary art can serve as a memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death. So it is also with Embrace (2018), a granite pillar evoking a tombstone and covered in ivy made of bronze and semiprecious stone. Ryan’s work can here be compared to the vanitas, a symbolic tradition that developed in the seventeenth century, particularly in Dutch painting, to show the transience of life and the futility of pleasure.

Ryan’s work has also been associated with stilllife evocations of the brevity of life, decay, and finally death. Wisp (Carrie Furnace) (2017) reminds me of the city of Pompeii, buried in ash in ad 79 during an eruption of the volcano Vesuvius. Ryan’s cast-iron palm leaf suggests a vestige of the old city, frozen for eternity—a petrified memory. Ryan honors the passing of time, even if by definition sculpture stops time in its tracks and freezes movement in matter. The eighteenth-century French chemist Antoine Lavoisier famously said that “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” Nothing completely vanishes: leaves rot, evolve into bacteria, then compost. They transi-

tion from one state to another, not destroyed but transformed. Before being leaves, they existed in another arrangement. Their life cycle is about change and evolution. Matter, like ideas, is in a perpetual state of flux, but sculpture captures its temporal imprint, seizing the ephemeral moment and perpetuating it into infinity.

Bad Fruit —a series of larger-than-life decaying fruit, begun in 2018—is Ryan’s best-known and most spectacular body of work, a reflection on the idea of ornament. It started for her with an interest in beaded fruit, a popular postwar craft hobby in the United States, retrospectively considered kitsch. Ryan—who grew up in California, rich in the production of fresh fruit—makes use of this crafting technique: starting with a shape carved out of polystyrene, she attaches manufactured plastic or glass beads to the “fresh” parts of the sculpture and semiprecious stones to the “rotten” ones. “Life” is made up of artificial materials, “death” of natural ones. Yet these sculptures are less about death than about the cycle of life after it. Their surfaces are like a landscape, a topography. The series manifests the artist’s interest in ecology, climate change, and the ravages of monoculture: it can be seen as a critique of the extractivist culture of the West, a meditation on the mass production of fruit and vegetables, which in Ryan’s hands look too good to be real, colorful and juicy but tasteless.

Among the many fruits represented in the series—cherries, melons, grapes, peaches, strawberries, pears, oranges, grapefruit, clementines, and more—the first Ryan chose, and the one she has created most often, is the lemon. A single lemon sculpture is covered in thousands of semiprecious gemstones and can take months to make; it is a work of patience. The artist is interested in the polysemic qualities of the fruit: a lemon can be used in both food and drink; it is a dud car, but also a symbol of optimism (“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”); and so on. In Bad Lemon (Old Money) (2023), the different degrees of mold pictured in the beading create a magnificent dialogue with the vibrant yellow of the lemon’s peel. It is a pure visual pleasure, between attraction and repulsion—toward fascination. As beautiful as they are disturbing, these sculptures intertwine desire and unease. They question our relationship with allure and disgust while challenging the notion of value. Here Ryan highlights the decline of life, but with perfectly executed works of art.

Ryan’s attention to the artificialization of nature can take other forms. The gigantic Daisy Chain (2021), for example, is assembled from found objects—garden hoses for stems, plastic funnels for pistils, cut vinyl for petals. An innocent amusement is reinterpreted for the age of plastic and excess. Ryan’s art lies somewhere between a critique of the twentieth century’s love of progress and a testimony to its consequence, the climate change of the century following. There is irony here, a subtle humor. It can be seen as a reflection on consumerism, in a society dominated by commodities.

The idea of broken civilizations reappears in such works as Untitled (Chandelier) (2015) and Satellite in Repose (2018), both made of glazed ceramic and various metals. This fallen chandelier and satellite could be remnants of an undated past, fossils of consumerism. Ghostly ceramic parrots gathering on them are the last witnesses left. The artist is interested in waste—she looks passionately for vintage or derelict objects, spending hours hunting online. In reusing these everyday relics and vernacular elements in her work, she gives

Photo: © Stefan Altenburger

Artworks, left to right: Pearls (2017), Generator II (2022), and Hanging Fruit (2018).

Photo: © Stefan Altenburger

them a second chance, and beauty to things that no longer have any. Ryan’s assemblages are about transfiguration, some sort of memorial. “Inanimate objects, do you have a soul?,” wondered the French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine; Ryan’s sculptures may both represent and include objects taken from reality, but she gives them a soul.

Ryan regularly pays homage to Americana. Bowling, for example: though bowling has been around for centuries in different forms and in different cultures, it is considered one of America’s most democratic pastimes. The artist plays with the symbol and its scale using real bowling balls. In Caprice (2016), one appears as a delicate pearl inside a large shell; in Pearls (2017), several become a set of pearls in a disproportionate necklace. Other works turn bowling balls into earrings or bracelets. Ryan also plays with symbols of the American dream such as the Airstream trailer. For the Bad Melon series (2020– ) she bought an old one and sliced it up to make pieces of melon rind, while the flesh of the fruit is made of semiprecious stones. The artist doesn’t hide the original function of the objects she uses: in Bad Melon (Wedge) (2020), for instance, part of the rear chassis is clearly recognizable, with its lights and brand lettering. In Generator II (2022), a Volkswagen hood and trunk become an oyster shell sheltering a sparkling spiderweb of quartz crystal. Nature and manufacture, organic and mechanical, living and nonliving, beautifully merge.

In the Bad Fruit series, the permanence and preciousness of the stones contrast with the swift and repulsive process of decomposition. Ryan’s interest in stones is a red thread running through her practice. Precious stones are considered dead, but are

This page: Installation view, Kathleen Ryan , Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, May 17–August 11, 2024. Artworks, left to right: Bad Cherries (2021), Daisy Chain (2021), and Recumbent Bacchante (2016–24). Photo: © Stefan Altenburger

Opposite: Kathleen Ryan, Bad Cherries, 2021 (detail), amazonite, aventurine, fluorite, turquoise, malachite, angelite, labradorite, smoky quartz, quartz, rose quartz, citrine, magnesite, aquamarine, green line jasper, sesame jasper, pink aventurine, agate, tiger eye, garnet, carnelian, lapis lazuli, moonstone, mother of pearl, shell, freshwater pearls, wood, acrylic, glass, steel pins on coated polystyrene, fishing poles, lead sinkers, and steel pallet cage, 98 ½ × 100 × 110 ½ inches (250.2 × 254 × 280.7 cm)

Opposite: Kathleen Ryan, Bad Melon (Wedge), 2020, cherry quartz, rose quartz, agate, amazonite, jasper, aventurine, rhodonite, rhodochrosite, labradorite, smoky quartz, quartz, Botswana agate, carnelian, horn, citrine, acrylic, glass, cast iron and brass flies, steel and stainless steel pins, polystyrene, and aluminum Airstream, 46 × 40 × 42 inches (116.8 × 101.6 × 106.7 cm)

This page: Installation view, Kathleen Ryan , Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, May 17–August 11, 2024. Artworks, left to right: The Rise and Fall (2014), Bad Melon (Wedge) (2020), Bacchante (2017), Bad Melon (Laid Back) (2020–24), and Bad Melon (Big Chunk) (2020). Photo: © Stefan Altenburger

Artwork © Kathleen Ryan

not; they are minerals, living elements. They grow, incredibly slowly by human standards, in the secret depths of the earth. Gemstones, especially crystals, are thought to have specific energies and powers, but the artist chooses them first for their materiality, color, and effect. She started this journey with a pair of sculptural seedpods: Miranda (2017) has seeds of jade, Diana (2017) of rose quartz, all bursting from their cast iron shells. Since then Ryan has employed many other semiprecious stones: aquamarine, jasper, turquoise, obsidian, agate, pink opal, amber, tourmaline, amethyst, onyx, lapis lazuli, and more—a powerfully suggestive list. These fragments of the universe would be first-rate items in a cabinet of curiosities.

Ryan sometimes hints at the human figure, but she has never represented it directly. Her most beautiful and metaphorical representation of the human—if tending toward the cyborg—might be Heart (2022), a mysterious, gleaming red halffruit whose beating heart is a motor engine. Apart from this dichotomy of life and machine, a sense of mortality—about all living beings—runs throughout her work. A tribute to the past, an anchoring in the present, and a projection into the future are signs of her hybrid practice. In an age marked by the acceleration of time, the instantization of information, and a deluge of images, Ryan’s work is a tribute to gesture and know-how, as well as to the long process of sculpture. But it is, above all, about sculpting time.

Spotlight: Kathleen Ryan opens at ICA San Francisco on October 25, 2024; Kathleen Ryan opens at Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway, in May 2025

About a year ago, I was visiting my friend and frequent subject David Hockney for tea at his London digs when he invited me to stay on: his friend the curator Norman Rosenthal had arranged for a pair of his friends, pianists Samson Tsoy and Pavel Kolesnikov, to come over later that evening so as to offer a private fourhand concert for David and a select group of friends. David’s hearing, alas, has been growing ever more attenuated (he has had to give up his operatic collaborations), so the opportunity to sit right by the piano as the two elegant young men played was especially auspicious. The intimate concert seemed to transport David utterly.

This past February the pair gave their Carnegie Hall premiere—four hands on a single piano, featuring a poundingly propulsive rendition of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring followed by a no-less-shattering evocation, albeit in an entirely different register, of Schubert’s achingly poignant Fantasie in F Minor—which electrified audience and critics alike. I was eager to talk to the pair about all of that, but especially about the singular manner in which they have been breaking free of the traditional strictures of classical performance by way of their marvelously various series of cross-disciplinary experimentations, encompassing dance, architecture, literature, and especially the visual arts.

—Lawrence Weschler

LAWRENCE WESCHLER When I think about your collaborations with visual artists, it reminds me of the Cubists working with Russian dancers, Marc Chagall with the theater, and so forth. Were there any collaborations of that sort taking place during the time you spent at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, from 2007 until 2012?

SAMSON TSOY I don’t think the early 2000s in Moscow can be compared with the beginning of the twentieth century. Our impression was that culturally, Moscow was partly in the process of catching up with the West, partly still not fully aware of it. There was mainstream, academic culture, at times remarkable, at times rather dusty. And there were niche projects, by turns either very avant-garde or quite naive. We arrived as outsiders from the provinces and entered the illustrious but conservative school. We spent those few years in Moscow mostly honing the “athletic” skills of piano playing, for which it was possibly the best place in the world.

LW Did you visit many museums during the time you were at the conservatory?

PAVEL KOLESNIKOV In those years I went to the Pushkin Museum regularly, particularly for the twentieth-century

PAVEL KOLESNIKOV AND SAMSON TSOY

Concert pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy are known as some of the most adventurous artists on the world stage. Their singular performances challenge the stereotypes of the classical music scene, never failing to surprise and mesmerize audiences from Carnegie Hall in New York and Suntory Hall in Tokyo to a car park in Peckham, London, or the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The pair’s experimentation with the relationship between space and music led to the creation of their own Ragged Music Festival, a unique touring site-specific project. Shaped by their inquisitive quest for the meaning of their medium, their recent large-scale residency projects at the Aldeburgh Festival and Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw explored the interplay of space, sound, and visual art. In recent years, the two artists have been working together and individually on projects that include digital and live collaborations with the choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, the sculptor Richard Serra, and the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, as well as a series of “imaginary collaborations” with Joseph Cornell, Marcel Proust, and Andy Warhol.

collection. That’s where I saw my first Matisses, my first Rembrandts. We went to other places occasionally, but looking back, I’m actually surprised and a bit regretful at how little we saw. We worked really hard in those years, it was extremely competitive—quite simply, we hardly had any free time.

ST The Pushkin Museum has an incredible collection. There was a [J. M. W.] Turner exhibition that came to Moscow in 2008 and was a really big deal. We got permission to skip a lecture from our music-history professor and went there. It was impossible to get in, the line went all the way around the huge building—we had to queue outside for hours and hours in freezing Russian winter. It was incredibly exciting, the sense of a truly important event, something rare to experience these days.

PK That museum was also appeal-

the world of Richter.

ST Education separates art forms: we study music, or writing, or visual arts. But artists exist in a dialogue with each other and with the world out there . The medium you’re using might be different, but connections work in a similar way; the brain and spirit work in a similar way. I see younger musicians training, they focus on six, seven hours of playing piano. The connection gets lost, there’s no time for it. But we always wanted that connection.

The same happens in other art forms, of course. Take ballet, for instance, which I adore. It’s breathtaking when the dancers manage to get outside of their world. But of course they have to spend so much time working on their very own notions that then, as a spectator, one often ends up feeling like a mirror, a mirror in a dance class.

PK The way each art form is defined in what it’s supposed to do or not do is hugely artificial. For instance, if we’re talking about music, even what we call classical music, there are certain ways it’s supposed to “work,” certain expectations it’s supposed to fulfill, but also large areas it’s not supposed to be concerned with. Very primitively speaking, it’s expected from music essentially that it sound not that it erect a building or make a drawing. But as artists, performing artists, we must realize that it’s not nearly as simple as that, that we have the full freedom and even responsibility to define the limits of our work and how it’s positioned, and there are few laws there except some applicable laws of physics.

ing for us because of its association with the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, a somewhat godlike figure for us in those times. A very great and profoundly original artist. I believe he is peculiarly misunderstood as a representative of mainstream Soviet culture while being the most decidedly non-Soviet musician of all of his generation! Making a proper acquaintance with what Richter was about was a revelation. Perhaps the best way to describe the Richter phenomenon would be to say that he was completely unable to differentiate between life and art. His life presents to me as a complex flux where artworks are treated as live beings, and, perhaps, vice versa. Imagine a world where works of music and visual art, nature, ideas, people, landscapes, all belong in the same category and can link with each other completely freely. That, in my understanding, is

There exist some bridges between different art forms where they cross into one another’s territory. Those zones are mysterious and hugely interesting, and they can provide you with a lot of vital information. I’m talking, for instance, about the way classical (functional) harmony somehow mirrors figurativism in the visual arts, or about how the nonverbal syntax of music is as close to literary syntax as it is to the syntax of dance. So that for me, for example, it’s much better and easier to learn about form in music by studying photography or painting.

LW My grandfather was a Weimarera émigré composer, Ernst Toch, and he would speak about the architectonic in music, which is to say architecture across time rather than space.

PK Yes, architecture is another area that more than borders with music— in not only technical aspects but psychological ones. Sometimes one can approach a piece of music as an inhabitable space—a house that one person after another fills with their very own dreams and fears.

LW My grandfather sometimes

preferred reading scores to listening to music. I was always mystified by that. Was he hearing his own version of the music in his head? Was there, I wonder, a pure version that he could only enjoy by reading it?

ST Sometimes we work without the instrument, we look at the score and do the work in the mind’s ear. It’s an important moment: you do get to focus on things that might get obstructed by the physicality of the process of playing. You need to try every possible route, but in the end it actually never is like what you initially imagined.

PK Some years ago I stumbled on a book of conversations between Francis Bacon and David Sylvester. I couldn’t believe it: the whole book is a kind of a magic manual that is more applicable to music making than many books about music I’ve read! Bacon speaks beautifully about physicality, the materiality of paint, about accepting the need to follow it. Now, the fact that sound is intangible and invisible doesn’t make it pliable. You cannot just bend it the way you want, because it’s a stubborn and unyielding material, quite like wood and steel, the two materials a modern piano is actually mostly made out of. You put a lot of effort into working it, but sometimes you need to obey and follow it. Recently, a dear friend suggested that melody making was like glassblowing—another great way to describe it.

LW When did your own collaborations with artists start, and how did they come about?

ST When we first came to London, in 2011, we rented a small garden flat in an interesting house. Our landlord turned out to be Antoni Malinowski, a very remarkable Polish artist. And over the years, slowly, he became a really important influence, on both a personal and an artistic level.

PK At that point there was an interesting collaboration going on, if we can call it that. Our piano was located below his kitchen, which was below his studio. Only after a few years of living there did we find out that Antoni liked to go upstairs and paint while we were working at the piano. The sounds rising through the structure of the house were reaching his studio like vapors or flames, and he found them beneficial and stimulating for his work.

ST We would visit his studio and see the completed works, or works in progress, but we never saw the painting process itself.

LW You were seeing how he was composing his work.

ST Yes, exactly. And then the fluidity and precision of his work

were also infiltrating ours. This sly exchange was going on for years.

In 2019 we started the Ragged Music Festival, which we wanted to become something of a sheltered playground where we could try out things that would be difficult to realize at mainstream concert venues.

We started it at the Ragged School Museum in Mile End, in East London. This is a place with interesting energy—a survivor, a shard, an outcast. A small place, humble but intriguing, it was perfect for us. We were keen to work with the spirit—to try and find some specific resonance between music and space.

it would be destroyed almost immediately because the school was being renovated. It only existed for a few months. Then builders came and tore it down. It was there just for that moment, and it created the uniqueness of the moment, and its fragility. We built our whole festival around that feeling.

LW What did you perform?

ST It was in May, but we centered our program around Schubert’s Winterreise [1827], a chilling tale of self-loss and self-destruction. Its counterpart was Bach’s luminous Goldberg Variations. The whole program with Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge [1826] and “Spring Sonata” [1801], Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring [1913], Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata [1975], and many other works, all oscillating between blazing sunlight in the windows ahead and the darkness of the black “thing” behind, and sometimes mixing them together.

LW It seems to me that you have the entire repertoire of piano and chamber music at your fingertips and that you use it the way a painter uses paint.

PK Musical text in its “dry” form, written down on a page, is a paradoxical thing. Music both exists in it, and doesn’t. The text is everything, and nothing. The text contains possibilities, an infinite number of them, within a certain field of meaning. In that sense it’s the same as any other material, it’s like paint, it has its use and limitations. It’s like paint . . . but an absurdly unversatile kind of paint. Imagine if paintings didn’t exist in lasting physical form but had to be re-created, incarnated every time, using a set of paints completely unique for each painting that wouldn’t be good for anything else. A subject for a [Jorge Luis] Borges story!

ST Every time you re-create a work, it comes out drastically different, depending on many factors—the acoustic and visual context, the message an artist may want to transmit to listeners. Some of its great fluidity comes from the exchange with the current energy of the audience.

PK But also, and perhaps most interestingly, when you put one piece next to another, there’s a link, a conversation that emerges between them. In the same way, there’s an interaction between visual artworks. The only difference is that music develops over time. You experience musical works one after another. There’s a constant stream of memory that captures everything. And that memory creates a very powerful—

LW Afterimage , as it were.

ST Antoni painted it knowing that

PK Our first experiment was purely musical. Then covid came, and we did two more festivals between the lockdowns there that suddenly acquired a wider significance. The communal act of live performance was being undercut in those days by the complex choice between safety and danger, between body and spirit. There was a lot of talk about open windows and ventilation. In this rather sinister context, we found an opportunity to work with Antoni in a more conscious way than before. He made a large wall painting, an incredible, mystical thing. It was at the back of the auditorium, on a partition that was blocking the windows. It was a kind of abstract trompe l’œil painting, largely black on black, that somehow played with the idea of doors and windows. It had a huge presence in the room, both looming and inviting, seductive perhaps. It threw that room completely out of balance, and the audience, which was mostly seated with their backs to it, was always aware of the shimmering abyss behind. As musicians, we were facing it while playing and we felt we could bounce every piece and every idea against it. It was unforgettable.

PK Yes, which adds layers, one over another, to an extraordinary effect. This is a process of building narrative—like theater, except music is inherently abstract. This is a really

important, fundamentally important thing. We recently had a conversation with Bridget Riley about that.

LW How so?

PK We met her after one of our concerts. She mentioned appreciating that music didn’t need to fight against figuration, it didn’t deal with figuration, and that was making the work much “freer.” It was amazing to hear her saying that—I had had it on my mind for so long!

ST She also said that she’s been learning many things about her art form through music. She brings in new ideas that have purer expression in music.

LW Indeed: her work has the sense of a vibrating string.

ST Yes, and if you let some of her paintings move and vibrate, not trying to control them, you’ll eventually experience something that’s like a sound hallucination, a visual illusion of a sound, a miracle of incarnation.

LW Robert Irwin used to talk about site-specific work, how he would always make a different piece depending on the site. Later in his career, he said, his work wasn’t just site-specific but site-conditioned— the conditions of the particular place and time and surround dictated through him the response. In a sense you’re talking about site-conditioned programming.

PK Yes…one begins with something site-specific and then it becomes site-conditioned. Music has this unique ability to be specific to the place and moment, infinitely.

LW Infinitely specific . That’s really perfect. Specific is finite by definition—that’s almost a Kierkegaardian

way of talking about the perpendicular intersection of the divine with the temporal.

PK I should probably write that down [laughter ].

LW Recently, though, Pavel, you did a project about Joseph Cornell, Celestial Navigation

PK I discovered Cornell’s work when I was in my early twenties. He’s become one of the most important artists for me. This principle of confining things together and making them work out the ways they “shift.”

Of course you need to do it very carefully, but there are so many possibilities that open up just by putting things together in a box. As performing artists, we often work within a box—a concert stage with a proscenium and a piano.

One day I thought it would be interesting to construct a recital based on the same principles. It wasn’t biographical in any way—it was linked to Cornell, but not about him. It was just this thing of putting things together I decided to make a pair of “boxes” that would together form a recital. I assembled the first one in collaboration with the architect Sophie Hicks, who made an abstract film to do with water and celestial bodies that was aligned with music. It was projected on the back wall on the stage—something of a Narnian wardrobe, opening up the space inside into a lyrical, nocturnal void, eventually fading and disappearing into absolute darkness.

The other one was much more austere—more like one of Cornell’s Dovecote boxes [mid-1940s–1952]. I asked the playwright Martin Crimp to write four short dialogues, one for

each of the Schubert Impromptus Op. 142 [1827]. And Martin had the idea of constructing them from found material. He’d discovered a conversation book for travelers from England to Austria that had been published in the eighteenth century. He picked a few dialogues from there that were incredible—mundane, poetic, and totally surreal. “From what quarter does the wind come?”—“To what passion is he addicted?” Or another one: “Do you not sleep?”—“They bombard the city.” They made such a strong impact that at some point we had to decide if they weren’t too powerful. They were projected on the wall before each piece, like intertitles in a silent movie.

ST I was there as a listener, as a spectator. To amplify the effect, you placed yourself sitting with your back to the listeners, facing the wall in front so you too could read them and take a momentary inspiration or a cue from them.

PK Yes, that performance was a very time-and-site-specific thing. It was at the Aldeburgh Festival, at Snape Maltings, in a brick barn turned into an amazing concert hall in the countryside in Suffolk. It was incredible because the audience behind me was reacting to the text. And then I had to react to the text and play the music that was already there, but somehow it was also produced by those words. The whole idea was prompted by one of my most favorite works of Cornell, a collage called Where Does the Sun Go at Night? [c. 1963]. There are two birds in a landscape speaking to each other, with kind of dialogue bubbles—only

Opposite:

Previous spread: Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, Carnegie Hall, New York, 2024. Photo: Sasha Brons

Left: Ragged Art Festival, Ragged School Museum, London, 2021. Artwork: Antoni Malinowski, Through which the light passes . Photo: Martin Crimp

Ragged Music Festival, Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam, 2023. Artwork: Eva Vermandel. Photo: Foppe Schut

they’re empty, black. This omission of text allows a totally nonverbal, inexpressible meaning to take over—a true miracle to behold. In our joint experiment with Martin we did the opposite: removed the image, letting it be replaced by a nonvisual void of music. It was like a glance into a different dimension.

LW There was also a show of Pop art at the Guggenheim Bilbao and you were asked to create a program.

PK By coincidence, before I received that invitation I had already been playing with the idea of a Pop art musical program, and I came to the conclusion that there was no art movement that was more un musical, particularly with regard to the work of Andy Warhol. But a good challenge is always my weakness! It took me a very, very long time to figure out a way, I was becoming really desperate. But eventually I thought, “Let me see if I can apply the core principles of the Pop movement, how I understand them, and see what happens.” I did a Google search for the most famous pieces for piano. There was a list of all those really famous pieces that are fascinating for two reasons: one is that no one would be able to explain why they’re so popular, and the other, they’re so well-known that they’ve actually sort of become invisible—or rather, inaudible. One hears them all the time but one cannot really hear them.

LW Some examples?

PK Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” [1801], Mozart’s C Major Sonata facile [1788], Debussy’s “Claire de lune ” [1890–1905], etc. Those are musical objects, rendered completely opaque by their ultimate familiarity. So I used those pieces to make funny constructions, sort of balanced so that they’re too serious to be a joke and too silly to be a real thing, and I played them on a loop. And I also came up with this idea of playing French exercises by Charles-Louis Hanon.

LW These are scales?

PK They’re not scales exactly, but they’re nineteenth-century exercises for finger dexterity. They’re based on scales and arpeggios and they just go through all the tones of the octave, moving first upward and then back to the bass. These are the most basic exercises out there, there’s nothing “musical” in them, they’re just purely functional. And of course they’re never treated as artwork. Throughout the history of music, they’ve never been performed on stage, I’m absolutely sure about that! But of course they sound absolutely stunning, insanely cool, when you put them in a stage situation. So this is what I did. I played them in octaves, in fifth and ninth and also on black keys repeatedly throughout the program. It was

joyful, perplexing, and very pure— pure fun!

LW Samson, for your part, you performed the Messiaen “Quartet for the End of Time” [1941] surrounded by a Richard Serra sculpture.

ST Yes, in Transmitter [2020] at Gagosian Le Bourget. In the autumn of 2021, I went to Paris to see the work and the space. I walked through Transmitter, and around it, and I inspected it from the gallery above. To me, Serra’s work is often testing the boundaries of possible and impossible. It creates what may seem an anomaly but in fact is the opposite—it just brings “true” experience into focus. Serra is an artist who understands space deeply. Here, I also had to find a way of making sense of this very complex space, both spatially and acoustically, to find a way to articulate it with sound and create a fluid exchange between the sculpture, music, and the audience. I found that the emotional response changed drastically depending on where I was in relation to the work. Literally, every corner of that space felt different. Most strikingly, while the work is incredibly imposing from a distance, the closer you get to it the more you experience its warmth, intimacy, subtlety, and even fragility.

PK It’s incredible to witness how, despite the scale (indeed perhaps thanks to it!), the experience easily shifts to subtle things—light, touch, sound. The way sound travels and changes in those sculptures is quite extraordinary.

ST There’s one more dimension that’s actively at play in Serra’s work, which is to say time , which becomes strangely tangible. In that somewhat apocalyptic moment, feeling prisoners of covid, many of us experienced a certain thickening of time, becoming more aware of it. Emotionally, during those days I felt very connected to Messiaen’s “Quartet for the

End of Time.”

The piece was composed in the prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz[, Germany] in 1940 to ’41. This is a time-, place-, and means-specific work written for a formation of four musicians who happened to be held captive there. Instruments would engage with each other, sometimes playing all together and sometimes in dialogues, or solo “revelations.”

At some point I began to feel how these two works, Messiaen’s and Serra’s, started nearing each other until in my mind they completely merged. I decided to engage the entire space of the sculpture for the performance, and asked Alina Ibragimova and Mario Brunello to play solo movements from Bach’s violin and cello suites in different parts of the sculpture. Then, together with Nicolas Baldeyrou, we all played the Messiaen piece at the entry—or the exit, depending on where you start your journey—of Transmitter

LW Could the listeners move around themselves, or they were in seats?

ST People were sitting on the floor, the staircase, the balcony, inside the sculpture. They were completely free to choose how and where to experience the music. Some followed the musicians, some sat down, others were walking quietly and observing the changes of sound, of the resonance.

LW It must have been amazing.

ST The space and the sculpture profoundly influenced the interpretation. You listened to how the sound unfolded and reflected, and you sensed the feedback from the artwork. Time became fluid and flexible, constraints disappeared, you gained a creative freedom impossible in a concert hall.

LW It’s such an appropriate response to Serra and how musical his work is.

ST Serra spoke beautifully about intervals in space, and I think that

concept is one of the most fundamentally important in music, too, even though it somehow often remains “invisible.” We work with notes and sounds, but also, as importantly, with the silences between them. And this autumn I will be continuing my work with or within Serra’s work The Matter of Time [1994–2005], this time at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

LW You also have a new CD just out where the two of you perform together, with four hands on one piano. It includes two works by Schubert and a piece you commissioned from Leonid Desyatnikov called “Trompe l’œil” [2023], which is very interesting in the context of this conversation. Apparently, the challenge you gave Desyatnikov was to do something in relation to Schubert’s Fantasy in F Minor [1828], which would subsequently be played in the same concert. And he recalled a trip to Milan where he saw the church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro, which is just off the main cathedral, a tiny chapel on the outside. When you walk inside, the space seems huge, because there’s a trompe l’œil painting on the back wall. The great fifteenth-century architect Donato Bramante, who also collaborated with Michelangelo on St. Peter’s, in Rome, had been given this tiny space and told “Make something grand here.” And with the trompe l’œil you walk in and think there’s a vast space, but when you walk toward the back, it’s suddenly not there at all. And Leonid wondered, what would it be like to do a trompe l’œil piece in music?

PK I often wonder how a painter creates a trompe l’œil—what exactly does it entail? What is the technique of superimposing images from different planes in one work, in one’s mind? When we were working on “Trompe l’œil” we were facing the same strange conundrum. In fact, we only properly heard it when we listened back to the recording in the studio. Before that, it was always a game of trying to come close and work on the detail but at the same time pulling back and seeing the whole. You were never able to properly embrace the whole thing.

ST It was a really strange process of working on something as purely musical as an audio album that was so visual, even if only metaphorically. We found ourselves constantly operating in extramusical terms. The whole album became a triangulation of reflections, a mirror chamber. In there, the relationship between the Desyatnikov piece and the two Schubert works became very real, visible . But also it was like deincarnation of image.

LW Indeed: A desert of pure feeling! [laughs ]

Eli Diner visits Jonas Wood in his Los Angeles studio as the artist prepares for an exhibition of new paintings in London.

IN THE STUDIO JONAS WOOD

THE

FACT THAT COLLECTING AND COLLAGING ARE SO CENTRAL TO HIS PRACTICE STRIKES ME AS INTRINSICALLY RELATED TO THAT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL IMPULSE, EXTRACTING BITS AND PIECES FROM A REPOSITORY OF MEMORY TO BE REARRANGED IN SOMETIMESIMAGINARY SCENES.

Jonas Wood shows me a small square photo of an arrangement of potted plants, some children’s drawings on the wall behind. A little blurry, it looks like it could have been shot off a TV playing a videotape. In fact, he found it, ages ago, on someone’s Instagram page: the picture jumped out from the endless flow of images because he thought it bore an uncanny resemblance to a painting he might make. It was weird, he said, so he grabbed a screenshot that years later finally became the basis for Still Life with Coffee and Minibook (2024). The fundamentals of the composition are unchanged, but the textures, of course, have been transformed, the softness of the original giving way to the naive directness and abrupt graphic contrasts of Wood’s visual language. Squiggly cartoon wood grain covers the multitiered stage where the plants sit; a flat gray backdrop in the photo has been turned into a window screen, rendered in an erratic sort of grid. There are other kinds of changes too. An empty pot in the source image has been planted with an arching white orchid; Wood swapped out the children’s artwork for art by his own kids, both still lifes with fruit. Between the plants he stuck a book with a coffee cup on top and cocked it at a conspicuous angle to all the vertical and horizontal lines, so that the book is something like the picture’s hinge.

That particular arrangement—a white take-out coffee cup sitting on top of a small white book— has appeared in Wood’s work a couple of times before: he did a drawing of it in 2012 and slipped it into a painting in 2013. The cup carries a logo of a steaming mug, and in both of those earlier works the featured book was a Van Gogh volume from the mid-century series Petite Encyclopédie de L’Art . In 2012, Wood and his wife, the artist Shio Kusaka, began adapting the format of the Petite Encyclopédie for a series they published on contemporary artists such as Tony Matelli and Anne Collier. It is Kusaka’s book from that series that shows up in Still Life with Coffee and Minibook Culling, fitting together, and modifying pictorial sources is central to Wood’s practice. This painting, though, born of that low-key paranoiac awareness of watching and being watched on the Internet, of stealing and borrowing, is finally a family portrait—his wife’s book, his children’s art—and in that respect it captures how the work of assembling pictures can be for Wood a kind of self-disclosure, staging personally resonant moments and fragments of his life. More than anything else, he tells me, the body of work he has made for his exhibition at Gagosian in London in October is tied together by its autobiographical content. Of course, much of that content is inaccessible to the viewer, who couldn’t possibly know, for example, that the cityscape of brick buildings in Chelsea (2024) is based on photos Wood took out of a New York hotel window at a pivotal moment in his career. Other works exude unmistakable intimacy, such as Shio, Momo, and Kiki with Leaf Masks (2024), with his kids in their pajamas posing with their mother. But visiting the artist in his studio, as he walks me through the process of making his paintings, I’m given a view into the interplay of memory, association, and private symbolism that he invests in his work.

Wood almost always works from photographs, which he’s constantly amassing in a personal archive. He has thousands of images, some found and some he’s shot himself. It can be years before he turns to a particular photo, and of course, most he’ll never use. He reconfigures the printed-out

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images by hand, cutting and pasting to make subtle adjustments or compose an elaborate collage. Sometimes he makes drawings from the altered photographs before finally translating them into paint. The fact that collecting and collaging are so central to his practice strikes me as intrinsically related to that autobiographical impulse, extracting bits and pieces from a repository of memory to be rearranged in sometimes-imaginary scenes. Wood can tell you precisely where the constituent elements in a painting come from, and even as their meanings are set by these origins, they are nonetheless transformed when fitted together through his puzzlelike mode of composition.

It is an approach in which memory is a malleable material, and maybe that’s why, in these paintings, distinctions seem to dissolve between family, art, and place. They bleed into or stand in for each other. There’s Wall of Fame (2024), for example, which, like Still Life with Coffee and Minibook , depicts his kids’ art, only here it’s a wall covered with a dense salon-style hanging. Much of his children’s art seems like it was made in tribute to their dad—pictures of Wood, and of Celtics players—and some of it reproduces his work, creating a looping effect of depictions of depictions of depictions. While Wall of Fame comprises a pretty faithful rendition of a wall in Wood’s studio, Shio Shrine (2024) takes greater liberties in its staging. Wood worked from a photograph he’d taken, of a shop in

Opening spread: Jonas Wood in his studio, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo: Laure Joliet

Previous spread, left: Jonas Wood’s studio in Los Angeles, showing Madison Still Life (2024, in progress).

Photo: Marten Elder

spread, right: Jonas Wood, Shio, Momo, and Kiki with Leaf Masks , 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 93 × 70 inches (236.2 × 177.8 cm). Photo: Marten Elder

This spread: Jonas Wood’s studio in Los Angeles, showing, from left: Robot and Bear (2024, in progress) and 10 Pigeon Hill Road (2024, in progress).

Photo: Marten Elder

Following spread, left: Jonas Wood, Office Still Life, 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 88 × 64 inches (223.5 × 162.6 cm). Photo: Marten Elder

Following spread, right: Jonas Wood in his studio, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo: Laure Joliet

Artwork © Jonas Wood

LA’s Chinatown crammed with ceramic vases, and subbed in Kusaka’s pottery. When he speaks about the work, he’s animated by the impossibility of the scene he has created, not so much because he has inserted his wife’s art into this improbable setting but because Kusaka made this work over the course of two decades and it’s never been assembled like this. A fantasy retrospective.

In a move that is the flipside of art and objects standing in for people, the two works in the show depicting human figures seem to dramatize how people get encoded as art. In Shio, Momo, and Kiki with Leaf Masks , Kusaka and the children, standing amid a profusion of potted plants and a large basketball sculpture, cover their faces with large leaves, like fig-tree leaves, holes cut out for the eyes. A playful gesture, the improvised leaf masks also have the effect of subsuming the family into Wood’s pictorial language (potted plants being a frequent motif in his work). It’s houseplants, too, in Self Portrait with Home Depot Cart, Joint, and Phone (2024) obscuring the figure of Wood, who peeks out from behind the titular orange cart loaded up with greenery and a stack of canvases. Here the self-veiling in art is emphasized by the fact that he is standing in front of a building painted in a camouflage pattern, which doesn’t give him much cover. The artist is hiding in plain sight.

Wood shows me where the photos that would be the source for Shio, Momo, and Kiki with Leaf Masks were taken (though, as you can imagine, a lot changed in the migration from photo to painting), just next to the location of Wall of Fame . It’s striking how often the studio appears in Wood’s work, though rarely is it obvious that it’s his studio. Only the title gives it away in Office Still Life (2024), which features an arrangement of work by a range of artists—Ed Ruscha, Laura Owens, Ruby Neri, Patrick Jackson, and others—mostly from LA and mostly people with whom Wood has a personal connection. And there’s Madison Still Life (2024), a depiction of wall-mounted metal shelves lined with potted plants. I’m taken to see the original shelves, in an outdoor area where the staff eats lunch, and now they’re crowded with even more plants. Wood built them to look like one of his paintings, a tableau to be photographed to be painted.

The prevalence of the studio as a subject for Wood probably shouldn’t be surprising. He has often been drawn to quotidian imagery—he began painting plants and basketball cards precisely because these things were close at hand—and his studio is a locus of work and family. He shares it with Kusaka, and the kids seem to spend a lot of time there; for a while, in fact, the family lived in an apartment upstairs, as their house was being renovated. But of course, the quotidian is hardly simple. It is the seed of memory, and is likewise protean. If this body of work comprises an autobiography that can’t be recognized widely, then the place where it is most visible is here, in the studio. It is autobiography articulated in an obsessive and meticulous process. It seems to me that more than in the final paintings or even Wood’s vast archive of source imagery, his autobiographical expression exists in the very transformation and transposition of imagery—composite memory, always in flux.

IN A MOVE THAT IS THE FLIPSIDE OF ART AND OBJECTS STANDING IN FOR PEOPLE, THE TWO WORKS IN THE SHOW DEPICTING HUMAN FIGURES SEEM TO DRAMATIZE HOW PEOPLE

GET

ENCODED AS ART.

VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL TO SEE

The 81st Venice International Film Festival ran from August 28 to September 7, 2024. Here, writer and film programmer Miriam Bale, who attended the festival, selects three standouts from this year’s program: Pablo Larraín’s Maria , Halina Reijn’s Babygirl , and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist —analyzing how each of these films clarifies the enduring themes of the auteurs’ larger oeuvres and gives a glimpse of what we can expect from them in the future.

BABYGIRL

The Dutch director Halina Reijn’s latest English-language film, Babygirl , is her first film as a director at Venice, but she has acted before in a film in the festival, Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book , which premiered there in 2006. In Babygirl , like Verhoeven in his English- and French-language output, she is playing with classic genres in a slightly subversive yet faithful way. The genre at play is erotic thriller, with Nicole Kidman as a CEO who embarks on a dangerous relationship with her intern. In Reijn’s previous English-language film Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (2022), she perfected and refreshed the Agatha Christie locked-house murder mystery with a young cast and dynamic style; in her latest she gets the erotic thriller right by presenting a film that is undeniably sexy, even veering toward dirty. What is most interesting, though, is Reijn’s updating of the genre. Rather than self-serious to the point of laughter, as many of the classic erotic thrillers of the 1980s and ’90s were, such as Fatal Attraction and 9½ Weeks , Babygirl is deliberately funny. (As one might argue the best sex often is.)

The other way Reijn updates the genre is that Kidman as Romy is not only the protagonist but her own villain. For comparison, in Fatal Attraction (1987), Glenn Close threatens to blow up Michael Douglas’s life after he has a hot affair with her. In Babygirl , Kidman is both the Douglas and the Close characters in the narrative. While the pair are equally obsessed with their S&M dynamic, Harris Dickinson as the intern Samuel is clear about consent and boundaries. He also keeps pointing out that it is Romy’s own masochistic desires (beyond sexual) that threaten to destroy everything in her life. It is exactly that possibility that she is attracted to, and in some way hoping for.

Still from Babygirl (2024), directed by Halina Reijn. Photo: Niko Tavernise

instructions offer a way to produce is silver, the color of the Celotex insulation boards that Stingel would use in large-scale installations in 2000. His first installation with silver-lined walls was at the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy, and he revisited the idea at institutions across the United States and Europe: the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the MCA Chicago, the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, and more. At first, Stingel was conflicted when visitors started to leave their own marks on the silver panels, carving their names and messages and chipping away at the silver coating, but eventually he embraced the participation of visitors, whose destructive acts of rebellion took the place of brushstrokes on a traditional painting. These early installations set the stage for Stingel’s practice as an invitation to break the rules.

Following his 1991 debut, Stingel made a career of transforming mundane materials into glamorous, haunting installations ripe with poetic gestures and references to his past. At the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, in 2000, a year before he was working with silver Celotex, Stingel debuted a series of large paintings made of industrial Styrofoam and marked with meandering footprints that echo abstract brushstrokes. He created these patterns by dipping his shoes in acid, then walking over the Styrofoam panels. The paintings read like cross-sections of an explorer’s tracks on densely packed snow, a reference surely tied to Stingel’s childhood in the snow-capped Italian Alps. Just as a traditional landscape might elicit the soft breeze of a pastoral scene, Stingel’s Styrofoam works evoke the familiar crunch of boots on freshly packed snow on a crisp winter day. At the same time, they also suggest the familiar crackle of fracturing Styrofoam, a commercial material widely distributed yet reviled for its pollutant qualities. In this way Stingel slyly conflates references to nature and to his own upbringing with the insinuation of industrial toxicity, even while his footprints moving across the canvas recall the long, fluid brushstrokes of an abstract painter. Like his silver-lined installations, which were sometimes adorned with crystal chandeliers, the works create the impression of the uncharted yet also the familiar.

Since the success of these painting projects in the early 2000s, Stingel has driven deeper into his own memories and sensory experiences and has brought them to bear on various new iterations of painting. In 2016, in a year-long exhibition, in eight successive parts, at Gagosian’s Park & 75 gallery in New York, he presented a mix of paintings evoking his earlier installations—a group of stainless steel panels reminiscent of his Celotex installations, for example, and abstractions made from decorative textile patterns echoing the carpeted installation he had created at the Palazzo Grassi in 2013. For parts VII and VIII of the show, he presented something different, a group of oil paintings, for part VII in black and white, for part VIII in color, that he copied from the murals in the Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, a cultural mainstay of New York’s Upper East Side. Stingel rendered his paintings from photographs of the murals, which were painted in 1947 by Ludwig Bemelmans— who, like Stingel, was born in Merano. Bemelmans had based the murals on his earlier illustrations for his children’s story Madeline (1939). New Yorkers cherish the Bemelmans Bar, and Stingel’s paintings function like portals offering the viewer access to the cozy, warm, pleasurable experience of socializing over cocktails at the Carlyle. Stingel has said that he wanted visitors to be reminded of the bar—he was attracted to Bemelmans’s depictions of animals and the seasons, but his main interest was summoning

the atmosphere of the bar itself: “My thing was more about capturing the bar, the vibe of the bar. Like when you have a drink, and you gaze at the wall.”3 The familiar came up again seven years later for another body of work, but this time the references were personal. Stingel’s quest to explore the limits of painting continues.

In 2023, for a solo exhibition at Gagosian, Paris, Stingel created a series of large-scale paintings by selecting details from one of Kirchner’s best-known works, Fränzi vor geschnitztem Stuhl (Fränzi in front of Carved Chair, 1910). Stingel installed his paintings within one of his bespoke installations, coating the walls, floor to ceiling, in a deep red and covering the floors in a matching carpet. Kirchner had made an unusual choice for Fränzi’s face, painting it a striking green, and Stingel’s choice of red for the surrounding environment offered a complementing contrast that activated and intensified his favorite detail. In Kirchner’s painting, not only the girl’s face but her hair and shirt are highlighted in shades of green, and her bright-red lips pop from the canvas. Stingel used the same detail repeatedly, focusing on the girl’s face and shirt, and sometimes twinning the face. He also abstracted the original by painting over his chosen detail and eliminating parts of the composition to give his works a distressed look—one might think of a cinema poster on a city wall, worn by the elements, or of a book cover worn from pleasure. Stingel has said that his inspiration for the work came from a childhood memory of his mother and an early appreciation for Kirchner: “My mother fed me with art books when I was young and there was one on Kirchner. I’m not sure if Fränzi was on the cover but it’s probably her green flesh that attracted me. After all, it’s one of his most reproduced images.”4 The vivid interior in which Stingel set these works, this time in a dramatic red, had a visual intensity that read as familiar yet dreamlike, as if viewers were entering a private chamber where they were surrounded by evocative paintings—a space where Stingel’s memory was cast onto the canvas.

The vividness and drama of Stingel’s installations recall the sweeping, expansive frames of film. One of the most successful movies to rely on this kind of visual intensity to tell a story is Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece The Shining . In 1980, as art theory was expanding and Minimalism was losing its dominance, Kubrick was premiering his first and only horror movie, an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same title (1977) starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. At the time, the film met with mixed reviews, but Kubrick’s impeccably eerie and unsettling fictional world has lodged itself deep in the contemporary unconscious. The lasting success of The Shining is owed to the visual experience that Kubrick created, with his meticulous interiors, his extensive references to art and photography, and his innovative use of a Steadicam to create long, continuous shots.5 The Torrance family come to live at the Overlook Hotel, remote in the mountains of Colorado, where they navigate a series of horrifying visions of past murders and repressed traumas. Shots of young twin sisters and their bloodied bodies, the decaying flesh of an old woman, and a cascade of blood pouring from elevator doors are edited into the film as a series of quick, terrifying flashes, appearing like the photographs in a slide show that jumps between the past and the present. The performances of Nicholson and Duvall are essential to the film’s success, but the lasting power of The Shining relies on the visual intensity that Kubrick created with mostly nonverbal, imagined, and felt moments woven together throughout.

While Stingel’s work is not about horror, there is an intensity to his palette—the electrifying orange of the carpet in his New York debut, the decadence of his silver-chandeliered installation at the MCA Chicago, and the intensifying red of his Gagosian show in Paris 2023—that resonates on a similar frequency to the pictorial richness of Kubrick’s Shining Just as a viewer engages with touching and immersing in Stingel’s installations—an experience that leaves a trace—the entire premise of The Shining has to do with what one can feel but not see or comprehend. Similarly, the viewer entering Stingel’s paintings is left with a deep, corporeal memory of the plush carpet, the synthetic Styrofoam, and the reflective surfaces of his silver walls.

While many have defined Stingel as a descendant of Warhol, the comparison is often made through surface connections, such as the use of silver, repetition, and installation, for example. In fact their differences seem more important than their similarities. Warhol loved images for the messages they conveyed—fame, death, wealth, social capital— and was deeply invested in the power of a sign. He worked over images by heightening their eroticism and overplaying the power they maintain over us. Stingel, on the other hand, uses his works like a portal—echoing the memory of a painting, or conjuring a personal association with a painting. His works are more haunting than erotic and operate as links between past and present. When we sit with a Stingel long enough, a cascade of experiences and memories washes over us. His images work over the mind, activating our memories; Warhol was interested in how an image could work over our desires. Warhol shows us the crush of lived experience under the grip of capitalism by flattening and hollowing out his subjects; Stingel gives us something with the possibility of enduring outside of capitalism, or perhaps despite it—memory, sensory experience, and a deep, intense experience of looking.

Stingel’s career both challenges and pays tribute to the history of painting while pushing the medium to its limits. His work reminds us to look with more than our eyes—to use our senses, activate our memories, and bring our bodies into the work. In a way, he encourages us to use our own inner knowledge of what makes a great painting while at the same time shifting the perspective lines to get us to think outside its boundaries. Like Kubrick, he builds suspense with prolonged emptiness and the delay of filling it. Stingel’s work, although indebted to the debates of the 1980s, is not about the death of painting but about a deep love and reverence for it. His entire body of work calls us to feel and see and think about the possibilities of painting, and about the many lives and permutations of its past and future and its enduring mark on history.

1. Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 69–86. On the lasting impact of Crimp’s text on contemporary criticism see Arthur C. Danto, David Joselit, Yve-Alain Bois, Thierry de Duve, Isabelle Graw, David Reed, and Elisabeth Sussman, “The Mourning After: A Roundtable,” Artforum 41, no. 7 (March 2003).

2. Speaking with the New York Times about Instructions , Stingel remarked that it was “like a manifesto” and “changed everything.” See Farah Nayeri, “Rudolf Stingel and a Career That Redefined Painting,” New York Times international edition, June 11, 2019.

3. Stingel, quoted in Robin Pogrebin, “Inside Art: Inspirational Murals,” New York Times , November 17, 2016.

4. Stingel, in Angel Lambo, “Rudolf Stingel Reanimates an Icon of German Expressionism,” Frieze , April 25, 2023.

5. Photography had a major influence over Stanley Kubrick’s work; indeed, his first professional job out of high school was as a photojournalist for Look magazine. There he worked with the photographer Diane Arbus, and the iconic twin sisters in The Shining were directly inspired by an Arbus photograph from 1966, Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. See Nathan Abrams, “How Art Inspired Director Stanley Kubrick’s Famous Horror Film The Shining ,” The Art Newspaper, December 14, 2022.

Opening spread: Rudolf Stingel, Untitled , 2010 (detail), oil on canvas, 131 × 102 inches (332.7 × 259.1 cm). Photo: Rob McKeever

Second spread, left, from top: Installation view, Rudolf Stingel, Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York, 1991

Rudolf Stingel, Instructions , 1989, limited-edition art book, 8 ¼ × 5 7 8 inches (21 × 14.9 cm)

Installation view, Rudolf Stingel , Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, January 17–May 27, 2007. Photo: Stefan Altenburger

Second spread, right: Installation view with Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (2022), Gagosian, Paris, March 17–May 27, 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Previous spread, left: Installation view with Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (2022), Gagosian, Paris, March 17–May 27, 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Previous spread, right: Rudolf Stingel, Untitled , 2000, Styrofoam and silicone, 96 × 48 inches (243.8 × 121.9 cm)

Opposite: Installation view with Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (2022), Gagosian, Paris, March 17–May 27, 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Artwork © Rudolf Stingel

BIGGER PICTURE

THE HEALING PROJECT

Zoë Hopkins reports on the Healing Project, a multidisciplinary arts organization founded by the composer, artist, and activist Samora Pinderhughes in 2014. Hopkins examines the project’s collective engagement with individuals impacted by structural violence, incarceration, and systemic oppression.

“I’m sweet, man, you know.”

These words meet the ear with profound clarity, insistence, and a shade of melancholy at the very beginning of the film Keith LaMar: sweet (2024). It’s LaMar himself who makes this simple declaration, and it’s clear from ripples of static in the background that he’s speaking on the phone. In fact, LaMar has communicated almost entirely through the phone for over thirty years, debarred for the most part from unmediated face-to-face interaction. Since a wrongful conviction in 1993, he has been in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in Ohio and is scheduled to be executed in January 2027.

In the film, though, it is not the bitter fact of this conviction that defines LaMar but the soft core of his sweetness, the ricochet of his laugh, the tender and wide eyes that gaze out at us from childhood photos of him. He is enshrined here in the avowal of his own humanity, which is also a disavowal of the brutality with which the carceral system aims to

delete such sweetness from those whom it ensnares. As LaMar said to me during a phone call, “Keith LaMar’s got to tell his own story, otherwise you don’t hear from him.”

Keith LaMar: sweet emerged out of one of many weekly phone calls between LaMar and Samora Pinderhughes, a codirector of the film along with Christian Padron and Amanda Krische. Pinderhughes—a musician, composer, artist, and self-proclaimed “Black surrealist”—is the executive and artistic director of the Healing Project, an initiative dedicated to enlivening art’s relationship to transformative justice, prison abolition, and community-centered healing in the face of the carceral state. The project is built on sustained, deep-rooted connection with people who have been affected by the criminal-justice system and on the collaborative telling of their stories. This has unfurled in a suite of performances, exhibitions, albums, and films— including sweet Pinderhughes founded the Healing Project in

2014 in response to childhood encounters with structural violence as he grew up in the Bay Area. At the core of the project is a question that he often asks in our discussions: “What would it look like if we built a world around healing?”

In pursuit of answers to this inquiry, Pinderhughes traveled across the country and interviewed over 100 people who are incarcerated, have been incarcerated, or have otherwise been harmed by structural violence and carceral apparatuses. (This project began with ten interviews commissioned from Pinderhughes’s mentor Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright and actor who also heads the NYU Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue.) One could summon the word “poignant” to describe the resulting archive of oral histories, but that descriptor feels too delicate for the full complexity of the emotional embroilment and attention that spring from listening carefully to these voices. Several testimonies roil with painful recountings of experiences in prison and with searing critiques of

racial and carceral capitalism. Others shimmer with dreams of alternative possibilities as the speakers respond to the question of what healing looks like, how they would design it, and what conditions would be required for such a design to take shape.

A selection of the interviews has been overlaid with collaborative scores arranged by twenty composers, including Pinderhughes, Chris Pattishall, Rafiq Bhatia, Boom Bishop, and others. These tracks accumulate in an hour-long soundscape that oscillates among moods and genres, from jazz to gospellike synth tones to experimental acoustics, music and voice holding each other in embrace. Twice in 2022—at the Kitchen in New York and at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco— these tracks were presented in exhibition contexts as an immersive sound room outfitted with surround-sound speakers. Pinderhughes also performed a selection of the songs for a live audience at Carnegie Hall in 2023. Next year, Pinderhughes tells me, this sound room will go mobile so that peo-

ple across the nation can experience these musical testimonies.

Referring to the sound-room installations, Pinderhughes tells me, “It’s powerful as a sound work because I can put all of these people into conversation who have dealt with similar things, have them speaking both to each other and to people who have never experienced these things. When people are listening, they can literally be inside the point of view of these folks who are talking.” The sound room, in other words, invites us to inhabit a chorus of interiorities, to envelop ourselves in a polyphony of voices, instruments, and imaginations, all sounding their insistence on the kinds of freedom we have been taught to believe are impossible. To enter these sound worlds is simultaneously to enter a more capacious conceptualization of our own world, to reconfigure its core around generosity rather than constraint. We are held in the ripple of these sonic textures, carried in their currents of healing and transformation. And the lucidity

with which such healing is described in each track makes it feel all the more possible. With a vividness that pricks at the raw heart, one interviewee— his voice set against percussive drill music—details his ideas of a rec center full of health and education resources for his community. Another interviewee, the late activist Sharon Hewitt, baldly asserts the uncontainable prowess of her imagination: “I must seize, in the context of right now, every extraordinary opportunity to be delusional, to see what is not there.”

This pairing of responses points us toward the spark that animates the Healing Project’s work: the knowledge that our fundamental needs move in the same orbit as wild, riotous—and, yes, delusional imagination, that healing involves a twinned attunement to basic material needs and to our need to imagine beyond what we already know. For Pinderhughes, this means “doubling down on the belief of what art can really do.” He emphasizes, “The future work of this project has to be imagina-

Opposite: Still from Keith LaMar: sweet (2024), created by Samora Pinderhughes, Keith LaMar, Christian Padron, and Amanda Krische. Single Channel Film

Above:

On Living (2022), performance: created by Samora Pinderhughes. Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk

How can art be more deeply engaged in the messy suturing of the fractures wrought by our political conditions? How can it hold us together? How can it bring us closer to obliterating the distinction between inside and outside the prison walls, and then obliterating prisons altogether?

tive . . . it is about saying, Can we build a world out of the things that people say they actually need? And that involves really giving the space to identify what those things are. Art can really devise that.”

Sound is not the only register in which the Healing Project’s artistic projects unfold; its work of envisioning is also wrapped up in images. The films of Pinderhughes and collaborators are one vertebra of this visual backbone. A carefully conceived visual language runs under and links together Pinderhughes’s films, which are buttressed by elegiac musical scores and voice-overs, mostly culled from the interview archive. They are shot for the most part on film cameras, so that their balmy ambiances are dappled with grain. Gentle hues and low, natural lighting prevail. Figures often appear blurred or in shadowy silhouette, like auras rather than spectacles. Contravening the hard and hardening edges of carcerality and surveillance, the aesthetics of these films encourage us to give ourselves over to a soft gaze.

While films such as sweet hone narratives of individuals with whom the Healing Project has worked (in this case Keith LaMar), others are broader in their consideration. Masculinity (2023), for example, seems to probe stereotypes of Black masculinity with imagery that disrupts them entirely: men wear motorcycle helmets decorated with flowers, old footage shows a young Pinderhughes playing the piano, a boy lies on a plush and patterned carpet playing with a feather, a dancer spins and leaps in a dark and empty studio. Yet the film buzzes with a complexity that exceeds nice and neat positive representation, or images of roses in lieu of guns. The anxiety that so often sculpts the emotional and social lives of Black men pulses through the veins of the narrative. At one moment Pinderhughes’s dubbed voice says, “The truth is ugly, I want to break something so badly, I want to punch walls inside myself forming new tunnels in which the blood runs hotter.” The same child who plays with the feather punches the air in

front of the camera earlier in the film. Masculinity entangles tender and brutal realities alike. It inhabits the full, sweeping totality of what Black masculinity is: the love and the violence, the pressure and the release, the impossibly harsh conditioning that has led to this fraughtness, the Black male desires to elude these conditions altogether.

In addition to these short films, the visual narratives of the Healing Project also include works made by the collaborators who are currently incarcerated. During a visit to Pinderhughes’s apartment in Harlem, he shared with me a pair of works made by Peter Mukuria, also known as “Pitt Panther” (after the Black Panther Party), who makes ink drawings on bedsheets sourced in the Virginia prison where he is incarcerated. One of these works, Self Portrait (2022), details a fabulated version of Mukuria’s cell. He sits on the bed, back facing the viewer and festooned with tattoos, as he reads a newspaper and listens to music on a listening device. On the desk next to his bed is a computer whose screen flashes

with what looks like a cartoon animation. Above, a small poster is decorated with the initials RIBPP, for “Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party,” a political party and solidarity network for which Mukuria is the minister of labor.

Holding the drawing in my hands, the inexorable force of it all came rushing in: the incredible privation in which the work was produced, the fortitude required to repudiate this privation by creating anyway, the marriage of generosity and fugitive vision that propelled its journey beyond the prison walls, Pitt’s unflinching insistence of using anyand every thing around him to self-fashion and selfimage, to weave his narrative into being and share it. The drawing is one response to a question that Pinderhughes asks during our conversation: “How can we jump outside the prison walls?”

Artists such as Mukuria—and the Healing Project itself—demand of art that it raise its relational stakes. It must rigorously recommit itself to deepening our social and affective entanglements.

Art “has made a lot of strides in the last thirty years, taking risks with forms and structure . . . but so much of art is divorced from emotionality,” Pinderhughes muses. “How can we imagine differently what’s possible with the work? What risks can we take with emotion?” Indeed, healing itself is a risk: there are few risks greater than the vulnerability required to undo the accretion of violence that has made prisons and police possible.

LaMar reminds me during our phone talk that “healing is about making whole again.” The Healing Project meets LaMar’s assessment and asks, How can art be more deeply engaged in the messy suturing of the fractures wrought by our political conditions? How can it hold us together? How can it bring us closer to obliterating the distinction between inside and outside the prison walls, and then obliterating prisons altogether? Pinderhughes’s work holds us and, in the same gesture, solicits us to hold in return, to hold and make whole.

This spread, left to right: Still from Masculinity (2023), created by Samora Pinderhughes, Christian Padron, Ray Neutron, and Kassim Norris (RSCK). Single Channel Film

Samora Pinderhughes. Photo: Ray Neutron

Peter Mukuria aka Pitt Panther, Self Portrait of Pitt Panther (2022), pen on bedsheet, created for the Healing Project. Photo: Anthony Artis

FormaFantasma Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire

In this ongoing series, the curator has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the fourth installment of 2024, we are honored to present and , founders of the research-based design studio FormaFantasma.

6. What is your unrealized project?

13. The future is . . . ?

A: The consequences of the present. Let’s radically focus on the present and learn to stay with the trouble.

A: Recently we wanted to convince a client to do a public library curated by people we admire from a variety of different fields: architects, anthropologists, filmmakers, et cetera, with the aim of assembling the most fundamental writings needed to design for the present.

28. Whom are you working with/ thinking with?

A: With my loved one and our dog. All three holding hands.

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

SF: I don’t remember the first, but what I do remember is when I visited the Museo Civico di Castelvecchio [Verona, Italy], restored by the architect Carlo Scarpa. I was fourteen. I thought I would never be able to be a designer. I was overwhelmed by the number of details.

AT: The Museo nazionale preistorico etnografico Luigi Pigorini, today part of the Museo delle civiltà, in Rome. It was full of daily objects and folk costumes. I loved it. I thought it was funny not to be able to touch anything.

3. What is the role of titles?

A: You know, in design you are very often asked to actually name products. Objects don’t have titles but names. While we like the animistic side of this, it also feels so stupid to name objects. Often this feels just like a way to sell more things with a friendly name. As if Billy the bookcase is the kind friend you go to the pub with, rather than a cheap, unrepairable monster made of chipboard. When we can (brands don’t like this), we call our objects just table, or glass, or chair.

Titles instead are beautiful when they stay with you, when even after seeing a work, those few words keep haunting you and keep unfolding meanings and evoking interpretations.

29. Do politics and art mingle?

A: Yes. There is no way out of this. Design and politics too. It’s inevitable. Every action or activity that is world-making is inevitably political.

33. What couldn’t you live without?

A: Sunny days.

10. Whom do you admire most in history?

A: Right now we’ve been reading a lot about Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker community. She isn’t necessarily somebody we fully admire but we’re very fascinated by her courage to work to reform society. Shakerism is often described as utopian but it was rather a pragmatic way to change the status quo. It was way beyond religion.

46. Be self-critical. What do you think is problematic about your own work? (Added by FormaFantasma.)

A: As much as we’re concerned about ecology in our work, we still very often fail or accept compromises. Design is about compromises and trusting that working within the systemic structure that we often criticize is the best way to challenge it. Time will tell if this is true.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Andrea Trimarchi Simone Farresin

SARAH CROWNER

MEETING IN TIME AND PLACE

This past summer, Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023), made a visit to Sarah Crowner’s studio in Red Hook, New York. Amid a series of new paintings that Crowner is making for an exhibition in Athens this November, the two discussed embodiment, honing attention, and what it means to enter vertical time.

JENNY ODELL In my conversations with people about their practices, especially in the context of How to Do Nothing , I’m struck by how acts of doing nothing are always embodied. I spoke with someone who really likes to shower in complete darkness at four in the morning. It’s their way of becoming reembodied. I go to the rose garden to remind myself that I’m a body, that I have a body. It’s so easy to forget: we’re working, we’re on our phones, we become just a mind in a way, as if that’s possible. Walking in here, surrounded by your work, I’m reminded of that—how you can feel it in the body as you approach a work of art.

SARAH CROWNER Yes, the moment of understanding is in the approach. Because I’m not making images, I’m making objects—and this has to be experienced bodily. One way to read my work is through its process: I’m not making an edge by literally painting a line, the hard edges are made by joining cut shapes painted on canvas with a sewing machine. It’s sort of similar to the way a carpenter might join wood; two things are coming together. That’s only really understood through walking up close to the painting, walking back, walking forward. And this is active, necessarily. In the same sense, with my tile installations, specifically the platforms, the bodily feeling of standing on a particular ground is another way to understand the work. Our bodies are rooted to the earth. We could be standing barefoot in the grass, we could be wearing stiletto heels walking on a marble floor, we could be wearing squishy Hoka sneakers on concrete—whatever the case, there’s always embodiment. I think that’s a really interesting way to think about art. Through one’s physical presence, all of the senses are brought into concert.

JO Absolutely. Part of feeling disembodied is a narrowing of perception to the visual only. There’s a flatness. There’s a part of How to Do Nothing where I wrote about seeing Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings. My first encounter was seeing them on a screen, and they were easy to write off—like, okay, those are panels of flat color. That’s what I thought of them as being. But then I saw them at SFMOMA and they stopped me in my tracks. They weren’t flat at all, they were pulsating.

SC One hundred percent. That’s why I’m also so glad when people finally make it out to my studio, because they’re going to have a very different experience than if someone emailed them jpegs to view on their phone. Different things in the paintings reveal themselves when you’re physically present. That’s about embodiment, as you say, but also about spending time, thinking about duration, speed.

JO Time and embodiment are very linked. When your sense of embodiment comes back, time also returns—a sense of time that isn’t uniform minutes ticking away. I’ve been thinking a lot about senses of time that aren’t fungible. Not clock time, not measurable work time, but other things like bodily time, ecological time, psychological time. I think it’s no coincidence that art is what does that for a lot of people: you come up to a painting like this and you’re like, Oh, here I am, I’m here in body. You become a more dimensional person; you’re not just this point on a timeline that’s trying to get to the next thing in the day—you have memories and associations and you’re noticing the skylight, and everything floods back in.

SC That was key to my thinking, especially with the performances I’ve worked on, where I’ve designed sets and costumes for dance. In the beginning I started with simple questions like, Can

a painting be a backdrop? Could a backdrop be a painting? What’s really the difference? The durational parameters of a performance are interesting to me: the performance could be forty-five minutes long, you arrive at a certain time, you find your seat, you sit down, you don’t look at your phone, you’re not supposed to chitchat, you’re meant to pay close attention to this performance for a set amount of time. Putting a painting in that setting, and seeing what would happen if someone’s attention were directed at the painting for forty-five minutes, felt really potent. It’s very different from museum time or gallery time. What happens to your attention to that object in various settings? And then, How do music and movement alter that experience? Does the music animate the forms in the painting, or do the performers make the painting/backdrop become even more still? Is the painting even a static object anymore?

JO And putting a painting in conversation with something else that’s happening, be that performance or music, changes both of them. I did a residency years ago where visual artists and dancers were working together for the Merce Cunningham centennial. I learned about his collaborations with John Cage, where the music and the choreography were conceived of separately but happened together in the same space. “Synergy” is the wrong word, but there’s an interaction between them that’s not going to happen otherwise. The result is its own thing.

SC Definitely. And with Minimalism or abstraction, for me there’s a real openness to interpretation. More so than with any kind of narrative or figurative picture-making, because in that case there’s probably something anchoring you there. But if you think of a simple green rectangle, a very simple, quiet, almost empty painting—that’s so much more open to possibility.

JO I always find it funny that some people will just completely write a painting like that off, but then there’s another group of people, including me, who might cry in front of that painting [laughs ].

SC I know, same. There’s this autonomy to an abstract painting, but then there’s also the agency of you, the viewer. There are these two things that are facing each other and an invisible thread or web connecting those two bodies together.

JO That’s what I also really love about your idea of walking on a painting. I haven’t had a chance to walk on any of your tile installations, but I can imagine feeling really aware of myself in that space. When I taught, I’d often include Yoko Ono’s Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting [1966] in my lectures. It’s the piece where you climb up on a ladder to find a magnifying glass, and you’re invited to use it to see painted really small on the ceiling the word “Yes.” I would always have to stress to my students that at that time, and still today, the norm when you walk into a gallery or museum space is, Don’t touch the art. Almost like you shouldn’t quite be there.

SC You don’t feel welcome.

JO And you’re not supposed to bump into anything. You’re trying to erase yourself, in a way. I would tell them you have to imagine the experience of climbing up this ladder, which is also precarious, like now you’re in the middle of the space and it’s about you at that point, and then getting this magnifying glass and having the ultimate affirmation from the artist: yes.

SC Yes.

JO It’s so rare. But it’s rewarding and funny to watch people when there are pieces where they are invited—fully, bodily invited—into the expe -

rience. There’s always this hesitation followed by glee [laughs ].

SC For sure. In your book, you write about bird watching versus bird noticing. That really resonated with me, and in the aims of my practice, “noticing” is really the right word. What I hope my paintings do, or my tile installations do, is make you notice the outside world in a way that’s more considered. I want you not just to look at the painting but to notice what’s around the painting, on the wall, the light bouncing off it, or a window adjacent to it, or the feeling of the floor you’re standing on. Hopefully the painting becomes a tool for training your attention to the outside world. I made a tile installation for a large outdoor ceiling in a building designed by the architect Tatiana Bilbao in Mexico, and there you don’t only just see the pattern of the blue tiles, and the objectness of the tiles, you also see the reflection of the ocean in the ceiling because of the way it’s situated in space. If you pay close attention to that moment for long enough, you might notice things that you might not have before. If we talk about what art’s role is, to me it’s to make you notice the world.

JO I was just asked yesterday what I thought the role of the artist was, and I gave almost the exact same answer. I think I used the word “lens.” An artist helps you see the thing that’s already there.

SC Art trains your attention, like meditation.

JO When I gave the original talk that became How to Do Nothing , I was at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. I was there for three days for a conference, and they have that James Turrell piece there, Sky Pesher [2005], so I went on three different days. The clouds through his skylight look so different moment to moment because you’re given that lens, because of the size and position of the square.

And then to your point, you go back outside and all the clouds look different.

SC And that’s when you start to notice birds [laughter ]. I definitely notice things outside my studio window, whether it’s a bird or the shape of a leaf. There was a moment last year when I was making bright red/orange monochrome paintings. They were for a show, Around Orange at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in Saint Louis [2023], which was, among other things, about color and a response to a 1956 Ellsworth Kelly relief. The studio was filled with red and orange, and at one point we had the windows open and a red cardinal flew in and sat right on one of the red paintings. And I was like, “What! Are the birds responding to the color?”

JO They do. Some birds see more color than we do, where we can’t even describe the color they see.

SC Right, because the males are more colorful and that’s attractive to the females, right?

JO So even when birds have a pattern we can see, there’s sometimes more to that pattern that they can see and we can’t.

SC He came in. He was hopping all around and then he sat right on top of a painting.

JO He probably liked it.

SC Best compliment.

JO I really love what you were saying about how the ephemerality of the environment that’s showing up in the pieces keeps something alive, as opposed to some inert thing that’s floating through space. There’s a phrase I use in my second book, “unfreezing something in time,” which is when you perceptually take a thing that’s there but goes unnoticed, or doesn’t fully appear, and you work to bring it to the front of your perception. For instance, I think there’s a way of looking at animals where it’s like an automaton: Oh, it’s over there, doing bird things,

Opening spread: Sarah Crowner, Ceiling (Stretched Pentagons), 2022, glazed terra-cotta tiles, plywood, aluminum, mortar, and grout, dimensions variable; installation view, Punta Mita, Mexico, architecture: Tatiana Bilbao Estudio. Photo: © Luis Gallardo/LGM Studio

Previous spread, left: A cardinal perched atop a painting in Sarah Crowner’s studio. Photo: Akiha Yamakami

Previous spread, right: Sarah Crowner, Tropical Nocturnal, 2024, acrylic on canvas, sewn, 96 × 72 inches (243.8 × 182.9 cm). Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Below: Installation view, Sarah Crowner, Platform (Blue Green Terracotta for JC), Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, 2022. Photo: Alex Marks, courtesy the Chinati Foundation

Opposite: Misty Copeland and Herman Cornejo in Garden Blue, 2018, American Ballet Theater, New York. Sets and costumes: Sarah Crowner; choreography: Jessica Lang. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor, courtesy American Ballet Theater

but it’s not actually having an experience. You can do it with really anything. As an exercise to counteract that, during the pandemic I picked a particular branch of a particular tree in a particular park and I paid attention to that branch every time I walked by. I would take a picture of it. It’s a buckeye tree, and it has a very particular schedule: the branch has a flower stalk, but each flower opens at a different time. So day by day it’s actually different. It’s more complicated than, Oh, there’s the tree. Those exercises are so important for new realizations. I started trying to keep a list of the first time I’d done something—first time I tried some kind of food, or whatever—but then it became impossible to keep this list because every time you do something it’s the first time that you do it. Everything is new, because things being alive, they’re in time, they’re changing.

I feel like your paintings are so opposed to the popular idea of a painting, which is very much like a thing that exists, that’s closed, and then you, the body, don’t have anything to do with it. It’s not really in time and it’s not really in the world.

SC I was listening to a podcast that discussed a book by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, called Taking Care of Youth and the Generations [2008], and in it he describes the concept of attention. He explains that in French, attendre is the verb for “waiting,” which shares etymological roots with our word “attention.” So attention is waiting. And, I would add, patience. To Stiegler, attention is “infinite waiting.”1 That’s interesting to think about when going into an experience with a painting. If you’re open to it and you wait long enough, something comes to you. But you can’t go into it with preconceived notions, or even go into it with the idea of emptying yourself.

JO Have you seen the Ad Reinhardt cartoon where there’s a guy pointing at an abstract painting and he’s like “Ha, ha, what does this represent?” And then the painting gets a face and it points back at him and it’s like, “What do you represent?” And then in the last panel he’s just like dead [laughter ].

SC Yes! Exactly.

JO I used to show that on the first day of class. Because the key word, as you said, is “open,” you need to be open. And there’s some humility also in that.

SC And vulnerability.

JO Like “I don’t know.”

SC “I don’t know, I know nothing, but I’m curious.” But that’s not actually true, because, okay, we do know a few things already! And, we do carry all this stuff with us on our backs. Even though I want to say you walk into the painting and you’re completely an open book and just wait, we do have all this history, whether we like it or not—our age, our experience, how our body feels that particular day. All those things do inform.

JO Yes, of course. The being open has to be qualified: being open to the interaction. I guess it’s like open to the idea that the painting could have something to say to you that would sound specific to you because of your associations.

Do you feel like there’s a general direction that you’re moving in, maybe even being surprised by, process-wise?

SC Well, the more I try to simplify my work, making it less compositional, less curvy, less complicated, more calm, it seems that I can’t, and I always end up going back to sharp, strong, organized forms. In my mind I’m leaning toward more quiet, more minimal, but then my body wants to gesture [laughs ]. So there’s that push and pull. Also, I’m

feeling the draw of scale. I want to make more tile installations and create public spaces on a larger scale. I want to do 50,000 square feet [laughter ], which is crazy. So if anyone’s listening . . .

JO That’s exciting. I think it’s really important to have that North Star.

SC The thing about having a studio, and I’ve had so many studios over my life—everything from 200 square feet in some falling-apart building in Manhattan to bigger spaces—is that my work morphs and changes to fit those dimensions. My work is like smoke, it’ll fill.

JO I love that. Should we talk about screens?

Something I was thinking about even before coming here was how that’s one of the conditions of being an artist now: your work is constantly consumed in little tiny jpegs.

SC I think so, and I don’t know what I can do about it or what could be done about it. It’s the way things are moving.

JO The role of art that we were talking about becomes so much more important. It’s crucial now, because it’s this island of a way of perceiving and being that we all need to learn from and be able to practice. You have to keep coming back, because it’s going to keep getting eroded by the way things are designed now.

SC It’s very precious. When I grew up, going to a museum was always a special experience; quiet, and meditative. I didn’t have to speak to anyone, and I liked that no one was paying attention to me.

JO It was contemplative.

SC Your mind could wander and come up with its own associations and you could take your own time.

JO There’s this book I cited in my own book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture [1948], by Josef Pieper,

a German Catholic philosopher. He made a distinction between horizontal time and vertical time. Horizontal time is both work and breaks from work. The breaks from work on that horizontal time are not real leisure to him; leisure for him is instead vertical time, which is something that cuts through that timeline or interrupts it. Vertical time is the time when you suddenly remember this incredible fact of being alive, and your vulnerability in the face of the world. It’s like looking at a sunset for some people. Or for me, when I was working at Stanford, I was usually in horizontal time: I’m late to class, I’m schlepping all these bags because I’ve taken two hours of public transportation to get there, I’m thinking about what I need to do in class, and then, let’s say it’s spring or fall migration, there would be a warbler in a tree and it just completely interrupted everything. At that point I wasn’t only a teacher or an employee or whatever; seeing this bird, I had to think about where it came from, think about weather patterns—and then it would all just collapse back down and I’d have to go to class. But that’s very different from “I had a fifteen-minute break in the break room.”

SC That’s really beautiful.

JO So museums are the places to find vertical time.

SC Totally, or seeing the cardinal on a red painting. Magic.

1. Bernard Stiegler says that attention is “waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object, and of course the infinitude of ourselves.” “Your Mind Is Being Fracked,” The Ezra Klein Show, May 31, 2024, 18:09.

Amit Noy conducts a close study of the latest piece from Marseille-based dance collective (la)horde.

The end of the world begins with the sound of rain. Halfway between a whisper and a racket, it trudges knowingly into my eardrums, carrying the dual promises of rot and renewal. Rain makes a laughingstock out of the word “ancient,” yet here its noise is rendered through the sound waves of industrial speakers. In an age of content, transformation is the sacred custom: we make rain from electricity, belief from disillusionment, and the glittering dope of futurity from the smog of the present.

Or perhaps the end of the world is a piece of theater. If so, it could be Age of Content by the French collective (la)horde. Founded by artists Jonathan Debrouwer, Marine Brutti, and Arthur Harel in 2013, (la)horde vivisect the zeitgeist with dance and choreography as their tools. Across theater, cinema, music, and visual art, they create and disseminate work with the speed and prolificacy of politicians or pop stars. In the past three years alone, their work

FIST-ING

has ricocheted among major international theaters, they have held outdoor performances in Marseille to crowds of twenty thousand, and they have collaborated with Madonna, Sam Smith, and Burberry. Created for and performed by Ballet National de Marseille—the nineteen-strong state-funded dance company and choreographic center that ( la ) horde has directed since 2019—Age of Content premiered in 2023 at Lyon’s Biennale de la Danse and is currently touring internationally.1 This October, (la)horde opened Van Cleef and Arpels’s Dance Reflections festival in Kyoto, Japan, with its 2020 performance Room With a View

In January 2024, I watched Age of Content in the suburbs of Paris. Before the show began, I sat in the audience and marinated in my own rain. I was fifteen minutes late due to a fiasco on the Métro, and during my subsequent sprint to the theater I ran through an entire shopping mall. Sweat tumbled blithely down my collarbones as I noticed the stage—a curtain, a staircase to a landing, a collection of cardboard boxes, and a car covered by a sheet. As the lights dimmed, the car’s headlights snarled to life.

The first dancer is a machine, one whose whine has sounded a gleaming paean to industry for the past hundred-odd years. The car reeks with the gall of progress; it personifies our obsession with the creation of object-systems that exceed human possibility even as they service it. They are the prostheses to our greed, and they have become indispensable to the way our bodies live and move. This car, designed by the scenographer Julien Peissel, is a creature of structure—its exoskeleton is rendered visible in the style that is constantly à la mode until it isn’t. When a human dancer does arrive, it is not the person that moves the machine but the machine that moves the person. One dancer mounts the other’s hood, splays their arms, and stabs out their hip in a gesture spliced straight from every music video of the last twenty years. They grip the car’s metal frame and hang upside down, head bobbing where a license plate might otherwise be, legs akimbo and paddling the open air. In a minute, the person will sprawl recumbent with the car hood (still moving) as both pillow and tow bar, lounging in the style of a Renaissance tableau. Each gesture is executed with a gussied-up efficiency wherein choreography is a logic of bodily optimization. What is the best way to load my limbs from one place to another? How can I stream my flesh into motion with the least possible resistance? Movementsans-friction is rare for the proscenium stage, which clings to an enduring fetish for the bumpy road of (quote unquote) authenticity. But what could be more real than faking something very, very well?

( la ) horde know that performance is a business of making myths. It’s fabulation from ground zero, buoyed by the (theater) box and its attendant systems of faith—the way we gather to make belief, and have for thousands of years. In their timely interventions into our tastes and behaviors, (la)horde are asking us to reconsider the assumed moral primacy of antispectacular and antientertainment theatrical tactics. Why should hard-boiled honesty hold the notion of realness in a chokehold? In 2024, the total and systematic erasure of naturalism is its own deep truth.

So the dancers grasp each other viciously, never quite long enough for us to believe it really hurts. They kick and struggle in a pantomime of violence that constantly vaporizes before it can cohere. Sometimes they stop to preen and pose, rendering us not a crowd of a thousand people but a giant front camera. Styled and costumed by Salomé Poloudenny, they’re all wearing Juicy Couture sweat

All photos: Age of Content (2023), conceived and directed by (la)horde—Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel; choreographed in collaboration with the Ballet National de Marseille

Previous spread and this page:

Photo: © Gaëlle Astier-Perret

Opposite: Photo: © Alexandra Polina

1. This writer has received financial and professional support from Ballet National de Marseille in the past, through their activities as a national center for choreographic creation.

2. One of the earliest known instances in the United States of a protester brandishing a raised fist occurred in 1913, when “Big Bill” Haywood spoke to strikers during the Paterson silk strike in New Jersey. Haywood, a founding member of the union Industrial Workers of the World (the “wobblies”), preached workingclass solidarity across all races and trades.

“Every finger by itself has no force,” he said, lifting his sizable hand to the crowd. “Now look,” he said, closing his fingers into a fist.

“See that, that’s the IWW.” See James Stout, “The History of the Raised Fist, a Global Symbol of Fighting Oppression,” National Geographic, July 31, 2020. Available online at https://www. nationalgeographic. com/history/article/ history-of-raised-fistglobal-symbol-fightingoppression (accessed September 6, 2024).

suits and queerly drawn Lycra masks stretched over their faces the way one dons a pair of tights. Running in lines, upward diagonals, and sharply spiking curves, their movements chart the geometry of progress. They etch graphs of inflation and deflation across the dance floor. Eventually they punch the air in a brash group rhythm with no discernible agenda or cause. Every finger by itself has no force.2 We’re wound taut by the pressure of one finger, one feeling, one force, into another.

VIDEO GAMES

The era of the poor image is over. Now, we salivate over that which is hypertouched, wealthy with the caresses of a computer mouse. In the second section, the dancers of Age of Content appear as avatars of themselves, because the twenty-first century is a role-playing game. Choice is the injunction, but the nature of the operation is blurred—pick your fighter? Your lover? The next manifestation of yourself? A lone dancer moves across the stage in a jaunt so carefully eradicated of human affect that they are a monument to blandness. They pick something up, put it in their pocket. They kneel, and their ass becomes a brief mountain, the gravitational center of our gaze. They’d be at home in Grand Theft Auto or a ChatGPT simulation, but I remind myself that this person has a liver, a bladder that fills and empties, kneecaps that creak in the morning. (la)horde have pasted the choreography of virtual selves onto what the Bible would call earthly flesh, and therefore smudged their supposed separation, that fib we work so hard to maintain. The Bible was the computer of the Babylonian era—the information system through which we refracted and defined our sensation of the “natural truth.”

The dancer touches the pole like they’ve been coded to do so by a Bluetooth remote. Their chest heaves exaggeratedly to signify each taken breath; a poor image of the precondition of being alive. As the sun comes out and we exit screen, I want to sing a hymn of praise for the specific cut of the waist on the dancer’s jeans. If the butt crack is a staircase, the jeans nestle two steps below the top, riding the conflicted tightrope between perversion and liberation.

Style is a substance, as real and consequential as the sky.

WEATHER IS SWEET

After death and before birth there is the fact of fucking, and the image of it that is imprinted a thousandfold on every street corner since ancient Rome. The dancers bounce themselves, they bounce each other, they bounce on top, and they bounce while pressed against the floor. It’s a theme and variations of the thrust, an anthropological inquiry into the physical architecture of humping and gyrating. Pornography is a field of choreographic study, or it should be! In Age of Content, the weather is sweet and the sun is shining, as long as everybody knows

to raise their ass on the downbeat. (la)horde’s depiction pierces in its complete absence of a moral flavor. The movements are studied clinically, with the detached fascination of a ballet teacher expounding on a rond de jambe. In the end, it’s a symphony of spinal movements that say more about our cultural moralisms than they do about sex. Every pelvis is a mecca of history, stamped with archives of repression, resistance, and straight infatuation.

TIKTOK FOR THE AGES

Sixty years after Warhol & Friends’ giddy rampage through the annals of high and low art, the distinctions they sought to complicate are still very much entrenched within capital-D Dance. 3 (Supposedly, Philip Glass is art and twerking is a soiled handkerchief.) In the final section of Age of Content , (la)horde conduct their own giddy rampage through the annals of movement, blitzing together movement quotations from a myriad of theaters, nightclubs, apps, and continents. Lucinda Childs, the glacial doyenne of East Coast postmodernism, intermingles with Jerome Robbins’s bodacious precision, and with a throng of social dances whose origins can be less confidently asserted and that circulate widely right now through TikTok. All this is tracked by a selection of Glass’s exhilarating loops of colliding rhythms (which both Childs and Robbins have worked with in masterful and iconic ways). It’s a saturnalia of movement, as irreverent as it is deeply researched. In tracing these dance quotations across distinct eras, genres, and origins, Age of Content reveals the vagabond spirit of any gesture. On the one hand, how could you even attempt to own, stamp, label, copyright, buy, sell, or distill the guttural force of any motion? On the other hand, that’s what you call a dance step, and we’ve been doing it for thousands of years.

3. Certainly they are within the theaters in which (la)horde often work.

Opposite: Photo: © Alexandra Polina

Below: Photo: © Fabian Hammerl

Why and how do people dance alone? Moeko Fujii looks to some iconic movie scenes to find answers. Whether through catharsis, introspection, or escape, to dance alone onscreen promises the possibility of a transformative release, solitary within the film but shared with the film’s audience, which gets to read an inner life written on the arc of a body.

The dance begins with an object: Loie Fuller twisting with a silk scarf; Charlie Chaplin as Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940), engaging in a pas de deux with a balloon globe; Fred Astaire twirling a hat rack in Royal Wedding (1951). They animate their inanimate partners and together they become a soliloquy of movement, dancing as though there were no audience, a world bursting with the interiority of one. Of course this is an illusion: caught on film, they dance as though they were alone, but they know that the crew and the film audience will watch their reverie. Yet their absorption seems to cancel out those watchers, creating a temporary world in which there are none.

In Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994), Faye Wong dances with kitchen prongs behind the counter of the food stand where she works, moving her hips while squeezing ketchup into a cup. Her favorite song to dance to is “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas, and the song plays many times in the film. She is in love with a policeman who is getting over someone else, so naturally she breaks into his empty apartment, puts on her Mamas & Papas CD, and dances to it, swinging plastic bags of goldfish. She likes her music loud—“the louder the better, keeps me from thinking”—and her relationships simple; when the policeman finally asks her on a date, she moves to California. When she dances she is always alone.

It’s honest, this dancing. It looks unrehearsed, inexperienced, and loose. I would use the word amateurish if Faye cared about such distinctions, which she clearly doesn’t. Her character simply does not care if she looks good. In fact, she looks good because she doesn’t. Faye does not give a damn about who is watching her. She is almost animalistic in her movements, like a dog bobbing its head to music. She shows the revelry we allow ourselves when we are alone.

On film, there’s a clear difference between the dancing of those who seem to be dancing alone and the dancing of people dancing for someone else. The difference is a degree of affect. When we dance, being looked at transforms us. We respond with a smile, a practiced glance that we know looks good. When no one is watching we lose selfconsciousness. We put on a favorite song, we crank it real loud, we start to mouth along, our bodies loose, and we let ourselves repeat a movement over and over. We bite our underlip and bob our heads, we swing our arms in windmills, our faces fall slack. We don’t necessarily smile with teeth, though sometimes we do, when the feeling takes us. We don’t have a someone to look to so our eyes scatter everywhere, the floor, the ceiling, focusing, unfocusing. The quality of this dance, then, depends on how much we can inhabit this paradox of performance— how much we can strip away the clean snap of training and technique, the acknowledgment of another.

Faye Wong’s dancing in Chungking Express makes us feel because it feels like the opposite of

performativity while continuously being a performance. And her alone-dancing changes. In one shot she dances around an apartment she’s broken into, bursting with glee, pink dishwashing gloves on her arms, delighting herself with her antics. In another she bobs along to the same song again and again at her food stand. Learning that her policeman loves someone else, she dances with a small, desperate smile on her face, snapping her hips, squeezing ketchup into a jar. It is a kind of dancing that does not care for control, training, or timing, and is fundamentally at odds with what a dance is usually for: an audience. As an audience we feel like an unwelcome witness—feel that if the character knew someone was watching, she would cease to dance.

But let us tread carefully. Consider James Stewart staring at a blonde girl dancing alone in her pink underwear in the opening scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Is the thrill of watching someone dance alone the indulgence of a voyeur? To put it crudely, what distinguishes viewing someone dancing alone from watching someone through a peephole? In Hitchcock’s hands, the dance alone is a reminder that cinema turns everyday banalities into entertainment—and that everyday banalities and entertainments are double-edged, both ordinary and strange. Film offers the private affair—a dancer gnawing on chicken while she practices alone, waiting for a man—as an easy visual thrill for someone else, and we indulge our curiosity while knowing we would be offended by such breaches in our own lives.

Previous spread: Still from Chungking Express (1994), directed by Wong Kar-wai. Photo: © 1994 Jet Tone Productions Ltd. © 2019 Jet Tone Contents Inc. All Rights Reserved

This page: Still from Rear Window (1954), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Photo: Paramount Pictures/Photo 12/ Alamy Stock Photo

Opposite: Still from Beau Travail (1999), directed by Claire Denis. Photo: courtesy Janus Films/The Criterion Collection

In Douglas Sirk’s melodrama Written on the Wind (1956), Dorothy Malone’s Marylee takes off her dress, smoking, throws on a sheer pink nightgown, and dances in her bra with a portrait of Rock Hudson, her unrequited love. After a few seconds, while she clutches Hudson’s portrait to her chest, it’s clear that she’s not dancing with him, or with any idea of him. If the girl dancing in Rear Window is above all a portrait of American domesticity—one that can be leered at from the safety of another window—then Marylee is its underside, American derangement, rolling her eyes and snapping her hips,

teetering drunk and out of control. Marylee is constantly too messy to make us feel as though we were getting a peek at her hidden everyday. Instead, she dances as though she wanted to rip the world apart along with herself. She can’t get what she wants, even when, or perhaps because, she has more than anyone can desire. Therefore she will dance. As she hits the climax of the song, her father, an oil tycoon, falls down a grand staircase to his death. Glorying in the excesses of her world—she is arrayed in the spoils, the silk, the jewels—she is also the spark that will make it implode.

Over time, Marylee’s mess gets harder to watch. When I was a teenager I loved her rollicking, how she seemed to leave splinters everywhere for other people to step on, how campy it is that she seems to accidentally kick her father into oblivion. Now I feel for her, thrashing around in her prolonged adolescence, all to send her family a message— I don’t care what you think—when in fact that’s all she cares about. And I see the weariness of her father, the fragility of his gray hand on the banister. How he had heard the loud music she’d put on and still decided to try and speak with her, a woman trying to drown the world out. Perhaps the dance alone is the expression of a flawed teenage logic: the idea that self-consciousness should be escaped in solitude (instead of, say, out in the world, in a club), that it is only behind closed doors that we can access the promise of some authentic self. That if the world will not embrace that self, it must all burn down. Turn down the music, I want to tell her—and get out of that house.

And yet there is something that rings true in Marylee’s gesticulations, in how she confronts and simmers and gives shape to her unhappiness, that I do not want to dismiss as part of some adolescent phase, or as something that will be solved by a mere change of location. It is silly to box dissatisfaction, yearning, and revelry into adolescence, as though the expression of asynchronicity were merely a matter of youthful energy. The dance alone is tinged with the force of restlessness; it is an effort to make something of envy and regret.

The dance alone holds twin tantalizing but opposing promises: of being our strongest expression of interiority (when we are not moving for someone else, we are moving for ourselves), but also of giving us a way to become someone radically different, or even to cease to be a person at all, through movement. If you look at Bulle Ogier’s character, an assembly-line worker, dancing and shaking in Alain Tanner’s The Salamander (1971), we might be tempted to argue that her dance alone is proof of a social fabric breaking apart, her movements simply reverberations of the atomizing shocks of modernity, the vibrations of machines. The dance alone, in that argument, is no escape: it is simply proof that we are solitary toys tottering forth after being wound up too much by the forces of capitalism.

What the lone dancer brings forth is not personality and individuality or the lack of it, but courting the space between our various possible selves, including between life and death. At the end of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999), after being ejected from the French Foreign Legion after a lifetime of service, Denis Lavant’s character Galoup decides to kill himself. He makes his bed and lies down on it, clutching his gun with his left hand. A vein on his arm pulses, and the unmistakable echoes of Corona’s “Rhythm of the Night” (1993) start to pulse along with it. The next shot: Galoup leans against the mirrored wall of a dark, empty club, watching himself smoke in an unseen mirror to the left of the camera. The viewer doesn’t know when or where he is in time, just that he is alone. His eyes track the sensual arc of his arm swinging down as he walks slowly, still smoking, to the center of the room. With one hand he traces tiny movements in the air to the music, then rejects them. He starts the process of forgetting himself. He raises his cigarette to his lips, then spins in a tight circle, smoke wrapping around his figure like a cape. Denis has said that in an earlier version of the screenplay, the dance fell before the scene where he takes the revolver, but when she was editing, she decided to put the dance at the end. She wanted to “give the sense that Galoup could escape himself.”

The dance alone holds twin tantalizing but opposing promises: of being our strongest expression of interiority . . . but also of giving us a way to become someone radically different, or even to cease to be a person at all, through movement.

To escape ourselves—to reach our heights by retracing the figures of what you were. By saying goodbye to them, no matter how cherished. What Lavant shows us is that in fact, the dance alone is both the imagination of sheer potential and the resolution it takes to face the end of things. His performance tells us that you cannot actually have the former without the latter. And in this steadfastness before oblivion, he marks what has been lost, and what is still to come.

Reid Bartelme, Harriet Jung, and Jackie Sibblies Drury

Costume design duo Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung speak with playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury about building the world of Illinoise, a musical based on the Sufjan Stevens album Illinois (2005) with choreography by Justin Peck. Having premiered at Bard College’s Fisher Center in 2023, in 2024 Illinoise had runs in Manhattan, at the Park Avenue Armory and on Broadway. Staging the conversation of friends around a campfire, it describes life in the American heartland and celebrates the value of storytelling. Bartelme, Jung, and Drury also discuss designing for the stage versus the fashion runway, a Britney Spears Halloween costume, and a new project for Alvin Ailey that will debut this winter.

REID BARTELME: Jackie, I thought about you today, because I was thinking about a dilemma that Harriet and I encounter. I went back and saw Illinoise on Monday for the last time.

JACKIE SIBBLIES DRURY: I can’t believe it’s the last week!

RB: I know! I was thinking about what happens during our design processes—and it happened during Illinoise—which is where you get to know who a particular character’s going to be, you think hard about what their costume will be, you bring together all these clothes to try, but then the outfit that the performer walks into the room wearing inevitably is the best-looking. And you think, “Why do we even bother?” So much inspiration for us comes from seeing what performers have in their closets, what their regular clothes are, and then trying to achieve that

level of “lived-in” that’s nearly impossible to achieve for the stage. And I was thinking, I wonder if Jackie encounters that when she hears conversations people are having, and thinks, Is that something I can achieve in my writing?

JSD: One hundred percent. But when playwrights or screenwriters try too hard to capture dialogue that doesn’t sound “written,” that false tone just sticks out immediately. Whenever there’s a line in a TV show or something that’s like, “You know, the thing about plants is that they’re always going to grow,” that cadence irks me, because it sounds so prescribed.

In terms of your work, at some point I was standing next to Harriet and you were trying on different things for the cast member Tanner Porter. I was like, “Wow, I didn’t even realize she was in her costume.” The difficulty of trying to make someone seem natural in costume—could you say more about how you two approach that? Is it just a gut feeling, or is there more of a process to it that you’ve developed over time?

HARRIET JUNG: There is something instinctual for me. I gravitate toward a particular color or fabric or shape of a garment, and something tells me I want to try it on this person. And then when I see it, I’ll know, “That’s it.” But there’s also a good amount of forethought. As Reid pointed out, when it comes to more theatrical shows like Illinoise, and even in pure modern dance and ballet, we look at how performers dress themselves. They have a sense of their own bodies, they’ve lived in their bodies the longest, and generally they know what looks good on them.

Previous spread: I was waiting for the echo of a better day (2021), choreographed by Pam Tanowitz, Fisher Center, New York, 2021. Photo: Maria Baranova

This page: Law of Mosaics (2022), choreographed by Pam Tanowitz for

Opposite: Works & Process (2018), created and directed by Reid & Harriet Design, choreographed by Burr Johnson, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: Robert Altman

New York City Ballet. Photo: Erin Baiano

But I will say, if you really let everyone go on stage in what they want to wear, it won’t look good [laughs].

JSD: Madness.

HJ: This is where we come in. Our job is to be like, “How do we achieve that worn-in, this-is-me look, but also create this cohesive, larger environment?” And that’s where we’re thinking about color balance, fit balance, and all of that.

Jackie, Illinoise was the first dance-centered piece you worked on, correct?

JSD: It’s certainly the most in-depth experience I’ve ever had with a dance-centered piece.

HJ: How was that? What was that experience like and how different was it from your normal way of working, writing words for people to say?

JSD: I worked with the choreographer Nichole Canuso, who has a company in Philadelphia—she did this piece [The Garden, 2013] that involved audience participation and I wrote text for her for that. But my very first ballet class was when I did warmups with the Illinoise folks a couple of weeks ago. I think I’m still sore, just holding onto the barre and stepping, I’d never done that before. But I’ve always loved the art form—there’s something so emotional about it. As a person who doesn’t have any physical articulateness, people who are able to have that amount of control over themselves, to make it look like they’re in different environments almost, I find it so miraculous and moving.

There can be something that feels limiting about text. It often has to mean one thing, and it has to be clearly conveyed from one person to another person. Even though Illinoise is a narrative dance piece, there was so much about it that felt flexible and fungible, and that was exciting. We didn’t have to answer definitively, I don’t know, “Is this character closeted? Does he know what his sexuality is? Is there a relationship between him and another character that’s unrequited, or is it unconsummated?” There’s flexibility for all these things to shift and be true, and that doesn’t mess up the story of it. That feels closer to the way life is: even though we all have identities, they’re always shifting slightly based on what our context is.

RB: I think we forget how rare it is to have that kind of space inside a physicalized art, where “What does this mean?”—when the medium is human bodies— can be answered in many ways.

JSD: I know that you both also have fashion training. How do costuming and fashion relate for you? Is there an overlap between those worlds, or do they feel very separate?

HJ: Conceptually, you would think they should have a lot of overlap, but working in theater, and starting to work on Broadway in particular, made me see that costume-design education and fashion-design education are actually quite distinct.

RB: Thinking back ten, twelve years ago, when we were in fashion school together at FIT [the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York], I was really following contemporary fashion shows because all the

students were so invested in what popular designers of the time were doing. When we’re involved in design processes now, I occasionally think back to that time, and I wonder when I stopped valuing fashion culture as much. I think inspiration comes from a different kind of research at this point in my life, and “fashion” has become just one facet of what’s going on in the process. When I look at runway shows now, I’m reminded what that kind of financial support and connections to celebrity culture can achieve aesthetically. I still look at them to check in with what’s going on in fashion, and sometimes find myself swept up in the glamour, but I don’t necessarily feel a sense of wanting to be involved with it the way I did in school.

JSD: I don’t know very much about fashion, but I’m intrigued by the things that go viral or that are more theatrical. There was a Rick Owens show a decade or so ago, where they used dancers and nontraditional models, that got my attention. There seems to be something similar about designing for a fashion runway— thinking about how a fabric moves— and your approach to work for the stage, but maybe it’s not that way in practice?

There is something instinctual for me. I gravitate toward a particular color or fabric or shape of a garment, and something tells me I want to try it on this person.

—Harriet Jung

RB: I would just say that a fashion show is such a controlled environment, and it’s so brief, so there’s a lot of range in terms of what’s feasible. Harriet and I are always thinking about, How is this going to survive extreme movement, how is this going to survive over a period of time, how is it going to be useful to a company and not have to be remade. Those just aren’t concerns in fashion design, so the container and the performance itself are quite different: in fashion shows, even if something isn’t particularly wearable, they make it so it’s wearable for those five minutes.

JSD: I’m hearing that they’re opposite in a way.

HJ: I don’t know if I would say “opposite,” because in fashion design—even though there are different requirements for durability, and different monetary incentives—at the end of the day, you still have to make something that someone can wear. Reid and I get asked about our approach all the time, and the short answer of it all is, it’s different for every single project. We’re working on a piece for Alvin Ailey [ Many Angels , 2024], for example, and they tour a lot, so one of their main points was, “These costumes, whatever they are, better be able to be washed and dried and ready to go.” So that became a focus of our design this time around. Of course it still had to have our aesthetic, it had to have the fabrics we like, it had to make sense in the context of the choreography, the music, the set design. But we really tried to make the costumes washable and durable, because that’s the premise of this piece. And then sometimes we do pieces where there are only four performances, and we get to create more delicate costumes that will have a shorter life. So the answer is always, it just depends on who’s involved and what the project is, and also budget. We have so many puzzle pieces we have to think about while we’re trying to be creative, you know?

RB: I also think that, especially in women’s wear, one desirable quality is ethereality, this kind of flowy, delicate, transparent thing that lends itself well to dance and movement. And we’re often trying to translate that into performance wear—how do you solve the challenges of taking this thing that’s not meant to be durable and make it durable? So over the years we’ve worked together, we’ve explored many different fabrics and fabrications and ways of creating space between the body and the garment so there isn’t pressure on the seams. It’s definitely informed our aesthetic and our practice. Obviously there was a lot of failure initially, making things that just fell apart as people danced in them, but nowadays it’s too tiring to do that [laughs].

JSD: Hearing you say “there has to be space so you’re not putting pressure on seams,” you’re thinking about body—I can’t even call it clothing—body fabric in a completely different way than I ever have.

RB: Body fabric. I’m writing that down.

JSD: You’re welcome. When you write a book about your career: Body Fabric

RB: That’s the title.

HJ: Body fabric. Wait, Jackie, did you know there’s a dance-wear brand called Body Wrappers [laughter]?

JSD: That’s delightful.

Can you tell me more about your work for the Alvin Ailey piece? That’s very cool.

RB: Yes, it’s our first time designing a dance for them. Lar Lubovitch, a choreographer I used to dance for, is making a work for five dancers in the Ailey company, and it seems to be a reflection on heaven a little bit—angels, the sky. When he approached us he brought these images of the sky and clouds. Out of a few options he went with one that’s particularly heavenly, with pink and gold and

sunrays setting in the clouds—that’s going to be printed on a giant plastic scrim that can be lit from behind. So that’s what we were working with when we received the Ailey assignment. We’re going typical Reid-and-Harriet style, if there is one, which is sheer.

HJ: Yes, angels, sheer, over a classic stretch biketard situation.

RB: Metallic, so you get reflective underneath a net jumpsuit.

JSD: Do you also feel like material scientists at this point? You have to know not only how the costumes will move, but also how they’ll interact with the backdrop, the light, the space. Do you make your own fabrics?

RB: No, but sometimes we have fabrics printed, or we paint fabrics, so we manipulate them to become different fabrics. Actually the fabric we’re trying to use as the underlayers for Lubovich’s Ailey piece, we used it in a Pam Tanowitz piece a few years ago where we quilted it over foam, and we turned it into a whole other Moncler-type fabric. Puffy vest.

JSD: I want to wear that.

RB: Like a coat. It would be absolutely incredible. It would be luxe.

JSD: All these people in their North Face whatever can’t even dream of a quilted foam vest.

RB: Metallic quilted foam, the next new thing. I was actually touring China with the Lar Lubovitch dance company in, like, 2009, it was cold, and I remember people in China at the time wearing puffy coats that looked lacquered. Whatever fabric it was, it was so high gloss. Incredible. I haven’t really seen it much here.

There can be something that feels limiting about text. It often has to mean one thing. . . . [In dance] there’s flexibility for all these things to shift and be true, and that doesn’t mess up the story of it. That feels closer to the way life is.

—Jackie Sibblies Drury

JSD: I’m dating myself, but that sounds like something in a Missy Elliott video, which I think was probably just a shiny plastic bag or something, but it looked cool [laughter].

HJ: That’s an iconic look.

RB: Harriet once wore that wet-look shiny-red Britney Spears jumpsuit from a video for Halloween, but made it out of vinyl.

HJ: I even did her hair—I got a wig.

JSD: Did you feel powerful?

HJ: Yes, to be in this crazy vinyl tight unitard and a long wig, it was fun.

RB: It was pretty perfect. It didn’t look like, “Oh, I made a Halloween costume of a Britney Spears costume.” It was like, “I have the jumpsuit.”

JSD: You should just wear that all the time. Although if I were a dancer coming into a fitting and you were dressed in a red wet look, I’d be so intimidated. I would just feel like, “I’ll wear whatever you want, it doesn’t matter.”

RB: That’s the next phase, Harriet, where we come in wearing absolutely absurd outfits to fittings so that people are scared. We actually take the opposite

approach, of looking entirely unassuming in fittings [laughs].

HJ: Right, and then people are like, “Let me design it,” and we’re like, “Please don’t.”

JSD: Does that happen to you? A funny thing to me about working on Illinoise was learning that choreographers making dances don’t get notes the way theater people do. It made me realize that theater people get a lot of notes because people feel like creating narrative is really easy, because we all do it all the time. Does that happen to you a lot, where people are like, “Oh, I dress myself, I don’t leave my house naked, I know what clothes are, so I know how to do this just as well as you do”?

RB: When you’re talking about getting notes for Illinoise, were they coming from the producers? Or who were you getting notes from—the dancers?

JSD: No, from producers.

RB: Oh right, okay. I guess normally when Justin is making dances, there isn’t a next person whose job it is to give feedback unless he’s asking for it. In the theater situation, the producers would be those people.

JSD: Producers, artistic directors.

RB: So you were accustomed to that.

JSD: Very much so. I was surprised we weren’t getting more, honestly. I like getting feedback, it’s always part of my process, but I just noticed that the notes weren’t ever, “Can we add another spin here?” They were like, “I don’t think the story is clear

enough in this section,” not, “The jump should be on a different count.” But maybe that’s not the sort of feedback the producers offer.

RB: I guess conventionally in the ballet-company environment there’s a culture of not interfering with the choreographer, but I don’t think it’s always been so. I think there have been situations like the Ballets Russes, when [Sergei] Diaghilev had the idea of pairing designers and choreographers with visual artists—there, everyone was getting notes from the director. Nowadays artistic directors’ jobs are to curate a season, but then give freedom to the choreographer. But we get notes all the time [laughs]. All the time.

HJ: That’s true. For the New York City Ballet, the tech rehearsal might be what, Reid, two days?

RB: Two days.

HJ: So you have two days to give notes. But on Broadway, for [the 2023 revival of Bob Fosse’s] Dancin’ [1978] I think they had a month to give us notes, you know?

RB: Yes. And not just, “Can that skirt be shorter?” It was, “Can all those costumes be different?” I mean, no [laughs].

JSD: But with that kind of a process, why even do any work before you start teching, if you’re going to have to change everything and you’re going to be working on it for an entire month?

RB: If the realities of production didn’t exist, that would be the best way to do it. You’d just go in when

Previous spread and this page: Illinoise (2023), directed and choreographed by Justin Peck, book by Justin Peck and Jackie Sibblies Drury. Photo: Maria Baronova

Opposite: Watermark (2021), choreographed by Pam Tanowitz for the Australian Ballet. Photo: James Brickwood

All costumes pictured by Reid & Harriet

you’re actually in the space with the actual lights and the actual bodies, and then you’d let the clothes evolve organically. But there has to be this planning process, so that there’s time to build clothes, and that is a problem.

HJ: A lot of times, directors and choreographers don’t really understand the hours it takes to make one shirt. Because we’re used to walking into Walmart and being like, “There are 100 shirts, pick one, buy it, who cares.” So there’s sometimes this disconnect.

RB: The dream scenario working in this multidisciplinary theater environment would be that we would have a team of production people who were with us the whole time and had access to all the machinery on-site. So even if tech had started and we’d roughed out clothes, everything would get finished and built and shifted in real time in the theater, so that the line of productivity would be clear and fast. That actually does exist in some opera houses in Europe, but it’s not possible here.

JSD: That would be so organic and satisfying.

RB: That’s the dream.

JSD: You’ve also melded your designs and personal style in such a way that I remember at one of the opening nights, [the dancer] Gaby [Diaz] wore a dress inspired by her character, which I thought was so cute. She’s now wearing things that fit her body the same way, because it feels celebratory and natural to her. You may have impacted her personal style going forward!

RB: That happens quite a lot, where performers don’t know about a certain shape of garment, and then they wear it enough that they’re like, “Oh, actually—now I’m feeling myself,” and they want to buy clothes that reflect that. That’s fun. We’ll start dressing you up, Jackie.

JSD: I would want to be dressed as an Illinoise hiker, but maybe not as a dancer in Pam Tanowitz’s Day for Night, that performance that you guys just did at Little Island [in Manhattan]. I feel like that would be less natural for me.

RB: We wouldn’t want to change your style, Jackie.

HJ: I was actually going to say, I think you have really good personal style. I remember you wore this almost Western-themed button-up blouse, I don’t remember to which premiere, but it was so perfect and cute. Do you know what I’m talking about?

JSD: I do. I think that was at Bard—still got it in the closet. Do you feel like you’re collaborating more with the dancers or the choreographers you work with, or are you also communicating between them?

HJ: That’s a really great question, Jackie, because sometimes what the dancer wants and what the choreographer wants aren’t the same, and that’s when it gets really difficult, because we’re stuck in the middle. Sometimes the director or choreographer doesn’t like the look but the dancer is in love with it, and we want to make the dancer feel comfortable and good, so we’re like, “Oh my goodness, what do we do?”

RB: Yes. Psychological navigation is a huge part of our work.

JSD: Especially with dance pieces that are less narrative than Illinoise, where you’re creating something that’s almost sculptural, it must be hard to decide if something is correct or not. Or is it easier when narrative is removed?

RB: Not easier, it just becomes a less story-driven question, as opposed to an aesthetic question. It’s about creating inner logic, but one that isn’t obvious, so there can be moments of deviation to create a kind of poetry or a little bit of disorganization. Harriet and I also have to navigate each other in fittings. Sometimes we know it’s great and we can both be like, “Yay!,” but other times I’m like, “I don’t know if Harriet likes this,” so I don’t say anything initially to avoid the two of us disagreeing in front of other people, because that gets strange for the client or the dancer, whomever.

HJ: But we do sometimes [laughs]. RB: Occasionally.

It’s about creating inner logic, but one that isn’t obvious, so there can be moments of deviation to create a kind of poetry or a little bit of disorganization.

HJ: We do. But our disagreement in fittings isn’t tense, it’s not like, “You’re wrong,” it’s more like, “Well, I like this one,” and Reid will say, “Actually I like this other one,” and we’ll decide, “Okay, we’ll sleep on it.”

RB: Yes.

—Reid Bartelme

JSD: I think your relationship is more functional than most marriages.

HJ: This is the longest relationship we’ve both had.

RB: We just keep making it work.

HJ: Reid and I have financials together, we have so many things together.

RB: Yes. There are all these areas where our lives are enmeshed, but then there are very easy boundaries in terms of what we keep separate, which I think is good. We manage to have a lot of fun in the studio. When it’s just Harriet and me, we’re laughing.

JSD: It’s really remarkable, I think.

I love the idea of people coming and working together. . . . as choreographers, [we] start with an empty space, and a body or two, and we say, “Carve this space.”

—Alvin Ailey

Right: Edges of Ailey, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024–February 9, 2025. Photo: Natasha Moustache, courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art

Below: Coral Dolphin in Edges of Ailey, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024–February 9, 2025. Photo: Natasha Moustache, courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Through February 9, 2025

One eyeful of Revelations (1960), or any Alvin Ailey work for that matter, leaves you with a feeling so weighty, it’s beyond words. This might be a cliché in the world of dance, but there’s likely no greater example of the dance critic John Martin’s concept of “metakinesis”: the transference of meaning and energy directly from body to body. A single muscle contraction might send prickles over your skin. Ailey’s virtuosic and vital choreography carries the heft of so much—history, spirit, beauty, race, hope, human communion. Edges of Ailey, an exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, distills and magnifies these threads in an homage to an extraordinary dance artist. Through ephemera, video, paintings, and more, the show brings to life the many facets of Alvin Ailey, the artist and the person. Curated by Adrienne Edwards, senior curator and curatorial-program director at the museum, the exhibition demonstrates the choreographer’s influence on the twentieth-century history not only of dance but also of music, civil rights, visual art, and beyond. An accompanying performance program, featuring such choreographers as Bill T. Jones and Ralph Lemon, attests to Ailey’s living legacy, extending from stages

and dance studios to archives and scholarship. Edwards has said:

Following six years of dreaming, planning, and researching, the extravaganza that is Edges of Ailey finally enters the world. Throughout this process, we have had the gift of Mr. Ailey’s guidance, available to us in his notebooks, interviews, dances, and by the way he did things, to which we have kept very close, and which has shaped every aspect of this show. Until now, there have been many exhibitions in art museums about dance but none about Ailey, a true icon and unquestionably deserving subject. Along the way, every time I told someone that I was working on this project, they would share their own Ailey experience. So many of us have a story about Ailey, the dance company. Such is the extent of his importance and reach. Now audiences will have the chance to know his story. It is no small task to hold someone’s legacy of this cultural magnitude in your hands. We have made something that aims to have the same imagination, sparkle, generosity, rigor, and daring as did he.

The philosopher Thomas Nail, whose newest book, The Philosophy of Movement: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), argues for a philosophy that gives primacy to questions around motion, talks with Ross Simonini about the implications of, and influences behind, these propositions.

According to the philosopher Thomas Nail, “Everything in the cosmos is in motion.” In fact, for Nail there are no “things,” only motion. No static chunks of matter. No nouns. A chair is not solid, nor is it made of many tiny particles. It’s a whirlpool of energy that, to us, appears “metastable.”

The totalizing motion that Nail describes is also completely indeterminate, which means it unpredictably zigs and zags, forever. In scientific/philosophical parlance this is called “swerving,” which is another way of saying that motion itself is in motion.

This is the fundamental idea at the core of Nail’s philosophy of movement, a philosophy with vast implications in every field: politics (migration), science (quantum physics), psychology (identity), ecology (climate change). As for art, Nail considers it not as a series of discrete objects or images but as an ongoing movement between body, mind, viewer, and the world around us. He points to Abstract Expressionism, aleatory music, improvisational dance, and Earth art as clear expressions of kinesthetics— the esthetics of bodies in motion.

Nail breaks down movement into levels of magnification—concepts he calls flows, folds, and fields—and draws on many thinkers, from Virginia Woolf through Karl Marx to the classical philosopher Lucretius. Ultimately Nail calls into question the underlying foundations of Western thought. To him, our belief in determinate objects is an ideology and a prejudice, like nationalism or anthropocentrism, and this calcified thinking is harming us, causing social and environmental problems. He even argues that his own theory is unstable, as are the thoughts and words that construct it. Nothing is fully determinate.

Nail is a prolific writer who has produced many books, but his newest, The Philosophy of Movement: An Introduction, is perhaps the most lucid and comprehensive document of his thought. As an artist, I have enjoyed the wonder that Nail’s ideas impart to my relationship with objects, and I believe his philosophy has something liberating to offer to anyone tired of static ideology and ready for their thinking to swerve.

AN ACTION TRANSPOSED INTO A WORLD

ROSS SIMONINI: It seems like the whole English language, with its nouns and subjects and objects, makes it almost impossible to speak (or even think) about a world of total movement.

THOMAS NAIL: Yes. I’m glad you’ve noticed. And it’s not just the English language; I would venture to say it’s nearly all Indo-European languages, which include more than half of the languages spoken on this planet. The emphasis on nouns is absolutely not universal in all linguistic systems. It’s an artifact of history, and therefore can change. In my work I try to use concepts and words that capture the processlike nature of things, like “flow” and “fold” and “cycle” and “field,” but these only get us so far because they’re still nouns.

RS: It’s almost easier for language to make

someone feel movement than to comprehend it. Have any writers made you feel this?

TN: Virginia Woolf and Lucretius have. They use many beautiful images from nature: rivers, clouds, trees, stars, things that, for me, don’t easily fall into determinate categories.

RS: Thomas Bernhard accesses the endless movement of thought with ongoing unpunctuated run-ons.

TN: And there are other ways of getting at movement linguistically. I’m looking at non–IndoEuropean languages right now, for instance ancient Sumerian. In ancient Sumer there was no concept of nature, there was no epistemology or ontology or similar way of unifying and homogenizing singular ways of being and knowing. The Sumerians had a whole different animist vocabulary. This is why I’m interested in ancient Egyptian and ancient Chinese texts now, like the Daodejing and the pyramid texts, to study their different ways of understanding movement, indeterminacy, and pattern without concretizing it into “nature” or “being,” which risk erasing all the unique differences of the cosmos.

RS: Is art generally well-suited to express a philosophy of movement?

TN: Absolutely. For example, sound and music can really resist our attempts to make something discrete of them, because you can’t just take a snapshot of music or you’ll destroy it. Art’s emphasis on sensuous qualities can also help get us away from the idea that the world is made of discrete quantities. Art offers different ways of seeing. For example, if an artwork could let you see the world with thermodynamic vision, you could watch all the waves and eddies of heat swirling around us and it would be obvious to you that everything was a changing process. But the faster we move, the less we look. We need art to slow us down. The more instrumental our behaviors, and the more capitalist urbanism dominates our lived reality, the fewer processes we tend to see.

For example, when the wind is blowing and you’re in a place like a forest, you really get a sense of how everything is responding to everything else in this very fluid and relational way. Virginia Woolf called these moments “moments of being.” She says that suddenly she would receive a “shock” and see “that behind the cotton wool [of discrete objects] is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.” She says that “all artists I suppose feel something like this.”

RS: Dance seems an especially relevant art form. TN: Yes, dance, in a broad sense, is a focused attention and direction to the movements of the human body, which typically remain unconscious to us. Our whole bodies are constantly rippling with micromovements, rhythms, cycles, and waves that we mostly ignore in order to do other things. But the art of dance can bring all that to the surface and show

us all the processes that are happening and thus show us new ways for them to happen.

As the French poet Paul Valéry wrote, “Dance is an art derived from life itself, since it is nothing more nor less than the action of the whole human body; but an action transposed into a world, into a kind of spacetime, which is no longer quite the same as everyday life.”

Dance can transform everyday life. It may even open up a “moment of being” where the ocean of movements around us, including our own, can be seen as the patterns of flow and iteration that they are. The Italian dancer and choreographer Irene Sposetti does incredible work in her BeingMotion project and I especially love her contact improvisational dance, which really emphasizes the indeterminate, relational, and patterned elements of movement.

CHAOS BREEDS IMAGES

RS: Chaos feels like a primary medium of all art, and seems central to a philosophy of indeterminacy.

TN: Agreed, as long as chaos does not mean disorder. All of the world’s oldest original language cosmogonies began with chaos as indeterminate, moving, fluid, and generative darkness. One of the oldest ideas about the beginnings of things was that everything came from chaos and returned to it.

RS: Right. Many mystical philosophies all point back to chaos.

TN: In the Daodejing , for instance, “ hundun ” is the name of indeterminate, turbulent, dark waters, or “chaos.” Hundun gives birth to the dao-order of the cosmos. But around the sixth century bce, the cosmogonies that began with chaos all started to change and shift, and chaos in its primordial form was removed from all the oldest Eurasian cosmogonies. For instance, the Daodejing begins the world with chaos (hundun), but then Confucianism rejects this starting point and goes on to be the more dominant religion in China for over a thousand years. The Rigveda, too, begins with chaos and movement, but then the Upanishads removed chaos and replaced it with the static god Brahman.

RS: Chaos becomes evil. The devil.

TN: Yes. Movement and chaos become the source of “disorder” relative to the new order and god. In the Hebrew Bible his name was Elohim.

RS: In stories, villains want chaos because it’s anticivilization.

TN: True chaos is the generative source of all cosmic novelty, and thus is a perpetual threat to all systems of order that desire permanence. Political

anarchism, as I understand it, is the recognition that nothing is above movement, and that chaos is why and how things become different from what they are. It’s unstoppable. It’s no accident that the most interesting black metal music often returns to ancient cosmogonies of chaos, like the Mayan Popol Vuh or the Norse Poetic Edda, as sources for artistic creation and novelty in a world dominated by the hegemony of monotheism.

The Irish/British painter Francis Bacon said in an interview, “For me, chaos breeds images.” He said the way he worked was by scrubbing and scratching and destroying his paintings; then he’d see images and patterns beneath “the cotton wool,” to use Woolf’s phrase, and then paint on top of that, and then he’d scratch it away again and paint on that. Through this process of iteration he made these really worked-over, highly ambiguous, pareidoliainducing images.

WAYS OF KNOWING

RS: What’s your definition of art? You describe it in your books as “what humans do when they focus on the qualitative dimension of things,” and you also write, “Art is not a representation of the world, and neither is our experience of it.”

TN: Indeed. To continue my favorite quote from Virginia Woolf, if I may: “The whole world is a work of art; . . . we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.” So yes, to me, what we call “art” is when we emphasize the qualitative dimension of reality in contrast to its quantitative dimension. With this odd-sounding definition I’m trying to expose the fact

Irene Sposetti, Contact Improvisation Festival, Freiburg, Germany, 2023. Photo: Patrick Beelaert

that it is not universal among all cultures to isolate certain types of human-made activity and then call them “art.” That’s a very specific historical invention. For most of human history, there was likely nothing called “art” that was separate from the cosmos itself. In my research on the world’s oldest texts, I find that what “we” call “art” is what they understood to be the human microcosmic iteration of macrocosmic patterns. The words “religion,” “art,” and “nature” are much later historical inventions.

RS: When you say “qualitative,” you’re referring to the distinction we make between the term “art” and everything else?

TN: Yes. What we call “art” as a kind of behavior or object distinct from science or politics, for example, has a specific history. Before we had this isolated thing people called “art,” what were we dealing with? The ancient Minoans did not have “art.” For them, these activities were ways of knowing, ways of being, ways of iterating larger cosmic patterns that were already present in the natural patterns of the ordered world. Humans are always participating in the cosmic order when they make art. It’s not like there’s nature on the one hand and then humans make some art that looks like nature on the other. That’s representation. That’s what I mean by “art is not representation,” in the larger scheme of things. Art doesn’t represent, it iterates. When we say “humans do art,” this divorces art from nature. That’s why I’m so interested in improvisation, generative art, and fractals like those found in Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Pollock once said, “I am nature.” The unity of art and nature (not representation) is the deeper historical insight found in Woolf, Pollock, Nietzsche, Lucretius, and others.

RS: You’ve said that art doesn’t have to be made by humans. Is a Picasso painting no different from a beehive or a flower?

TN: I think there’s a tension to be clarified. On one hand I’m giving a definition as it pertains to the Euro-Western usage of the word “art.” On the other, I’m trying to undermine that usage and say “Art is nature,” via Woolf. But when you say something like “Ethics is nature,” or “Knowledge is natural,” everything kind of falls apart from the modern perspective.

RS: Right. If art is everything, why make distinctions?

TN: When Woolf says “we are the thing itself,” that completely undermines the distinction between art and nature in the Western tradition. It’s a simple thing to say, but the consequences are quite complex and unclear.

RS: Woolf is an artist saying this, so there’s a poetic freedom for her, whereas you are a philosopher, and the implication is that you’re stating definitions and truths. It’s an interesting example of how the space that we give art, even if it’s a kind of artificial, contemporary distinction, still allows for a suspension of our critical faculties, which, in turn, allows us to access a complex thought like “art is nature.” And

we’re both receptive to accepting it from Woolf, who can put it so beautifully, but if I hear it from a philosopher, I bring my critical mind to the conversation.

TN: Yes, I think that’s a big difference, because with philosophers you often expect there to be a definition, which by the etymology of the word “define” means delimit, making something discrete. But when you make something discrete, you cut it off from everything else. That’s what philosophy often does: it cuts everything up into a series of propositions that all fit together in some kind of coherent way. But that’s also a very narrow understanding of what philosophy can be or has been.

RS: Definitely. Some philosophers even seem to model themselves as artists, while others feel like they’re coming out of science. Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze, for instance, very much feel like artists to me. Where do you place yourself in that?

TN: That’s a good question. I’m totally with you for somebody like Nietzsche—I think he imagines himself part poet, part philosopher. But for me, I engage with science in a way that Nietzsche doesn’t. I try to integrate science. And Deleuze absolutely has his own kind of literary conceptual playfulness with the terms of science. He says stuff like “Light moves at infinite speed,” but come on, man! [laughs] Light does not move at infinity, you can’t just say that! But he’s not interested in being consistent with scientific vocabulary. I, however, am interested in art just as much as in science, politics, and ontology. I spent about a decade of my adolescent life really into making art—drawing, painting, and playing guitar in punk-rock bands. From punk I got into political activism for another decade and then into political theory, philosophy, and ontology. And in the last eight years or so of my life, I’ve been much more interested in the sciences and in collaborating with physicists, psychologists, and mathematicians.

Our whole bodies are constantly rippling with micromovements, rhythms, cycles, and waves that we mostly ignore in order to do other things. But the art of dance can bring all that to the surface.

–Thomas Nail

In my book, I’ve proposed some definitional distinctions between philosophy, art, and science as they work in the modern world. But then there’s another part of me that’s already into a very different way of thinking, and trying to push myself and my thinking beyond those distinctions. For me, philosophy has been the act of clarifying the distinctions that have been made previously and adding a few new ones. I’m not committed to my distinctions in an “I got everything right” way, but I do think that if you cut things up slightly differently, you can get really different historical and aesthetic outcomes. So my hope is that the way I’ve proposed the distinctions in my philosophy, we may get some different outcomes that are going to be better than what we have now.

Rennie McDougall is working on a book on dance in New York, to be published by Abrams Press in 2026. Here he shares an overview of one of the topics included: dance diplomacy. Drawing on past scholarship, McDougall reminds us of the fine line between cultural exchange and propaganda in government-sponsored art.

World War II ended shortly after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, each blast killing tens of thousands of civilians in an instant and tens of thousands more in the aftermath. America had proved its brute power, showing the world that it would not hesitate to eradicate innocents in its quest to “defend democratic freedom.” Once the dust had settled and the United States had rewritten international constitutions, occupied rival territory with military bases, and imposed disarmament on other countries while strengthening its own armory, its government was determined to project an image of America as the harbinger not of mass destruction but of freedom and culture, with capitalist democracy the marker of peace.

To accomplish this, the US government developed a multifaceted plan to win the cultural war between capitalist democracy and communism through radio programs and state-sponsored artists’ tours. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the Emergency Fund for International Affairs to present American artists abroad in what he called his “Crusade for Freedom.” Jazz musicians, modernist writers, and Abstract Expressionists traveled the globe advertising the creative freedoms afforded in America and denied to artists in communist countries. So too did dancers—via the advisory panel of the American National Theater and Academy (anta)— performing a freedom of expression through their bodies that challenged the old European hegemony of ballet. In all the arts, modernism was the wave of the free global future. Central to this mission’s success was convincing people—Americans and international citizens alike—that this pro-American propaganda was not propaganda at all but the free expression of individuals.

Martha Graham, one of the most prominent figures in modern dance—not only because of her studied technique, which drew from the central motor power of the body to express deep emotional states, but also because of her powers of oration— went on her first state-sponsored tour as part of Eisenhower’s “Crusade for Freedom” in 1955. Graham and her company visited the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, India, and Iran—countries that Eisenhower referred to as “domino states,” vulnerable to falling into communism at the slightest bump.

Graham had become an advocate of American freedom during the war years. Her Americana works, beginning with Frontier in 1935, depicted the vast American West as a place of unbridled opportunity and the spirit of the individual over the oppression of the group. Perhaps her most overtly nationalistic work was American Document (1938), a dance accompanied by readings of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Declaration of Independence. When American Document premiered, it included text critical of American history, but as the work toured those sections were edited out in favor of a more bluntly patriotic message.1

Despite this, Graham insisted that her works were not political. “I am not a propagandist,” she told an audience in India. Modernism, she and others claimed, was an artistic mode free from any definitive meaning that could be wielded toward political ends. Not that Graham herself didn’t take political positions publicly: she famously rejected an invitation to perform at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, stating that Jewish members of her company would be unwelcome there. “So many artists whom I respect and admire have been persecuted,” Graham stated, “that I should consider it impossible to identify myself, by accepting the invitation, with the regime that has made such things possible.”2

During the Spanish Civil War, she participated in procommunist fundraising (which earned her an FBI file), yet she also expressed avowedly anticommunist sentiments. According to Agnes de Mille, Graham’s friend and biographer, in the late 1920s she likened communists to demolition workers: “Just give them a building to tear down, and they’ll be quite happy to leave our government structures alone.”3

Graham’s works, she said, expressed universal truths, sometimes through ancient Grecian myths, sometimes through an American sensibility. This clever contradiction, that American ideology could become synonymous with universal truth, was central to the American propagandist project during the Cold War and made Graham a perfect ambassador for American interests overseas. The State Department tours were manifestly political in intent. A United States Information Service (USIS) memo, circulated during the planning of Graham’s domino-nations tour and unearthed by historian Victoria Phillips in her exhaustive research on the subject, read, “Entertainment which does not also carry a political message should be reduced to a minimum.” Another read, “Events should be planned and ‘planted’ to implement propaganda themes.” Graham was a vital ambassador precisely because her work could be wielded as propaganda—a word used frequently in USIS memos—but, importantly, didn’t appear to be so.

To avoid the accusation of propagandism, Graham did not perform American Document during her Asian tour. Instead, she presented Appalachian Spring (1944), her vision of the American frontier and its promise of self-made opportunity, free from the tyranny of religion or state. Every performance during the Asian tour ended with Appalachian Spring , and audiences from Japan to Iran stood in rapturous applause during the

curtain call. Political leaders, who initially thought modern art inscrutable and indulgent, attended the performances and became convinced of America’s cultural supremacy in relation to the Soviet ballet. The Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova had toured the same region with a small company just before Graham’s arrival, and the comparison generated what the Japanese press called a “literal war of dance.” 4 The Soviet dance was that of the old world, a product of czarist Russia, art for the elite. Graham’s modernism, conversely, was stark and new, and her diplomacy was hugely effective; her multiracial dance company, as well as her collaboration with the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi, demonstrated an American ideology of inclusion and cultural exchange. In 1957, Paul Gray Hoffman—president of the Ford Foundation, delegate to the United Nations, and later the first administrator of the United Nations Development Program—called Graham “the greatest single ambassador we have ever sent to Asia.”5 In matters of culture, at least, Graham won the war over the Russians.

“Dance Is a Weapon” is a phrase that once appeared in materials produced by leftist dance groups in 1930s New York, such as the New Dance Group and Workers Dance League. During the ’30s, communism had serious support among Americans who’d become disillusioned with capitalism during the Great Depression. In the Communist Party USA, dance played a vital role in uniting workers and their allies. Dance was both a group activity in which everyone could participate and a form of theater that could communicate communist ideology through the dancers’ collective bodies.

Critics found the communist dancers’ use of agitprop techniques—poses and actions used to convey communist messaging in as legible a way as possible—stilted and obvious, deadening the spontaneity and sophisticated possibilities of modern dance. John Martin, the first dance critic for the New York Times, was crucial in popularizing the opinion that politics was anathema to art and that modernism was the movement of America’s future. Modernists such as Graham, whom Martin championed and who opposed the communist agitprop dances, were loath to admit that their own choreographies could be used as a tool in any large political or ideological war. Yet modern dance did become a potent weapon for America during the Cold War, capable of swaying the minds of millions. Modernists were also capable of using overt political messaging in dance, as Graham did in American Document . But when they revealed politics in their works, it was considered universal and apolitical.

Graham was not the first American choreographer supported by Eisenhower’s Emergency Fund. José Limón, a dancer and choreographer originally from Mexico who was a student of modern dancers Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, toured Latin America in 1954, following the CIA’s successful

overthrow of democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, ending the Guatemalan Revolution. Limón’s presence in Latin America, as a Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrant to the United States, was of particular use to the US government in their fight against rising anti-American feelings in the region. Limón symbolized a solidarity between North and Latin Americas, with the goal of distracting from continued US interference in Latin American countries’ right to govern themselves.

As the cultural Cold War continued, the United States worked to further its claim of cultural supremacy by using defectors from the Soviet Union who had come to America to escape limitations placed on Russian artists. George Balanchine came to the United States after first escaping the Soviet Union in 1924 (the year Joseph Stalin assumed power), then fleeing Europe on the eve of World War II. He adopted Americana wholeheartedly, dressing in cowboy attire and idolizing Ginger Rogers and Josephine Baker. Between 1952 and 1956 he took his New York City Ballet on multiple state-sponsored tours, proudly boasting of American freedom and rejecting the limitations put on art in the USSR. Both Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, two star

Previous spread: José Limón leaps high as a part of an all-soldier revue for the Third War Loan Drive, Camp Lee, Virginia, 1943. Photo: Underwood Archives/ UIG/Bridgeman Images

This page: Martha Graham poster in Farsi by the US Information Agency, Tehran, 1956. Photo: Artvee

Opposite: Poster for Martha Graham Dance Company’s performances in Japan, 1955, Ethel Winter and Charles Hyman Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress

ballet dancers who defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 and 1974, respectively, effectively acted as living endorsements of America’s victory in the cultural Cold War.

But the idealistic postwar image of America projected to the world was threatened by contradictions within. Undermining the notion of American freedom was the continued disenfranchisement of Black Americans, brought to global attention by the civil rights movement and used as evidence against America by the Soviets. US agents of the cultural war needed to rectify that image.

In 1962, Alvin Ailey, who founded his company in 1958 with a group of African-American dancers,

went on a state-sponsored tour of Australia, Burma, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Formosa (Taiwan), Japan, and Korea. Ailey’s works, and specifically his piece Revelations (1960), a dance set to traditional Black spirituals and reflecting the AfricanAmerican journey from bondage and struggle to freedom, attested to America’s uplifting of the AfricanAmerican experience and expression.

Ailey, an artist whose work spoke both specifically about African-American experience and universally about the human spirit overcoming oppression, was an ideal American ambassador during the civil rights movement. Black artists whose works confronted racism more directly found less support.

1. See Susan Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 127–28.

2. Martha Graham, in Dance Observer, April 1936, 32.

3. Graham, quoted in Agnes de Mille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (New York: Random House, 1991), 87.

4. See Victoria Phillips, Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 4.

5. Paul Gray Hoffman, quoted in Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 175.

6. Katherine Dunham, quoted in Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 104.

7. Eleo Pomare, quoted in Thomas A. Johnson, “I Must Be Black and Do Black Things,” New York Times, September 7, 1969.

8. Prevots, Dance for Export, 7. 9. Ibid., 9.

For further reading see Clare Croft, Dancers as Diplomats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Katherine Dunham, a pioneer of modern dance who actively challenged segregation, believed she was ignored by anta after one of her works, Southland (1951), which depicted a lynching on stage, received praise from the communist press in Paris. “The State Department has given us no recognition whatsoever,” she said in 1958, “and it is becoming increasingly difficult for me in giving interviews to canny press people to cover up for what could look like discrimination to the rest of the world.”6 Eleo Pomare, a choreographer whose works such as Blues for the Jungle (1966) also reflected the ugly truths of the Black experience in America, said in 1969, “I’m labeled undisciplined, angry, and I know the State Department has forgotten my behind—if they ever even considered sending me overseas to represent the US as an artist—because I will not do what they want from a Black dancer.”7 It was clear that state sponsorship would not come to certain artists who dared to reveal any truth about America’s contradictions when it came to freedom.

The generation of modernists supported by the Cold War campaigns are still upheld as titans of American dance nearly fifty years on. Their legacy as American diplomats and propagandists is less appreciated than their individual artistry and expression. But their legacies cannot be removed from the fact that the individualistic modernism within which they operated played a vital role in diplomatic operations and propagandistic missions in the cultural Cold War. As such, the freedom of their expression was somewhat kept on a leash.

Following the success of the state-sponsored tours, the US government began investing in dance and other arts at home. This was something new, state sponsorship of art being, after all, more of a Soviet project. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Endowment for the Arts, and among the first individual recipients of its dance grants were choreographers previously supported by state-sponsored tours, including Graham, Limón, and Ailey. In the decades to follow, dance experienced a golden age of support, building audiences and appreciation for a modern dance that signaled both a unique American sensibility and a universal appeal. Importantly, support was granted by peer-review panels, ensuring some separation between the government and the arts.

This support, vital for the ascendance of modern dance in the United States, helped to establish the contradictory sense that American art was both free from political intervention and useful as pro-American propaganda. This contradiction would become harder to reconcile in the latter half of the century, as the postwar belief in the benevolence of American diplomacy started to wane. American involvement in wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq (to name just a few) dispelled many Americans’ belief that their country’s diplomacy relied solely on peace and cultural exchange. Artists

became less inclined to be used as propaganda and were more likely to critique American imperialist projects, both in their works and beyond. The idea that modernism had been an apolitical art movement was no longer tenable.

In 1998, the dance historian Naima Prevots, in the prologue to her book Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War , wrote that cuts to arts funding in the 1990s threatened the arts in America and that it would be instructive to look back to Eisenhower’s support of the arts “as an important aspect of American life, but also as a powerful tool in the creation of world peace.” 8

But when posing the question of whether government support of dance during this period had a political agenda, Prevots answered no. “In dance,” she wrote, “the groups sent abroad were chosen by a panel of professional peers,” which “sought to insulate the selection process from overt political pressure, ensuring that merit would be the chief consideration.”9 Today, in considering the lessons of that period of governmental support, we should recognize what Prevots could not: that merit alone is an often dubious claim, and that even in the absence of overt political pressure, government support of the arts depended on their usefulness for diplomatic and ultimately propagandistic goals. During the same postwar period when state support elevated the modernists, the development of McCarthyism led to the scouring of government departments for anyone with communist sympathies. Leftists were thrown out of the very government arts departments they had helped establish during the New Deal era. By the ’90s, the National Endowment for the Arts declined funding to performance artists whose work it deemed immoral and degenerate (code for work with overtly homosexual content), ending the period of peerreviewed arts funding free from obvious political interference. But as some artists had known from the start, the artistic freedom for which America prided itself around the world was greater for those who did not challenge America’s idealized vision of itself.

Opposite: Thea Narissa Barnes in Martha Graham’s work Frontier, 1987, Martha Graham Legacy Archive, Music Division, Library of Congress.

Photo: David A. Fullard, PhD

This page: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Leningrad, 1970, Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress

Dance

Winter 2024

Editor in chief: ALISON MCDONALD ; Dance Editor: GILLIAN JAKAB; Managing Editor: WYATT ALLGEIER ; Text Editor: DAVID FRANKEL ; Design Director: PAUL NEALE ; Design: ALEXANDER ECOB, GRAPHIC THOUGHT FACILITY

Contributors: REID BARTELME, MOEKO FUJII, HARRIET JUNG, RENNIE MCDOUGALL, THOMAS NAIL, AMIT NOY, JACKIE SIBBLIES DRURY, ROSS SIMONINI

Front cover: Dispatch Duet (2022), choreographed by Pam Tanowitz for the Royal Ballet, costumes by Reid & Harriet © 2022 Royal Opera House, London.

Photo: Andrej Uspenski; Back cover: Jeux (2023), choreographed by Christopher Williams, costumes by Reid & Harriet. Photo: Maria Baranova

GAGOSIAN & Dance, the fourth in a series of stand-alone themed supplements

MICHAEL CRAIGMARTIN COLM TÓIBÍN

Michael Craig-Martin’s sixty-year career is the subject of a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, on view through December 10, 2024. Ahead of the exhibition’s opening, the artist met with his longtime friend, the novelist Colm Tóibín, to discuss his materials and the generative inquiries at the heart of his practice.

I was invited to do an interview for the Quarterly in conjunction with my current retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It was suggested to me that it be with an artist in a different field. I decided to take the opportunity to ask Colm Tóibín. I was delighted and touched when he agreed.

We were introduced some years ago by close mutual Irish friends. Colm and I were both born in Ireland, though our lives and worlds have been very different. Colm lives in Los Angeles now. In order to speak face to face we arranged to meet at a hotel in Barcelona, a city close to his heart. His conversation is personal, warm, relaxed, chatty, moving easily from subject to subject. He has a powerful presence, very animated both facially and physically, alert and engaged.

I had expected us to have something like a conversation and had prepared things to ask Colm. I had not expected him to have decided to genuinely interview me, but as you can see from the first question, that’s what he did. I have done numerous interviews, but this one was different. The extreme simplicity and directness of the questions are those of an artist, not a critic or commentator: not “What’s it about” but “How is it done.” A maker’s questions about materials and processes.

I am deeply grateful to Colm for the great compliment of this interview.

—Michael Craig-Martin

COLM TÓIBÍN I’m an outsider in this world of visual art, so there are certain things I need to clarify. I’m going to say a word, and could you just tell me what it’s meant to you and what it’s done for you? The first word is “acrylic.”

MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN Acrylic is a kind of plastic paint. It’s unlike oil, and it has certain advantages and certain disadvantages. For me, one of acrylic’s big advantage is it dries very quickly, almost immediately. Also, I couldn’t do what I do with oil paint because in order to draw the lines on the surface, I use tape, paint over the tape, and then remove the tape to get the line. Oil paint would go under the tape and make it lift, whereas the acrylic paint seals the tape down.

CT So take me through “tape,” the second word. MCM I use this tape that I found in the ’60s, which was originally designed for the electronics industry. It’s very unusual because, first, it comes in every width: from unbelievably fine, like a hair, up to an inch. Second, it’s made out of crepe paper. And because of this you can make any kind of curve you want.

CT Tell me exactly how you do that.

MCM You just do it with your finger and you press it down. And what’s fantastic is, unlike a pen, if you get it a little bit wrong, you pull it off and do it again.

CT Now take me through another word, the word “paper.”

Opening spread, left: Michael Craig-Martin standing beneath An Oak Tree, Rowan Gallery, 1974. Photo: © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth. All rights reserved 2024/ Bridgeman Images

Opening spread, right: Michael Craig-Martin, Self-portrait (aqua), 2007, acrylic on aluminum, 48 × 35 ¼ inches (122 × 92 cm), The Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London/ John Hammond

Opposite: Michael Craig-Martin, Zoom , 2020, acrylic on aluminum, 78 ¾ × 89 ¾ inches (200 × 228 cm)

This page, right: Installation view, Michael Craig-Martin , Royal Academy of Arts, London, September 21–December 10, 2024. Photo: David Parry, courtesy Royal Academy of Arts

MCM Well, I use paper very little anymore because I do all my drawing directly into the computer, using a mouse. I don’t like using those stylus pens or anything like that.

CT But before you had a computer—

MCM Before that, I drew in pencil on paper, and then I put a sheet of clear acetate on top of the drawing. Using very thin tape, I would trace my own pencil drawing so as to get a perfect line drawing, because what I wanted, originally, was to have a kind of drawing that had no signature. With tape there’s no gesture in the line at all. But ultimately that process of pencil, acetate, paper was clumsy for my purposes, because what I wanted was to produce templates. So once I’d drawn a book, I never drew another book, because it wasn’t necessary. I used the same drawing again and again for everything— every time I needed a book, I had the template. The problem with the acetate was that the sheet is only one size. It was limiting. Then I got the computer and I could scan everything into the computer and change the size as desired.

CT Take me through aluminum, your surface of choice now, compared to paper.

MCM I didn’t go directly from paper to aluminum. Originally I made paintings, like most people, on canvas. The problem was, I’m making paintings that need to have a flat and firm surface. Because I’m using tape, I have to push down to get the tape to stick; and in order to put the paint on, I use little rollers. I don’t need a surface that gives, like canvas. It was okay, but it wasn’t totally satisfactory. When I discovered that you could make paintings on aluminum, it was a great relief. The aluminum is so precise, and for the kind of extremely precise work that I do, it’s the perfect ground.

CT So the aluminum and the computer both arrive to solve problems and create solutions for you.

MCM This also coincided with a third factor, which is I suddenly discovered how to use color.

CT I want to go back a moment, to 2004, when I curated an exhibition in Dublin for the Chester Beatty Library. They asked me to select things from their collection. I came in as a nonscholar, noncurator, and I couldn’t work out what to do until I decided to just choose the color blue. I selected blue objects, but then the question was how to present this to the public. And one of the ways was to use you. So your work opened the exhibition. I bring this up because I’ve known people who were genuinely surprised when they learned that your relationship to color wasn’t merely uneasy, but that for many years you

were unwilling even to entertain color. Now it’s so much a part of your work that people have a hard time believing that wasn’t always the case.

MCM Before I started to use color in such a big way, it was scary. I’m an almost excessively logical person; I set out on a track and I expect the track to take me in a logical direction. And color seemed so wayward. It wasn’t until the early ’90s that I suddenly started to use big color—red, yellow, blue, green, pink, orange—always the brightest hue of whatever color it was, and always a color you could name, just like the objects. I don’t use a mixed color, never grayish or bluish. No. It’s got to be blue, red, yellow, pink, purple, whatever.

The revelation was suddenly discovering that it didn’t matter what a color was when you painted it; what mattered was the colors together. Once you start to use certain colors, then other colors fall into place, of course, so it’s not as arbitrary as it sounds, but there’s a freedom of choice about such things. You don’t need to say, “This is an object that would be seen in green, that’s the natural color. Grass should be green.” But even grass, you can make a painting of grass and why not make it blue? In a painting it doesn’t matter; that’s a wonderful expressive freedom.

CT Do you remember exactly when this realization occurred?

MCM That started in the early ’90s, with two exhibitions: one at the British School at Rome and the other at the Galerie Papillon in Paris [both 1993]. The installation in Rome was the first time I painted the walls a color. The space was an old room with two marble fireplaces. I was used to exhibiting in whitebox galleries and suddenly I’m in a room with history, a room with character, a room that has a past. And this past is visible. So I thought, Well, I should play with the character and paint the walls with colors. The Papillon gallerist saw the show in Rome and said we should continue with color in Paris. Her gallery had six small rooms around a little courtyard—a very Parisian kind of thing—and I painted every room a different color. From the minute I did that, and saw the response to it, I never went back.

CT But it was partly your own response to it too, wasn’t it?

MCM Oh, I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. By doing this, the walls invited people to step inside the painting. The rooms became the painting.

CT In your paintings, the object—if we can use the word “object” or “subject” or “thing” in this context— be it a pen, a ball, or whatever you’re putting at the

center, it has no history, right? It has no personal dimension. You’re not expressing some immense thing using the object as the vehicle.

MCM No. My idea with the objects is I treat them absolutely neutrally, and I treat them the same no matter what they are, whether it’s a grand piano or a safety pin. I draw it the same way and I treat them as equals. I have no hierarchy.

CT There was a fascinating image in the catalogue for your exhibition at Chatsworth House [ Michael Craig Martin at Chatsworth , Derbyshire, March 16–June 29, 2014] where this large pink highheel-shoe sculpture is casting a shadow [laughs ]. And I go, I found a shadow! But the important thing in the work is that the flatness is flatness is flatness, is that right?

MCM That’s true. But of course, the wonderful thing about what you’re describing with the shadow is, it’s not a sculpture of a high heel or a pitchfork or whatever, it’s a sculpture of a drawing. And it’s the drawing that’s casting the shadow and the shadow is in a sense identical to the object because the shadow is also two-dimensional. It’s also an image.

CT I’m presuming that this doesn’t arise from a large philosophy of objects, but rather that it arises from some fastidious relationship to work, to the making of it. Help me.

MCM The objects are the subject matter of what I do. When people look at my work, they see the subject matter. When people talk about artwork, generally they’re not talking about the work, they’re talking about its subject matter. Now the subject matter of the objects has allowed me to explore the world of image making, the world of two dimensions, the world of painting, the world of drawing, the world of sculpture. Those are my interests. After all, I don’t make the objects I draw; I make a different kind of object, which is an image object.

CT It’s fifty-one years now since An Oak Tree [1973], your celebrated installation that consisted of a glass of water on a wall-mounted glass shelf, accompanied by a text you wrote, in Q&A form, that states that you have transformed the glass of water into an oak tree. Could you tell me who you were then, where you were living, what was happening around you? Imagine you’re a novelist and take me through the character of you from those days.

MCM I’m in my early thirties. I’ve been working as an artist since I was about twenty-five, twenty-six

when I left art school. I’m teaching a lot. And I’m at the ground level of Conceptual art, the beginnings of Conceptual art. A lot of Conceptual art was to do with language, but there were also many people who were interested in what art is: What’s the essence of it? What can be art and what’s not art? You have artists putting work on the floor, or artists doing giant things in the landscape. I’m one of the people who’s interested in a philosophical question: What’s the essence of art, what’s the bottom line? And An Oak Tree is my answer at thirty-three or thirty-two to what’s the bottom line, what’s the base, if you strip art to the bare minimum. I thought, since art is usually seen in terms of transformation, the ultimate artwork was one in which none happened at all. There’s no transfiguration, but there is transubstantiation—which, if I hadn’t been a Catholic, I wouldn’t even have known existed. There’s a change of the essence of something but not the appearance of it. I wrote the text that completes the work; I realized that if I said this is an oak tree, that’s the name change, but that’s not enough. I’m not saying it’s an oak, I’m saying it’s become something it doesn’t look like. For that I needed more words, and I decided to put it in the form of a discourse, so it’s question and answer. There’s the believer and the skeptic, the artist and the audience. That’s the text.

CT What school did you go to?

MCM I went to the Priory School in Washington, DC, an English Benedictine high school.

CT I mean, hello [laughter ]. All of us who were brought up with transubstantiation, especially with the wine, where you lift the cup and say some words and from that moment on it’s the blood . . . it was the wine, now it’s the blood. Some words made it change. That idea of believing and not believing, of seeing and not seeing, that came to us who were Catholics.

MCM We grew up with this. It was completely acceptable. And I realized that for works of art, there’s a way in which they don’t work if you don’t believe.

CT So after that, between say ’74 and the early ’90s when you start to use color, aluminum, the computer—what’s happening in those years?

MCM Well, there’s a long period of me doing different things. Basically, what happens is when I do An Oak Tree , it’s such an absolute work that I realized

Left: Installation view, Michael Craig-Martin , Royal Academy of Arts, London, September 21–December 10, 2024. Photo: David Parry, courtesy Royal Academy of Arts

Opposite: Michael Craig-Martin, Pricks , 2000, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 56 inches (213.4 × 142.2 cm)

Artwork © Michael Craig-Martin

that once I’d done it, there was no next piece.

CT Yeah.

MCM I couldn’t go on from it. It was a dead end. I floundered for a little while. I saw the work as liberating, and yet I was being trapped by it. So I went back to basics: draw objects. I went from using objects, like the glass of water, to drawing them. I became more and more interested in the world of two-dimensional image making.

CT Are you still answering the question of what art is, or what can be done with the drawings, as much as you were with An Oak Tree ? Is it the same question?

MCM I see it as the same question. Other people see a bigger difference between the work of the early period and the work of the later period. To me, all the work that I’ve done is consistent. Essentially, it’s asking why is one thing art and not another thing? What’s the role of image making in art? I’m still in that exploration. Every time I’ve thought that what I was doing had seized up on me and I couldn’t think of what to do next, a little door has opened somewhere. In some ways what I’m dealing with, these objects, is basic and small or stupid in a sense. But I have some weird belief that part of art is to make something that’s stupid not stupid. Or to make something that’s not important important. Of course you can see the objects—a pitchfork, a tape, a shoe—as symbols, as metaphors, but in the end it’s just a shoe. And that’s actually more interesting than all the other things that are supposed to make it interesting.

CT To what extent are you doing something playful?

MCM I see it as totally playful; that’s the whole exercise. It’s not science, it’s play.

CT But if you’re saying it’s not science, it’s also not art in the romantic sense of somber solemnity about emotion, sublimity via the image—you’ve taken so much out of that.

MCM Yes. As with An Oak Tree , I’ve tried to strip away everything I thought was unnecessary and to see what happened. Over the years of working, the thing that continues to surprise me is that no matter how much I strip away, there’s always so much left. There was always plenty there even after I’d stripped away everything that I saw as marginal. You get rid of a certain kind of expression, you get rid of this, rid of that, and still it’s interesting.

Rosalind Brown’s debut novel Practice , released earlier this year, has been garnering high praise from critics and fellow authors for its vivid and honest depictions of mental processes and daily ritual. The story tracks a single day in the life of a university student, Annabel, as she attempts, amidst a litany of diversions, to compose an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Here, author and senior editor of Harper’s Magazine Joanna Biggs meets with Brown to discuss the futility of divorcing mind and body, the pitfalls of discipline, and what it means to write as an aesthetic project.

joanna biggs: One of the things I really loved about the novel is how a philosophical problem is given novelistic shape. It’s very difficult to fit philosophy or a topic like the mind/body problem into a novel. It’s unusual. I’m thinking of Simone de Beauvoir’s novels, which never really quite do it, or Jean-Paul Sartre’s. There are other books that try to, but I really think yours gives the mind/body problem expression in a novelistic form. Practice is set over the course of one day, when the protagonist Annabel is trying to write an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets but her body’s always calling her away: she needs to pee, she needs to eat, she needs to have coffee, she needs to masturbate, she needs to go and walk and do yoga, all these different things.

rosalind brown: I don’t think it should be as unusual as it is, but I agree that it’s certainly unusual. The mind/body problem: I suppose the word “problem” is a problem for me. The way that Annabel is choosing to live, it’s a kind of intellectualization applied to everything, even a compliment or someone she met in the kitchen. But there’s also a concretization of the kind of academic work that she’s doing. She pictures Shakespeare sitting at a table writing. She pictures the young man coming to the theater to see a play. There’s a melding of these two modes, which she’s doing unconsciously or instinctively, really without thinking about it. She has this very clear structure for the day, where she has the mind in the morning and then the body in the afternoon, but without realizing it she’s closer to a more integrated model than she realizes.

jb: I also wanted to ask whether the idea cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am,” is different for women?

rb: That’s the myth that’s been created around women’s existence, the idea that women have a closer connection with their bodies because of childbirth and breastfeeding and periods, but I suspect that what that phrase suggests more is that historically there’s been a lack of connection between men and their bodies. I don’t think that’s actually true either, but that’s part of the myth. Alienation from one’s own body, if “alienation” is even the right word, is complex.

jb: I was thinking of novels like Sheila Heti’s Motherhood [2018], where there are these cycles of the body that shape the narrative. But in your book, it’s not an argument about mind or body, which is better or whatever, but an exploration of their entanglement. I went through picking out all the moments when she wants to be different things: when she’s saying it’s much better to be a body, when she says things like, “There’s nothing even in the best of the sonnets that could convincingly replicate the sensation of being fucked by him.” So it’s like sex is way better than any kind of text could be—

rb: I don’t know if that’s exactly what she’s saying.

jb: What is it she’s saying?

rb: Well, I think it’s not that one is better than the other thing, it’s just that the two are not the same, even if the pleasure she gets in reading Shakespeare is also extremely intense and physical, especially when she’s had some coffee, but it’s still not the same. But there’s a kind of equal value that the two things have. I think the argument is that she needs both. She wants both.

jb: Also the thing about the mind/body problem is that we can’t not have both. Sometimes you need to piss and sometimes you need to read a poem. That’s how it is, right?

rb: Yeah. And you know, the argument of phenomenology, Maurice MerleauPonty for example, is that all thoughts are thought by a body, a perceiving body. So perception is where we need to begin all philosophical problems, not just those that are more obviously about perception. Does that make sense?

jb: Yes. And is that where you begin as a novelist?

rb: It’s hard to say. It’s interesting what you said about trying to write a philosophical novel because, although I’m really interested in philosophy, I’m a novelist because I want to write novels. I didn’t sit down and think “I want to write a novel about the mind/body problem,” or a question or a theme. I think maybe that’s why some philosophical novels fail—because they’re set up as this kind of allegory. I find this sometimes even in Iris Murdoch, who’s an obviously very accomplished novelist, that sometimes I don’t get the impression that she wrote this book because she wanted to write a novel. She wanted to set out this problem and let it unfold in a narrative form. For me it’s not about that so much as creating a complete literary experience or thing . . . neither of those words is right . . . a literary phenomenon.

jb: No, those words arrive at something that I was thinking about as I read Practice. With so many novels I think, “Oh, this could be a movie.” But your book remains resolutely literary. The other novel I think is a supreme example of this is Beloved [1987], by Toni Morrison—that is a movie actually, weirdly, but the book is such a pure experience of language. I think a novel doesn’t work properly if it’s not in language in this sense.

rb: Yes, there’s something that can be done with language on the page that isn’t available to films or adaptations. Practice was able to grow out of a few of the images that Annabel is picturing to herself: these very abstract metaphorical—well, let’s say poetic—thoughts. In any case, only documentable in language. For me, [Marcel] Proust was key to this approach, because he is supremely novelistic and incredibly aesthetic. His whole novel is basically an attempt to pin down a series of very fleeting internal processes that the character is remembering/experiencing/reexperiencing. And the reason I want to write novels rather than feature articles, where I’m arguing something a bit more clearly, is because a novel is where you can find out what’s in the image that’s been made. You can then think, Okay, what style is this? And what are the affordances of this particular starting point? And when I say style, I don’t just mean how the sentences are written, I mean a sensibility, in the way novels by Henry James or Virginia Woolf are complete sensibilities. You can consider not only the structure of the paragraphs but also how the plot and the characters evolve in a continuous line from the formal composition. What I found when I really tuned into that was that Practice—this sounds terrible to say—but Practice almost wrote itself, because then it was an aesthetic project and that made a lot of things clearer and easier.

jb: That makes sense. I was thinking about the comparison of this book to Proust in another way, too: in Practice, it’s all occurring on one day, all these different thoughts about the mind, the body, reading, desire. And in Proust, I remember as I finished In Search of Lost Time [1913–27], after the two years I’d spent [laughter]—

rb: I took longer than that.

jb: He squashes everything into one party, one moment, one day. And that’s the point, that everything comes together in one moment, in a rush. That’s one of the things art can do to us, it can change time.

rb: And just to say one final thing about Proust: I find it really satisfying that at the end, one of the few things that makes the narrator crystallize and realize his vision of being a writer is not his great love for Albertine or whatever, it’s him tripping over an uneven paving stone, or a spoon being knocked against a plate. And in the first volume, it’s the coming into and out of view of the church towers—very tiny but incredibly vivid, visceral moments like that. It’s actually quite abstract but also very accurate. And I find the same with Woolf: if you read her diaries, the way she talks about her writing is always extremely abstract and full of metaphors of deep pools that are filling up slowly . . . she doesn’t limit herself to sitting down and saying, “What will this novel be about?” And that’s the reason I wanted to talk so much about style and texture earlier, because I think a typical book review spends most of its word count addressing what a novel is about rather than how it exists as a kind of linguistic experience. To the point where even—have you read Milkman [2018], by Anna Burns?

jb: I haven’t, no. I should do.

rb: It’s incredible. And the way it was written about, and the way certain friends spoke about it—they wanted to frame it purely in terms of the feminist impulse that might have driven her to write it. Which definitely exists, but the novel is also a brilliant stylistic project. That’s all I could think about it. It’s really hard to describe, and yet I think about 90 percent of the experience of reading the book is that it’s completely odd and original on that level.

jb: The other writer I’ve heard talk about writing this way is ClaireLouise Bennett.

rb: Oh yes. Great example.

jb: And you’re right, there are lots of things wrong with book reviewing but one of them is that sometimes you read a book review and it’s like, That wasn’t my experience of the book.

rb: Or reading a book review and saying, Okay, I know a lot about the plot—in fact, you’ve spoiled the plot for me, thanks very much—but also, what is this book like? I think that’s a completely different question from “what is the book about,” because obviously any topic, any plot, could be treated in so many different ways that it would be a completely different novel. Claire-Louise Bennett is amazing and I remember reading Pond [2015] at some point, I think it was between my master’s and my PhD, and thinking, Thank God someone is taking a tone. I remember having that phrase come to mind. Not in a kind of “Don’t you take that tone with me” way, but taking a tone as in deciding to adopt a voice that’s not a cinematic, transparent voice that reads as if the screenplay was half-written already. Rather, it’s a literary voice that has to be a piece of literature.

jb: Your book is very funny. There were many moments that made me laugh, particularly when Annabel is thinking about Shakespeare being

rejected and imagining his beloved seeing him as the snively poet before going to the Globe Theatre and realizing that he is actually this swaggering actor. Was it important for you that Annabel’s life of the mind was funny and satirical and riotous and free?

rb: Well, I wouldn’t enjoy writing something devoid of humor. I mean . . . I don’t know. I’m trying to find an artistic motive for making it funny. Maybe I don’t need to.

jb: No, you don’t. You can enjoy yourself writing it; we can enjoy ourselves reading it. Practice was part of your creative writing PhD, which also included a scholarly essay about the legends that have grown up around writers’ routines, right?

rb: That’s how it ended up. It started as a project about the novella as a form, because I felt that not enough had been written about the novella. Not so much what it is, because obviously it’s a completely manufactured idea as a genre, but what we make it represent. And I kept coming up against this: “Oh, it’s a very disciplined version of the novel.” Then I got really stuck on this question of discipline and how much people seem to value it in literature. What does discipline mean in this context? Quite often I concluded that actually what we’re talking about is the writer editing out anything that’s “unnecessary” in the text. But all of it is, strictly, unnecessary; no novel needs to exist, so what does that even mean? Our cultural obsession with how disciplined writers are with their routines—if you google writers’ routines, it’s just insane. And particularly when editing—there’s a huge amount of kill-your-darlings-type advice that really seems aimed at editing the pleasure out of writing and whatever might make that particular writer unique or original. Really, use some adverbs if you want to. It was a bit polemical, the PhD in its start, but then I diverted through Freud, and also Michel Foucault, to try and understand that as a cultural phenomenon. What I’ve concluded about discipline is that if it gets in the way of harmonizing with the bit of you that wants to write, then it’s probably not helpful. You need a very fine-tuned attention to harmonize with that bit, but once you do, then enjoy it. Otherwise there’s no point. It’s not like it’s really well-paid, so why else do it?

jb: I can feel the pleasure when I read Practice. I can see that you care about these things deeply and about the writer’s mind getting to stretch and try things and have fun on the page. I often think Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own [1929] has been misunderstood because people say, “Oh, she’s arguing for £50 a year and a lock on the door,” but actually so much of that book, and the lectures that it came from, are about what happens when you’re in that room. What things get in your way? There’s a bit at the end where Woolf says, “I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.” Which is the point about both phenomenology and the value in taking a tone. When you were thinking of Annabel being in that room, working on her essay on the sonnets, what are the problems that get in the way of her writing? How does she get to things in themselves? How does she get to being herself?

rb: Well, in the kinds of essays that you write as an undergrad, you’re not encouraged to write in an impressionistic way. And I think that’s Annabel’s main problem—she’s really impressionistic, or at least she’s experiencing the sonnets and her life as a series of beautiful moments. Her thoughts are not easily converted into propositional knowledge. That’s one issue that she’s having. And then just concentration. I think the difficult thing when you shut that door and you’re in the room on your own is there’s always potentially a part of your brain that says you should be doing something else, or that you could be doing something else. And with an inexhaustible subject like Shakespeare’s sonnets, there’s always something else you could be reading, and you’re always a little bit worried that the idea you’re going to come up with has already been thought of so it won’t be valid in some way. Or, simply, you’re a bit thirsty and your glass is empty so you’d better go and get some more water. There’s always a kind of side commentary: when is my next break going to be? Have I done enough to stop for the day? Or whatever.

Annabel’s trying to work out what’s better, to go and speak with people and have her boyfriend stay, or to leave enough space that she can actually have all these other weird thoughts and fantasies that are entirely hers. And that goes back to the Woolf thing about being oneself. The things that are yours won’t come if you do all the things that you feel like you should be doing.

jb: Yeah, you can’t even know what they are if you’re just doing that.

rb: In a way it’s a version of “write what you know,” isn’t it, the kind of “be oneself” thing, which is a very boring piece of advice, except that for Woolf, what she knew was constantly expanding. She was reading all the time, she traveled a lot, she learned languages. Lydia Davis has an essay that makes a similar point: write about what you care about, but make sure you care about a lot of things and learn all the time. That’s much more valuable to me than “Make sure you get up early, make sure you schedule time to write.” Yes, okay, I’ll admit I do do that [laughter], but that’s not all I need to do to be a good writer.

Artist to Artist Sarah Sze & Rirkrit Tiravanija

In 2023, Sarah Sze’s immersive video installation Pictures at an Exhibition made its debut at the Thailand Biennale, titled The Open World and codirected by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gridthiya Gaweewong in Chiang Rai. On the occasion of the work’s inclusion in Sze’s 2024 exhibition at Gagosian, Paris, she met with Tiravanija to discuss thriving in chaos, making room for experiences in time, and her materials.

SARAH SZE How was your flight to Paris?

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA My flight was great. I thought I should read a little about your work before our conversation; I like to read what a fellow artist has said, so I can ask them to say more. But, Sarah, you’ve said everything already.

SS [laughs]

RT I was like, what question could I ask to pry open more stuff? Well, one thing I want to hear more about is your current exhibition, here in Paris. It feels a little like an earlier work of yours, Portable Planetarium [2010]. It feels like you’re exploring planets. When your work Pictures at an Exhibition debuted in The Open World, the piece became the heart of the show, with the clock ticking, beating, in the middle of it all. It was amazing to watch it with the other works: Pierre Huyghe’s film [Untitled (Human Mask) (2014)], which was apocalyptic, like the last person

on Earth, you know? And Haegue Yang’s piece [Envelopes Domestic Soul Channels— Mesmerizing Mesh #208 (2023)] about shamanist cures for problems in the world. All of these things were talking to each other. For people who came to that show, many if not most were unfamiliar with art like that, but at the same time, they could totally enter it and relate to it. The imagery is so much of the everyday.

SS That combination of Haegue’s, Pierre’s, and my work was a really nice curatorial nexus. It was interesting to work with you as a curator—you were completely carte blanche. You had no idea what I was going to make. I actually didn’t know what I was going to make. Then you gave me this huge room alongside these incredible artists, so I had to really make something [laughter]! It was a nice opportunity to do something fast that could be very experimental. I wanted it to be flexible and light and portable. I wanted it to just appear onsite and bloom like a flower.

I’d gone to this talk about the James Webb telescope. They explained how the engineers had got the telescope farther into space: almost like a piece of origami, they brought it out flat and then let it unfold into space. The whole structure was about this kind of unfolding. I love this idea. It reminded me of those oyster shells with paper flowers in them. You put it into water and then a rose grows out of it.

RT It’s also like those Chinese paper toys that come flat and you blow air into them. I like the element of animation in your work: the movement and life that’s bubbling or boiling or changing. There’s always kineticism, and in this particular work, it’s all there in such a simple way.

SS I wanted it to be like a kiosk, a system that unfolds and provides information anywhere it goes. I always think about the site of a work. Pictures at an Exhibition has this sense that anywhere you bring it, it solves the problems of the space. In this location in Paris, there’s a frame through which

you enter the space, seeing a portion of the videos through it. The video in this work isn’t projected on a flat screen, it’s on all of these shredded pieces of paper. But you look through the frame of the entrance and it’s like you’re seeing a moving image through a portal rather than projected on a flat screen. It was an entirely unexpected way to view a film.

And then in the space in Thailand we had these crazy tall doors that made it feel like you were entering an entirely new world. There was this spill of light. It began with a remainder. And then when you entered there was more a compression in the space. The sculpture acted like a magnet and a projector at the same time.

RT To install a video sculpture without having to black out the room was a great part of it.

SS Right, I didn’t want anything that tells you, “Now I’m going into the art and now I’m coming out.” You just find yourself in it. You find it melds in and out of the real world. It’s in conversation with the architecture, they’re married. Obviously that melding of art with daily life is deeply part of your work too.

RT We spoke a lot about the idea of wanting an experience in time. People don’t often spend much time looking at art, but with your work you have to spend time. You have to pay attention to little things. We’re currently in a TikTok world, made up of these short little clips, and that’s reflected in your work, but at the same time it also goes much deeper. As a viewer, you can keep watching, plant yourself down, or move around it. It’s really successful that way.

SS It’s interesting that you brought up TikTok, because of the speed of these timeframes in which we’re fed information. We develop dexterity moving through that timeframe. I think of Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth [1999]; when he made that, everyone was looking at it and thinking, “I know exactly how to read this, but I don’t know why.” I should ask him, but I think it’s because he’d been doing a lot of commercial editing, so it was edited

in that way. It was extremely fast, with very short, fast edits, because commercials are dictated by finances. It’s a kind of edit that leaves you wanting more—that timeframe is constant desire, constant longing. It’s the frame of: I’ll show it to you, I’ll give you it, oh, now I take it back. And then you wait to see it again. I was trying to do something similar with the edit for this work, but the sense of time, the pace, of editing and of dealing out information has shifted substantially since the ’90s or even the 2000s.

RT What I notice is the variety of imagery in the video. You’re making it with so many different genres—it’s an encyclopedia of ideas.

SS That’s what it was supposed to do: think through how we’ve used film or images to track time. So the variants of ten is a reference to Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten [1968/1977]. Also Chris Marker’s La Jetée [1962] and Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 [1962]. There are direct references to [Eadweard] Muybridge: the experimentation and creation of slow motion by August Musger in 1904, the crowning-of-the-milk image by Harold Edgerton in 1957. No one had ever seen time like that.

RT In a way you’re turning the history of video art upside down by playing with these different elements.

SS I think artists have this amazing opportunity to look at their work as a lineage of conversation over time. It’s interesting to look at someone like Nam June Paik or Maya Deren, and for me to think what they were doing so brilliantly and then what I want to do differently. It’s educational to look at the work and decide exactly why you’re not going to do that and use that information to define your own work. Scientists have a more formal way of looking at each other’s work and learning from it, they grow off each other’s work. Which is honestly what we as artists do. So for me, looking at Nam June Paik’s work over time gave me the energy to be free from the object. I was more interested in this idea of energy—physical structure is just the tool for the energy to

exist. Emphasizing that reminds you of the fragility and the portability of an object. That’s something that’s very interesting in your work, too. You bring something and it’s portable and you set it up, and then you gather it and you go somewhere else and set it up. Like Untitled (lunch box) [1998– ]. It’s a vagabond; it’s got this quality of a traveler.

RT Finding its place again and again.

Could you say a little more about material? Paik addresses the frame of the television; the screen becomes a major theme. And with your work, I was thinking of printmaking because you have digital images, but they’re all projected on paper, not on film or screens. And all the torn edges of the paper are important, right?

imagery or light, or the shifting between the two.

SS No, I think that’s right. I think it’s more about how the image has become material, how we deal with it every day. The image is an everyday object in our life. The fact that I’ll receive 100 images and I’ll probably take at least 50 a day on my phone— we’re totally used to that.

I love that you brought up printmaking. One of my favorite parts of printmaking is when you clean the press and you get ghost prints—you see it disappear as it gets clean. I think it applies to sculpture, too, this idea of a ghost image of something that reappears and disappears. That action is as important as the image itself.

RT It’s also memory.

SS Yes.

My work is rooted in an exploration of memory. How does something get seared into memory? How is it lost? How is it retrieved?

—Sarah Sze

SS Absolutely. It’d be much easier to have those be perfect squares [laughs], but they’re all hand torn. It’s not just the idiocrasy of the paper edges but the rawness of the rips: the feel, the sound, the materiality of it. The paper is material, obviously, but the digital image is material also. It’s like an image appearing on paper the way a print does in printmaking. But in some senses the digital is much more ephemeral. We’ve had paper much longer; we know how to make it last, preserve it. It’s one of the most ancient durable structures we have. With technology, though, the minute you have it, it’s out of date. Museum conservation departments are constantly trying to update the technical equipment in their collections. It’s a huge challenge.

RT It’s interesting the work doesn’t feel so much about technology. To me it’s more about

RT In what I do, people don’t always realize but it’s all about memory. For me it’s always constructed by the person who’s looking, because they come with their own experience in life. What’s interesting about looking at your installation is that it constructs so many different stories, because viewers are all looking at a very different place at different times and they’re remembering very differently.

SS I didn’t realize the work was about memory until I started making it, and now I realize it’s completely rooted in memory. I’m asking, How does something enter your memory? How is it lost? How does it get revived?

What’s fascinating in your participatory installations is this idea of trying to make the work live, to create a live experience. You remind people of the fleeting moment and how we

Opening spread:

Top: Sarah Sze. Photo: Deborah Feingold. Bottom: Rirkrit Tiravanija. Photo: courtesy the artist

Previous spread: Sarah Sze, Pictures at an Exhibition, 2023, mixed media, including paper, clamps, string, and stones, overall dimensions variable © Sarah Sze. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Opposite: Sarah Sze, Crosswalk, 2024 (detail), oil, acrylic, archival paper, acrylic polymers, ink, tape, string, diabond, aluminum, and wood, 45 × 40 inches (114.3 × 101.6 cm) © Sarah Sze. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

decide to hold on to certain moments. I think all of that intensified after covid, because so much of how we remember time is through chance interaction, serendipity, a meeting with someone else and how that marks time. And when we were isolated and on our screens, our time was more dictated by the scheduled world of Zoom meetings. You never run into a screen the way you run into people on the street, so we had fewer chance encounters during that time.

RT I actually wanted to ask you about the idea of chaos in your work.

SS It’s a growing palette. There are certain things in the video and in the paintings in the show that repeat or relate to each other; they draw from the same archive. It’s really like going to a bookshelf of images—you move them around, you select some and not others; some survive.

RT How do you create an internal value system: a certain image over another, or a moment in time over another? Those are decisions you make; there are certain things you’re attached to and there are certain things

My world is one with so much information that it’s chaos; you actually have to let go and wander through it.

—Sarah Sze

SS Yes, chaos. I think as artists, we don’t get to choose what kind of work we make. I’d love to be like a painter of small watercolors. I think, Why can’t you do that? Oh, Sarah. But your practice does choose you. I think for me it’s that my world is one with so much information that it’s a chaos, you actually have to let go and wander through it. How you do that is your choice. It’s the same as looking at a piece or at a painting, you’re probably not going to get all of it; you give in to that. You choose things and be with them.

RT Well, that’s my description of utopia. For me utopia is to be able to be in the chaos and not be affected by it. You can sustain yourself with all those commotions and accept it. You never try to hold on to it and you never try to stop or fix things, you just kind of move through it. It’s beautiful. How do you edit all that chaos, all this imagery, into one cohesive thing?

you, like you said, just let go. Does it have to do with your own psyche?

SS I think it doesn’t and does. And like you said, if you ask a viewer, What was the image that lasted for you?, the answer will of course be different for different people—the artwork is giving them an arena of choice. I try to incorporate that nonhierarchical approach in the work. Once it’s made, I kind of distance myself from it, but I also listen to and see how people interact with it.

Personally, in videos and images, I often look for a moment that makes you sort of gasp, take a breath—you know what’s going to happen and you’re still surprised. Like the fox going across a road—I can’t believe that happened. And you can’t plan those things, right? Or you’re walking through a field and all of a sudden you hear birds and they all fly off. When something happens in nature, it’s so profound, because you know it’s by complete chance that you witnessed it.

Alasdair McLellan loves Scotland in the winter. “It’s more dramatic,” he tells me. “I quite like that bleakness. I feel there is a romance to it and a beauty to it that you don’t really see in other places.” The British photographer, noted for his fashion work, was there on assignment for Louis Vuitton in 2020 before the covid pandemic forced him to stop working. But McLellan wasn’t shooting a campaign for the house; he wasn’t shooting Vuitton products at all. He was there to capture a country of his choosing, in any artistic manner that he pleased, for his own monograph. Vuitton was his commissioning publisher.

McLellan’s volume, coming out this year, is part of the brand’s Fashion Eye book series. Launched in 2017, it highlights global locations through the lenses of (mostly) fashion photographers. A small team of editorial directors who specialize in fashion photography is responsible for selecting the photographers, but the artists themselves are otherwise given carte blanche. “It’s amazing that a brand such as Vuitton will commission a wide range of different

photographers around the world and give them creative freedom and to make a beautiful book that will get seen by a lot of people,” McLellan says, noting the freedom he was given in both the creation and the editing process. “I don’t really know another brand that does such a thing.” That’s likely because there aren’t any—at least in the fashion world. Louis Vuitton has the unique designation of being the only house with its own publishing arm. The question is, How did this become their focus?

The creation of a high-quality book arguably has a lot in common with the making of a piece of high-end luggage. Both involve expensive materials and craftspeople to put them together. Both are designed to be used, but (especially in the case of Vuitton luggage) they have equal value in simply being displayed. And in a strange and increasingly sad way, thanks to the decline of print media, books are also becoming a luxury item.

As objects, books have tangentially been a part of Louis Vuitton since the company’s beginning.

TRAVELOGUE

Library trunks have long been among the company’s many luggage offerings, with notable clients such as Ernest Hemingway. The array of possible configurations could safely transport books, small objects, or even a typewriter.

But it goes deeper than that.

As far back as 1892, Georges Vuitton, son of Louis, took it upon himself to write the history of travel via in-depth research on luggage. Famed Le Figaro journalist Émile Gautier provided a preface to his book, Le Voyage , but the rest was all Vuitton. Georges was a bit of a luggage phenom, having already patented a trunk with airtight fastening and a footlocker system with a collapsible camping bed; he would also go on to craft the Monogram Canvas design the house is known for today. Le Voyage was published two years later, sharing his deep interest in the objects we move with and how they operate. But it was his son, Gaston-Louis, who introduced an overt connection to literature into the brand.

Aria Darcella ventures through the history of the French house’s bibliophilic engagement with travel, publishing, and art.

Gaston-Louis was something of a creative polymath, drawing, writing, and often nurturing collaborations with artists. Moreover, he was an avid bibliophile whose personal library topped out at around 6,000 volumes. Over the course of his lifetime he founded three publishing societies, printing titles that blended literature and illustrations. (One of them—La Compagnie Typographique, which reprints rare or unpublished works in typefaces that have fallen out of use—still exists today.) This interest brought him into a new world of crafts, including printing, bookbinding, engraving, and more.

Gaston-Louis became a partner in the family business in 1907. Seven years later, the house moved to a new, flagship location on the avenue des Champs-Élysées titled the Vuitton Building. In addition to selling their wares, the space offered a litany of services, from storing luggage to selling theater tickets. There was also a reading room— which one can only assume was Gaston-Louis’s idea.

Still, no amount of heritage explains the explosion into publishing that began in the 1990s. First came the Voyager Avec (Traveling with) series, which launched in 1994 in partnership with the notable writer, editor, and literary critic Maurice Nadeau. The series aimed to present travel through the writings—some previously unpublished—of prominent literary figures, using their words to capture either certain places or what it took to get there. The inaugural volumes included Ernst Jü nger’s Ré cits de voyages (Travel narratives, 1994), a collection of Jünger’s travel diaries written between 1932 and 1964, and Blaise Cendrars’s Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles et autres po è mes (Panama or the adventures of my seven uncles and other poems, 1994), a collection of poems that Cendrars wrote in the 1910s. Over the next twenty years the collection grew to include Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Natsume So - seki, and Philip K. Dick, until it ceased publication in 2014. The concept was loose and evocative: a chance for

readers to escape to one writer’s interpretation of a place and a moment in time.

In 1998, the house launched its second series of titles—the Guides Louis Vuitton , published in English as the City Guides —a much more direct approach to the subject of travel. The collection initially spanned thirty locations in Europe, with detailed maps and listings for the best things to do, see, and eat: all the trappings of a traditional guidebook displayed in a chic vessel, and curated around top-tier businesses. By 2013 the series was revamped to span thirty more cities around the globe. It proved wildly popular and that number has been expanding ever since, with two more on the way this year. The guides are updated every couple of years, save for Paris, which is updated annually owing to its popularity. (There’s also a digital app that’s updated every six months, a testament to the seriousness of the operation. How we gather information has changed with the times, but apparently our need for recommendations never will.)

THE BOOKS OF LOUIS VUITTON

This spread, left to right: Image from Fashion Eye Mexico by Deborah Turbeville, courtesy Louis Vuitton Malletier

Mock-up for the Library

Trunk and Desk secretary

trunk, c. 1926, Louis Vuitton Archives © Archives Louis Vuitton Malletier

Library Trunk, GastonLouis Vuitton style, 1936, in Monogram Canvas from the Louis Vuitton Collection © Louis Vuitton Malletier

The practicality of the City Guides makes them an outlier among Vuitton’s other books. In this sense, the 2013 launch of the Carnets de Voyage (Travel Books ) was a return to form. Artists and illustrators were invited to depict cities through their work, while weaving in their own travel notes and information about themselves. Here, a sense of exploration and discovery were back at the heart of the project, the idea being that the volumes resemble an artist’s notebook. One of the inaugural titles was Daniel Arsham’s take on Easter Island. Subsequent volumes have included Thomas Ott’s haunting meditation on Route 66, while even Mars was brought to life by the Belgian illustrator François Schuiten, who has arguably made a career out of devising fantastical cities.

The concept is exceedingly charming and offers an avenue for imagination and experimentation that travel publications aren’t known for. This year will see an edition on Amsterdam by Laurent Cilluffo, whose

simple yet evocative line drawings have illuminated The New Yorker. Cilluffo’s images streamline the city into a series of red, white, and blue lines. It’s the kind of sleek interpretation the city rarely receives.

Between Voyager Avec and the Travel Books , a variation on a theme emerges: using artistic expression to embody the emotional resonance of travel, rather than the practical act of it. Travel is not about luggage or even the destination; it’s about the journey, and the emotions and memories that arise along the way. McLellan’s Scotland book, for example, didn’t start out as a personal project, but over the course of his time in that country—shooting the people, the landscape, the culture—it became one. “It was just about to catch a feeling really, more than anything. To put it into my world,” he says. “There was no set agenda with it, it was just about capturing something. . . . I guess doing the place justice.”

McLellan chose the country as a tribute to his father, whom he describes as being “obsessed” with

the culture. “He learned Scottish Gaelic, he even learned Irish Gaelic,” he says. “I mean, I don’t know how useful those languages are, but my dad learned them.” After years of delay, Fashion Eye: Scotland is finally set to be released. Over the extent of his journey—he was still shooting as recently as last January—the project seems to have made McLellan himself enamored with the region.

The Fashion Eye series, which launched in 2017, sees the merger of major changes in culture and Louis Vuitton itself. In the years since the launch of Voyager Avec , the brand has expanded into readyto-wear and has established itself as a luxury behemoth. To a whole generation, it is now a fashion house first, a fashionable-luggage-maker second. Simultaneously, in the mid-2000s fashion increasingly became a focus for museum exhibitions, reshaping and intellectualizing the conversation from what we wear to why we wear, and what our clothes say about us.

“As the difference between fashion and documentary grows smaller every day, this seems a logical step for Louis Vuitton,” says the photographer Martin Parr. An avid collector of photo books, Parr was tapped for Fashion Eye: UK , which was released earlier this year. Though he doesn’t consider himself a fashion photographer, Parr’s work often makes connections between clothing and society, be it through the lens of class or of subculture. He told me by email that he said “yes straight away” to the project. “I think it is a great series,” he said. “Some of them are a bit weak but generally they stand up well.” The series has included titles from both rising and established artists, including Miles Aldridge (Córdoba , 2022), Coco Capitán (Trans Siberian , 2022), Daniel Obasi ( Lagos , 2022), Kishin Shinoyama (Silk Road , 2018), and Harley Weir (Iran , 2018). Some feature the work of deceased artists such as Slim Aarons, whose archive of high-society photography was mined

for editions on both the French and the Italian Rivieras.

Among this year’s other new releases are Mexico by Deborah Turbeville, the late photographer whose haunting, deliberately aged images provided a contrast to the sleek aesthetic of contemporaries such as Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin. Iceland by Jackie Nickerson is also on the way.

What is most striking about Vuitton’s various book projects is not what they publish but what they don’t. Although they have produced books on their atelier with Assouline, Rizzoli, and other major publishers—who have found a wealth of fashion photography, runway images, and other creative aspects of the house rife for book fodder—their in-house series look beyond their own walls. That’s not to say that Vuitton’s books aren’t a branding exercise. They absolutely are. Most modern fashion companies trade on heritage, or “house codes” in industry parlance. Louis Vuitton is no different,

even if its methods are. Drawing on the intangible concept of travel and the personal passions of the founder’s grandson (however influential to the company’s trajectory he may have been) is an interesting way of staying true to yourself while producing something entirely new.

Commissioning artists to create monographs is expensive, as is publishing art books in general. To do both when you already have a wealth of readymade content is a flex. But it’s also a commitment to the artists involved, a form of modern-day patronage. To echo McLellan, no other brand does such a thing. Maybe the best way to support illustrators and photographers in the dawn of AI is to commission monographs. Maybe a novel way to save print media is to release luxury books. What difference does it make if the logo stamped on the front is that of a historic publisher or a historic brand? Can’t we just have nice things?

This spread, left to right: Image from Fashion Eye Scotland by Alasdair McLellan, courtesy Louis Vuitton Malletier

Image from Travel Book Las Vegas by Yann Kebbi, courtesy Louis Vuitton Malletier

Image from Fashion Eye Scotland by Alasdair McLellan, courtesy Louis Vuitton Malletier

David Jacob Kramer, author of Heads Together:WeedandtheUnderground PressSyndicate,1965–1973 (Edition Patrick Frey), has begun work on a new book that will document the hand-built homes spawned by the utopian “back to the land” movement of late-1960s Northern California. Kramer and photographer Michael Schmelling have been traveling the region, collecting oral histories, archival materials, and new documentation of these idiosyncratic architectural projects. Here, Kramer and Schmelling take us to the Last Resort, the home and surrounding buildings created by David Lee Hoffman since 1973.

When we arrived at David Lee Hoffman’s home we found him on his landing, blowtorching the ends of some fir trunks he’d chopped from his hill, a Japanese technique for protecting wood from mold. He took a break to heat up some leftovers for lunch, pulled out of the freezer compartment of his 1950s Westinghouse fridge (which has never needed a single repair). Frost sealed the lid of the stone dolsot pot that he had had custom-made in Icheon, Korea, so that it could fit in the center of his parabolic solar cooker, which is about the size of a cable dish. In around twenty minutes the pot was too hot to touch without a dish towel. Hoffman couldn’t remember what was inside—it turned out to be shiitake mushrooms and bow-ribbon pasta, with a traditional Tibetan hot sauce, called sherab, that a friend had brought back from Dehradun, India, for him. It was really good.

Lunch over, Hoffman put his face-visor back on to return to his logs. They will be used in a log hut for his solar cooking, like a barbeque gazebo, on a spot chosen to overlook the sweeping valley. Tiled in salvaged flagstone, brick, and mar-

ble, this landing hosts many of Hoffman’s most innovative structures. There’s the SolarPowered Shower Tower, its octagonal glass cubicle set on a base made of cobblestones from San Francisco streets. What looks like a birdhouse stands near it; inside is a dial tracking the humidity of the underfoot Tea Cave, which stores over 50,000 pounds of rare teas. A few steps away is Le Grande Pissoir, a citadel for an eco-sustainable toilet, its gabled roof styled after a Tibetan temple. A stairway leads to the top of the hill, where another project is still in the works: Hoffman’s bedroom. From there, almost all the structures can be seen, thirty-seven of them across his two-acre property in Marin County. Hoffman calls it the “Last Resort.” Hoffman bought the land in 1973, after a decade spent traveling across Asia and dodging the

Vietnam draft. His time in Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Tibet has influenced the style of his pagodas, bowed roofs, upturned eaves, and meticulous wooden joinery. The Last Resort is one of the great American art environments and a case study in environmentally sustainable living. In March it was added to the National Register of Historic Places—the first time a property has been included for its merit in ecological design. But it’s also in breach of multiple local building ordinances, and Hoffman is under eviction notice by the county. The most recent allegation claims that his sewage-recycling system is a contamination threat to creeks and a health hazard to neighbors owing to potential runoff. Hoffman considers this absurd—he has devoted a lifetime to developing innovations in the purification of waste. The county has provided no evidence to support its claim. Nobody has even taken samples. When I looked into the case I found no official paperwork of that sort whatsoever—not a single test. It’s an audacious accusation to be based on hearsay.

The liens and fines the county has lobbed at Hoffman now total over $5 million, so if they do manage to sell his property out from under him, Hoffman won’t get a penny. It feels personal. Last year the Court of Appeals ruled against him. Eighty years old and struggling with a bad case of Lyme disease, Hoffman has stoically continued his construction work, along with the constant repairs and maintenance the Last Resort demands. Unless he has to go to court, which lately has been often, Hoffman pretty much wears the same thing every day: Blåkl ä der pants with built-in kneepads, a work shirt with notepads in both pockets, cap, mustache, and a leather harness festooned with tools that he’s made extra sturdy by drilling a screw into the straps where they cross at his back—he is always looking to improve things.

Marin County has become a ritzy place to live since Hoffman moved here in 1972, when it was the global epicenter of the “back to the land” movement, then at its peak. Nearly a million young people went rural, the greatest urban exodus in American history. 1 Only an hour from HaightAshbury, Marin was a refuge from the fallout of 1967’s Summer of Love, the hippie district overrun with teen runaways, cops, heroin, speed, and syphilis. Brutally logged for over a century, Northern California had cheap land. Marin was still lush.

The Whole Earth Catalog was produced here in 1968, a publication that called itself an “access device,” servicing these utopian homesteaders. Its pages were crammed with a bricolage of tools that could

be mail-ordered to re-create society by hand, from turbine ventilators to one-ton-capacity hoist-winch-pullers, with hippie haikus sprinkled in between. It empowered back-to-thelanders to grow their own food and build their own homes. Stewart Brand, the book’s publisher and editor, described his readers as “fanatics with a functional grimy grasp on the world. Worldthinkers, dropouts from specialization. Hope freaks.”2

The legacy of this Marin community still buzzes. Lloyd Kahn, former editor of the “Shelter and Land Use” section of the Whole Earth Catalog , lives in the area in the home he built, running his imprint, Shelter Press, whose many titles on D.I.Y. construction include his own Shelter, an annotated scrapbook of owner-built homes around the world that has sold over 250,000 copies since 1973. Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead lives twenty minutes from here, someone Hoffman hung out with before learning Weir played guitar. Many locals have rallied around Hoffman. On the main road to his home a sequence of hand-painted signs fixed to telephone poles protests Hoffman’s treatment. “David Lee Hoffman’s handbuilt home is a national treasure,” the first says. On the next: “Should these hands be in handcuffs?” Then: “No way.” Lastly: “Let David stay.” Hoffman doesn’t know who made them. Over a thousand people in the area have signed a petition to preserve the Last Resort. Hoffman has a lawyer working on his case pro bono. A nonprofit is raising money to buy and preserve the property and to study and maintain it into the future.

“I’m not trying to stick it to them,“ Hoffman told me. “I don’t intentionally flout the law because I don’t like laws. I do follow the laws of nature and in this case they’re contradictory to the laws that people write to ostensibly protect us.”3

“Open Land: A Manifesto,” published in 1966, argued that ownerbuilding is natural and that people have been doing it since prehistoric times. “Man has a nest-building instinct just like the other animals,” it

argued, “and it is totally frustrated by our lock-step society whose restrictive codes on home -building make it just about impossible to build a code home that doesn’t sterilize, insulate, and rigidify the inhabitants.”4 As hippies flooded into rural NorCal, local authorities used building codes as their weapon of choice to try and get rid of them. When backto-the-landers preferred to build with recycled or foraged wood, for ideological reasons and because they were broke, inspectors soon appeared at their doors handing out fines for using “ungraded lumber.” These “red tags” could be issued for not having two doors between a kitchen and bathroom, not being sufficiently earthquake proof, or not having an indoor latrine. If owner-builders couldn’t

can’t be safe because we didn’t give you permission.’”

In 1988, Hoffman’s neighbor went to the county because a retaining wall Hoffman had built went a few feet over the parcel’s dividing line. A succession of fines ensued for things like a ceiling being too low and an inadequate number of power outlets in a room. In The Owner-Builder and the Code: Politics of Building Your Home (1976), owner-builder Ken Kern wrote, “In the social lag between the advent of new modes of thinking and lifestyles and between the ultimate assimilation of those ideas, the code is sometimes used as a bludgeon against those ‘guilty’ of innovation. . . . The codes can be a device used to terminate that activity. In this manner, they become instruments used to preserve the status quo and to stifle the evolution of new ways.”5

When Hoffman began developing his closed-loop bio-recycling toilet system in the 1970s, his visit to

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pay, they faced armed officials with bulldozers.

Back-to-the-landers squared up against this ramped-up code enforcement in court and won many legislative updates. The struggle became known as the “Code Wars.” For Hoffman it never ended. Knowing a standoff was likely when he started building, he went to extremes to ensure his work could withstand any scrutiny as to its structural integrity. It’s built to last. “I overbuilt everything,” he explained to me. “The property comes with a fivehundred-year warranty. They just say ‘Where’s your permit?’ Like, ‘It

the county offices to obtain a permit was met with bemusement. No coding framework existed to permit a compostable toilet, let alone one that relied on thousands of earthworms. Coding issues around toilets were a common grievance for back-to-the-landers, who felt they were being forced to conform to society’s irrational fear of poop. “We do not subscribe to the Western cleanliness fetish,” wrote the authors of The Owner-Builder and the Code , “which fosters a totally irrational approach to basic biological functions.”6 Hoffman put it to me more simply: “Death and shit are not discussed.”

Previous spread: Tea House, with organic garden below, the Last Resort, Marin County, California, 2024

spread, left to right: David Lee Hoffman, Marin County, California, 2024

to an unfinished cabin that will eventually become Hoffman’s bedroom, the Last Resort, Marin County, California, 2024

moat surrounding Le Petite Pissoir, the Last Resort, Marin County, California, 2024

Grand Pissoir, with “intestine” filtration on the roof, the Last Resort, Marin County, California, 2024

The pièce de résistance of the Last Resort is Le Grande Pissoir—an elaborate human-waste converter that took five years to construct. The toilet itself is conventional, a model that was salvaged cheaply and is now over 100 years old. Sitting on it affords a vast, unobstructed vista of the entire gorgeous valley. Its functional chambers are built into the hillside, where the blackwater (poop) is filtered and vermicomposted (by earthworms). Corn, tomatoes, and chilies grow along the roof, serving a filtration purpose. Four solar-powered pumps push the evolving material along. There is also an adjacent urinal, molded from concrete and Turkish gold travertine.

To explore all elements of this complex operation would take a hefty book, which Hoffman swears to write before he dies. In short, the blackwater lands in a chamber—the toilet’s “stomach,” to use Hoffman’s term—filled with earthworms that eat it, transforming it into wormcast. This trickles down a “living wall” of igneous rock and plantlife, aerating it. Three sedimentation tanks further filter what is then pumped up to the roof, or the “intestine.” To prove that the water is now successfully purified, a little of it washes into an aquarium in front of the toilet, where you can watch goldfish swim while you’re pooping and know you are causing them no harm. Hoffman once cultivated snails to eat toilet scum—snails with an extrastrong grip to withstand a flush—but raccoons kept picking them off. Overflow from the aquarium spills back down the living wall. The loop is complete. There is absolutely no smell at all.

“For them, it’s perfectly normal to spray our food with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides,” Hoffman lamented. “They think nothing of it. But you try using nature’s finest fertilizer, poop and wormcast, and they can’t accept it.”

deionized water and sonic vibrations. His clients included the Smithsonian museums, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Textile Museum in Washington, DC, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. He sold the patent to a German company in 1990.

Hoffman was among the first to record Tibetan chants, working in Dharamshala, India (home of the Tibetan government in exile), pressing three popular vinyl records on his own label in the 1970s, and donating the proceeds to the Dalai Lama’s religious foundation. He befriended the Dalai Lama there in the 1960s and photographed His Holiness’s routine at length. The Dalai Lama enjoyed practicing his English with Hoffman and Hoffman learned to speak the nomad dialect of Tibetan. Hoffman also started a publishing imprint, Dorje Ling, issuing Tales of Uncle Tompa: The Legendary Rascal of Tibet (1975), authored by his friend Rinjing Dorje.

he wanted Hoffman’s earthworms to eat his body. Hoffman fulfilled his wish, clandestinely filling the lining of Blank’s coffin with worms, liverwort, finely ground charcoal, oyster

When something isn’t right to Hoffman and no solution exists yet, he’ll invent it himself. Through the 1970s and ’80s he ran his own business cleaning vintage rugs and woven textiles with his own patented concoction of raw lanolin extracted from the fleece of sheep, along with

After returning to the United States from his travels, he couldn’t find the high-quality tea he’d acquired a taste for in China. He has spent the decades since traveling back and forth to China on buying trips for his longest-running business, importing specialty teas. He buys the tea directly from traditional growers who have been sidelined by the Chinese government’s investments in industrially produced varieties, much inferior in quality and packed with pesticides. Back in the 1990s, Hoffman’s roaming of the remote “tea mountains” in Yunnan province caught the eye of government authorities, who detained him a couple of times for suspicious activity—he had to make it clear he was genuinely interested in dealing in such an antiquated product. Many structures in the Last Resort are dedicated to the drying, packaging, and distribution of the teas. Hoffman’s Phoenix Tea Company has a store down the hill from the Last Resort, only open for four hours on Saturdays, with tea aficionados from around the world forming lines. In 2007, filmmakers Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht followed Hoffman on a buying trip for their film All in This Tea . Hoffman and Blank became dear friends; Blank died before completing work on another documentary to be titled The Real Shit on David Lee Hoffman Blank had once told Hoffman that

shells, and various other compostable ingredients, including ten pounds of Golden Bi Luo tea, Blank’s favorite. Hoffman emailed me the full recipe in case I ever wanted to use it.7

Though not formally trained as an architect, horticulturalist, environmentalist, or helminthologist (a scientist specializing in worms), Hoffman is all of these things. He dropped out of his engineering course at San Jos é City College after his first semester, too preoccupied with rebuilding a 1932 Ford roadster hot rod. His generalism aligns with Buckminster Fuller’s notion of “trans-disciplinary integration” to achieve ‘‘coevolution”: a holistic, “omnidisciplinary” approach to humanity’s betterment. This was the inspiration for Brand in creating the Whole Earth Catalog , something of a recipe book for its fulfillment. Fuller himself was a self-described “engineer, inventor,

This spread, left to right:

A new roof being made for the humidity tracker for the Tea Cave, constructed from recycled slate tiles, the Last Resort, Marin County, California, 2024

Side view of the Tea House, the Last Resort, Marin County, California, 2024

A slab of recycled marble, the Last Resort, Marin County, California, 2024

Titanic II in its pond, the Last Resort, Marin County, California, 2024

Photos: Michael Schmelling

mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer and choreographer.” 8 Back-to-the-landers had to pick up new skills in a hurry, rather than developing the single realm of expertise that roots a typical career. Specialization was antithetical to Fuller’s “synergetics,” which aimed to “get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.”9

The systems Hoffman has invented are driven by his urgent concern for the planet’s growing scarcity of natural resources. Pretty much everything used in the construction of the Last Resort was recycled or salvaged: windows from a defunct Silicon Valley chip-making facility, damaged bricks from a local manufacturer, wood refuse from a pencil factory, roof shingles from the home of the Eagles’ Don Henley. A symmetrical bird silhouette, wings outstretched, appears in some form on every structure: the motif is hand-cut on the tops of hundreds of fence posts, mosaicked with pebbles on flat roofs, scroll-cut from copper as siding, and inlaid in brass on doors. They are songbirds, a kind of bird that Hoffman noticed he was seeing less and less of due to pollution and global warming.

bon footprint as long as I can still use my body to be down in the garden an hour a day,” he says. “My systems, rather than disrupt or destroy, actually encourage nature. When I see snakes and frogs and lizards in the garden, I know that everything is working just as it should.” He calls his egg-laying chickens his “girls,” has named them all, and their coop overlooks the pond. The Tea Cave, formerly storage, has become a bat cave, and the bats take care of the mosquitoes that would otherwise be a nuisance around the moats and pond. Hoffman is also a big fan of bat poop, a high-potency fertilizer.

in the modern home. In his landmark guide to the sustainable privy, The Toilet Papers (1978), Van der Ryn wrote, “In not too many years, our vast cities will have to reassemble themselves into coherent biological systems.”11

The Last Resort is currently in a court-appointed receivership, meaning the county is already planning for its sale. Hoffman has managed to keep protracting the process to keep working. He keeps a brave front of confidence. His main concern is what will happen to the place if he becomes unable to apply the care it requires, or if he dies. He doesn’t want it to become a sterile museum but to be a living organism, a place of learning. He likes to call it the “School of Industrial Tai Chi.” He figures there’s enough tea stored to support twenty years of caretaking on the property; the problem is, nobody but Hoffman knows exactly how to keep the worms healthy, or to give Le Grand Pissoir the endless love it needs. “So many of these systems are unique— you can’t look them up on the Internet,” he says. “I realize I’m a very difficult person to replace.”

The songbirds are decoration, not art—Hoffman won’t call himself an artist. “I can’t speak about the artistic merit of this place, because, in a way, I just work here,” Hoffman said. “But I’m proud of these systems. First and foremost is its functionality.” Even the life-size fishing boat he sculpted in concrete is functional. Hoffman took us aboard and lifted the lid to the bulkhead, revealing a twentyfoot-deep well that helps to feed the pond it sits in. Atop the mast is a solar collector. The pond teems with koi, goldfish, and frogs, whose croaking Hoffman imitated well enough to elicit a backand-forth. Duckweed and papyrus in the water act as filters to keep it clean and pretty. An ornamental boat is traditional to Chinese garden ponds— known as a shifang , it’s the best spot to take everything in.

In the late 1970s Hoffman studied Japanese joinery under the master builder Makoto Imai, though his training was informal and his references to traditional Asian practices do not attempt to be faithful. His own version of Japanese sumisonae -like corner brackets sits below many of the roofs. Pointy shafts rise from Hoffman’s pagodas, looking like so - rin , the vertical spires on Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. He applies techniques and materials as he likes and avoids replicating them on any two structures. He prefers to learn new things and try them out.

In the Himalayas, Hoffman also learned organic farming practices, and large swaths of the Last Resort are dedicated to raised crop-beds that produce enough fruits and vegetables for him to feed himself. “I could be quite happy just eating stuff from the garden, very comfortably on a very small car-

The late Sim Van der Ryn, an architecture professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was a friend of Hoffman’s and lived a few minutes away. In 1971, Van der Ryn started a radical new syllabus, taught directly on his property: ARCH 102 ABC, or “Integrated Synthesis of the Design Determinants of Architecture.” The course liberated graduate students from the fluorescent lights of the classroom for a year of communal living during which they built their own homes with wood from disused chicken coops. The unschooled architects of the back-to-the-land movement have impacted professional architecture; sustainability is no fringe consideration in home design today. The California State Building Code now requires that a minimum of 65 percent of the debris from construction and demolition projects be recycled or salvaged for reuse. In 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $4.8 million in grant money to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for research into vericomposting technology using tiger worms, with testing in India, Myanmar, and Uganda, where flush toilets are too costly. 10 Waste is still wasted

1. See Jeffrey C. Jacob, “The North American Back-to-the-Land Movement,” Community Development Journal 31, no. 3 (July 1996): 241.

2. Stewart Brand, “Alloy,” in Brand, ed., The Last Whole Earth Catalog (New York: Random House, 1971), 112.

3. David Lee Hoffman, interview with the author, July 10, 2024. All quotations of Hoffman come from this interview.

4. “Open Land: A Manifesto,” 1966, in Unohoo, Coyote, Rick and the Mighty Avengers, eds., Friends of Morning Star Scrapbook (Occidental, CA, 1976), 157.

5. Ken Kern, Ted Kogon, and Rob Thallon, The Owner-Builder and the Code: Politics of Building Your Home (Oakhurst, CA: OwnerBuilder Publications, 1976), 106.

6. Ibid.

7. Full recipe as Hoffman emailed it to me September 2, 2024: Ten pounds of rinsed peat moss. Ten pounds of Golden Bi Luo tea. Ten pounds of moist black earth. Ten pounds of duckweed or liverwort. Two pounds of finely ground cooked fire-pit bones and oyster shells. One pound of finely ground charcoal. Thoroughly mix all ingredients and divide into thirds. Fill equal portions into three clean food-grade burlap bags. Divide twenty pounds of Eisenia foetida or Lumbricus rubellus into three piles and add one pile to each of the three bags. Place bags at the bottom of an untreated pine-wood coffin. Cover with white cotton-muslin sheet.

8. R. Buckminster Fuller, quoted in Albin Krebs, “R. Buckminster Fuller, Futurist Inventor, Dies at 87,” New York Times , July 3, 1983.

9. Fuller, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (London: Macmillan, 1975), xxvii.

10. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Water, Sanitation & Hygiene : Strategic Overview, August 2012. Available online at https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/wsh-strategyoverview.pdf (accessed September 5, 2024).

11. Sim Van der Ryn, The Toilet Papers. Designs to Recycle Human Waste and Water: Dry Toilets, Greywater Systems & Urban Sewage (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1978), 118.

Ashley Overbeek takes us through the history, the contemporary culture, and some of the people of a coastal Uruguayan town that hosts world-class museums and art installations.

Created in 1943, América Invertida is a pen-andink drawing by the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García that depicts an upside-down South America. An instantly recognizable work for many in Uruguay, América Invertida relates to TorresGarcía’s concept of “constructive universalism”: a focus on the integration of the collective artistic legacies of the Americas, particularly the preColumbian art of South America, with modern artistic movements.

Torres-García created an earlier iteration of an inverted South America in 1935, on the cover of his manuscript La Escuela del Sur (The school of the South). In this manuscript he calls for South America to expand its artistic identity to encompass its own cultures and traditions, rather than defining itself only in relation to artistic movements from the North (namely the United States and Europe). Many of Torres-García’s issues remain relevant today, for those living beyond South America as well as within it. With an art-fair circuit that has historically looked primarily to cities in the global

ART ON THE COAST

north, one can run the risk of missing the vibrancy of art and art destinations outside of a relatively narrow geographic area.

One such location is José Ignacio, a laid-back beachside town on the coast of Uruguay. Always a prime location for catching fresh seafood, José Ignacio was settled during the pre-Columbian era by the Indigenous Charrúa and Guarani, remained populated during the Spanish colonial period as a fishing village, and has since become a special town to visit for both domestic and international travelers. With fewer than 300 full-time residents, according to the last available census, José Ignacio has an outsize art and culture scene. Guests can begin their day at Rizoma, a hybrid art bookstore/café/studio, then pass by Casa Neptuna, an artist residency housed in a geometric brightgreen building designed by the Argentine artist Edgardo Giménez, before taking a short drive to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry in nearby Manantiales to view masterworks by local and foreign contemporary artists such as Carmelo Arden Quin, Gonzalo Fonseca, Vik Muniz, Louise Nevelson, and Frank Stella.

Given its long history through different eras of civilization, the identity of José Ignacio has been shaped by a variety of cultures, but according to current inhabitants has always reinforced the concept of community. “It’s a place where people say hello,” says Rodrigo González Di Carlo, the coordinator of the Fundación Cervieri Monsuárez, an art foundation and exhibition space in the town. “The human connection is so important here. When I’m walking down the street, we’re seeing each other face-to-face. When we ask, How are you?, we’re interested in knowing the answer. Maybe that’s partially dependent on the individual, but it’s also part of the context of José Ignacio: the culture, the nature nearby, the sound of the waves, the wind. You can see that in the way we interact with our neighbors and the town’s visitors.”

When walking along the main road of José Ignacio, one can easily spot the Fundación’s monumental building made of stone, glass, and umber weathered steel. Designed by the renowned Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly, the building itself reflects the geological and anthropological history of the town: “As Rafael stated, the preHispanic design of the stone wall was inspired by José Ignacio’s coastal landform,” said González. The stones were meticulously crafted by Peruvian artisans who also worked on the restoration of Machu Picchu. This construction is a reflection of the cultural legacies of José Ignacio, as González elaborates: “You have this top-of-the-line artistic

space for contemporary exhibits inside, but this building references a traditional method of precolonial Indigenous people who lived here in Latin America. So it has that duality too.”

Inside the Fundación’s walls when I visited was an exhibition of work by Vivian Suter, who is Argentine-Swiss and lives in Guatemala. “It was an incredible exhibition,” says González, “over ninety paintings . . . including the body of work exhibited in the Reina Sofía [in Madrid]. . . . There were some others that came all the way directly from Guatemala, from her workshop. It was unbelievably special, the experience of working with [Suter] and having that kind of exhibit in my country.” Suter’s expansive canvases draped from the high ceilings of the Fundación, with swirls of bold organic colors in conversation with one another. This prolific kind of display is a recurring installation method for

the Buenos Aires–born artist, who first employed it in 2014 at Kunsthalle Basel. After spending her childhood in Buenos Aires, Suter went on to live in Switzerland before returning to the Americas. In her current studio in Panajachel, Guatemala, she embraces her natural environment, often leaving canvases outside to interact with their surroundings: branches, soil, and rain mix with paint to create a hybrid abstraction.

González tells me that the Fundación’s artistic program focuses at its core on Latin American artistic excellence, but also emphasizes local outreach as an important part of its organizational mission. “We have public rural schools in the area that we were lucky to invite to see the Vivian Suter exhibit and they were amazed,” González explains. “It’s very important to generate a sense of belonging for the families that live here year-round. It’s a

Top left: Joaquín Torres-García, América Invertida , 1943, ink on paper, 8 5⁄8 × 6 ¼ inches

(22 × 16 cm) © Museo Torres García

Above: James Turrell, Ta Khut , 2021, José Ignacio, Uruguay

© James Turrell. Photo: Tali Kimelman, courtesy Posada Ayana

vision we have for the foundation—not just to be open during the summertime, no, it’s going to be open year-round and we will have activities and extension programs in the communities. We hope to plant this seed in these next generations that art is not only a way to express yourself, but also a career path. That’s maybe not so talked about here in Uruguay. That art is a way to live and to have a future.”

Across the street from the Fundación Cervieri Monsuárez is Posada Ayana, a small boutique hotel, built by Robert and Edda Kofler. On entering the posada, visitors are met with a variety of artworks, ranging from the organic ceramic creations of Marcela Jacob to a mirrored etching by Marco Maggi to a richly dark polished-wood sculpture by Krikor Abrahamian. “Almost 90 percent of the art is from Uruguay,” says Robert Kofler. “We

try to meet young artists at different events and buy art from them.”

Originally from Austria, the Koflers have furnished the posada as a tribute to the two places they call home, Europe and Uruguay. “We brought in vintage furniture from Europe to reuse and give new life to old furniture. And for everything else, we made it all according to our design with local carpenters. For me, it was very important to only buy local craftsmanship,” says Edda Kofler. Behind each item in the posada is a thoughtful sourcing story. When I asked about the creamy woolen blankets in the bedrooms, my directions were to “walk to the Faro de José Ignacio [a landmark local lighthouse, built in 1877] and look for Hugo; his workshop is next to it.” Hugo is a master weaver who is happy to take the time to show both neighbors (the term for those who reside in José Ignacio during

a part or all of the year) and visitors his tools and techniques. “Scouting all these items has been a way for me to connect to Uruguay, to be more at home in a country that I’ve never lived in before,” Edda says, “because it helps me connect to other people and to see what it means to live here, what it’s like to feel the local culture and the local life.”

In addition to works by Uruguayan artists, Posada Ayana is also home to Ta Khut (The light, 2021), James Turrell’s first free-standing Skyspace in South America. “What impressed us so much about José Ignacio were the skies uncontaminated by [artificial] lights.” says Robert. “In the evening you really see the stars, the moon, everything is seen because you don’t have a lot of streetlights. So that’s why I thought that having an artwork related to light would be great.” Edda adds, “When you come to José Ignacio the very first time, you’re fas-

cinated by the colors of the sky, the change of sunsets; you have the whole sky filled with pink and orange.”

Visitors to Ta Khut can sit on the peripheral seats, or lie on the floor on soft blankets to look up at the round opening set in the center of the structure’s white dome. Like other Skyspaces, Ta Khut has a light program for the twilight before sunrise and after sunset each day. During this cusp of change, day to night and night to day, the lights within the dome interact with the changing light and colors of the sky, creating sometimes supernatural hues in our perception of color. “We want to use Ta Khut as a catalyst for inspiring other art,” Robert says. “This year, in the spring, Edda initiated a program with students of the music school of Montevideo, Uruguay. They stayed with us for a week. They composed a sound piece connecting

the Skyspace to the area. So all of this in the back of our minds, we wanted to bring something special to this area and hopefully be a catalyst to extend the cultural experience in the area.”

On a wall in his home, González has hung a poster of Torres-García’s América Invertida . “I think it’s very important for artists and agents of cultural spaces here in Latin America to live by this thing that Torres-García preached, ‘Our North is the South,’” he tells me:

We have to look at ourselves, at our cultural heritage, why we are the way we are. It was an incredible milestone for this Venice Biennale that for the first time ever, a Latin American curator was in charge of the exhibition. That’s great, but we also need our art spaces, our art fairs, our art biennials, and we need to be proud of them.

Left: Installation view, Vivian Suter, Fundación Cervieri Monsuárez, José Ignacio, Uruguay, January 6–March 31, 2024. Photo: Francisca Vivo, courtesy Vivian Suter, Gladstone Gallery, House of Gaga, Karma International, and Proyectos Ultravioleta

Right: James Turrell, Ta Khut , 2021 © James Turrell. Photo: Florian Holzherr, courtesy Posada Ayana

They were burning ants behind Block B. It was Saturday morning, cleaning day. The ants had appeared in the muddy, littered patch of grass before inspection, an eyesore, black ants with painful stings, big-headed soldiers flanking workers in a gushing column. I itched all over staring at them. We had been washing our clothes behind Waddington House, Samson and I, when Nko rushed out to tell us about them. Ant columns were regular occurrences here, they appeared in wet and dry places, strings marching across our hostel floor or up the shwa-chop tree in front of our classroom. Once, two columns had appeared as parallel lines in front of Waddington House—one red, the other black—and we had made a game of breaking their once peaceful lines, poking them until they broke ranks, scattering in all directions.

Today they were behind Block B, the densest, longest column I’d ever seen, stretching all the way to the Waddington House bathrooms. A week had passed since Soludo’s disappearance and nothing was normal here. Our entire school shivered with speculations about his whereabouts, especially with exams and interhouse sports looming. He was our hostel’s star boy, a fabulous sprinter with ostrich legs and a cheetah’s sprint, he’d snatched gold and silver the previous year, before our arrival at Marian Boys’, for being best at high and long jumps as well as the 100- and 300-meter races. It was somehow understood that despite committing the expellable offense of running away from school, he would not be expelled, that Sir Obinweke would read out his offenses during morning assembly, sounding his verdict like a high-court judge, squinting grimly behind the lectern as he declared: You are hereby sentenced to twelve strokes of the cane and one month’s suspension!

We knew nothing for sure, of course, we were JSS 1 boys, and our intel was as good as the speculation of our seniors who spoke of the matter with as much secrecy as the flaunting of their rage, disciplinary oaths spilling out of teenage lips, though we did not see them that way back then, as simply teenagers. They felt pretty grown to us, and those “big boys” were going to deal with our friend whether the school chose to or not. Apparently, Soludo had grown wings. Envious of his notoriety, his seeming untouchableness, they schemed in the corridors and the senior corners and we eavesdropped from the safety of our corners, pretending to be occupied. The general feeling was that they did not want him expelled, they genuinely hoped that he was safe out there (crazy things happened all the time to children who ran away, such as accidents, kidnappings, and ritual killings), they only wanted him knocked down a peg or two, wanted to see him cry, like a little girl, in front of the whole school.

I had minor panic attacks that week, especially at lightsout, when, for some inexplicable reason, it would appear crystal clear to me that Soludo had fallen into evil hands. We had seen ghosts and deities and had heard the ethereal moaning of unknown spirits—the world was no longer new to us.

Meanwhile, it was Saturday morning and the boys were burning ants. OBJ was in charge of operations, standing there in his untucked day blues, shouting suggestions like a commander-in-chief. We were to get flammable things, scorch the ants to death. Some boys gathered nylon bags from surrounding refuse, while others, following OBJ’s lead, found broken jerry cans whose fires dripped in clumps of sea green onto the ants’ rank and file. They screamed hysterically in my head, scattering all around. We had taken posts at various points, flaming them at every junction; boys in blue holding brooms and cutlasses and fiery trash, ready for labor.

We followed Nko, Samson and I, taking our place at the belly of the file. Nko looked around, grabbing a carton and tearing it. He lit it on another boy’s fire and, squatting, flamed the ants. “Plastic is better,” said the boy.

I watched as the carton burned, yellow flames, loud and quick. The smell of smoke. Plastic bags curled and dripped, giving a churning odor. Gallons and jerry cans were the most beautiful, the liquid smell of their burning, their ordinary fire and its dripping detonation, bluish green, like viscous bombs falling. There was fire on patches of grass, a result of the jerry cans whose flame lingered. I began to look around for something plastic—bread sachets were wet, some covered in caked toothpaste, disgusting, so I picked a carton instead.

“The soldiers are rushing around,” I said, squatting to join the game. “They are wondering who these giant attackers are.”

“It’s a war zone they don’t understand,” OBJ supported.

“An enemy they don’t know!” thrilled a boy standing to my left.

“Be careful,” Nko said, standing up and beating his legs. “They bite.”

I jumped up. There was a crawling sensation on my feet, up my legs. My carton was all burned out and I looked around for more. I was a picture of excitement.

“We have to focus on the head of their line!” OBJ bellowed, like a commander of boys. I imagined that we were soldiers.

“I’m going back to our clothes,” Samson said, “before someone steals them because we’re here killing ants.”

“Nobody will steal them,” Nko said. “You’re just afraid of ants.”

“No, I’m not. It’s just foolish killing them, what did they ever do to you?”

“They’re trespassing,” Nko said.

Samson was unfazed. “It’s not like they would stay here forever. Fire or no fire, they will still return to where they came from.”

He turned around, walking toward Waddington House. Nko was somewhat right: it was their house’s duty to sweep that portion and the ants were in their way. I was holding another carton now, contemplating my next moves, when I felt the sting in my thigh. A small cry escaped my lips. I stomped my feet, scratching.

Nko beat my hand. “Don’t scratch! You’ll only make it worse. Did you see the ant that bit you?”

I knew what he was driving at. Once, a soldier ant had stung me while sleeping over at Grandma’s house, and my cousin Elo, who was from the village and wise about these things, had told me that the antidote was that very ant’s fluids. I’d been skeptical but he did his face like “This boy isn’t ready,” and, sniffling, I’d shone a torch on the floor, squashing the first ant I saw with my pointing finger. It barely had liquid and it did nothing for me, the little it had. “Maybe it was not the one that bit you,” said Elo, “let’s keep looking.” In the end, Grandma had rubbed red oil on the spot and told me to sleep. The pain would be gone before I knew it, she said.

I missed my grandma.

I left Nko there, returning to Samson. It hurt like hell, the sting, and I was trying not to cry. There would be nobody to tell me sorry, especially now that Soludo was gone. I missed Soludo. It was a week since his disappearance and no one, not even his mother, knew where he was. Our teachers had interviewed us a gazillion times, threatened us, even punished his corner mate, Bobby, and, still, nothing.

It is the year 1964, two years before the pogrom, the genocide, the war. The place is Kano and the sun is scalding. You are a colonel freshly returned from Sandhurst and he is from a town near Dutse, the man who is not the bond your spirit seeks but whose eyes charm yours and whose fidelity will save your life. (In 1966, he warns you about the killings the night before they begin.) He is a cobbler during the day and a charm-maker’s apprentice at dusk, and he feels your roving, timeless search at first glance. His spirit calls out to yours and you walk up to him, ignoring the other cobblers and handymen beckoning you. Your mortal self has no inclination of your timeless search; in this life you are a practical man, a soldier who loves novels and disco, denouncing all religions and superstitions. Attuned to spiritual things, he smells your soul’s longing, the cobbler man who wears the sun and the heat like second skin. He, too, has a timeless story that you will learn. His black is a sun-kissed black, shining with the perspiration of his labor. He shrugs matter-of-factly when you ask how he does it, sit under the hot sun all day mending shoes. A chameleon skittles past his feet and he swears at it in Fulfulde, raising your shoe as though to smash its fleeing shadow. His name is Fahad.

Nko’s sleepwalking began that night, after they burned the ants. I believed it was karma, his somnambulation (I’d seen ants during my daytime naps, which had become more frequent since I first encountered the angel and the freaky man cow, it was always daytime by the brook where the man cow rested, like a watchman after a long night).

Nko blamed Osita squarely for it, meanwhile Ifeanyi believed it all connected, a string of events that had begun long before Collins’s death. He came to that conclusion because of his dreams, which had begun after Freedom Week, on our second week at Marian Boys’. Nko’s visions had begun then too; only my encounter that rainy night was new.

It was the end of night prep and Nko was putting away his books. Osita stood beside him, trying to get his attention. “Did you not hear

me?” he said, tapping Nko’s shoulder.

I was waiting to walk Nko to chapel for choir practice, Ifeanyi having left earlier on to use the bathroom. I was somewhat scared of walking alone, especially after everything that had happened lately. It was dark outside our classrooms, the night vaguely illuminated, the power having gone out during night prep so that we lit our classrooms with rechargeable lamps, though the corridors remained lively with the voices of students, boys putting away their books or lingering with friends, dashing in and out of classrooms, swearing and laughing and yelling for their friends.

“They keep shouting people’s names at night,” Nko murmured. “They will not learn until an evil spirit hears it and hurts someone’s child.”

“What will the evil spirit do?” Osita said, looking down at him, mischief in his eyes.

“I don’t know. Maybe we should try with your name.”

“You know your problem, Nkorita?” Osita said. “You’re just too proud for no reason at all.” Osita made to snatch Nko’s choir notebook from the table, but Nko grabbed it fast, glaring at Osita, who would have immediately fled into the corridor had he gotten the book first, tricking Nko into a game of chase. Osita glared right back, as if he wasn’t the troublemaker in that situation. He clicked his finger, a devious idea lighting his head, and rushed to the window with the missing louvers. He stuck his head out and began to yell: “Nko! Nkorita!!” Nko rushed at him, standing on his tippy toes to shut Osita’s mouth, but Osita was hiding his head, laughing and hiding his head, and sounding very pleased with himself. He sputtered into Nko’s hand: “Nkorita!!” Turning around, his face was a sunshine of grins, Nko beside himself with rage.

“I na-achoka okwu!” he bellowed, stomping out of the classroom. That night, Ifeanyi had the strangest dream, and Nko’s sleepwalking began.

I soared in the dream like a migratory bird, gliding like a crane through the kaleidoscopic portals of time and space. It must have been the 1600s, clumps of huts among the clustering thickets, shrines, and groves, no steeples yet.

Your name is “Omankalu” in this dream, your title “Ide Ji Obodo.” You were here before the bonding, before this millennium when you are Omankalu blood bound to Nwachukwu.

It was a long dream, and now the song that lulled me, pulling me into the waters of past memories, was like the receding flow of a stream. I saw her face for the first time, the girl in the toilets of Block B, dirty stalls appearing in a little corner of my dream’s mural—I saw her shadow, a smallish teenager with pointy hair, the village beneath her frame, your village, Ide-Nri. Soon I was levitating, sailing above the memory of those past lives and falling freely into the life plot of once-forgotten memories.

The year of your bonding, Nwachukwu was an apprentice, a farmer in his father’s lands during the day (as were you all) and a town crier’s assistant at night. He liked to play his oja in moonlight, outside his mother’s hut, for his umunne na umunna. Between tunes, he told the sweetest stories about the world of all things: trees and flowers, insects, animals of the stead and the forests, humans and the great big sky. He sat on an upturned mortar, loincloth bunched between his legs, slightly elevated from his audience, who sat in cozy curls on their mats. His skin was the color of mud and he had seven dark scars on his bare chest, tiny incisions tallying the number of his returns.

He was an ogbanje, a spirit child born to die before puberty, a journey he’d begun as three consecutive stillbirths. The year of your bonding, he was ten-moons-and-five, and it was the year 1662 by today’s standards.

But you first met him, at the stream seven moons before, when he was eight-moons-here and you nine. He was in his precarious years. His parents had begun the rituals after his third return, marking him, yet every seventh or eighth moon he’d returned to the land of the Unborn, breaking his mother’s heart. People said he’d been a wicked child who rebuffed her prayers, her attention, but as the years went by you came to see that he’d, simply, always been too precious for this world. He was a beautiful child, full of witty quips that sometimes got him fleeing from the older boys, slippery as fish; and when he laughed, his little head fell back, and between his lips rang the purest sound. The moment you laid eyes on him, your spirit saw his spirit, and you left your clan, swimming to him as he played in the water with his. You stood uncertainly in the shallow end, tentatively wading toward their circle. They were waist-and-elbow-deep in the stream (he was slightly above elbow-deep), six children splashing water at each other. The currents were strong that morning, pulling your legs, the sand below treacherously soft. Arms stroking the surface, keeping you afloat, you waited to be noticed, but they continued to play, laughing, oblivious; and he continued to duck from their splashes, going under. The clustering trees formed a shadow around their bed as they moved deeper with the currents. The stream swallowed him shoulders deep. You noticed the sky above the trees,

and the unseeing, unhearing splatter of activity all around: women soaking cassava on the other shallow end where no one was allowed to wash or play; children playing with their friends, filling their water pots, beating wet laundry against the rocks on shore. He was chin deep when you looked again, hands flailing as the currents snatched him off his feet, carrying him toward the dark mouth of the grove. There were stories of children who had gone that way, taken by the spirits of the stream, their bodies found many towns over, or never again. He kicked and flailed, kicked and flailed, his cousin, Osadebay, swimming desperately after him. The set of actions came to you in a flash: there you were on shore, running toward the grove, faster than current. The forest and the creeks were your friend, and eightmoons-here, you were already a marvel under water. Still, it was precarious, the currents by the grove could drag you away with him. And yet. The trees, their branches twisting toward the water. You grabbed a fat, solid branch while the currents fought you; submerged from the neck down, there was nothing beneath your feet, not soft wet earth, only living water. You grabbed his flailing arm, which was all that remained of his body—the stream having accepted its gift with glee, taking him under and beyond—and held him there until his cousin, six moons older and more experienced with the currents, grabbed him ashore. That evening, his mother came to your mother’s hut to show her appreciation, and while both women got acquainted, trading stories, you asked if he would like to play, and together you scuttled off into the compound.

In the moons that followed before his fifteenth, you showed him the ways of the forests—how to lay traps for big and small game; how to lie in wait, silent as the trees, for the kill; how to shoot an arrow with great precision; how to give an animal a clean death—and he opened your eyes to beauty all around. All the while he bestrode this realm and that of the Unborn, with seasonal fevers that threatened his life, so that he burned and sweated days on end in his mother’s hut. She let you sit with him, let you administer the dibia’s remedies, and year after year he said no, said here was the place for him, and his mother looked at you one day, something grateful in her eyes, as she said, “Perhaps all he ever wanted was a brother like you to make him stay.” By his fifteenth moon, it was concluded that he was here for sure, and his father threw a party for him. There was much drumming and dancing, men and maidens flirting in the dark corners around the compound, akpu na onugbu overflowing from his mothers’ kitchens, palm wine from his father’s stead. You see it now, the full moon that night and the vivacious drumming in that corner of the village. You see him and you see you, wandering away from the party. The paths are dark, lit occasionally by the fires of a compound.

“Where are we going?” you ask.

“To the stream,” he says.

No one went to the stream after dusk, when the spirits came out to play, and you wondered, fleetingly, if he was taking you to meet his spirit friends. You stopped in your tracks. His face in the moonlight was gentle, with an otherworldly beauty, and for the first time in your years of friendship, you felt a bone-chilling fear of him, the boy who was not of this world. The surrounding darkness crowded with presence and meaning, and in the soft whites of his gentle eyes was a quiet knowing. He saw your fear and he saw your love.

“Are you afraid of me?” he asked.

“No,” you said. Your voice faltered. “There is nothing to fear. It’s only you, Nwachukwu.” You looked frantically around: the immense

darkness with its eerie night sounds, things lurking behind trees. “But I do not want to go to the stream. We should go back home. This is not the night we encounter a bad spirit. Not tonight.”

He walked toward the bushes, sitting on a fallen tree. He picked up a twig, doodling in the sand. The path went four ways, a crossroad: ahead was the stream and behind was the village. You sat beside him. “Who said it’s over?” he asked, eyes on the sand. “I could die tonight or a few moons from now.” He paused, crickets and toads accentuating the silence. “My mother. My mother.”

“You will not die. You have broken the cycle by living this long.”

He shrugged. “Everyone in my father’s compound has always treated me like an egg, as though afraid to offend the recalcitrant spirit child lest he chooses to go away, or, worse, incite his spirit friends against them.” He chuckled, a low, sad chuckle. “In all of this, it is my mother I think of. I am her only child.”

“I know.”

“Can you make me a promise?”

“Anything.”

“Will you always check in on my mother should I go with the coming moons?”

“You are not going anywhere.”

“Omankalu! Please just listen. Do you promise?”

“I promise—aren’t you my brother? But I tell you this, nothing will happen to you.”

He continued to doodle in the sand. Fireflies glowed in the dark. His scribbles were almost imperceptible, but you could see, under aqueous moonlight, the shape of an ant. You took the stick from him, thinking of the beast you had once seen during an expedition with your father and his company one moon ago. He’d gone in search of tusks, a hunting accomplishment worthy of a title if successful, venturing into forests you had never dreamed of, crossing many streams and old, abandoned villages. You were too young for the journey and the dangerous hunt, still you went, watching as your father marked their tracks, saying, “They are near, maybe seven or eight of them—we will have to isolate the matriarch.” The sound the beast made when you finally found her in the snare, in a tangle of ropes, you’d never heard anything like it before; and the way she fought the hunters, who pulled on the ropes against which she struggled as they came at her with their spears. She maimed a hunter with her massive tusk and shook the ground with her stomping. Her cries were furious and plaintive, and your father said, “Hurry before her companions arrive!” You hid behind a tree as Father had instructed, overcome by a wondrous trembling. When the elephant fell, you felt no triumph, only deep respect and a sense of the glory of all things. Her tusks sat above your father’s stead in his obi, and whenever you looked at them, you saw the dying light in her eyes, and felt a rush of love and pity.

You drew her now, doodling in the sand. “Enyi ,” he said, which, depending on the accent, meant “elephant” or “friend.” You nodded. You retrieved your little knife from the side of your loincloth, unsheathing it.

“I will make you a promise today, in blood,” you said. “That no matter what happens today or many moons from now, I will find you in every lifetime and be your brother.”

He looked up at you, taking the knife from you. He slit his palm. “Brothers, in this life and the next,” he said.

You clasped hands, blood to blood, spirit to spirit, and, unclasping, drew each other into an endless hug.

I woke up with a jolt. Samson was standing by my bed. “I know where Soludo is,” I said. It was way past lights-out, sometime around one in the morning, the hour—between one and three—when witches

were said to be most active.

“The man came to my window again,” he said, wide-eyed. “I think Nko is in trouble.”

“What man?” I whispered, panicking. The lights were out and everyone was asleep.

“The man with the horns. He told me to check on the boy ‘whose eyes had seen the dead.’ That’s Nko.”

Samson’s voice was cool, strangely normal, as though he were talking about regular stuff. I did not register then the oddness of his composure, still stunned by the vivid intensity of my dream. Somewhere in the kaleidoscopes of my shifting dreamworld, I’d found myself on a street in Onitsha, a city I’d only ever passed through, the bus to or from Kano stopping there to pick up or drop off passengers, spilling us for a moment into the smelly, oily disorder of some motor park. I’d seen the roofs as our bus drove by, endless clusters, blue, brown, and red; tall, tall flats and decrepit compounds on whose falling balconies shirtless men brushed their teeth. Onitsha was loud and crowded, but the street was quiet this morning, darkly gray. Old Peugeots and Mitsubishis parked in front of one-story buildings. A foraging dog suddenly pausing by the electric pole to bark at the roof. The street brimmed with the strangeness of its unfamiliar energies, and—to God Who Made Me—I felt the presence of other spirits, rising as surging ruptures at the dog’s alarm. This was their turf, their home, their marketplace—who goes there! My friend asleep in the compound across the street, shaking from a nightmare. I needed to identify the street and knew I must perch on one of the cars for a clearer view of the numbers drawn in black or blue on the compound walls. But they were down there, the owners and runners, stalking behind the cars and electric poles. The dog continued to bark, inconsolably mad. I reminded myself that this was my dream and they could not hurt me. Yet this dream felt different—perhaps with the

new knowledge from recent uncanny occurrences at Marian Boys’, it felt like real life. Still, the knowledge that I was the boy asleep on his bunkbed, and not the bird perching on a dusty Audi, the sense that none of this was real—it assured me greatly. Shortly after, I woke up.

“Quick, come,” Samson was saying.

Slowly, memories of our fight returned to me. “No,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m not going out there.”

Samson’s face curled, and something about his angry face filled me with pity. It was the sense that he might weep. “Please,” he said. “Nko needs our help and I can’t go alone.”

I sat up properly, lifted my mattress and retrieved my slippers. “What about the cow man? I’m scared.”

My top-bunk mate stirred, letting out a frustrated groan, like a warning, and turned his back to us, continuing his sleep. “Please lower your voice,” Samson said, soft and clear. He seemed resigned to the task at hand. “That’s why we’re going together. If anything catches either of us, the other person must run into the nearest hostel and make a loud noise. Wake everybody up.”

We were at the door now, plotting our moves. Fear pumped my heart, rapid-rapid, panic in my veins. I could not believe I’d been picked for such a task; outside, night loomed with every possible danger. The air was nippy with the breath of dead and living things. I shivered, looking up at Samson.

“We’re going now, but you have to strengthen your mind before we do.”

I took a deep breath, closing my eyes. “Let’s go.”

How did I come to be here, in Samson’s arms, Ifeanyi kneeling by my head? I’d heard my name in my sleep. Nko. Nko. Nko. Like the syncopated thumping of three pestles rising and falling on beat: N-ko. N-ko. N-ko. I remembered nothing else, only my rising moment and

their voices calling my name, luring me to the reservoir. What would they have had me do? Drown myself?

Samson was crying, tears rolling freely down his face. “Nko, o Nko,” he wept.

Once outside, we’d hit the corridor hard, dashing toward Block B. Past the island of light between our blocks and into the darkness of the corridors. We had to take the stairs two stories to Awka House, Nko’s hostel, and hesitated at the door, wary of the stairwell. We walked gingerly in; a weak beam grazed the wall, cast from the corridor of the topmost floor. We ascended, alternating between partial illumination and interminable darkness, grabbing the cold banisters as we went. Samson was in front. I gripped, then let his shirt go, casting cautious glances behind us. We took it two steps at a time. Samson accelerated, darting up the stairs, and I rushed behind him, fearing what lurked behind.

Nko was not in his corner when we got to Awka House, nor was he in any of the corners we peeked into, moving stealthily so as not to cause a stir. Samson went to OBJ’s corner, tapping him. “Have you seen Nko?”“No,” OBJ said, in sleep. We went outside, contemplating.

“Are you sure of what you saw?” I asked, feeling suddenly exhausted. “Maybe he’s in a senior’s corner.”

“If you don’t want to help me look, you can go back to bed,” Samson snapped.

I leaned against the veranda’s banister, staring down at the hedges, the football field, Classroom Block vaguely shrouded in the dark. That was when I saw him, first as a figure emerging from the staff quarters, my bones freezing with fright. And then he fully emerged, short, light-skin Nko wandering into the poor light of the

twin streetlamps. I pointed: “There he is!”

“Where is he going this late?”

“Maybe he went to read.”

“Alone and at this time? I think he’s walking to Waddington House.”

Immediately, as if hearing our whispers from that distance, he dashed behind the hedges, sprinting into Chaplain’s front yard. “He’s running to the tank?” I said.

Samson turned swiftly to the stairwell door, which had been wedged open with a stone (the wind often made it bang at night), flying blindly down the stairs. I followed him, pausing for a wink on the second-floor landing. A shard of light splashed across a fragment of the gratified wall, the unilluminated words like lurking brigands behind a pale curtain. I stood there, forgetting my fear, my haste, mesmerized by the shadow on the wall, her voice cooing, kpakpangolo, kpangolo, Prosperity na e-kwu, kpangolo ; and there, before my eyes, new words began to appear on the wall:

Your soulmate sings of motion—

Two right turns after the market, one left turn into the rivered street: the house.

Text © Arinze Ifeakandu, 2024

Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend

Lubaina Himid. Predicting Positions 2023 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 72 x 72 inches (1 83 x 183 cm). © Lubaina Himid. Cour tesy the Ar tist Hollybush Gardens, London and Greene Naftali Galler y.

Photography by Andy Keate

JEFF WALL: BEFORE THE IMAGE

Informant (2023)

Juan Marsé’s novel Ultimas Tardes con Teresa (Last afternoons with Teresa), published in 1966, is the story of an affair between Manolo, a young man from one of Barcelona’s post–World War 2 migrant neighborhoods, and Teresa, a girl from a wealthy family. The book creates a panoramic critical vision of the rapidly changing social order of the 1950s. The ambitious and attractive antihero, poorly educated and without prospects, is pursuing illegal means of livelihood—stealing motorbikes—in the rough conditions of the El Camel neighborhood, still emerging from the hillsides above the city. This involves him in business with an older man, uncle to a fifteen-year-old girl who otherwise has no family. She is Hortensia, and has been infatuated with Manolo for some years. She, like her rival Teresa, is blonde. Hortensia has found work in a local pharmacy, one of the newly established businesses in an area with rudimentary services and few paved streets. Priding herself on her properly legal occupation, in contrast to the kinds of things she sees around her, she insists on wearing her white lab coat everywhere and has become well-known locally. The author devotes few passages to Hortensia, but her relationship with Manolo and her intense frustration and jealousy pulse throughout the long narrative.

Things come to a climax near the end of the novel. One night, provoked once too often by Manolo’s flirtatious yet dismissive treatment, Hortensia witnesses him stealing another motorbike in order to visit Teresa in her parents’ distant villa, and, seemingly on impulse, decides to inform the police. The pharmacy has a private telephone, in an era when access to the device was very restricted; this gives Hortensia a unique opportunity to inform anonymously. Marsé never describes or comments on her feelings, thoughts, or actions in enabling the authorities to arrest and convict Manolo and bring the novel to its conclusion.

The photograph was taken in Barcelona in 2023. The smaller image inserted into the larger one reveals that she is on the telephone to the police.

Jeff Wall explains the stories and literary allusions behind two photographs of his that will appear in an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, in November.

Previous spread: Jeff Wall, Informant: An occurrence not described in chapter 6, part 3 of Ultimas Tardes con Teresa by Juan Marsé, 2023, inkjet print, 53 5⁄8 × 55 ½ inches (136 × 141 cm), edition of 3 + 1 AP

Opposite: Jeff Wall, Portrait in Noto, 2007, inkjet print, 78 ¾ × 96 inches (200 × 244 cm), edition of 3 + 1 AP

Below: Jeff Wall, Hillside, Sicily, November 2007, 2007, gelatin silver print, 97 × 120 ¼ inches (246.3 × 305.3 cm)

Artwork © Jeff Wall

Portrait in Noto (2007)

I traveled in Sicily in the autumn of 2007 with the intention of photographing a rocky hillside. There’s something timeless about them, captured in this passage from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel il Gattopardo (The Leopard , 1958) describing a hunt by the protagonist and his companion:

The term “countryside” implies soil transformed by labour; but the scrub clinging to the slopes was still in the very same state of scented tangle in which it had been found by Phoenicians, Dorians, and Ionians when they disembarked in Sicily, that America of antiquity. Don Fabrizio and Tumeo climbed up and down, slipped and were scratched by thorns, just as any Archidamus or Philostratus must have been tired and scratched twenty-five centuries before. . . . When the hunters reached the top of the hill, there among the tamarisks and scattered cork trees appeared the real Sicily again, the one compared to which baroque towns and orange groves are mere trifles.

A few days after completing the photograph Hillside, Sicily, we entered the baroque town of Noto, intending a brief visit before continuing my search for another possible hillside image. (I soon found one on the outskirts of Ragusa.) At a café, we noticed a middle-aged woman accompanied by a young man who might have been her son. She was behaving unusually and he was attempting to manage and possibly protect her. My wife, Jeannette, felt an intense sympathy for the woman and the boy and suggested we try to photograph them. But we hesitated and they disappeared. We left Noto after admiring its remarkable architecture and headed west into the hills, but we continued to think about those two and decided to go back to Noto to see if we could find them, thinking that they were likely known in the neighborhood. Our guide was confident he could locate them, and did so within a few hours. She came to our meeting place, without the young man, who was in fact her son, but with an adult man who negotiated with us. I photographed her in about fifteen minutes. I explicitly do not do portraits, but made an exception in this one circumstance.

Hidden in Plain Sight

New discoveries in the art of

JasperJohns

In the second part of a twopart essay, art historian John B. Ravenal considers Jasper Johns’s continued engagement with the motif of woodgrain.

Separating from the Referent

In the mid-1980s, between making the first and last of the “bath pictures”—works he based on the bathroom in his home in Stony Point, New York— Jasper Johns introduced a new motif: a nearly full-length figure based on his own shadow. The shadow appears life-size in the four Seasons paintings (1985–86). Surrounded by Johns’s possessions and in environments depicting the changing times of year, the motif has been widely understood as a meditation on the passage of time and the stages of human life.

Each of the four backgrounds behind the shadow refers to a place where the artist lived and worked, including the horizontal wood planks in Fall , which recall his Manhattan studio on Houston Street. 1 Woodgrain also appears in the boldly grained picture frame within Winter. But its most unusual appearance in The Seasons occurs in the assertive pattern that fills the triangles, squares, and circles in three of the four paintings. Clustered at the bottom or top and mirrored across the vertical center lines of the paintings, these geometric forms have been variously seen as inspired by Dürer’s engraving Melancolia I (1514); 2 Cézanne’s dictum to “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone”; 3 and an early-nineteenth-century brush painting, Circle, Triangle, and Square (also known as The Universe), by the Japanese Zen master Sengai Gibon. 4

Whatever the source, most notable is that filling these shapes with woodgrain represents the pattern’s first appearance entirely free from a descriptive role. It may still retain allusions to Johns’s living spaces, whether Houston Street or Stony Point, but it no longer describes a wall, floor, door, table, or even a hypothetical shop sign, as in the artist’s poster for the Whitney Museum of American Art (1977). In The Seasons , the geometric forms that enclose the woodgrain now declare the pattern’s independence. Building on his prior juxtapositions of the organic and the geometric in the 1977 Savarin print (see part one), Johns here binds the two more closely together. He creates a new form that joins a symbol of nature with the purity of geometry, perhaps in fulfillment of Cézanne’s statement.

I would also propose that this union of opposites represents woodgrain shedding its vestiges of literalism and attaining the neutrality that Johns prized in his early motifs. Johns famously described his flags, targets, numbers, and letters as “things the mind already knows.”5 As a found image, woodgrain shares with these other, already known subjects the quality of being at once familiar and overlooked. It also offers Johns the elasticity he seeks in his motifs, exemplified by a decade of hatchmark paintings (1972–82), a pattern he described as having “all the qualities that interest me—literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of complete lack of meaning.”6

Woodgrain may seem only partly to share these

qualities with hatchmarks, but in its many iterations in his work, Johns has pushed it increasingly in this direction. He seems to value it precisely for its lack of resistance to the repetition, variation, and mutation that distinguish his practice. By the time of The Seasons , after nearly two decades of permutations, woodgrain had shed its need for an external referent and come close to resembling “an image of pictorial technique,” as Rosalind Krauss once described Johns’s hatchmarks.7

Even this notion of extreme neutrality, however, offers only a partial understanding of the function of woodgrain in Johns’s work. Further consideration of his deep reworking of figure/ground relationships provides a fuller picture. Thomas Crow has described “Johns’s ability and desire to promote his ground to the status of a figure, not just by making figure and ground mechanically equivalent, as high Modernism sought to do, but by endowing his grounds—harlequins, hatchings, and flagstones alike—with aspects of character, identity, and capacity for action that the term ‘figure’ carries in traditional art.”8 The same is true of simulated woodgrain. Johns uses this motif to complicate figure/ground relations, sometimes with optical illusions and spatial disorientation, as when floorboards seem to tip upright and become a wall, at other times by disconnecting the pattern from its referent altogether, then shifting and mutating what is commonly understood as ground so that it takes on the role of figure.

By contrast, Mirror’s Edge and Mirror’s Edge 2 , a pair of large, complex paintings from 1992 and 1993, use a wood element to anchor rather than disrupt space. The paintings layer ever more imagery onto the familiar setting of the studio wall, including

Previous spread: Jasper Johns, After Holbein , 1993, encaustic on canvas, 32 ½ × 25 5⁄8 inches (82.6 × 65.1 cm). Photo: Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York

Below: Jasper Johns, Winter, 1986, encaustic on canvas, 75 × 50 inches (190.5 × 127 cm), Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois

Opposite: Jasper Johns, Fall , 1986, encaustic on canvas, 75 × 50 inches (190.5 × 127 cm). Photo: Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York

new motifs: a plan of Johns’s grandfather’s house that he reconstructed from memory, a stick figure derived from a mural by Pablo Picasso, and a swirling galaxy that Johns found in a photograph. A faux-wood strip runs the full height of each painting. In their narrowness, lack of seams, and position at the vertical edge, these strips echo the real wood batons leaning out from other Johns paintings, such as Perilous Night (1982). Those actual strips, by projecting into the viewer’s space, had counterbalanced the pictorial illusion of shallow depth. Johns could have used the same means in the two Mirror’s Edge works, but instead he painted faux-wood strips. Their format matches the real batons but their painterly grain emphasizes their pattern over their location in space. Kirk Varnedoe described these two dense paintings as “symphonic in their orchestrations and dreamlike in the variety of their floating juxtapositions.”9 Unmentioned and seemingly unnoticed in this visual symphony is the role of woodgrain: flush with the picture plane, the faux strips anchor the surface while the swirl of images opens up illusionistic depths ranging from centimeters to light-years.

Heads and Bodies

In another pair of paintings from 1993, Johns again began by linking woodgrain to a plausible referent but then stretched it far beyond. The colorful fragmented figure in After Hans Holbein is based on Holbein’s chalk-ink-and-watercolor drawing Portrait of a Boy with a Marmoset (c. 1532/35; Kunstmuseum Basel). 10 Johns faithfully recorded many details of the original work, even outlining small missing sections of paper from its top and right edges. When it came to the original work’s light blue background, however, he replaced it entirely. Johns had traced the image from an exhibition poster that hung in his New York City townhouse, 11 and the poster’s large text may have encouraged him to add, in stenciled letters in the upper-right quadrant of the painting, the title and date of his own work and his own name, also recalling his poster for his 1977 exhibition at the Whitney. He filled the remaining background with assertive woodgrain in a light tone on red, organized in vertical planks of varying widths, like the barn-board walls at Stony Point.

In After Holbein , a grisaille version of the painting, the stenciled text gives way to columns of black sperm shapes on a gray ground. Across the entire image, sperm and woodgrain vie for prominence: it is unclear whether these patterns have transgressed their role as background to fill the puzzle-piece-like sections of the boy’s figure or whether the boy has become see-through, allowing glimpses of the ground behind him with even more transparency than the shadows do in The Seasons. In either case, the flipping back and forth here merges figure and ground, negating the distinction between the two.

John Yau has described this collapse of figure and ground as a meditation on mortality, with the youth forming and disappearing before our eyes, as if between birth and death. He goes on to say that the “wood grain (or ground) evokes time beyond our demise, and our absence from it.”12 His observation underscores the capacity of woodgrain to reference issues of temporality and existence. A growing tree’s continual laying down of new fibers and cells in an orderly pattern of light and dark rings presents a graphic record of both its vitality

and the passage of time. In addition, each new ring responds to changes in temperature, precipitation, and other external conditions, altering the regular growth pattern of a particular species or tree and recording information about past climate, ecosystems, and even galactic events. 13 In this way the final pattern stands at once for past and present, life and death, timelessness and ephemerality.

The year after Johns made the Holbein paintings, he explored a new variation on the relationship between the figure and woodgrain. In Untitled (1994), a field of floorboards provides the ground for a contour drawing that Johns based on Auguste Rodin’s plaster assemblage of a minotaur holding the torso of a female centaur (c. 1910; Musée Rodin). 14 Johns traced the contour from a photograph, but the figure in his painting appears a step further removed from the sculpture, reading as if it were a framed image laid flat on a wood floor. Closer looking, however, reveals that the frame doesn’t align with the floor. While the floorboards

run parallel to the sides of the actual painting, creating an edge-to-edge field, as in Johns’s early flag works, the internal framed image has a gently trapezoidal shape, indicating slight recession into space. Rather than lying on a floor, it is better seen as leaning against a wood-paneled wall. In addition, the framed image’s transparency allows woodgrain to fill some of the figure’s puzzle pieces with great clarity, while in other areas hatchmarks obscure the background. Johns once again confounds the distinctions between floor and wall and melds figure and ground, allowing the image to flip back and forth in spatial confusion.

Dizzying Complexity

In 1997, Johns began a series distinguished by the new motif of a draped string spanning the painting’s surface in a catenary curve. These works also reintroduced the actual wood strip leaning out from the picture plane that had first appeared fifteen years earlier in works such as Perilous Night Over the span of a decade and across eighty paintings, drawings, and prints, the Catenary series elevates the play between real and faux wood to

new levels of convolution. The first painting in the series, Bridge (1997), set the tone on a grand scale. Across a ten-foot expanse, a field of gray brushstrokes replaces the densely layered imagery of Mirror’s Edge and related works of the previous few years. Only a few images remain, clinging to the perimeter, including the spiraling galaxy and a new motif of the Big Dipper constellation. A real wood slat at the right edge, leaning into the viewer’s space, has an eyehook screwed into it that secures one end of the catenary string. Along the other three edges of the painting runs a faux wood frame. Johns had depicted woodgrained frames before—in Winter, for example—but they were always contained within the image rather than forming the image’s actual border. And wood strips, both real and faux, had formed a single edge of many other earlier paintings and works on paper. But the faux strips in Bridge are the first illusionistic frame to surround most of a work. At the lower left, Johns screwed a second real eyehook into this faux frame, where it supports the other end of the catenary string and presents a playful inversion of a nearby painted nail. The eyehook’s concreteness lends validity to the faux wood, increasing the illusionism of the painted frame. But higher up along

Below: Jasper Johns, After Hans Holbein , 1993, encaustic on canvas, 32 ½ × 25 5⁄8 inches (82.6 × 65.1 cm).

Photo: Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York

Opposite: Jasper Johns, Untitled , 1994, encaustic on canvas, 28 ½ × 42 ¼ inches (72.4 × 107.3 cm).

Photo: Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York

this same edge, the gray field of paint spills onto the fake frame, undercutting the illusion. In a further play of true and false, behind the real wood slat at the right Johns painted a mirror image of its back side, including the stenciled title. This implies that the slat has imprinted itself on the painting’s surface. Scott Rothkopf has described the “complicated reciprocity that [Johns] develops between the architecture of his slats and their painted surfaces” as part of the overall “reflexive visual logic” of the Catenary series. While familiar from Johns’s earlier work, he notes, it now takes on an “almost dizzying complexity.”15 The play of real and fake woodgrain serves as an essential, if largely unacknowledged, component of this intricate construct, contributing to the fluctuation between a two-dimensional surface, a shallow optical space, and hints of infinite depth.

Simulation and/as Translation

During the early 2000s, Johns continued to use the motif of wood slats to probe the relationship between reality and simulation. Two Bushbaby paintings, from 2003 and 2005, feature tall, vertical wood batons. The first painting is the size of a person; the second replicates the first painting’s composition while nearly doubling its size. In both works a wing nut fixes an outer slat with a dangling string to an inner slat. The arrangement recalls other such devices in Johns’s work, where wooden sticks and batons imply rotation or lean away from the surface. Referring to the movable slats in the Catenary series, Johns had said, “It’s important that one sees the instability of what one is looking at—that it could be changed. I like that you’re aware of other possibilities, whether you set them into motion or not.”16 The statement could apply to Johns’s entire practice, with its embrace of mutation, contingency, and instability.

Breaking with his usual practice of making finished drawings after his paintings, Johns developed the Bushbaby imagery first in a watercolor-and-graphite version. The drawing shares most of the paintings’ motifs, but the greater separation between the black shapes, which suggest a rudimentary figure, offers even less clarity about the nature of this ambiguous form. 17 Johns’s careful delineation of the slats’ woodgrain pattern—present in many of the nearly forty related works on paper—suggests a level of commitment that seems to exceed merely the effort to make a convincing representation of a real material. On a formal level, the precisely rendered woodgrain sharpens the juxtaposition of the organic pattern and the nearby geometries. This contrast is amplified in a small inset image at the upper right, where tight cropping accents the play between the woodgrain, polka dots, and quadrilaterals. The careful translation from one medium to another—from real wood to encaustic, watercolor, or graphite—also elevates the status of woodgrain. Verisimilitude here not only confers fidelity but underscores the role that woodgrain plays as one of the principal motifs in this hermetic series.

An untitled watercolor from 2006, based on an untitled painting from the same year, offers further insight into how instances of “faithful” translation convey additional meanings beyond the initial act of representation. The painting belongs to a group of seven made between 2004 and 2012 that combine the slat-and-string constructions with the flagstone motif. The untitled drawing—here, in Johns’s usual practice, made after the finished painting— carefully re-creates the look of the painting, including the shading around the canvas and slats. 18 And while the woodgrain is a freehand invention, it, too, conveys an aura of exactitude. The care taken in its rendering establishes it as a twin, though not a true copy, of the actual wood strip in the painting. Johns both takes a liberty and counters that impression by the heightened level of finish.

Despite the creative liberty Johns introduced into this supposed translation, he could never be accused of exhibiting what Vladimir Nabokov colorfully described as the translator’s “three grades of evil”—which boil down to ignorance, laziness, and arrogance. 19 Rather, Johns seems to court what Nabokov might have agreed was a fourth, counterintuitive risk of translation, were he to have considered it further. This is the risk of creating the impression that a meticulous rendering, whether textual or visual, offers a transparent window onto the original—a deception that may inform the enigmatic Italian saying Traduttore, traditore , or “The translator is a traitor.” One is reminded of Johns’s keen interest in the ambiguity surrounding Edvard Munch’s adoption of a woodcut aesthetic for his lithograph of The Scream (see part one). For Johns, fidelity serves as another ploy in a repertoire full of such devices. It bolsters the impression of his fauxwood slats and batons as proxies for the real thing, while in truth problematizing the equation.

In general, incorporating a found object, such as a real wood slat, into a painting highlights the artist’s acts of selection and recontextualization. The found object’s change of location and function calls attention to its materiality, which is accentuated by its juxtaposition with the painted surface. Carefully re-creating the color, form, and pattern of that found object in a different medium might seem merely to validate the relocation of the object to its new setting, that is, the initial act of appropriation. And Johns’s practice of making drawings and prints after his finished paintings seems to align with this notion, as if he were enshrining or memorializing the original painting. But in creating a simulation, in whatever medium and to whatever degree of finish, Johns also activates long-standing questions about the complex relationship between the original and the translation.

Even setting aside what one translator describes as the myth of “forensic fidelity,” an ontological problem remains.

20 In “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin memorably described an unbridgeable gap between the original and the translation: “Whereas content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds. For it

signifies a more exalted language than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien.”21 No matter its fidelity, then, the translation would be considered inherently superfluous, and would carry this superfluity within it as a distinguishing feature.

Similarly, the more carefully and convincingly Johns makes his simulated woodgrain, the more it stands as a “supplement,” to apply Jacques Derrida’s term for an addition to something thought of as complete and an origin—an addition that usurps the position of that supposed origin in order to question the binary logic of an original and a copy. 22 A seemingly innocuous aspect of Johns’s work, then, woodgrain comes to serve as a decoy—a concept woven throughout Johns’s art—carrying within itself the kernel of a deconstructive logic.

Conclusion

Identifying the sources of Johns’s woodgrain pattern no more explains his imagery than uncovering the origin of any of his motifs. His works, like those of most artists, are not codes to be deciphered with a special key, or reduced to fixed meanings. But this line of inquiry does provide a fruitful starting point for deeper understanding. The significance of Johns’s motifs lies in their ever-shifting characters and interrelationships. Tracing the paths by which a new image enters his work, and then closely tracking its evolution, offers insight into the complex and intuitive way he works, layering observation, memory, and invention. That this process sometimes functions beneath Johns’s consciousness seems clear. Yet as images rise to his level of awareness, they unleash new meanings and new possibilities for further exploration.

Woodgrain, in its union of literalness and elasticity, has offered Johns a generative motif for probing some of his central and enduring concerns: the links between figure and ground, past and present, and reality and imagination. In discussing one of his most celebrated motifs—crosshatching— Jennifer Roberts revealed how the “seemingly chaotic arrangements of marks . . . are in fact governed by print-based patterns of reversal, repetition, and rotation.”23 Woodgrain too, over the course of its

This page: Jasper Johns, Bridge, 1997, oil on canvas with objects, 78 × 117 inches (198.1 × 297.2 cm), Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois

Opposite: Jasper Johns, Bushbaby, 2003, encaustic on canvas with objects, 65 7 8 × 44 inches (167.3 × 111.8 cm). Photo: Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York

Artwork © Jasper Johns/ Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

life in Johns’s work, undergoes such varied and complex deformations. But unlike crosshatching or other better-known subjects of his, its manipulations are less overtly on display. Woodgrain is first and foremost a pattern we know from myriad natural and artificial surfaces in our surrounding environment. This familiarity has inhibited inquiry: woodgrain’s persistent legibility, paradoxically, has contributed to its invisibility.

That woodgrain spans fifty years of Johns’s career owes, at least in part, to this phenomenon of hiding in plain sight. Unlike woodgrain, many of Johns’s motifs make time-limited appearances in his work. They are used intensively and then retired, their possibilities seemingly exhausted. Crosshatching was the exclusive subject of his painting from 1972 to 1982; it has rarely reappeared since its culmination in the three large paintings titled after Munch’s Between the Clock and the Bed . Other motifs play out over even more limited time frames, such as Holbein’s boy with

a marmoset, only in use from 1990 to 1993. Still others, however, may extend over decades, as with the “green angel,” based on Rodin’s minotaur and centaur. Woodgrain, too, appears in clusters, but with greater regularity than almost any of his other motifs, populating his work nearly every year or two from the mid-1960s to 2018. True, it usually plays a supporting rather than a leading role, but it always contributes something essential to the meaning of the work. Woodgrain’s cloak of neutrality, then, has not only kept it under the radar but has fostered its staying power. Again and again, in widely different works and across all of Johns’s media, woodgrain has recurred, fitted into images in a way that often seems natural and unremarkable, but that upon closer looking displays the complexity, the nuance, and, ultimately, the strangeness that attend the more celebrated of Johns’s motifs. This Zelig-like act of mutation and self-perpetuation is anything but neutral.

Excerpted from an unpublished essay. Part One appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly.

I wish to thank colleagues for help with my research: Carlos Basualdo, Roberta Bernstein, Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, Harry Cooper, Sarah Eckhardt, Bill Goldston, Larissa Goldston, Jennifer Gross, Stephanie Gutman, Emily Handlin, Rebecca Rabinow, Maryhelen Murray, Shelly Langdale, Robert Lazzarini, Catharine Manchanda, Donna McClendon, Christopher Pye, Eva Respini, John Henry Rice, Jennifer Roberts, Scott Rothkopf, Chris Santa Maria, Patterson Sims, Deborah Solomon, David Swetzoff, Michael Taylor, Ann Temkin, Jacqueline Tran, Jim Webb, and Joni Moisant Weyl. Special thanks to Alison McDonald, Wyatt Allgeier, and David Frankel at the Gagosian Quarterly. Deepest gratitude to Jasper Johns and Maureen Pskowski for their support of my research. As ever, love to Virginia Pye.

1. The other three surfaces are terra-cotta tile from St. Martin (Spring), brick from Stony Point, New York (Summer ), and stone from the courtyard of Jasper Johns’s Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse (Winter ). See Barbara Rose, “Jasper Johns: The Seasons,” Vogue , January 1987, 259–60.

2. Ibid., 259.

3. See Roberta Bernstein, “Seeing a Thing Can Sometimes Trigger the Mind to Make Another Thing,” in Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective , exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 57.

4. Ibid.

5. Johns, quoted in “Art: His Heart Belongs to dada,” Time , May 4, 1959, 58.

6. Johns, quoted in Sarah Kent, “Jasper Johns: Strokes of Genius,” 1990, in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews , ed. Kirk Varnedoe, compiled by Christel Hollevoet (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 259.

7. Rosalind Krauss, “Jasper Johns: The Functions of Irony,” October 2 (Summer 1976): 95.

8. Thomas Crow, “Moving Targets: Change and Renewal in the Art of Jasper Johns,” in Jasper Johns: Drawings 1997–2007, exh. cat. (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2008), n.p.

9. Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, 359.

10. The sitter for Portrait of a Boy with a Marmoset was long identified as the young Edward, Prince of Wales, but this identity is no longer accepted. See Bernstein, “Seeing a Thing,” 74 n. 126. The pet has been variously called a marmoset, lemur, and monkey.

11. Ibid., 62.

12. John Yau, A Thing among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2008), 167.

13. See Jim Robbins, “Chronicles of the Rings: What Trees Tell Us,” New York Times , April 30, 2019. Available online at www.nytimes. com/2019/04/30/science/tree-rings-climate.html (accessed August 30, 2024).

14. Johns first used this motif four years earlier and it appeared in dozens of paintings, drawings, and prints over more than three decades before its source was identified and the connection made to his interest in the pathos of damaged and broken figures. See Yau, “Jasper Johns: Hiding in Plain Sight,” Hyperallergic, May 29, 2021. Available online at https://hyperallergic.com/649178/jasperjohns-hiding-in-plain-sight/ (accessed August 30, 2024). See also Greg Allen, “Jasper Johns Fan Dance,” greg.org (blog), May 31, 2021. Available online at https://greg.org/archive/2021/05/31/jasperjohns-fan-dance.html (accessed August 30, 2024).

15. Scott Rothkopf, “Suspended Animation,” in Jasper Johns: Catenary, exh. cat. (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2005), 10–11.

16. Johns, quoted in ibid., 9–10.

17. Gary Garrels and Bernstein read the black shapes as a totemic figure inspired by Pablo Picasso’s Harlequin of 1915 , and the smaller rectangles as genitals. See Garrels, “The Bushbaby Series,” in Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind’s Eye , exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with Yale University Press, New Haven, 2013), 150–56, and Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Sculptures (New York: Wildenstein Plattner Institute, 2016), 296–97.

18. Thanks to Bernstein for this observation, and for looking at her notebooks to confirm that the drawing was made after, not before, the painting. Emails to author, January 21 and 26, 2022. In the photograph of the painting in Bernstein’s catalogue raisonné (P339), the slats overlap; in the drawing, they are spread apart.

19. Vladimir Nabokov, “The Art of Translation: On the Sins of Translation and the Great Russian Short Story,” New Republic, August 4, 1941. Available online at https://newrepublic.com/ article/113310/vladimir-nabokov-art-translation# (accessed August 30, 2024).

20. Saskia Vogel, in Emily Temple, “10 Literary Translators on the Art of Translation,” Literary Hub, November 28, 2018. Available online at https://lithub.com/10-literary-translators-on-the-art-oftranslation/ (accessed August 30, 2024).

21. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings , vol. 1, 1913–1926, 5th ed., ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 258.

22. See Jacques Derrida, “Part II: Nature, Culture, Writing. Introduction to the ‘Age of Rousseau.’ ‘. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . . ,’” in Of Grammatology, Corrected Edition, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 141–64 passim.

23. Jennifer Roberts, “The Printerly Art of Jasper Johns,” in Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2012), 34.

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Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin (S), 2014

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Family room designed by Nicole Hollis, featuring library curated by Douglas Flamm. Artwork: Doug Aitken, I’ll be right back. . . Aperture Series , 2019 © Doug Aitken. Photo: Douglas Friedman/Trunk Archive

GAME CHANGER: DOROTHY LICHTENSTEIN

Scott Rothkopf, Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, remembers his friend, Dorothy Lichtenstein.

When Dorothy Lichtenstein died last July, the news came as a shock to many of us who loved her, because even at the age of eighty-four, few people seemed so full of life. All her signature qualities were intact, from her warm and present gaze to her intellectual avidity to her effortless sex appeal. And she still had probably the best laugh I’ve ever known: huge, gravelly, and endearing, with an occasional hint of wickedness appreciable only to her intimates, or so we liked to think. But for me, at least, the shock of her death also owed to the grim recognition that we are losing the last of that 1960s Greatest Generation, including Brice Marden, Richard Serra, and Frank Stella, who all died over the past year and were all living links to an artistic golden age. Dorothy was real-deal art-world royalty. If her modesty might have bristled at this description, she had the good sense to embrace the responsibility that comes with having a remarkable past and making something of it for the future.

One of the ways Dorothy did this was to welcome young people into her life, and I was fortunate to be among them. I first met her as a college student nearly thirty years ago, and from that moment on she was far kinder to me than she had any good reason to be. That was Dorothy: generous beyond measure and forever open and curious about the next generation of just about everything. She had a casualness and confidence that came with being smart and beautiful and having been at the center of it all. She had amazing stories of hanging with Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, or working at the Bianchini Gallery in the ’60s when Elaine Sturtevant did her wild pseudo-Pop show there. (Dorothy once even promised me one of those paintings for the Whitney—if only she could find it!) But there was nothing nostalgic about her. She didn’t just share her unpretentious yet starry aura with kids like me; she showed genuine enthusiasm

for what we brought to the table. In my case that meant commissions for two of my first published essays, both on her husband Roy, and real interest in the first exhibitions I curated of artists she’d never heard of that I cared a lot about. This kind of generosity is hard to quantify and easy to underestimate but was one of Dorothy’s enduring gifts.

Her other gifts were more readily classified as world-class philanthropy, even if they were rare in their adventurousness and largesse. She served the Rauschenberg Foundation on behalf of her old friend Bob. She supported museums and educational initiatives all over, especially on the East End of Long Island, where she and Roy long lived. She nurtured a gorgeous friendship with Agnes Gund that benefited Studio in a School and the Art for Justice initiative, formed to help those currently and formerly incarcerated. When Aggie wanted to sell one of her most prized possessions—and one of Roy’s best paintings—to benefit Art for Justice, Dorothy not only blessed the deal but championed the idea of using art’s power and value to lift those most in need.

I always looked forward to visiting Dorothy during the summer at her classic Hamptons house on Gin Lane. It was so much more modest and old school than one might have expected for a person of her stature and means. The ceiling was low and the sofa was long, ample enough to accommodate her hulking Bouvier, Brutus, and sheaves of the New York Times . Usually we sat at the kitchen table over Tate’s cookies and a glass of water (from the tap!), Dorothy’s trim carriage and perfect posture offset by her signature, ever-so-slightly disheveled hair. Hours flew by as we gossiped and talked politics (a die-hard progressive), and I traded news from the art world for a trove of memories. Our last visit there was a few months before I would become director of the Whitney, an institution

Opposite:

that had been committed to Roy’s work since his first appearance in the museum’s Annual exhibition back in the 1960s. When we had lunch again last spring, she embraced with excitement our new free-admissions programs, which would expose so many young and diverse people to contemporary art. The fact that there will be no more of these cherished visits leaves a gaping hole in my heart.

Dorothy’s greatest bequest to future generations was her impeccable stewardship of Roy’s artistic legacy, which she oversaw with an improbable mixture of scholarly exactitude and surprise-me laissez-faire. Through the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation she supported serious academic endeavors such as monographs by PhD students, focused exhibitions, and a monumental digital catalogue raisonné dedicated to Roy’s work. In this she was aided by the Foundation’s inaugural executive director, Jack Cowart; its longtime chair, Ruth Fine; an incomparable staff; and passionate trustees, including her stepsons, David and Mitchell Lichtenstein. Yet she always remained open to new—and, dare I say, fun— ventures that furthered Roy’s spirit, from Pop paraphernalia sold at the dearly departed Barney’s to a 2023 postage stamp commemorating the centennial of Roy’s birth. I’ll never forget presiding over the latter’s launch in the Whitney’s theater, where we grinningly signed first-day covers alongside US Postal Service brass for adoring philatelists from far and wide. Dorothy’s twin modes of custodianship—rigorous and open—were not mutually exclusive but mutually enriching, as when she blessed the Whitney’s suggestion that Roy’s first New York retrospective in nearly forty years be cocurated by a young artist, Alex Da Corte. To her this unprecedented, even daring, proposal seemed like the most natural and wonderful thing in the world.

Equally natural and wonderful in her eyes was a late-in-life decision to donate Roy’s former studio and their home on Washington Street, just four blocks from the Whitney, to house the museum’s Independent Study Program. Dorothy had long wondered what to do with the building, but the one thing she knew for certain was that it shouldn’t become a shrine to her and Roy. For years, she and the Foundation were in dialogue with her new neighbors at the Whitney about what would become a gift of more than 400 works to create a Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection around the corner from his studio. And eventually her contribution came to include the building itself, after my visionary predecessor as Whitney director, Adam Weinberg, had the brainstorm that it house the ISP, an interdisciplinary training program for artists, curators, and critics. Dorothy loved the notion that the renovated home and studio would forever be inhabited by young people and renegade new ideas. At a dedication luncheon last year she remarked that she had never regretted her decision and that with each passing day it felt more right. She died just six months after the first cohort moved in, but her inimitable spirit will live on there and everywhere through successive waves of contest and creation.

This page: Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein, Amsterdam, 1987. Photo: Marcel Antonisse/ANP/AFP via Getty Images

Dorothy Lichtenstein, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2013.

Photo: Thomas Samson/AFP via Getty Images