Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2023 by Gagosian Quarterly

ne of Pablo Picasso’s paintings of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, from 1932, graces our cover—a stunning work from one of the most celebrated moments of his career. The occasion is an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, that investigates Picasso’s life as a foreigner in France from 1900 to 1973. A few years after Picasso made the painting, he met the photographer Lee Miller on holiday in the South of France, and got to know her—both were involved with the Surrealist movement at the time. Miller would photograph Picasso throughout their friendship, which lasted over thirty years. In addition to her fashion and fineart photography, Miller was a journalist, a war correspondent, a fashion model, and a muse: she collaborated with Man Ray and was a central figure in the intellectual avant-garde of Paris during the 1930s. A new film and exhibition focused on her life and work promise to shed new light on the underrecognized significance of her contributions. Richard Calvocoressi brings us to Berlin, where he lived for a period in 1983. The city was then deeply and literally divided, plagued by tense military standoffs long after the end of World War II but unknowingly on the verge of its reunification, in 1989. Richard explores the vitality of that revolutionary scene, which produced some of the most daring art of the time, and also talks with the artist Georg Baselitz, then forging a new artistic language. Baselitz has continuously reinvented his image-making for the more than four decades since, and Richard visited him in his studio and discussed the reemergence of the stag motif that proliferates in his new works. In a lighter examination of the crossover between politics and art, Derek Blasberg speaks with Virginia Hart, director and curator of the galleries of the US State Department, which hold a historic collection of the nation’s art and architecture. Our Screen Time column features Ashley Overbeek in conversation with Neil Leach, providing a glimpse into the boundless potential and unprecedented complication of artificial intelligence’s impact on architecture. And John Currin, Jarvis Cocker, and Peter Saville reflect with Young Kim on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the album This Is Hardcore by the band Pulp, in which they all played a collaborative role. We invited the poet Ariana Reines to respond to the sculpture of Carol Bove. Raymond Foye and John Szwed discuss Szwed’s recent biography of the musicologist, filmmaker, and all-around polymath Harry Smith, the subject of an exhibition cocurated by Bove at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In a personal remembrance, Larry Gagosian reflects on the life and legacy of his late friend Brice Marden. It was a privilege to work with Brice over the years, and he will be greatly missed.

Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

Larry Gagosian celebrates the unmatched life and legacy of Brice Marden.

38 A Foreigner Called Picasso Cocurator of the exhibition A Foreigner Called Picasso, at Gagosian, New York, this November, Annie Cohen-Solal writes about the genesis of the project, her commitment to the figure of the outsider, and Picasso’s enduring relevance to matters geopolitical and sociological.

46 Lee Miller and Friends The American Surrealist photographer Lee Miller is the subject of the exhibition Seeing Is Believing at Gagosian, New York, this fall. Here we present a conversation on the stewardship of Miller’s legacy, her photography and writing from the frontlines of war to the pages of Vogue, and the intertwined lives of her friends, lovers, and the many artists she knew.

54 Fashion and Art, Part 16: Thom Browne Designer Thom Browne talks with Derek Blasberg about the twentieth anniversary of his company’s founding and a new monograph on his creative output.

60 Carol Bove Poet Ariana Reines responds to the work of Carol Bove.

69 Building a Legacy: The Ransom Center

100 This Is Hardcore: Pulp and the Making of an Image

146 Screen Time: A Conversation with Neil Leach

This past summer, Richard Calvocoressi visited Georg Baselitz in his studio to discuss the motif of the stag in Baselitz’s newest paintings.

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of This Is Hardcore, the sixth album by the band Pulp. Author Young Kim reflects on the album’s impact, both musical and visual, on the late ’90s and speaks with the primary collaborators—Pulp lead singer Jarvis Cocker, art director Peter Saville, and artist John Currin— behind the iconic imagery.

Ashley Overbeek speaks with architect and theorist Neil Leach about the light and dark sides of artificial intelligence shaping our built environment.

80 Benjamin Moser: The Upside-Down World Benjamin Moser, author of biographies of Clarice Lispector and Susan Sontag, returns with a new book, The Upside-Down World, which tracks his decadeslong engagement with the Dutch masters. Here he speaks with Josh Zajdman about the genesis of the project, the importance of judging your subjects, and the danger of art.

86 Rachel Whiteread: . . . And the Animals Were Sold An installation by Rachel Whiteread in the Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, Italy, commissioned by the city’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo and cocurated by Lorenzo Giusti and Sara Fumagalli, opened in June and ran into the fall. Fumagalli writes on the exhibition and architect Luca Cipelletti speaks with Whiteread.

92 America’s Collection: The Art and Architecture of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms Derek Blasberg interviews Virginia Hart, director and curator of the State Department’s Washington galleries housing treasures of fine and decorative arts from the early days of the United States.

106 A Vera Tatum Novel by Leonora McCrae by The final installment of a fourpart story by Percival Everett.

120 Sarah Sze: Timelapse Francine Prose ruminates on temporality, fragility, and strength following a visit to Sarah Sze’s exhibition Timelapse at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

128 Mount Fuji in Cinema: Satyajit Ray’s Woodblock Art In the first installment of a twopart feature, novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri arrives at a more nuanced understanding of the filmmaker Satyajit Ray by tracing the global impacts of woodblock printing, following its perspective and language as it circulated in the last three centuries.

136 Around and Around and Around: Federico Campagna and Carsten Höller On the heels of Carsten Höller’s exhibition Clocks in Paris, he talked with the philosopher Federico Campagna to consider the measurement of time, the problem with fun, and the fine line between mysticism and nihilism.

152 The Art of Biography: Cosmic Scholar, The Life and Times of Harry Smith Raymond Foye sits down with John Szwed to discuss his recent biography of the experimental polymath.

160 Deutschland 83: Recollections of a Curator Forty years ago, in his role as a curator at the Tate, Richard Calvocoressi made a temporary move to Berlin in order to observe and encounter the city’s evolving art world. He now reflects on that time and on the artists who were revolutionizing aesthetics in the fraught years preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall.

168 A Horse, Of Course Alix Browne considers the enduring presence of horses in art.

174 Balthus’s Drawings Scholar and researcher Yves Guignard, who is working on the archives of Balthus for a revision of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, examines his engagement with drawing, arguing for a more concerted attention to these works than scholarship has paid them.

180 “Kiss Me, Stupid” Carlos Valladares mines the history of the romantic comedy and proposes an expanded canon for the genre.

WINTER 2023

Stephen Enniss and Megan Barnard met with Gagosian’s Lisa Turvey to discuss the history of the Ransom Center, Austin, and their ongoing work in the field of archives, from acquisition to stewardship.

74 Georg Baselitz: The Painter in His Bed

TABLE OF CONTENTS

36 Brice Marden

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Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2023

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald

Founder Larry Gagosian

Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Editor, Online and Print Gillian Jakab

Published by Gagosian Media

Text Editor David Frankel

Associate Publisher, Lifestyle Priya Nat

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

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

Cover Pablo Picasso

Contributors Megan Barnard Georg Baselitz Derek Blasberg Ami Bouhassane Alix Browne Thom Browne Richard Calvocoressi Federico Campagna Amit Chaudhuri Luca Cipelletti Annie Cohen-Solal Stephen Enniss Percival Everett Raymond Foye Sara Fumagalli Larry Gagosian Yves Guignard Virginia Hart Jeff Henrikson Carsten Höller Young Kim Neil Leach Benjamin Moser Ashley Overbeek Antony Penrose Francine Prose Ariana Reines John Szwed Lisa Turvey Carlos Valladares Rachel Whiteread Jason Ysenburg Josh Zajdman

Thanks Karrie Adamany Yosan Alemu Richard Alwyn Fisher Julia Arena Joell Baxter Chris Berkery Priya Bhatnagar Carol Bove Paul Burgess Michael Cary Serena Cattaneo Adorno Vittoria Ciaraldi Cristina Colomar John Currin Alicia Diaz Eseverri Noah Dillon Tyler Drosdeck Andrew Fabricant Elsa Favreau Jill Feldman Mark Francis Hallie Freer Julien Garcia-Toudic Brett Garde Lauren Gioia Darlina Goldak Judy Gunning Freja Harrell Camille Haus Jerson Hondall Delphine Huisinga Sarah Jones Shiori Kawasaki Léa Khayata

Linda Klaassen Jennifer Knox White Sabyrzhan Madi Lauren Mahony Mirabelle Marden Kelly McDaniel Quinn Rob McKeever Jarek Miller Adele Minardi Mary Mitsch Olivia Mull Amira Nazer Kerry Negahban Kathy Paciello Stefan Ratibor Helen Redmond Antwaun Sargent Clementine Sherman Diallo Simon-Ponte Micol Spinazzi Sarah Sze Putri Tan Harry Thorne Jess Topping Lisa Turvey Timothée Viale Benedict Winkler Mimi Yiu Jonathon Zadrzynski

Opposite: Rachel Ruysch, Vase with Flowers, 1700 (detail), oil on canvas, 31 ¼ × 23 ¾ inches (79.5 × 60.2 cm), Mauritshuis, The Hague

CONTRIBUTORS Young Kim Young Kim is a writer who works in art, fashion, film, music, and literature while managing the estate of Malcolm McLaren, her late boyfriend and creative/business partner. Her first book, A Year on Earth with Mr. Hell (2020), is distributed by Omnibus Press. She is currently finishing a book on her years with McLaren. Photo: Penny Slinger/Young Kim

Annie Cohen-Solal Annie Cohen-Solal is a distinguished professor in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University, Milan. She won her doctorate at the Sorbonne and has taught in universities in Berlin, Jerusalem, New York, Paris, and Caen. Her biography Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life (1985) has been translated into fifteen languages, and her other books include Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867–New York 1948 (2000), Leo & His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli (2010), Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (2014), and others. With Jean-Hubert Martin, she curated Magiciens de la Terre. Retour sur une exposition légendaire (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2014.) Born in Algiers, she lives between Paris, Cortona, and Milan. Photo: Sijmen Hendriks

Alix Browne Alix Browne is a lifelong editor who has written about art, fashion, design, and culture for W Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and others. She has a horse, of course.

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

Megan Barnard Megan Barnard is associate director for administration and curatorial affairs at the Harry Ransom Center, where she manages the acquisition of collection materials and the Center’s curatorial staff. She works closely with the Center’s literary archives and has curated several exhibitions, including Literature and Sport and Culture Unbound: Collecting in the Twenty-First Century.

Georg Baselitz The German painter, printmaker, and sculptor Georg Baselitz is a pioneering postwar artist who rejected abstraction in favor of recognizable subject matter, deliberately employing a raw style of rendering and a heightened palette in order to convey direct emotion. Photo: Elke Baselitz

Richard Calvocoressi Richard Calvocoressi is a scholar and art historian. He has served as a curator at the Tate Gallery, London, as director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and as director of the Henry Moore Foundation. He joined Gagosian in 2015. Calvocoressi’s Georg Baselitz was published by Thames and Hudson in May 2021.

Rachel Whiteread In Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures and drawings, everyday settings, objects, and surfaces transform into ghostly replicas that are eerily familiar. Through her use of the casting process, her subject matter—ranging from beds, tables, and boxes to water towers and entire houses—is freed from practical use, suggesting a new permanence imbued with memory. Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Sara Fumagalli Sara Fumagalli is an Italian curator, writer, and event organizer who currently serves as curator at gamec—Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo. She has collaborated with a number of film festivals in Italy and abroad such as the Annecy Festival, the Bergamo Film Meeting, and the Siena International Short Film Festival.

Francine Prose Francine Prose’s most recent novel is The Vixen (2022). Other books include Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles (2005), Reading Like a Writer (2006), Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (2014), and Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern (2015). The recipient of numerous grants and awards, she writes frequently about art. She is a distinguished writer-in-residence at Bard College.

Luca Cipelletti Founder of Studio AR.CH.IT, Milan, Luca Cipelletti is an architect and interior designer who focuses on the relationship between art and architecture and on exhibition spaces, collections, and museum design. Since 2018, his design projects have been represented by the Giustini/Stagetti gallery, Rome.

Carsten Höller Born in Brussels in 1961 to German parents, Carsten Höller lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, and Biriwa, Ghana. Using his training as a scientist in his work as an artist, Höller concentrates particularly on the nature of human self-exploration. He has undertaken many projects that invite viewer participation and interaction while questioning human behavior, perception, and logic. Photo: Jamie-James Medina

Ami Bouhassane Ami Bouhassane is codirector of Farleys House & Gallery, the organization in Sussex, England, that manages the Lee Miller Archives and Farleys House, home of her grandparents Lee Miller and Roland Penrose.

Federico Campagna Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London. He is a fellow at the Warburg Institute and at the Royal Academy Schools, London, and a lecturer in intellectual history at ECAL, Lausanne. He is the author of Prophetic Culture (2021), Technic and Magic (2018), and The Last Night (2013). He is currently writing a book on the history of the Mediterranean imagination. He is the cofounder of the Italian philosophy publisher Timeo and a director at the UK/US publisher Verso.

Antony Penrose Antony Penrose is the founder of the Lee Miller Archives and codirector of Farleys House & Gallery, which manages the home and estate of his parents, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. A broadcaster on radio and television, an author of podcasts, and a lecturer, he is also the author of two plays and ten books, including The Boy Who Bit Picasso (2010).

Amit Chaudhuri Amit Chaudhuri is the author of eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn (2022). He is also a poet, essayist, short-story writer, and musician. His New and Selected Poems is scheduled to be published in 2023 in the NYRB Poets series. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and edits literaryactivism.com. His version of “Summertime” is included in BBC 4’s documentary Gershwin’s Summertime: The Song That Conquered the World. His latest album in his project in crossover music, Across the Universe, came out earlier this year.

Jason Ysenburg Jason Ysenburg joined Gagosian in 2014. He is the gallery’s liaison for the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and the Estate of Tom Wesselmann and has worked on numerous exhibitions for the Richard Avedon and Andy Warhol foundations.

Ariana Reines Ariana Reines is a poet, Obie-winning playwright, and performing artist. Her last book, A Sand Book, won the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize. She has created performances for the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Le Mouvement, Biel/ Bienne; Works+Process, the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; the Swiss Institute, New York; Modern Art, London; and Performance Space New York. Since 2020 she has run Invisible College, a platform for the study of sacred texts and poetry.

Stephen Enniss Dr. Stephen Enniss is the director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. During his tenure the Ransom Center has acquired scores of major archives, including those of Rachel Cusk, Ian McEwan, Arthur Miller, Michael Ondaatje, and Nobel Laureates Gabriel García Márquez and Kazuo Ishiguro.

John Szwed Josh Szwed is the author and editor of many books, including biographies of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Alan Lomax. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 2005 was awarded a Grammy for Doctor Jazz, a book included with the album Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax. Formerly a professor of anthropology, African American studies, and film studies at Yale University, where he had a tenure of twenty-six years, he was also a professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University and served as the chair of the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Philadelphia with his family.

Carlos Valladares Carlos Valladares is a writer, critic, programmer, journalist, and video essayist from South Central Los Angeles, California. He studied film at Stanford University and began his PhD in the history of art and film and media studies at Yale University in the fall of 2019. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Film Comment, and the Criterion Collection. Photo: Jerry Schatzberg

Raymond Foye Raymond Foye is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn Rail. His most recent publication is Harry Smith: The Naropa Lectures 1989–1991 (2023). Photo: Amy Grantham

Yves Guignard After completing a BA at the Universität Basel, Yves Guignard defended a doctoral thesis in Lausanne on the German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde. He has worked as a translator from German into French and as a cultural mediator for the Fondation Beyeler, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Fondation de l’Hermitage, and the Musée cantonal des beaux-arts, Lausanne.

Benjamin Moser Benjamin Moser is a writer based in the Netherlands. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (2009) and of Sontag: Her Life and Work (2020), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. His new book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, was published in October 2023.

Josh Zajdman When not writing about books or art, Josh Zajdman is doom-scrolling Instagram or working on his novel.

Virginia B. Hart Virginia B. Hart is the fifth director and curator of the US State Department’s Diplomatic Reception Rooms, having previously served there as assistant curator. Since starting work in 2008, she has established the Rooms as a robust and publicly accessible museum collection.

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

Neil Leach Neil Leach is an architect and professor and the author of over forty books, most recently addressing AI. He has taught at many of the leading schools of architecture in the world, including Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, and currently directs the Doctor of Design program at Florida International University.

Ashley Overbeek Ashley Overbeek is the director of strategic initiatives at Gagosian, where she has the pleasure of working with artists on Web3 and digital projects. Overbeek is also an advisory-board member of the Art and Antiquities Blockchain Consortium, a 501c3 nonprofit, and a guest speaker on the subject of art and blockchain technology at Stanford and Columbia University.

IN SEASON

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

Memoir

Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun by Jackie Wang This compendium of Jackie Wang’s texts is culled from her zines, Tumblr blog, and published essays between 2010 and 2017. In the preface, Wang writes, “Under what conditions do we become who we are?” The answer emerges over the course of the book through examinations of her travels: from punk houses to China, Berlin to dreams, and through the letters and poetry of her friends.

On the Table

Dinner Service by Donald Judd Under the direction of Flavin Judd, artistic director of Judd Foundation, together with Puiforcat artistic directors Charlotte Perelman and Alexis Fabry, the company has produced a dinner service designed by Donald Judd in the 1980s. The eight-piece service, in sterling silver, includes distinct yet complementary dinner, bread, soup, salad, and dessert plates, a serving bowl, and cups. Configured in various dimensions, the items form a full table setting. Puiforcat worked closely with Judd Foundation to interpret and complete Judd’s designs in a new material, and the pieces achieve the incredibly tight 90-degree angles of his original prototypes.

This spread, clockwise: Cover of Jackie Wang, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (Semiotext(e), 2023) Hilary Pecis’s bag for Dior Lady Art #8, 2023. Photo: © Harry Eelman Cover of Lauren Elkin, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) Roy Lichtenstein Drinking Glasses, 2013, glass in presentation box, produced by Art Production Fund and the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

In the Bag

Dior Lady Art #8 Continuing its ongoing collaborations with artists for the Dior Lady bag, Dior invited Mircea Cantor, Gilbert & George, Ha Chong-Hyun, Lee Kun-Yong, Mariko Mori, Ludovic Nkoth, Hilary Pecis, Mickalene Thomas, Zadie Xa, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, and Xu Zhen to design limited-edition versions of the house’s celebrated purse.

Dinner Service by Donald Judd. Photo: Eric Poitevin, courtesy Puiforcat

Critical Engagement

Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin Just as Hélène Cixous’s Le Rire de la Méduse (1975) sparked a new discourse around literature, writing, and feminism, Lauren Elkin’s latest publication will surely redefine questions and assessments of the body and gender in contemporary art and performance. Drawing from a broad range of art and theory, Elkin allows dead ends, ambiguities, and unsettling revelations to arise in her vivid engagement with the monstrous.

Art at Home

Roy Lichtenstein Drinking Glasses This limited-edition set of four drinking glasses featuring art by Roy Lichtenstein was produced through a collaboration between the Art Production Fund and the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein; it was originally released in partnership with Barneys New York in 2013. The design for the glasses is based on Lichtenstein’s Drawing for Paper Cup (1967), which it translates into three dimensions.

This spread, clockwise: Cover of The Godmother (Picture Books | Gagosian, 2023) Cover of Rick Lowe (Gagosian/Neubauer Collegium, 2023) Cover of Somewhere, 2017–2023 (Loose Joints, 2023) The Lip Tag Necklace from Venyx’s Man Ray Collection, 2013. Photo: courtesy Venyx

Picture Books

The Godmother by Joy Williams and Walton Ford

Derrick Adams, Funtime Unicorn, 2022. Edition of 30 + 10AP © Derrick Adams Studio Cover of Anna Weyant (Gagosian, 2023)

Gagosian’s Picture Books imprint, organized by author Emma Cline, invites renowned artists to respond to fiction by some of today’s leading writers. This installment pairs writer Joy Williams with artist Walton Ford, who gives form to the elusive wolf allegedly harbored in the undercroft of a small Maine church in Williams’s novella The Godmother.

Art Book

Rick Lowe

Monograph

Anna Weyant Anna Weyant is Gagosian’s first monograph on an artist known for her precisely rendered figures of soft beauty, simmering with the tensions between feminine sexuality and purity, tragedy, and comedy. The resonance of art history and the effect of doubling features in essays by John Elderfield and Yvonne Owens. In a third essay, peppered with wry references to pop culture, Naomi Fry discusses the subtle differences and multiple viewpoints in Weyant’s paintings, exposing the virtuosity the artist applies to revealing the fullness of female experience. Finally, Weyant and the acclaimed cartoonist Edward Steed discuss the awkwardness of fame, the sweet spot of comedy, and the indescribable nature of a great work of art.

Gagosian collaborated with the the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago to publish a new book on Rick Lowe. Exploring interrelationships between Lowe’s studio-based paintings and his social-practice projects, the book focuses on his communitybased series Project Row Houses (Houston), Black Wall Street Journey (Chicago), and Victoria Square Project (Athens). Reproducing over fifty recent paintings with extensive details, the book includes essays by Allison Glenn of the Public Art Fund, Dieter Roelstraete of the Neubauer Collegium, Fani Paraforou of the University of Thessaly, and Abigail Winograd of the Smart Museum of Art. A conversation between Lowe and Valerie Cassel Oliver of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is included, as is an essay and extensive chronology of Lowe’s career compiled by Sydney Stutterheim.

Photo Book

Somewhere, 2017– 2023 by Sam Youkilis Sam Youkilis is a documentary photographer and filmmaker based in Italy. His increasingly popular Instagram page presents still and moving snapshots of everyday life from around the world: butchers slicing, lovers entwining, birds flocking. These fleeting dispatches now find a permanent home in a new 500-page monograph published by Loose Joints. Jewelry

Lip Tag Necklace: Venyx’s Man Ray Collection Venyx’s new collection of nine limited-edition pieces is inspired by the work of Man Ray. This necklace, with a yellow gold chain and an enamel pendant, showcases the artist’s celebrated painting Observatory Time: The Lovers (1934). The tag pendants have become Venyx’s most iconic pieces and have been adapted here for this special Man Ray collaboration.

Edition

Derrick Adams’s Funtime Unicorn As part of Derrick Adams’s recent debut exhibition with Gagosian in Beverly Hills, Come As You Are, the artist created a limited edition of his signature Funtime Unicorn (2022) sculpture. A motif in his paintings come to life, Adams’s decked-out spring rider continues his exploration of leisure, fantasy, and play in Black culture.

Art Book

Stanley Whitney: There Will Be Song The color plates of this exhibition catalogue, which employs Frenchfold signatures, include details of fourteen paintings, a gatefold of the largest canvas, and installation photography. The design emphasizes the individuality of each work and the recursive creativity of Whitney’s practice. In the essay “What You Want,” David Levi Strauss analyzes the nature and resonance of Whitney’s work, concentrating on his role as a colorist. The book is available with four different covers illustrating details from the paintings Bridge (2022), Color Memories (2022), Stay Song 106 (2022), and There Will Be Song (2023).

Right: Cover of Dead in Long Beach, California (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD, 2023) Below: Covers of Stanley Whitney: There Will Be Song (Gagosian, 2023)

Novel

Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn After publishing numerous gripping short stories—including “Memoirs of a Poltergeist,” serialized in the Quarterly in 2022—Venita Blackburn is back with her first novel. In singular prose, Blackburn weaves a tale of death, impulse, humor, kinship, and self-discovery.

li gn e-r os et .c om

BRICE MARDEN

This page: Brice Marden in his studio, Tivoli, New York, 2017. Photo: Mirabelle Marden Opposite, from top: Brice Marden, Locksley Shea Gallery, Minneapolis, 1974 Brice Marden, Thira, 1979– 80, oil and wax on canvas, 18 panels assembled in 3 parts, overall: 96 × 180 inches (243.8 × 457.2 cm), Centre Pompidou, Paris. Gift of the Centre Pompidou Foundation in honor of Pontus Hultén, 1983 Brice Marden, Cold Mountain 6 (Bridge), 1989–91, oil on linen, 108 × 144 inches (274.3 × 365.8 cm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Artwork © 2023 Estate of Brice Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Larry Gagosian celebrates the unmatched life and legacy of Brice Marden. Brice Marden was an artist of extraordinary gifts. He had a profound understanding of the world as something to be observed, of the subjectivity of perception, of visual pleasure, of the jolt of excitement from seeing things as they are. He looked to solve problems and collected his solutions on paper and canvas, linen and marble, but insisted we have our own experience with what we see in his work. He was a painter of rare insight into the pleasure and poetry of his medium, always dedicated to gesture, chance, substance—the elemental matters of art. Brice was fond of hats; it was one of his trademarks. In the last couple of decades he was nearly always clad in a simple black watch cap. Brice was always a traveler but never a tourist. When a place interested him it became ingrained in his art, and he would return many times over the years. He had studios in Hydra, Marrakesh, Nevis, Tivoli, and of course Manhattan. He reveled in the details of each environment and let those places inform his work—from the ancient to the avant-garde. Brice was somehow both things. He created wholly unforeseen paintings that were new and now and timeless all at the same time. He often constructed his paintings of multiple panels to explore the problems inherent in two colors colliding. If edges are the places where two things meet, Brice positioned himself to work in the gap between two edges. Brice moved to Manhattan in the mid-’60s, when New York was the center of everything exciting that was happening in art. Brice was in the middle of it all: he became a friend and acolyte of Jasper Johns, studio assistant to Robert Rauschenberg, a denizen of Max’s Kansas City. He was of a particular generation of artists who stood out for their fierce individuality. They were friends, but never a school or movement or ism, all voyagers following their own startingly original paths. Brice’s early success at the Bykert Gallery in 1966 set a ball rolling that only gained momentum. Career

retrospectives came at the Guggenheim in 1975 and the Museum of Modern Art in 2006. In between and since, his achievements were celebrated and recognized the world over. Brice and Helen were friends of mine for many years and I had my first chance to include a work of his in a group show in Los Angeles in 1985, Sixties Color. In 1991, I was able to bring together the five canvases, eight drawings, and related notebooks that constitute Brice’s Grove Group (1972–76) for a solo exhibition at our flagship gallery on Madison Avenue. It was not only the first solo show of Brice’s work that I hosted but the first time the series had been exhibited as a group since their making. It was also the first time Brice had seen them together. After his first experience in Hydra, in 1971, Brice returned to Manhattan with his impressions of the Grecian landscape and notebooks in hand. Over the next several years he created paintings that probed the memories of the colors he discerned from Hydra’s remarkable landscape: the subtle difference between the blue side and the gray side of an olive tree’s leaves, how they shimmer silver in the wind and contrast with the colors of branches, soil, and sky. He tapped the sacred grove of the muses, worked with the information nature had given him, and developed his own signature in the dialogue between classicism and abstraction. In the age of Primary Structures and “systems,” Brice was at the forefront yet apart. At the time he was producing the Grove Group, the poet John Ashbery put it this way: “Marden’s canvases are monochrome, but the resemblance to reductive art ends there. For, rather than reducing the complexities of art to zero, he is performing the infinitely more valuable and interesting operation of showing the complexities hidden in what we thought to be elemental.” Brice gave the monochrome a soul, and the tension between formal thinking and romantic thinking in the work reflected the same duality in its maker. His investigations into the formal matter of art always had a human scale—panels made to the dimensions of a body, gestures that explored the edges of an arm’s reach. And for an artist who, as a student at Yale, insisted that he never quite understood the tricks and strategies of Josef Albers’s famous color curriculum and gravitated away from Hans Hofmann’s “push and pull,” Brice became a colorist in the caliber of Henri Matisse and Mark Rothko. Maybe even surpassed them. He paid attention not only to the emotion of color but to the physical substance of its appearance; that color has a presence in the mind just as it has a presence in the room. This sensibility and concern remained constant as Brice’s work evolved beyond his deceptively straightforward monochromes to embrace the gestural fugues and variations of the second half of his career. If the monochromes are arias, the poetry and vitality of his calligraphic compositions are the dance. You feel Brice’s colors in your bones. This is what Brice shows us in the gifts he left behind: that color has an uncanny presence, that memory has a palette, that poetry can move an artist’s hand just as it moves his heart. Brice will be profoundly missed.

A FOREIGNER CALLED PICASSO

Cocurator of the exhibition A Foreigner Called Picasso, at Gagosian, New York, this November, Annie Cohen-Solal writes about the genesis of the project, her commitment to the figure of the outsider, and Picasso’s enduring relevance to matters geopolitical and sociological. I have been interested in the issue of immigration ever since I entered the art world. I began my career as an intellectual historian: I was a scholar of Jean-Paul Sartre and wrote his first biography. It was quite unexpected that I would fall into the orbit of the art world, let alone so fast, but two days after I arrived in New York City, in 1989—I had just been nominated cultural counselor to the French Embassy in the United States—I met Leo Castelli at a dinner. Out of the blue, Leo told me, “You don’t look like your predecessors.” (I was the first woman in the position.) “You’ll take New York city by storm and I’ll teach you American art. Come to the gallery tomorrow, I have a show with Roy [Lichtenstein]. Come for the opening and stay for the dinner.” From that moment on, I followed in the footsteps of Leo Castelli. It so happened that there were any number of resonances between his trajectory and mine: he was born into a Jewish family in Trieste, I was born into a Jewish family in Algiers, and both of our family histories included traumas of displacements and pogroms. We shared multiple cultural roots and could navigate between languages, playing with words, weaving through German, Spanish, Italian, French, and English. We belonged to the same tribe. For my first Christmas in New York, Leo asked me to join him in the Caribbean on the island of Saint Martin. Arriving at the airport there, I was greeted by Jasper Johns, who was immensely warm. And that was typical: increasingly welcomed in this sophisticated world of artists, critics, and gallerists, I walked a fabulous red carpet into the flourishing American art world and was thrilled to be included in it. I could see how Leo, with his cosmopolitan training in Europe and his fascination with the Medici, had been able to import those cultural elements into the United States. When he arrived in New York in 1941, fleeing a Europe on the precipice of war, the local cultural life was to Previous spread: Dora Maar, Portrait de Picasso, Paris, studio du 29, rue d’Astorg, winter 1935–36 (positive image), gelatin silver negative on flexible cellulose nitrate support, 4 ¾ × 3 5 ⁄8 inches (12 × 9 cm), Centre Pompidou, Paris © 2023 Dora Maar Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris. Pablo Picasso likeness © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York

him “like a desert.” But because of the catastrophic political tensions that had steadily succeeded each other in Europe—World War I, waves of fascism, civil wars, World War II—America became a new creative center. Marcel Duchamp, Hans Hofmann, and so many more were uprooted and began anew there. With the extraordinary speed that is characteristic of the United States, and with its financial means and the freedom of a thriving civil society, a new culture emerged. Thanks to charismatic personalities such as Castelli and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., endogenous and exogenous factors combined, and by the time I arrived in New York, the city was offering its artists an incredibly fertile ground. In my job as French cultural ambassador, I operated like an anthropologist, in awe of everything I was experiencing. I loved the interdisciplinarity and the fact that it multiplied my creativity. In France, institutions were difficult to access, contemporary art was little celebrated (to say the least), and disciplines were compartmentalized. To a certain extent, this compartmentalization persists to this day, and this is exactly the story behind my exhibition and book Picasso l’étranger in 2021–22, the first incarnation of a project that is now being carried over to New York with A Foreigner Called Picasso at Gagosian. In 2015, I attended the opening of the new Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris. There I spoke with the historian Benjamin Stora, the museum’s scientific advisor, and he expressed his interest in doing a show about Pablo Picasso, who was denied French naturalization in 1940. Laurent Le Bon, who had just become president of the Musée national Picasso–Paris, attended the same event, and I asked him if he had spoken with Stora. He hadn’t, and it was once again clear to me that compartmentalization—the separation of the art world from the worlds of sociology,

Above: Annie Cohen-Solal and Leo Castelli, New York, 1990. Photo: Marc Riboud/Fonds Marc Riboud au MNAAG Right: Tapestry made after the work Le Minotaure (1928) by Pablo Picasso,1935, wool and silk tapestry, 56 × 93 ¼ inches (142 × 237 cm) © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Opposite: Pablo Picasso, Instruments de musique sur un guéridon, 1914, oil and sand on canvas, 50 7⁄8 × 35 inches (128.5 × 88 cm), Collection Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © Christie’s Images © Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent

anthropology, history, science—was still a reality in France. My academic training and my personal upbringing involved multiple cultures and disciplines; I am at heart a cultural historian and a political sociologist, and there is nothing I like more than building bridges. I soon invited Le Bon and Stora over for dinner, introducing them, and the project was launched. The first stop was the archives, both of the Paris police department and of the Musée Picasso. Beginning with three large boxes of Picasso’s correspondence, I focused initially on his letters among his family around the time of his arrival in France in 1900. It was essential to put my feet in Picasso’s shoes: what did he feel as a foreigner in a country that was then hypernationalistic? A country whose president, in his speech to open the Exposition Universelle of 1900, essentially said that the people who had come there from all over the world had come to admire the genius of France? Picasso must have heard this arrogance with some incredulity: he knew there was genius in him. At the age of fourteen, he had reproduced Velázquez’s portrait of Philip IV in the Prado, and he knew that his copy was better than the original. I too certainly 42

registered the arrogance: it reminded me of what I myself had faced when I arrived in France at the age of fourteen. I am interested in the way societies look at the other, the pariah, the foreigner, the one who does not belong, because it’s also my story. In my research for the show, I tried to find the weak signals, the microelements, that build up one’s system of reactions and interactions. As my work progressed along this line of inquiry, Picasso’s precarity emerged continually. Throughout his time in France, he continuously felt vulnerable, knowing that he could be expelled at any time. This was his Achilles’ heel—but he hid this fear, and went about constructing networks of powerful friends, collectors, and collaborators that protected him in various ways. He was extraordinary about creating networks. The collector and lawyer André Level, for example, protected Picasso throughout his life, advising him on navigating French law, French finances, and so on. The same is true of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the German dealer who worshipped Picasso’s work. Kahnweiler created the first global awareness of Cubism, brought in fabulous critics to engage with this new type of art, and built an immense commercial

This page: Identity card application receipt for Pablo Picasso, 1935, 6 1 ⁄8 × 7 5 ⁄8 inches (15.6 × 19.5 cm), Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris Opposite: Pablo Picasso, Seated Harlequin, 1901, oil on canvas, lined and mounted to a sheet of pressed cork, 32 ¾ × 24 1 ⁄8 inches (83.2 × 61.3 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, New York

Left: Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait “Yo”, 1900, ink and essence on paper, 3 ¾ × 3 3 ⁄8 inches (9.5 × 8.6 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Raymonde Paul, in memory of her brother C. Michael Paul, 1982 © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, New York Below: Anonymous, Portrait of Picasso on the place Ravignan, Montmarte, Paris, 1904, 4 ¾ × 3 ½ inches (12 × 8.9 cm), Musée National Picasso-Paris © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

network of new clients all across Eastern Europe, helping him to place Picasso’s work in collections and museums from Düsseldorf to Berlin, Prague, Moscow, Munich—all while Picasso was barely recognized in France. To put it simply: his works were not collected by museums in the country where he lived and worked. As I engaged with the existing scholarship on Picasso, it was clear to me that these geopolitical topics had been ignored—the focus was always on a particular medium, or period, or his relationships with muses and his family. I offer a different approach. The political and social status of the artist is a primary element to understand if we want to engage in art fully. To understand Picasso’s work— why he is Cubist, classical, Surrealist, political— we have to go back to his status in French society. In the police archives I saw the photographs, files, and fingerprints collected on Picasso throughout his life in France. Some of these photos came as something of a shock: he looks like a mafioso. This is not the Picasso we know; what the police see in him is the foreigner, the alien, the pariah. At the time, the French police department tasked with tracking foreigners was the most sophisticated in the world. And Picasso was targeted for three reasons: initially because he was a foreigner who couldn’t speak the language; because, having lived 44

with Catalans, he was suspected to be an anarchist, which he truly was not; and because, as an avant-garde artist, he was rejected by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1940, he filed for naturalization because, with the German invasion approaching, he feared for his life, but his application was rejected. He was then invisible in France until 1944, when he decided to join the Communist Party. But after he donated ten beautiful paintings to the new Musée National d’Art Moderne, in 1947, he was granted the status of privileged citizen. Picasso is relevant today, then, as a model of the behavior of someone treated as a dangerous alien. The exhibition and book focus on an artist who was the target of banal xenophobia but who, through his shrewd intelligence and political acumen, managed to navigate the country’s tensions and win. At the present moment, who does not see how the French eventually coopted Picasso? He is celebrated in a museum of his own, the Musée Picasso, at the center of Paris, and is considered key to the country’s history and prestige. In this framework I view Picasso’s trajectory as that of a comrade. He is a guide, a compass for us all. What he tells us through his behavior is that one is never a victim but one has to fight and win. Though people often infer that a foreigner has no agency, Picasso proves exactly the opposite.

Photo Mathias Zuppiger Zurich

Artwork Karin Schiesser Zurich

. christophegraber.com .

The American photographer Lee Miller is the subject of the exhibition Seeing Is Believing, at Gagosian, New York, this fall. The show details Miller’s underrecognized influence on the Surrealist vanguard, exploring her friendships among them and in particular her relationship with Roland Penrose, the English painter, collector, art historian, and Pablo Picasso biographer who was her longtime partner.

LEE MILLER

Ahead of this exhibition, cocurators Richard Calvocoressi and Jason Ysenburg spoke with Antony Penrose and Ami Bouhassane, the son and granddaughter of Miller and Penrose. The conversation covers the stewardship of Miller’s legacy, her photography and writing from the frontlines of war to the pages of Vogue, and the intertwined lives of her friends, lovers, and fellow artists.

& FRIENDS

RICHARD CALVOCORESSI Tony, it’s been over twenty

years since we worked together in Edinburgh on a joint show on Roland and Lee at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. That was in 2001, Roland’s centenary year; how have things developed since then in terms of the perception of the couple’s work and reputation? ANTONY PENROSE The Edinburgh show represented a massive turning point in the way we do things here at Farleys House & Gallery [the museum and archive in Sussex, England, where the couple once lived] because the people in Edinburgh were so generous in working with us that we came away with a really good understanding of how to put shows together. Although we’d done other exhibitions, we’d always been kept at arm’s length and not terribly involved. This gave us the courage and the opportunity to do a lot of our own shows afterward. One of the first was a direct spinoff at the Getty [Museum, Los Angeles], and then the National Portrait Gallery [, London] show together in 2005, and then the V&A [, London] in 2007. In a way, it was like Edinburgh was a coming of age. Yes, we’d done shows before but not quite with the rectitude and the research and everything we did on that occasion; it was a wonderful, wonderful experience. RC It’s very nice of you to say that. I remember the estate was a much smaller organization then than it is now. Can you say something about how the infrastructure has developed? AP In those days there was Carole Callow, who was our fine printer. And we had a lovely lady called Arabella Hayes, the registrar and archivist. These two were everything for about ten years. The organization was tiny. RC And then, Ami, about twenty years ago you became part of all this. How has your life changed in the last twenty years? AMI BOUHASSANE [laughs] Well, I started by accident, really. I was pregnant with my first in 1998 and my dad said, “These people keep turning up at the house wanting to have a look at it and it’s kind of embarrassing. Can you help me develop tours of the house?” Tours were never part of the original business model when they founded the Lee Miller Archives. When he and my mum [Suzanna Penrose] and Roland set it up, the idea was the archives would work with museums and we’d represent the copyright and sell to collectors through galleries. We never dreamed people would come here, because this is the family home, why would you? Also, it’s in the middle of nowhere, no public transport, so it’s a mission to get here. But when dad’s book [The Lives of Lee Miller] came out, in 1985, people began to remember Lee Miller and make these little pilgrimages here. So we started these impromptu tours and he wanted me to help him develop them and work out a way we could be open to the public. That’s when I got bit by the Lee Miller bug. I ended up being an archivist part time. I had the baby and was guiding tours with her on my front, and then when she started adding too much to the tour commentary, she’d be on the floor upstairs in the office with Arabella [laughter]. RC Did you tell visitors that you were holding Lee Miller’s great-granddaughter? [Laughter] Since then you’ve worked alongside Tony on exhibitions and publications, and you’ve taken the lead on a number of different aspects of this operation. AB Yes, and now I manage the archives and the house. It’s grown from being a team of five people: now, all year round we have a team of fifteen, and then in the summer, when we’re open to the public, we grow to being more than fifty. So that’s quite a beast. 48

Quite an operation. When did you open the gallery? AB Well, we soon realized when we started opening to the public that although people were coming to see Lee Miller and Roland Penrose’s home, what they didn’t think about before they came was, you don’t usually hang your own artwork in your home. So they’d come and want to see how Roland and Lee lived, but then they’d go away feeling like they hadn’t seen enough of, particularly Lee’s work, because in her lifetime she only hung three of her own photographs in the whole house. So we had a barn on the farm just next to us, which used to be the repair shop for the tractors, but dad had the idea of turning it into a gallery space. In one end we showed a selection from the archive that you wouldn’t get to see normally, and in the other we’d try to do what Lee and Roland did in their lifetimes, which was champion and promote other artists—sometimes Lee and Roland’s contemporaries: we’ve done a Dorothea Tanning exhibition, we’ve done Eileen Agar, Grace Pailthorpe . . . but we also show living artists, local artists, established artists, and it’s quite exciting to be able to use the space to share their work as well. RC Getting back to the public perception of Lee. Tony, would you say that the emphasis now is more on her work as a war photographer, or as a fashion photographer, or as a portrait photographer of her artist friends—on whom this exhibition we’re working on for Gagosian is very much centered—or is it all of those things? AP I’d like to think it’s all those things. It’s almost inevitable that the war photography attracts the most attention. And of course, whenever anybody thinks of Lee Miller, they tend to think of Lee in Hitler’s bath, and that kind of photograph—it’s sensational in the way that people tend to present war photography. But it’s only a very small fraction of her work, and gradually I think people are beginning to understand that, she’s not seen only from that perspective anymore: people recognize that yes, she was an amazing portraitist, yes, she was an amazing Surrealist photographer, and yes, she was an incredible fashion photographer. All of these aspects we are able to put forward in different ways, but I think it’s all coalescing now. RC Because all these different aspects fed off each other. They were interrelated. AP They were. She could never have been the war photographer that she was without first being a Surrealist. AB And we wouldn’t survive as an archive if we didn’t have that kind of breadth of work and experience that she had, because one of her strengths is that she covered so many different subjects and one can look at her work from so many different angles. RC When I was doing the book on her work, I was reading all her dispatches from the front, which were published along with her photographs in Vogue magazine. AP We published those as Lee Miller’s War [2020]. RC Exactly. Her writing—and I know she found writing hugely challenging—but it always struck me that her dispatches were some of the most immediate, direct war reporting that I’d ever read. Is that an aspect of her work that people have picked up on? AB Definitely, that’s what got me. AP Yes, writing got us both way before the images. And what was so fascinating about Lee was that her formal education was very minimal. She learned by doing. And she was never afraid to take on a challenge that she thought worthwhile. I think one of her greatest assets was the ability to know a good chance when she saw one. Beneath that she was incredibly well read. She knew James Joyce inside out and back RC

Previous spread, left: Lee Miller, Fire Masks, 21 Downshire Hill, London, England 1941, 1941 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2023. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk Previous spread, right: Lee Miller, Picnic [Nusch Éluard, Paul Éluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray, and Ady Fidelin], Île Saint-Marguerite, Cannes, France 1937, 1937 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2023. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk Opposite, top: Lee Miller, Joseph Cornell, New York Studio, New York, USA 1933, 1933 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2023. All rights reserved. leemiller. co.uk Opposite, bottom: Pablo Picasso, A L’Arlesienne – Portrait of Lee Miller, 1937, oil on canvas, 31 ½ × 23 ¼ inches (80 × 59 cm), National Galleries of Scotland, long loan, The Penrose Collection, 1985 © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Antonia Reeva, courtesy National Galleries Scotland

to front—I mean, studying Ulysses [1922] in depth, that’s really the acid test of everything. She did a photo article for Vogue on James Joyce, and you can see how well she knew the work from that. She read everything from what she called penny dreadfuls to really highbrow stuff and just seemed to absorb it. AB She wasn’t pretentious. She hadn’t been trained to write, so she wasn’t trying to emulate some pompous person. RC It’s not an overly literary style. AP It’s more of a journalistic one, on the spot. AB You feel like you’re on her shoulder. AP She’s at a crime scene and she’s reporting. RC Exactly; it’s so immediate. In the war, she was allowed to go to the front where non-American combat photographers were not, I understand— AB The British wouldn’t allow women at all. RC So being a woman and being American put her in an extraordinary position, in a way. Do you think being brought up in America gave her a sort of confrontational, direct manner? I don’t know, I’m just thinking that someone English, more like your dad, Roland, would have perhaps been a little more reticent. AP Being an American made her an outsider, in a way, and I think she had that slight distance that gave her an even more acute observation in Britain and France and the rest of Europe. AB Well, you have to credit her parents as well, though, because they brought her up as equal to her brothers. She was born in 1907—in those days, girls were brought up to learn how to cook and clean and be a good wifey. They weren’t taught that they were equal. And it’s a big credit to both parents, particularly her dad, Theodore, an engineer, who encouraged her to invent go-carts with her brother. They didn’t mind that she got mucky and was daring. AP And played dangerous games. AB They gave her a chemistry set for her eighth birthday, which is really unusual for a little girl. So her baseline is different straight away. She was taught from a kid that she was equal, so when she got to be an adult, when people said “You can’t do that, you’re a woman,” she hit them with, “Well, why not?” AP And that’s not a typically American thing; that was very much a Lee Miller thing. JASON YSENBURG I think that level of independence is something we’ve tried to capture in the exhibition. It’s about telling a story of her strong sense of self. Another example is the short period when she came back to New York as a professional photographer and set up her own studio [in 1932]. AP She was connected to a front-runner: she was very close with the art dealer Julien Levy, and that really got her into all kinds of things. AB Well, she made sure to have her ducks in line: She had offers of work from Vanity Fair, and she had Levy lined up as a dealer who promised to do her first solo show that December. Because she was from a middle-class family, she wasn’t like some of the early women photographers from Victorian backgrounds who started as hobbyists and were supported by their wealthy husbands. She didn’t have that luxury. And there was also that certain amount of pride. So coming to New York and launching her studio was quite an important step. JY There’s something about her focus that is quite extraordinary. When she set her sights on something, it happened. AP I would never describe her as being self-serving or a go-getter, but she jolly well knew how to use her chances. RC You’ve recently researched and compiled and edited her and Roland’s letters. Can you say something about that? 49

We found these 300 pages of love letters between Lee and Roland from when they first met, in 1937. They met at a fancy-dress ball and he then whisked her off to what he called a Surrealist summer camp in Cornwall, where they met up with Man Ray and Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, Ady Fidelin was there, Paul Éluard, Nusch Éluard—Henry Moore and Irina [Radetsky] rocked up and spent a few days with them too. They had a wonderful time there and then they decamped and went to the South of France and met up with Picasso and Dora Maar. That’s when Picasso painted Lee’s portraits. So Lee and Roland had this wonderful kind of summer of love together, but by then she was actually married to an Egyptian man, Aziz [Eloui Bey], and had been living in Egypt for three years. Eventually that summer had to end and she needed to go back to her husband. And when they left and she went back to Egypt, she and Roland start writing to each other. There are kind of lovey-dovey bits [laughs], but what I loved about them was that they were gossiping about their mates and their mates just happened to be quite famous artists now [laughs]. So you get these little tidbits about how Max Ernst is having problems with Leonora Carrington and Marie-Berthe Aurenche, whom he was married to at the same time. But they’re also talking about the political situation, him in England, her in Egypt, as the war starts. And within that, she’s also writing about trips she’s done, how she’s gone and learned how to become sister of the serpents and how to train snakes and how she’s cross that her husband won’t allow her to have venomous snakes in the house [laughs]—for some reason he’s scared he’ll get bitten. It’s a lovely way into her Egyptian photography, and that group of friends, in addition to her relationship with Roland. It’s been great to compile all the letters, have that part of the archive out there and accessible to people. We called the book Love Letters Bound in Gold Handcuffs [2023], because obviously they were writing to each other but they desperately wanted to see each other again. In 1938, a year later, they met up again and did a trip around the Balkans together, through Romania and Greece, mostly. Then Roland went back to England. He had to leave early; she continued traveling and went to Syria as well. And when he got back to England, he wrote this Surrealist poem, with his pictures. RC The Road Is Wider than Long. AB Yes, it became The Road Is Wider than Long. It was published in 1939 and it’s thought to be the firstever British Surrealist photobook. It’s quite significant historically. So he went out to Egypt, leaving in January 1939 with the first published copy of The Road Is Wider than Long, in which he’d done some little color pictures and written this dedication. And he went out with that and a pair of gold handcuffs, designed by Cartier, to see Lee. RC And Aziz, her husband, was prepared to let her go? AB Yeah, he was amazing. Quite early on, she wrote to Roland that she’d told Aziz about him, and in the letter she says, “Well, you know, he was a little bit upset but he then said to me, ‘Well, if you do leave me and divorce me, can I be one of your lovers?’” AP He gave her money, he gave her his blessing, he gave her a boat ticket to London. And he loved her right until he died, even while marrying somebody else. And the extraordinary thing about Lee is that she chose her men very wisely, the ones that she was seriously committed to. Think about it: there was Man Ray during her time in Paris, really important. AB

Then there was Aziz, generous, kind, very reliable. Then there was Roland and we know about him. And then there was [American photojournalist and editor David E.] Sherman. The men among themselves were also dedicated to each other: look at the closeness between Man Ray and Roland. A Frenchman once said to me, “The shortest distance between two men is the love of the same woman,” and I think it’s true. Roland wrote Man Ray’s biography, collected Man Ray’s work, and always promoted Man Ray. RC So coming to Seeing Is Believing, the current exhibition, curated by my colleague Jason: is this the first show that exposes or looks at the interconnected lives of these lovers, friends, artists, in a concentrated way? AP Various single aspects have been looked at before but nobody’s ever really looked it as a generality, as an overall, have they? AB And at that particular period as well, beginning with 1937. Before, it’s been mostly about the men Lee knew. That’s actually another reason we really appreciated working with you: whenever I used to go pitching to museums and directors and things, we’d often have to spend the whole time talking about the men Lee knew, and then in the last ten minutes we’d get to talk about how she was a great photographer. It was invaluable to meet curators like you who had the foresight and could recognize that she was a significant photographer in her own right and we didn’t have to do that spiel. Before, it had been very much about the kind of things that were done to Lee, the men who painted Lee, the men who did this or that to Lee. The kind of big muse. RC Oh, the muse bit. AB It makes us twitch, you know, because it implies that she didn’t have her own intelligence and input. Whereas this show really is looking at Lee. It’s quite bold, in a way, because it’s not just about her and her women relationships, it includes the men, but it really shows this equity between them as artists, the way they worked together. Those connections are quite well thought through. JY It’s interesting you say that because something that’s not often brought out in looking at this whole group of artists is the degree of collaboration. Not just collaborating in terms of Man Ray and Lee Miller, there are a lot of photographs on which they both worked and sometimes you don’t know whether it’s by Lee or by Man Ray or the two of them together. AB Well, you still don’t. And if you read some of Lee’s later interviews, she talks a lot about working with Man Ray. She was only actually his assistant for the first nine months, but she talks about how within a year of being in Paris, she was doing all of his photography for him because he wanted to paint. And it wasn’t like, “I did his pictures for him, give me the credit,” it was like they were friends, they were lovers, they supported each other. And that’s what this show demonstrates: this group of artists were interconnected and they supported each other artistically. It wasn’t a competitive thing. JY The other aspect is the collaboration between a writer and a painter or a photographer, which is one of the great themes of Dada and Surrealism. It was as much a literary movement as a visual one. So you’ve got Joan Miró and Éluard collaborating on great portfolios. RC Éluard and Man Ray. JY And you have Lee and Roland collaborating. AP Another one that I don’t know whether Jason’s thought of putting in the show is Jean Cocteau. Because he and Lee were very— AB Oh gee, you need a bigger gallery, Jason. 52

Well, hopefully what we’ve brought together tells a story that people will be captivated by and want to research further. RC This exhibition is very much about friendships that were formed in the ’30s and during the war and then continued afterward. So Roland and Lee went to America in 1946 and met up again with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning and Man Ray and, who was it? AB Juliet. RC Juliet Browner, exactly. And when Lee and Roland settled where the house is, at Farleys farm in Sussex, they all visited and then more and more artist friends came down here. There was that great feature in Vogue called “Working Guests” [July 1953] where everyone is pretending to do something, like the philosopher A. J. Ayer, aka “Freddie,” bringing in the logs. When we showed that photograph in Edinburgh, a fellow philosopher, I think Anthony Quinton, saw it and said to me, “Oh, Freddie, doing something useful for once” [laughter]. You were a little boy when Picasso came [in 1950], and the story goes you bit him and he bit you back. Do you remember a lot of those people staying the weekend? AP Yes, I do; I just wish I remembered it with more clarity. But I was very young—3 1/2 when Picasso came—so some memories like that one in particular are kind of vestigial. I just remember that he smelled good and he was good on the hugs and cuddles and that. But later visits to his homes in France left much stronger memories. I was very fond of Man Ray. When I was really young he was not at all interesting. He just couldn’t see the point in children. Then when I was about fourteen or fifteen and I began to be interested in photography, that’s when we connected and he was absolutely brilliant. He wouldn’t show me how to do things but he would just quietly encourage me, particularly if I visited his studio in Paris. Max Ernst, on the other hand, was a bit scary because he would talk very loudly with a very strong German accent and throw his hands about, which was just a little bit troubling [laughs]. But there were others who were much more fun. RC There was a whole younger generation that came. Artists like Richard Hamilton. AP And John Craxton. The thing was, Roland and Lee were always so generous: “Oh, when you come to England, come look us up. Come and visit us, we live in the country.” And of course everybody would show up sooner or later. One of the reasons they came here to Farleys was the proximity to Newhaven, a port for the cross-channel ferry—Newhaven to Dieppe and then on to Paris by rail. The taxi drivers in Newhaven got so habituated to us that if somebody got off the ferry and looked a bit weird and didn’t speak English, they just brought them straight here. And it usually worked. That’s how we got the painter Jean Dubuffet, because he hadn’t a clue where he was supposed to go. RC They just brought him straight here with [poet and critic Georges] Limbour. AP Exactly, him and Limbour. And of course it was here that Dubuffet met Richard Hamilton, and that started Hamilton off on the whole process that eventually became Pop art. It was just these amazing meetings. AB Over some of Lee’s crazy cooking. AP That was a kind of conversation piece if you like: Lee’s dinner. It started in the kitchen. Guests would arrive and they’d be immediately forced to peel potatoes or cut stuff up and drink vast quantities of whisky. And so finally when they wobbled through to the dining room, the party was already started. JY

Previous spread, top left: Lee Miller, Saul Steinberg, Farleys Garden, East Sussex, England 1952, 1952 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2023. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk Previous spread, bottom left: Lee Miller, Picasso and his son Claude, Golfe Juan, France 1949, 1949 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2023. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk Previous spread, right: Roland Penrose, Seeing is Believing, 1937, oil on canvas, 39 3 ⁄8 × 29 ½ inches (100 × 75 cm), The Penrose Collection © Lee Miller Archives, England 2023. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

FASHION AND ART In October, Phaidon published Thom Browne, a comprehensive monograph dedicated to the designer on the twentieth anniversary of his company’s founding. Esteemed since the business’s early days, when he worked only in menswear and boasted a signature approach to tailoring, over two decades Browne has grown the scope of his vision to include womenswear, accessories, and remarkable runway presentations. Here, Browne meets with Derek Blasberg to discuss the anniversary and the book.

PART 16: THOM BROWNE

THOM BROWNE: Do you know how Larry Gagosian refers to me? DEREK BLASBERG: No. Uh-oh. TB: “That guy that wears shorts.” DB: How do you know that? Is that how he addressed you in person? TB: One of my friends was at a dinner party and mentioned to him that I was a fan of one of his artists and he said something to the effect of, “You mean that guy that wears shorts?” DB: Honestly, that’s impressive. That’s the power of your aesthetic. TB: Twenty years. It took twenty years but now he knows. DB: Can we start even earlier than that? As a child, were you an arty kid? Did you go to museums or galleries growing up? TB: It was definitely something my mother wanted us to be involved in. With seven kids, my mother basically needed daycare and would put us in sports, but my sister and I took art and drawing classes and that sort of thing. It was always something that was around through my mom. DB: Did you also play sports? There’s definitely a sport angle to your design. TB: I swam. I played tennis when I was young but at Notre Dame, where I went to college, swimming was such a part of my life. My sister swam as well, and for our first twenty years that was such a big part of our lives. DB: Are you still involved with Notre Dame stuff? TB: Going back to Notre Dame is so inspiring because you see how creative the young generation at universities is, they’re just so much more evolved now. I look back and I think, “I was so not this evolved when I was here.” I was so busy with other things. Maybe that’s why, after college, it took years to really figure out the more artistic and creative side of myself. DB: At Notre Dame, you studied accounting, so yeah, I guess there was a whole world to discover after school. TB: I was speaking with somebody yesterday and they were trying to figure out how it happened. I think, up until school, it was just held back. And after I graduated it took time for it to develop. DB: Was there a single incident that propelled you to flesh that out more? TB: Meeting Flavio Albanese when I first graduated school. I think meeting Paul Fortune in LA. DB: You met these guys socially? TB: Just socially through other people. Seeing truly creative people proved to me that I should be this happy doing what I do. For these people, this happened; this is what you can do. I was always going through life thinking that if you’re not a doctor, an attorney, or an accountant, what else do you do? After graduating school, all of a sudden I started meeting people who were truly creative, and that’s when it really started. DB: I had a similar experience. When I wanted to work in the fashion and art worlds, my parents were sort of daunted. They knew accountants and lawyers and doctors, so they felt like they could give me guidance into those fields. But when you have a kid who has some creative perspective, they were like, “We don’t know any writers or fashion people. What’s a stylist?” TB: My parents were always so encouraging. They never held any of us

back. But I was the only one who wasn’t either a doctor or an attorney. I was the one they didn’t know what to do with but they were always like, “Well, we don’t know, but just try to be good at it and be true to yourself.” DB: Is your family more art or fashion or style or culturally minded now? I thought it was sweet when my mom told me, “I saw Tom Ford sold his company.” I knew my mom only keeps tabs on the ownership of Tom Ford’s fashion and beauty brands because it was part of my world, and I thought it was sweet of her. TB: Ha, not really. It’s a typical family that will always bring me back to when I was twelve, when I was the middle kid who was shy and quiet. So they always know a little more than I do. My sister or brother will say, “What do you think I should do with this room?” And I’ll say, da-da da-da da-da, and they’ll think about it and then respond, “No, no, no.” I want to say, “I just want you to know, I actually do this for a living and people actually respect my opinions!” DB: You’re the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America! Show some respect! TB: Not at home, I guess. DB: Has the way you work changed since you started this company years ago, or is it pretty much the same? TB: I hope it’s the same! I think that’s the challenge as you grow. Evolve? Yes. And grow and mature. But not change. We have these conversations all the time: As you grow and get bigger and more people come in [to a company], the challenge is making sure that you don’t lose how it started. I approach things the exact same way I always have. DB: What do you remember most about the early days of your company? TB: When I started, most people didn’t like it. They thought it was ridiculous.

Previous spread: Thom Browne, 2023. Photo: Blaine Davis Above: Thom Browne’s Fall/Winter 2009 menswear presentation at Pitti Uomo, Florence. Photo: Dan and Corina Lecca Below: Thom Browne’s sketch for Fall/Winter 2015 menswear collection

This page: Backstage at Thom Browne Couture 2023, Paris. Photos: Corey Tenold

But I loved it! So I had to convince new people year after year after year, “This is what it is and you have to understand it.” I didn’t know anything about fashion when I started. Did I really care about being in fashion? I don’t know, but I knew I wanted to do what I was doing. That was one thing of taking tailoring and reintroducing it to people in different ways, and I always want to keep that, taking that entrepreneurial approach, which isn’t always easy. DB: There’s an interesting parallel here to young artists. We know so many stories about artists who are laughed at or misunderstood and then, years later, their works are reconsidered— TB: I think if you do something important you have to expect a lot of people not to like what you’re doing at the beginning. Too many young artists and designers feel like success and acceptance should be immediate. They want immediate gratification and that’s their challenge. For me, it took five years for anything really to start happening, and I almost went out of business. It wasn’t until 2015–16 that it really started to kick into gear. That was fifteen years later! So, you have to commit, but you also have to love what you’re doing more than anybody else. And that’s how it’s easy. DB: Do you think that’s why you were able to stick with it, because you were so passionate and committed? TB: Yes. I loved it more. I still do. DB: Young people want success immediately now, but they’re also confronted with negativity much quicker too. It took you twenty years to find out Larry Gagosian thought you were just a guy in shorts, whereas now you can read the comments section and you’re told to “Fuck off and die” immediately. TB: Yes, we did have the luxury that ignorance was bliss. In a way, you didn’t know what most people thought. Now you know what everybody thinks. But you know what? Who cares? Of course, you’re human, so it will affect you somehow, but you have to learn almost how not to care, how to not let it change how you do what you do. That’s easy to do when you love it. DB: I remember a couple of years ago I saw some of your design sketches and they weren’t what we consider traditional design sketches. They were super abstract. Have you always drawn like that? And is that what your sketches still

look like? TB: I can’t really fashion sketch so I don’t try to. For me, everything really starts from proportion and shape. So that more Bauhausian way of putting images on paper is how I start. And then I have really good sketchers on my team. DB: Do you do that on a computer? TB: No. DB: You actually draw the square and the triangle and the circles? TB: Yes. DB: Oh wow. Have you kept them for all of these years? TB: I have most of them. DB: I also know you’ve exhibited canvas works before too. When was that, how did that happen, and do you want to do more of it? TB: I used to do it a lot when I had more free time. DB: You would paint on a canvas or you would sort of silk-screen off a sketch? TB: Oh, no. I’d paint. DB: Do you want to be a painter on the side? TB: I loved it and loved it and then all of a sudden somebody wanted to do a show and it became another job and I loved it less. I don’t do it as much. DB: Someone asked you to be in a show? TB: Yes, and that’s when it got tricky. It was all just for fun and then it became not a hobby. I don’t really do it anymore. I mean, I sketch for work but I don’t paint anymore because it became another job. And I didn’t need another job. DB: We have an ongoing conversation in this series about whether fashion can be art and vice versa. What are your thoughts on that? TB: I don’t like to answer that. DB: Honestly, no one does. That’s why we ask it! TB: In regards to my work, I like people other than myself to say whether it’s art or not. I do feel like fashion is an artistic expression. I think art is sometimes just the simple way of making something. I always defer to Andrew for that. DB: Andrew is your partner, Andrew Bolton OBE, the head curator of the Anna Wintour Costume Center at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Should we call him now? Speaker phone? TB: I do feel like Andrew has elevated fashion, but he has elevated fashion to the level of being worthy of being at the Met. So, yes, it can be art. I’m not going to speak for him but I do respect his opinion because he truly does approach his shows from an artistic point of view.

DB: Some people could suggest that your shows are performance art. TB: Yeah, and I feel like, even our day-to-day I’d like to feel is almost a piece of living art. I feel like the image that I’ve created over the last twenty years—you recognize it out in the world, and that’s something I’ve been very conscious of. I wanted it to be more important than just clothes. Even when LeBron James and the Cavaliers bought my suits, I wanted it to be more than a fashion moment; I wanted it to be more of a cultural moment, so that kids would look at it and see, “Wow, it’s not really the clothing that I’m seeing, it’s all of them together.” It was more of a cultural moment than a fashion moment. DB: Speaking of your shows: you do something that no one else does. How important is the spectacle or performance of the show? TB: I wouldn’t want to do a show if I couldn’t do that. Look, I love the business and I love the classic elements because that’s where it all started. But I love the show because I love the stories being told. I like putting ideas in front of people that start conversations. DB: How long does it take to conceptualize an idea? Years or—? TB: It can take five minutes. DB: But I imagine you work further in advance. Just to build all the bird heads for your 2023 couture show must have taken some time. TB: Actualizing it all takes at least a couple of months, but the idea could Opposite: Behind the scenes at Thom Browne Couture 2023, Paris. Photo: Corey Tenold Above: Thom Browne’s Spring/Summer 2013 womenswear presentation. Photo: Dan and Corina Lecca Below: Thom Browne’s Spring/Summer 2007 menswear presentation. Photo: Dan and Corina Lecca All images courtesy Thom Browne

come in a minute. DB: Has there ever been an idea that you thought was too far-fetched? TB: No, but there are things I’ve done that I probably couldn’t do now. DB: Like what? You mean because of the constraints of physicality? TB: No, I mean culturally. It’s a different world now. DB: Have you ever been backstage and just felt like, “What the hell is going on? How did I get here?” TB: No! I’m very organized throughout the whole thing. When I’m backstage I love the whole thing. All of it. Those are the moments that are the most exciting and what I love most is the excitement and the craziness of it. But it’s never that crazy. It’s always controlled, which is important to me. DB: You have a book coming out this year, which is a tome devoted to your first twenty years, and there’s a quote that Andrew, who wrote the opening thesis, included from Gerhard Richter: “Gray has the capacity that no other color has to make ‘nothing’ visible.” Did you know that quote before the book? TB: No, and this is why it was a luxury working with Andrew, because Andrew elevated everything to his level. Andrew always says that designers are the worst at curating their own shows or doing their own books. And I was like, “Okay, Andrew, you do it.” And he did. He did put together such an amazing thing. DB: I imagine it must have been a little therapeutic to go back to those early shows. Remember the ice-skater collection? TB: Yes, February of 2006. DB: How did you feel digging up some of these? TB: You just realize there’s just so much work. The most important thing for me was seeing how the collection has evolved and the consistency through the collections. That’s what was really nice to see. DB: There’s not a lot of text from you here. Are you ever going to write your memoirs? TB: It would be two pages.

Opposite: Carol Bove, New York, 2023. Photo: Jeff Henrikson This page: Carol Bove, Triguna, 2012, steel, concrete, brass, peacock feather, shell, and found metal, 67 × 20 ½ × 12 ½ inches (170.2 × 52.1 × 31.8 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York Following spread: Carol Bove, Triguna, 2012 (detail), steel, concrete, brass, peacock feather, shell, and found metal, 67 × 20 ½ × 12 ½ inches (170.2 × 52.1 × 31.8 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York

A few days after Carol Bove received a book of mine in the mail, she texted me the following poem: Matter goes beyond matter, The air of the earth / sculpture. Words go beyond words, The earth of the air / poetry. It would be impossible to represent the range of Bove’s astonishing output in only five or six images, as I’ve so graciously been invited to do. So I’ve chosen to focus on works in which peacock feathers play a role. I am fascinated by how Bove contrasts “apparent” heft with extremes of delicacy. I adore and am deeply attracted to skewed and “bad”

proportion, which she plays with relentlessly, and with satisfying—neverending—wit. Some of Bove’s pieces seem almost to “read” with the precision of a sentence—an assortment of objects sit on a high metal plinth as if conjugated into a kind of solid grammar. Others conjure aura and relationship within and amongst themselves, or seem to beckon the viewer by engaging our acquisitive eros, by fomenting our desire to test and touch what we see, to inhabit somehow the animality of material being. At times I feel it’s pure geometry she’s gaming out, and at others the history and culture that certain materials emanate. In a way, everything Bove makes could be understood to be “about” strength. But to return to

the ostentatious and overdetermined—already too loud in itself—peacock feather: it so happens that my last book was completed by grace of the peacock, a figure that had never previously held any particular allure for me, whose “beauty” and decorative applications felt so overfamiliar I could not really see the mysteries, the many mysteries, its obviousness concealed. What could be more feminine than a peacock feather—and yet it’s a male thing. What could be more frivolous—and yet it shows up in the most mystic of mystical places, an angelic realm whose secret of staying hidden is hiding in plain sight. —Ariana Reines

CAROL BOVE

ARENA Because that light was not like the others Making us seem to be becoming a place & because on a traffic island the sun had filled me & because my mother was crazy & because she was sometimes sane & because I was in love & then I wasn’t in love anymore & because I was hungry & because I needed to party & because I was grieving & because I had studied the Dust Bowl, the architecture at Delphi, Judaic & Islamic legends of Moses, Midianite theology, the history of Haiti, Aryan horsemen of ancient Iran, the collapse of Sumerian agriculture, Kundalini yoga, Allan Savory’s & competing theories on desertification reversal, ancient & contemporary methods for ruminant grazing, grasslands & myths of grasslands, those Hopi stories that can be found in books, Roman haruspicy, Hellenistic astrology, the life of the Marquis de Sade, one or two novels, one or two volumes of poetry, Bulgarian choral singing, elements of contemporary sculpture, certain Gnostic scriptures, my own appetite & because you can pay a professional to cleanse you of demons with a chicken egg & because the air filled first with the odor of cheap men’s cologne & then of human excrement over warming Pop-Tarts & because one morning in Santa Monica a woman emerging from a store Was heard to say “They don’t have guns in the toy store” to which her man Replied “I know.” He was seated beside a child. “We’ll get it In another toy store” said the man. & because an ugly incense was emanating From HOUSE OF INTUITION & because Kabir wore A peacock feather in his cap & Krishna had one in his turban & because King Solomon brought peacocks, TUKKIYIM In a boat back from Tarshish & because I fell down sobbing over a beaded cloth & because what I had for so long failed To see, what I had ignored, mistaking it for ornament Was information hiding in plain sight & because there was no way to touch What was converging on us & because once 63

There were oil pits near Ardericca & a pitch spring on Zacynthus & because Iris Was the messenger of the gods I’d forgotten & because “The iridescence in the peacock was due to a complex photonic Crystal” & because that crystal was silica & so For the most part was sand & likewise the stones To which desolate people increasingly communicated their wishes

Left: Carol Bove, The Occult Technology of Power, 2006, wood and metal shelves, books, peacock feathers, and concrete, 44 × 65 × 10 inches (111.8 × 165.1 × 25.4 cm) Opposite: Carol Bove, Untitled, 2013 (detail), peacock feathers on linen, UV filtering acrylic, 96 × 48 × 5 inches (243.8 × 121.9 × 12.7 cm). Photo: Jeffrey Sturges

& because glass was melted sand & Johnny Cash was attacked By an ostrich & because pens used to be made of feathers & because Chopin & George Sand had been miserable in Mallorca & because there were dust storms on Mars & sand storms in China & Israel was investing heavily In anti-desertification efforts & because Papa Doc Had shorn Haiti’s mountains of trees & when dust from Azerbaijan Blew into Tbilisi I lay with a nihilist in a fenced-in woods & when strange lights appeared 64

At the height of the spruces there was dust on our tongues & because I navigated by the pinecone in my skull Same as everybody else & because a bird Had alighted on the lectern of Bernie Sanders & Mozart Kept a sparrow as a pet & because the mute son of Kenzaburo Oe learned speech from records of birdsongs & because Of the bird friends of Odin & Maasaw & because the gizzards Of fowl were iridescent & likewise the pearl & likewise the viral “Unicorn Frappuccino” & because Big Sur

Carol Bove, The Night Sky Over Berlin, March 2, 2006 at 9pm, 2006, wax, concrete, driftwood, polyurethane foam, peacock feather, steel, bronze, wood, Plexiglas, gold, 48 × 48 × 96 inches (121.9 × 121.9 × 243.8 cm). Photo: Carsten Eisfeld Artwork © Carol Bove “ARENA” from A Sand Book by Ariana Reines (Tin House, 2019) © Ariana Reines

Was on fire & a hot wind was blowing over the Henry Miller Library & because in Paradise California people burned In their cars & because the bullets kept flying & because the relentless spread Of stupidity was allegorized in Flaubert’s Novels by grains of sand & because idiocy Came down onto Baudelaire on the wind Of a wing & because the less we could agree The more it seemed we were revolving Into a gem 66

Building a Legacy: The Ransom Center This ongoing series features conversations with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship who offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. For this installment, Dr. Stephen Enniss, director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and Megan Barnard, associate director for administration and curatorial affairs at the Center, meet with Gagosian’s Lisa Turvey to discuss the history of the Ransom Center and their ongoing work in the field of archives, from acquisition to stewardship.

LISA TURVEY The Ransom Center was founded in

1957 as a repository for rare books and manuscripts, and its holdings now include 1 million rare books, 42 million manuscripts, and a huge photography collection. How have your collecting practices evolved? MEGAN BARNARD In many ways this goes back to the origins of the Ransom Center and to Harry Ransom, an English professor at the University of Texas, who advanced to become the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and then the vice president and provost and president and chancellor. In 1956, shortly before the Ransom Center officially became the institution that it now is, he described his vision for establishing what he called “a center of cultural compass.” Ransom believed that very strong library collections were the foundation for a university, and he initially focused that collecting primarily on literary manuscripts and rare books. But he was deeply interested in the creative process, the trail the author leaves behind that shows how works were generated—the notes, the evolving drafts, false starts, correspondence, all of the various supplementary materials that tell the story of how a creative work came to be. And so the Ransom Center began collecting full archives at that time. That wasn’t a common practice yet, although it has certainly become quite common. Ransom’s idea for establishing a “cultural compass” led, still in the early history of the Center, to the idea that the institution should look more broadly at culture, so the Ransom Center began collecting in other areas, such as art and photography and film. A lot of the early collecting in those areas was due to strong connections with the Center’s literary archives.

These cross-disciplinary connections are a real hallmark of the Ransom Center’s collecting. We have a collection-development policy now that guides our collecting decisions, and it’s publicly available on our website. Among the guiding principles of that policy is the idea that we collect materials that document the creative process of individuals or organizations working in literature, the arts, and the humanities, and that foster connections among the Ransom Center’s collections. STEPHEN ENNISS There was also a Texas theme to Ransom’s original vision; he was mindful of the strong research collections on the East Coast and West Coast and wanted to create a similar resource in the center of the country. But because those East and West Coast institutions had such a long head start and had already amassed huge collections of rare books, Ransom understood that the University of Texas was not going to catch up. The pivot to the papers of writers was innovative at the time, in the 1950s and ’60s. But it was also partly driven by the recognition that the institution could immediately and in very short order establish a collection of great distinction, unrivaled by any collection anywhere else. It was partly that understanding that drove this pivot to manuscripts and archives, and it was a particularly fortuitous time to do that. Some US institutions had manuscript collections, but abroad, collectors of contemporary authors lagged far, far behind their American counterparts. One bookseller memorably told me that in the UK an author had to be “securely dead” before the British Library would be interested in his or her papers. Ransom recognized an opportunity early in living authors’ papers and in creating a unique

and distinctive resource that we’ve now sustained for more than sixty-five years. LT Your holdings are so wide-ranging; highlights include one of twenty copies of the Gutenberg Bible, [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein’s Watergate papers, Ezra Pound’s copy of [T. S. Eliot’s] The Waste Land [1922], and David O. Selznick’s archive. But the collection also coalesces around distinct nodes. How do you conceptualize those interdisciplinary components? SE We’d love to think that it all makes perfect sense. And there is a rationale; it’s articulated in a collection-development policy and we try to steer close to it. There are opportunistic things that occur, so some of the collections you named have unique circumstances that led to their being here. But in terms of the nodes, one of the things we’re consistently looking for when materials are offered to the Ransom Center is the interconnection between the collection on offer and the collections already here. A very rich research environment is created as those interconnections proliferate. It’s very common for researchers to come to the Ransom Center thinking they want to consult one archive and then finding themselves needing much more time to spread outward into all these interconnected areas. In the early years, the Ransom Center collected in a more encyclopedic fashion and more broadly than the fields we’re bestknown for today. As the collection has matured, as the institution has matured, we’ve recognized the strength of these patterns and connections. MB Oftentimes creative figures represented in our collections collaborated with one another, or influenced or corresponded with one another. 69

We really try to think about what material has the best use for research purposes, for teaching, for influencing research and learning. We try to focus on those materials that relate directly to the creative work. — Megan Barnard

As one example, Gabriel García Márquez, whose papers are here, was heavily influenced by William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce, and the Ransom Center has strong collections related to all those writers. Looking across disciplines—I’m thinking of our performing-arts collections—we have very strong archives related to playwrights. But then we also have many archives of actors, scenic designers or costume designers, critics, and photographers who have all worked in the field, and their archives can tell different parts of the story of the production of a particular play. Having these connections offers unique opportunities for researchers and students to approach their research questions from a wide range of angles. SE Over the history of the institution, there have been cultural shifts that have changed the nature of collecting. When Ransom began collecting and established the Center, there was an emphasis on literary culture, and there still is. But the Center began collecting film very, very early. And we know today, of course, that a lot of creativity that might in another time have been expressed in the novel or the short story has moved to film and screenplays. A similar thing occurred in our photography collections. The origin of the Center’s photography holdings was a historical nineteenth-century photography collection; a few decades ago the emphasis shifted to the archives of prominent photojournalists who were documenting wars and conflicts of the twentieth century. But what’s occurred over this span of time is a shift in the very nature of photography and its recognition as a fine art. LT “Gone to Texas” is shorthand for your acquisition of an archive. What’s your sense of the 70

Ransom Center—which is not only an archive but also a museum and a library—vis-à-vis other institutions? Are there peer institutions with whom you collaborate or compete? SE That’s a big question. We do have peers. We’re all engaged in trying to identify, preserve, and make accessible the most important and significant cultural products of our time, and that’s not an activity that any one institution can completely or successfully do, so it’s very much a collective enterprise. Close peers of ours are institutions like Yale’s Beinecke Library. But many other major universities have very fine special collections, and we collaborate with our peers on a very regular basis and enjoy good relationships with them. On the question of competition, there’s a type of collection that’s so desirable, any institution would want to acquire it. So there certainly is desire, and maybe you could express that as competition. But it unfolds in an unusual way. Often, the creator, writer, or their family or agent has already determined where they think that archive belongs. In the case of Gabriel García Márquez, we simply received a phone call one day from a representative of his family asking if the Harry Ransom Center would be interested in acquiring his papers. Of course the answer was yes, but many other institutions that had gotten that call would have answered yes. It’s our responsibility then to make it happen, but the competition has been discreet and silent and often occurs before the offer is made. Once that offer is extended, there’s a good-faith negotiation between the seller and the buyer to try to reach a common understanding. It’s unusual, and some would say even irregular, for someone to invite

multiple parties to try to buy the same collection simultaneously, and we have chosen not to engage on collections presented that way. MB Building on the idea of collaboration, we’re offered materials every single day, and often those collections or items would fit well at the Ransom Center. Sometimes, though, we aren’t the right place for them. So a part of what we do, and many of our colleagues at other institutions do, is try to direct materials to the appropriate place. If we’re offered materials, for example, that relate to a particular creative figure and we’re not the repository of record for that person’s archive, it’s much better for researchers if everything resides together, so we will often recommend that the person reach out to the institution that does have that figure’s archive. And we have been the recipients of references like that as well. There’s a real collaborative spirit among our colleagues throughout the field, and a sense of commitment to the idea of trying to do the best that we can to preserve our cultural heritage. There’s collaboration in other ways too. We regularly collaborate with peer institutions, whether they’re library archival institutions or museums, by loaning materials for exhibitions; we have an active loan program. We also often collaborate on grantfunded projects, various initiatives, and digitization projects. For example, we recently partnered with Swansea University on an extensive digitization project for Dylan Thomas’s archive. LT You mentioned the advantage for researchers when all elements of an archive reside together rather than being dispersed among different institutions. Is the general preference to acquire the

It’s a very intimate thing to take the type of material we’re talking about from someone who’s had a successful career, as a writer for example, and may still have a lengthy career ahead of them. It’s a very significant step they’re taking. So a trust relationship is key. — Stephen Enniss

entirety of a given cultural figure’s archive? SE There’s been a change within the profession over the decades. In the ’50s, ’60s, and into the ’70s, maybe later, it was common practice for archives to be widely scattered, and the idea of a complete archive wasn’t as firmly established. More recently, institutions have recognized how beneficial it is for researchers to work in an archive that at least aspires to completeness, so when we acquire an archive, even of a relatively young figure—I’m thinking of the British novelist Rachel Cusk, who was in her fifties when we acquired her papers—we expect that we will continue to acquire her papers as she goes on to write works that haven’t even been conceived at present. We’re really making an open-ended and ongoing commitment to the individual writer and would be advocates for the profession to recognize that principle and give deference to the institution that has established a source archive that they’re committed to building. What can disrupt that is if someone perceives the market as something that they can leverage for financial gain. Some sellers may perceive competition as a way to drive up price, so while we’re committed to that principle of trying to keep an archive together, we won’t be held hostage by that principle and will do our best negotiating in good faith to achieve a fair market price for the seller and hope to keep that collection intact. It’s not a view that’s universally held. MB There are also sometimes circumstances where there are challenges to keeping archives together, particular circumstances that just prevent it from being possible. Another situation that’s

a bit different is a photographer’s archive: there can be multiple prints of the same photograph and it doesn’t necessarily make sense for all of those to reside in one place. It can be quite important and helpful for those materials to have a broader reach and to be represented in collections at museums that are dispersed geographically. The same can be true for artworks; it doesn’t always make the best sense to have everything in one place. But when you’re looking at archival materials that tell the story of the creative process, that’s the type of material that really is very helpful to keep in one place if possible. LT When acquiring an archive, how completist are you? Is the tendency to acquire everything with a connection to the creation of the work and the creative process, or do certain materials not make the cut? MB We really try to think about what material has the best use for research purposes, for teaching, for influencing research and learning. We try to focus on those materials that relate directly to the creative work, but a person can take a very expansive view of that, right? We don’t need every pen or pencil that someone used. We try to be very comprehensive but we can’t collect everything. The types of materials that we rarely collect will be things like personal effects—maybe the desks or furnishings that someone used, or the various objects that they surrounded themselves with. We try as a guiding principle to think about what would be of most use for research for years to come. Sometimes that can be a little hard to predict, because trends in research do change, but that’s really what we’re

trying to keep in mind as we make those decisions and as we talk with creative figures about their materials. SE One of the first things we do is enter into a conversation that’s very much oriented around def ining what the archive is. We’ve actually approached writers and expressed an interest in their archive only to be told, Oh, I don’t have an archive. But do they have a closet or an attic? All kinds of materials end up being relevant for research and teaching purposes. At the end of the day, what the archive becomes is defined during that process of discussing what we’re interested in, but also what the individual is comfortable including in a public academic institution. And most archives have a kind of silent history of erasure that sometimes comes to light: materials that are perhaps too personally revealing that the individual can’t comfortably part with. The history of this kind of collecting is filled with absences and destruction of materials. We’re always advocating for the preservation of as much of that record as we can possibly collect, but competing forces come into play around this question of just what the archive contains and what it is. LT I imagine it’s impossible to generalize, but can you give a sense of the timeline from initial discussion to acquisition to processing to public accessibility? And has digitization helped that process or made it more involved? SE What has to be present is trust between buyer and seller. It’s a very intimate thing to take the type of material we’re talking about from someone who’s had a successful career, as a writer for example, 71

That institutional validation that someone’s work is going to be studied in future decades, long after the figure is gone, is a very significant thing, as is the open-ended commitment to serve that legacy for years. And it’s more valuable than gold. — Stephen Enniss

and may still have a lengthy career ahead of them. It’s a very significant step they’re taking. So a trust relationship is key. And sometimes the assurances of a third-party agent can help provide those reassurances. Sometimes it’s months or even years of direct communication with the author. It’s highly variable how long it might take. I was recently, I thought, in a rather advanced stage of discussion with a writer, a Booker Prize–winning novelist, about his papers, and at the eleventh hour, he said he wasn’t ready. Which is fine, because he must be ready and we have the luxury of being able to wait, because we’re in this for the long, long term. But it can be a lengthy process to work through the many issues attached with the transfer of such personal material. MB As for digitization, it offers all sorts of opportunities, particularly for the researcher. It can make it much easier to share collection materials with remote researchers who aren’t able to travel to our reading room. We digitize and make available online thousands of collection items every year. Our peer institutions do as well. What we have found, and general trends in the field seem to indicate, is that as digital facsimiles of original collection materials become more widely available online, researcher interest in seeing the original also seems to remain very strong, or in many cases even increases. I think that’s different from what people may have expected—that as you create new opportunities for access through digitization, it creates stronger interest not only for those digital facsimiles but also for the originals. SE Another part of your question was about the 72

timeline of processing a collection and making it available. We have a very good record of cataloguing collections in a short time and of making them accessible. All institutions of the kind we’re talking about have backlogs, us included, but one of the things that an individual contemplating placing an archive would be well-advised to think about is the institution’s reputation for fulfilling their obligations and cataloguing a collection properly—perhaps digitizing portions of it if that’s agreeable to the copyright holder—how robust are they and what is their capacity to fulfill the institutional commitment that’s being made. A couple of examples might be helpful. It was 1961 when Arthur Miller’s archive was first acquired, and it was 2016 or 2017 when we acquired the remainder of it. We work on that notion of completeness over decades sometimes. The Anne Sexton papers originally came many, many years ago, and we’re in the process of making a significant addition to that archive. The commitment that the Ransom Center is making is really an open-ended and enduring one, and part of what we have to offer a creator is that ongoing service to their legacy that spans beyond their lifetime and ours as well. LT For those readers who have archives that they may wish to donate or sell in the future, what steps should they take now to make that process smoother? What materials should they be saving? MB Probably the place to start is for someone to be thinking about their goals for their archive and its future accessibility. Any institution will need to gain an understanding of what the archive is, what materials are available, and there may need to be

some discussion about what’s best suited for a particular institution. Another thing to think about is whether materials would be offered as a donation or for sale. It’s important to recognize that even a donation requires a substantial long-term investment from an institution, so any acquisition at all, whether it’s a donation or a purchase, is a commitment from the institution in perpetuity that requires very significant investments of time and various resources. It can also be helpful for a person to think about what materials they are actively making use of on a regular basis as part of their creative process. That might be material they need to retain, at least while it’s still useful to them. It’s really helpful, too, as conversations start with an institution, to build a relationship with that institution, visit the institution, get a good understanding of how materials are made accessible, what the mission and the commitment of that institution are. Acquisition should not be the end of a relationship; it’s just the beginning. SE I’m glad you made those points, and I would echo one of them: the institution that one chooses to approach about the acquisition and then care of one’s archive in perpetuity is making a very significant commitment of time and resource to that figure’s legacy. That institutional validation that someone’s work is going to be studied in future decades, long after the figure is gone, is a very significant thing, as is the open-ended commitment to serve that legacy for years. And it’s more valuable than gold.

GEORG BASELITZ

THE PAINTER IN HIS BED

Previous spread: Georg Baselitz, Hirsch (Stag), 2022 (detail), ink on paper, 39 3 ⁄8 × 29 ½ inches (100 × 75 cm). Photo: Jochen Littkemann Opposite: Georg Baselitz, The Painter in His Bed, 2022 (detail), oil, dispersion adhesive, and plastic on canvas, 118 1 ⁄8 × 196 7⁄8 inches (300 × 500 cm). Photo: Jochen Littkemann This page: Georg Baselitz, 2023. Photo: Christoph Schaller Following spread: Georg Baselitz’s studio, 2023. Photos: Christoph Schaller Artwork © Georg Baselitz 2023

This past summer, Richard Calvocoressi visited Georg Baselitz in his studio in Bavaria to discuss the motif of the stag in Baselitz’s newest paintings. RICHARD CALVOCORESSI There were occasional

images of deer and stags in your earlier work—in paintings and works on paper from the mid-1980s, for example, and in the family portraits of circa 1997, some of which are decorated with sketchy line drawings of motifs from Sorbian folk art such as stags, flowers, and religious symbols. But in this new body of work there appears to be a change, an explicit identification of the artist with the stag. The largest painting in the series, The Painter in His Bed, depicts four standing stags at rest against a black background. How do you explain this change? GEORG BASELITZ I haven’t changed. I painted deer as a child; they were part of my model, my motif, what I saw. The folk art you’re talking about is not Sorbian but Saxon—Saxon reverse glass paintings and other folk art. And there they appear as they do in normal iconography, as a vehicle for something religious: time, transience, and so on. I think certain animals appear iconographically throughout art history: the dove, the swan, the hare, the stag. RC Do you see the stag as a particularly German symbol, evoking the forest of German Romanticism, like the eagle in your earlier work? But by repeating the same motif of the stag in a potentially endless series, and painting it upside-down, or combining it with found objects such as nylon

stockings, are you stripping it of its historical associations, even introducing a note of absurdity? GB The stag in art history is European, not German. Many stags were painted in Italy—by Pisanello, for example. In Holland, too, or think about Courbet in France. Stags are everywhere, be it as a depiction of a natural experience or as an iconographic or allegorical symbol. And I know that, so my depiction can’t be unconscious. It’s a very specific intention, and that intention is, as you would say today, to challenge. But I would actually call it verballhornen. I don’t know if that’s a word that can be translated, verballhornung, that is, twisting it into a joke. It’s not only serious, it’s rather funny. RC I can think of numerous images of stags in the history of art, from prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France, to medieval visions of Saint Eustace and Saint Hubertus, with a crucifix between the antlers, to representations of the metamorphosis and death of Actaeon by Titian [1559–75], to Landseer’s famous Monarch of the Glen [1851], and also the nineteenth-century hunting pictures of Ferdinand von Rayski, which you got to know as a teenager in Dresden. Also the drawings of Carl Fredrik Hill, and even, finally, the drawings of Joseph Beuys. Were you conscious of any of these precedents when you were painting your new pictures of stags? GB I am always uncomfortable with such resuscitations or comparisons, because my approach is initially much more unconscious, freer of visual inf luences. I’m not obsessed with a stag from Beuys, Lascaux, or Courbet. I’m simply interested in this object, not because I want to make something according to my environment, not because

I’m interested in the occurrence in art history. What’s happening there? The question “why” is a secondary question. Almost all these things that I have used, the eagle or the songbirds or the hare, I have used in a way that expresses itself most through cynicism, through criticism, through contempt, or having fun. It’s never actually a friendly quotation. Unkind quotes, if at all. RC The stag is a free animal, a wild animal. It’s also hunted, pursued. The background of Kokoschka’s famous, ironically entitled Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist, for example, painted in 1937, shows a stag and a figure of a running man. Have you ever felt that your art was misunderstood, or, if not denounced, at least ignored or even suppressed by the authorities? I’m thinking about your experiences particularly in Berlin in the 1960s. GB I don’t think it’s so much a feeling that I have, it’s simply a matter of facts. An artist has a media appearance, and my media appearance was never assessed positively, always negatively. That was very beneficial to me, though, because it made me more secure on my path and more invulnerable. The stag is a German sofa painting, as are the Alps and cherry blossoms. That’s well-known, because even famous painters grew up somewhat bourgeois, and above their sofa there hung a picture of a stag. In Germany there is a picture of a stag above every sofa. In France perhaps it’s a Renoir. That’s how I imagine it. In England there are more cherry blossoms than horses above the sofa. And it’s in this context that you have to understand what I’m doing, because it’s always one step off, or several steps off. I have collected Carl Fredrik Hill’s stags and they are completely meaningless, because he just flipped through magazines and illustrated 77

newspapers, and what appears in those? The same things that hang above the sofa. Well, that’s the only context. RC Can you say something about the use of nylon stockings and underwear in these paintings? This isn’t the first time you’ve used them, but— GB To me, stockings are truly ugly physical objects. I don’t like them. And now I can go up to Freud and say, “Dear Sigmund, I had to wear stockings until I was fourteen,” which is an actual fact, “and has this caused a lot of damage?” And he will surely provide me with some explanations on that. RC What about the series of ink drawings of stags overlaid with thick, black, jagged lines? Did you feel the drawings were in danger of becoming too delicate, too beautiful, and needed to be undermined or canceled? GB If that were the case I would have thrown the drawing away. You can create different layers. You can make many layers. You can create those layers through various techniques, styles, or elements, like color, et cetera. It’s not when the drawing has failed that I create another layer, but because I painted realistic fences in earlier pictures, board fences in front of the motif. There is something behind the fence, so to say. More or less the same is happening here. There are no fences, but stockings. That’s an addition, if you will, but actually it’s 78

less than that, as the outcome is desired. I know it beforehand. RC In the interview with Andreas Zimmermann in the catalogue of the Vienna Kuntshistoriches exhibition this spring, you say: “I have finally been painting the [Robert] Rauschenberg I have always wanted to paint.” I assume you’re referring to the picture Hirschrobert [Stag Robert, 2022] in this series, and to other paintings that combine fabric, as here, with the image of the stag’s head, in a form that recalls, or makes one remember, Rauschenberg’s Bed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. What is it about Rauschenberg’s combine paintings that interests you so much? GB It is, after all, a method, a working method, a method that already existed shortly after 1900. And Rauschenberg, as an American, as a foreigner, came across this Dadaist, Expressionist German art in dependence to Kurt Schwitters. They call it “collage” here. Picasso made collage a little earlier, but Picasso never used it in a socially critical way. In Germany it was always used exclusively in a socially critical, political way. It was never a formal gimmick. There was always a second opinion to it. It makes some people uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable too, but it’s something you can’t prevent. Strangely enough, when I saw the first Rauschenberg exhibition in Berlin, must have been

around 1966, 1967, with the Dante cycle exhibited in the Amerikahaus, I immediately thought of Schwitters, of course. But what also came to my mind was that the symbolism Rauschenberg used—presidents, portraits of eagles, et cetera— were perfectly typical iconography. They weren’t destructive actions but rather multiplications. It was addition and assemblage in a new organization. The images were organized in a completely different way than, for example, Willem de Kooning’s or Clyfford Still’s. They were simply layered with political statement, with sociopolitical statement, and they were meant to be destructive but to lead to a good end. And I found that very interesting until the end, and still today and I’m especially interested in why the Americans as such need to do something like this. Andy Warhol, one of the most important American artists, painted the most wanted criminals at the very beginning; then these electric chairs, these car accidents—all scenes that are aesthetically unpleasant, and not only aesthetically but unpleasant in general. And he depicted them using a very simple, anonymous method, silkscreen printing, which is direct and very— RC Mechanical— GB —un-European, very different from Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg, who were very European, or dependent on Europe. And I found that very pleasant.

Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize winning–author of biographies of Clarice Lispector and Susan Sontag, returns with a new book, The Upside-Down World, that tracks his decades-long engagement with the Dutch masters. Here he speaks with Josh Zajdman about the genesis of the project, the importance of judging your subjects, and the danger of art.

BENJAMIN MOSER: THE UPSIDEDOWN WORLD 80

JOSH ZAJDMAN When I first heard about this book,

I was surprised. I was expecting another amazing biography of a misunderstood literary figure. When you were done with your Sontag biography, how did you transition to this very different subject? BENJAMIN MOSER Once you finish a book, you fall into a void of despair about what’s next—especially a book like the Sontag biography; it involved so many years of research and work. And everybody said, “Oh, who’s the next big female intellectual?” But I don’t want to just keep doing the same thing. When I moved to the Netherlands, over twenty years ago, I started making notes on the things I was seeing in the Dutch museums. I’ve been doing it and doing it, but mainly just for myself, since it was really a very personal attempt to figure out where I’d ended up, what this place was. I didn’t feel like there was a place for me to start getting to know this culture but I felt the appeal of it, and more than the appeal, the obsession it can spawn. So in a sense I’ve been writing this book for all those years, and it felt like the logical next step for me. JZ Throughout the book, you ask certain questions or present maxims for how to see and engage with art and life. “Why do we make art and why do we need it? What is beauty and how does it relate to taste? How in the world are we supposed to live?” When you think about those questions, has your relationship to them changed over time? BM I think so. I think the reason that the technical, art-historical, or scientific approach to art is ultimately unsatisfying—at least to me, and I think to most people—is that it doesn’t get anywhere close to what you actually feel when you look at art. It’s not just about the frame, and the palette, and the formal composition—all of those things are interesting, but there’s something else. If you really look at it in the way that I did, art becomes addictive. I was young, and coming into this totally foreign culture, trying to figure out who I was, what makes me tick, and what makes us tick as people. It’s very hard to live, even if you take the path of least resistance. So looking at these questions through art was something that I really wanted to share with other people, inviting them to examine their affective responses—intimidation or terror or excitement or all of the above. There are these incredible tensions, and there should be, because art can kill you. You can’t play around with art. It’s dangerous. JZ You write, “As with Dante, Shakespeare and Bach, you cannot rush an acquaintance with Rembrandt.” And later on, you say, “It is beautiful, and it is also excruciating, the hallmark of Rembrandt.” BM Rembrandt dramatizes this the most shockingly. I think that when these names become perfumed and ringed with this aura of sanctity that most great painters or artists have, you don’t fully look and see that what you’re seeing is fucking scary. This is not something you even want to look at, not really, because if you do, it might take you somewhere you might not want to be going on a Thursday afternoon when you’re walking through this museum. It was so intimidating to write about Rembrandt, especially in the Netherlands, because there’s so much written about him. Like Shakespeare if you live in London. So I tried to find another way to write about him that I think got at this emotional discomfort that he creates, even though he’s sanctified in Dutch culture. When they start digging through the archives and figuring out that he wasn’t such a nice person, that raises another question: does the artist have to be such a nice person? People in other societies—and in other times even in our own society— didn’t really care about the artist’s personality or even

probably pick up, I don’t know, 80 percent of Dutch paintings and walk down the street with them. Most of the great Rembrandts and Vermeers you could just take off the wall. And that gives this art a kind of apparent readability. It shows a mother and a child; we think we know all about mothers and children and that they’ve always been the same thing. But of course, they really haven’t. In Amsterdam during the Golden Age, four pandemics killed 10 percent of the population within one century, so that’s one in every generation—huge swaths of the population just died. That’s not counting the normal infant mortality, not counting the wars. And you know that’s also the miracle of something like a Vermeer, how peaceful it looks, how he just tightened that frame so that you only see this one little thing. You don’t see the cholera next door, or the dead babies, or the shit in the canal, or the war with the king of France. You just don’t see it at all. JZ But at the same time, you feel like you’re seeing all of something. That room is so beautifully and fully rendered that you think there can’t be life outside of it. BM Yeah, you think, “Oh, what a peaceful country. What a lovely place.” And it was; I mean, it was better compared to everywhere else. In the book, I’m always trying to show you what you think you’re seeing and then trying to make you see it a little bit differently. JZ Would you say there is a unique experiential quality to these works? BM I think you want to not be anesthetized. Even if you’re looking at Rembrandt’s dead criminals, or scenes of terror and sacrifice, as much as you’re looking at a beautiful Vermeer, you want to be taken out of that ordinary thing. So that’s why I resist the idea that Dutch art is about everyday life; it’s actually the opposite of everyday life. It’s this thing that, in a way, elevates your life, makes your life worth living. JZ Between you and Donna Tartt, all eyes are on Carel Fabritius. He died young and tragically. Is it just the Jim Morrison thing, died young and full of talent? BM He was very good-looking, too. There’s this one self-portrait where he looks completely gorgeous in a way that you can’t imagine. We don’t know what a lot of these people looked like; we don’t their biography. And I think we should care about it, in a way, to the extent that it shows something about him, which is that he was a man of extremes. We don’t love Rembrandt because he was our friendly neighbor, just a regular person. He was not a regular person. We love him because he’s this exaggerated kind of superhuman, a sort of art monster. JZ Who’s comfortable going there . . . BM Well, I don’t know if he’s comfortable, but he’s going there. JZ Well, do we need to talk about cancel culture now? [laughter] Is this debate about art versus artist especially relevant? BM It is. That’s such a contemporary term, cancel culture, but this always existed in certain ways. I’m reading a biography of Spinoza right now, a contemporary of Rembrandt—he lived in a world where, in terms of religion and “cancel culture,” we cannot imagine how restricted people’s abilities to speak and to think were, and this was in one of the freest countries in Europe. You could lose your head for denying that the earth revolved around the sun, or go to jail for denying the Holy Trinity. It’s really hard to imagine how unfree people were. Still, in my biographies, I do invite, in a certain way, judgment. I put my judgments out there in full 82

view and people can make of them what they will. Because I think that one way to bury somebody, and to make them boring, is to smooth out all the rough edges. I like rough edges. They’re where the drama is. I want the reader to wonder why they did what they did, what they were thinking, who they really were, why they weren’t nice to their wife or husband or lover, why they drank too much. Those are the kinds of questions that keep someone alive, that keep people from turning into street names or statues. The worst thing you can do to an artist isn’t to criticize him, it’s to make him boring. JZ The book unfolds through biographical sketches. By the end of each one, you have a look at the whole person. More broadly, you trace a through line across all Dutch art. What is it in a nutshell? BM Well, the Dutch invented so many subjects that weren’t considered subjects. They invented so much of the way we see the world. One of these nonsubjects was a family in their house, you know, walking the dog, talking to the neighbor. That hadn’t been considered a subject. For the Italians, art was always what was above real life, something elevated, sacred, not for the living room wall. Also, the size of their paintings, their intimacy. There are exceptions, obviously, but you could

Previous spread: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Laughing Man, c. 1629–30, oil on copper, 6 × 4 7⁄8 inches (15.3 × 12.2 cm), Mauritshuis, The Hague Opposite, left: Carel Fabritius, Self-Portrait, c. 1645, oil on panel, 25 ½ × 19 ¼ inches (65 × 49 cm), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands Opposite, right: Carel Fabritius, The Goldfinch, 1654, oil on panel, 13 1 ⁄8 × 9 inches (33.5 × 22.8 cm), Mauritshuis, The Hague Above: Jan Steen, ‘As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young’, c. 1668– 70, oil on canvas, 52 5 ⁄8 × 64 inches (133.7 × 162.5 cm), Mauritshuis, The Hague Following spread: Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, 1634, oil on panel, 9 ¾ × 7 ¾ inches (24.7 × 19.7 cm), Mauritshuis, The Hague

know what Vermeer looked like. Rembrandt was never particularly good-looking. But Fabritius was obviously a genius. We can tell that from his few remaining works, of which there are only twelve. JZ That’s wild. BM It’s a third of the number of Vermeers. It also raises a question about ancestry and genealogy. There’s Rembrandt and then you get to Vermeer through Fabritius, who was Rembrandt’s student and Vermeer’s teacher. But how did that transmission happen? And how did Fabritius make these pictures so magical? Because they are. If you just sit on one of those benches in the center of the gallery at the Mauritshuis in The Hague and watch people, they might read the label, they might not read the label, but if you sit there long enough, you start noticing the patterns: it doesn’t matter if someone is bored or texting their girlfriend or has to go to the bathroom or is hungry or their feet hurt—every one of them will stop in front of The Goldfinch [1654]. I don’t know what they see. JZ You write, “After Cervantes, a novel could be about anything. It could also be about nothing. After Vermeer, a painting could be too.” Did they just blow everything open and we’re still in it? BM Oh, we’re still in it. Just as we’re still in the world of the novel. It’s interesting how this happens.

The Dutch, or at least a lot of them, become Protestant, and a great deal of Catholic religious art is destroyed, and the Protestants don’t encourage religious art. But since they’ve always had lots of painters, these people have to find something else to do. Painters begin painting whatever they want. If you want to paint a little bird and call that art, you can. They paint landscapes, they paint still lifes, they paint portraits. You think, “Of course people always painted pictures of famous people.” Well, actually they didn’t. Portraiture wasn’t reinvented until the fourteenth century. Someone had to think of that. There’s so much of this that we think of as obvious but it’s not obvious. JZ One tidbit that really surprised me was the almost complete omission of homosexuality in Dutch art. BM We know that there were gay people, because we can find descriptions of people being persecuted for it . . . and it’s safe to assume that homosexuality was as common then as it is anywhere else. But though the Dutch painted absolutely everything, there are zero—it’s not that there are only a few— there are zero depictions of anything that could even be interpreted that way. When I discovered Ruisdael’s story—he never married, not that that means anything—and looked at his paintings, there 83

are a few little indications, maybe a couple too many naked guys in a few of his pictures, you know, and you think, “Huh.” And there is a sort of sensibility in Ruisdael that I found that made me wonder. It’s fascinating. That was apparently something that just couldn’t be touched. JZ Talk to me about Instagram. BM Instagram started for me with my Sontag biography, because I was reading all this photography theory. There are a few essays that everybody reads: it’s Sontag, it’s [Roland] Barthes, it’s Walter Benjamin. You read these essays and you can bullshit your way through any discussion of photography theory. But I realized I’d never taken a picture in my life. I started trying to take one good picture a day just with my phone. And then I realized how incredibly hard it is. It really helped me to understand just how constructed photographs are. You realize, getting back to this thing about daily life, is it daily life? No, it’s not. It’s somebody’s highly, highly edited version of daily life. In painting, it looks like a maid with a broom sweeping the floor, but it’s actually just as much of a construction. JZ You write about the concept of “wall power.” What is it? BM Wall power is museum jargon, but it means something that even your dog would respond to. It’s a quality that the Greeks called “charisma,” from which we get the word “grace.” It implies something given by God, divine or connected to the divine. 84

Once a painting is a Vermeer, even if it’s ugly everybody’s going to be really excited about it because it’s a Vermeer. But they’re not responding to the actual object. They’re not staying in the work, which is almost irrelevant in the shadow of this great name. They’re responding to the name, they’re responding to the reputation, they’re responding to the price. But real wall power is something else, and it’s very rare. My conclusion is that what we see as wall power is really the reflection of the person’s soul that they put into an artwork. So, when we see this bird by Fabritius, we’re actually seeing Fabritius, or we’re feeling something of him. JZ Sticking with thematic approaches, let’s talk about late style. Is it a compression of talent instead of age and attenuation? What do you think it is? BM I started thinking about it when I was writing about Clarice Lispector, who died pretty young. At forty-six, she fell asleep with a cigarette and burned her whole body, basically. From one night to the next, she became an old lady, someone who had trouble walking, who was in a lot of pain, who needed somebody to help her get out of bed—you know, an old person, even though she was forty-six and then died at fifty-six. But in those last few years that were left to her she created this unbelievable series of masterpieces. And maybe it had something to do with the freedom that comes from just not giving a shit anymore, and knowing that your time is so short that you have to produce, you have to make

it count. You don’t have time to waste. I write about Frans Hals: you see him losing his mind in this way that’s like fireworks exploding. This is somebody who was always a genius, but those last paintings are so shocking and so magnificent. I’ll never forget the first time I saw those paintings, the Regents and Regentesses [c. 1664] in Haarlem. I just could not believe it. It has a kind of ambition and scale and grandiosity that you would associate with Italy but it’s just the last breath of a great genius. And seeing that is, whoo, it’s exciting. JZ From late style to mortality isn’t a leap. You write a lot about the latter and how half of your life has been spent abroad. BM More than half, isn’t that weird? JZ Has the combination of age and living abroad made you more reflective? BM I’ve enjoyed growing older in a lot of ways, because I’ve become smarter, I’ve become more experienced. I’m less of an idiot than I used to be in all these ways. It doesn’t happen to everyone. I feel if you can make it to my age and be pretty much okay in life, that’s a lot more than a lot of people can say. My last book was dedicated to a great childhood friend who died when she was in her late thirties. On the other hand, middle age can also make things less exciting. Living in the Netherlands is not that exotic anymore. It’s not that interesting in a lot of ways. The reality of my living in Europe is that I go get dog food at the grocery store sometimes, and my computer doesn’t work and I have to call the guy to fix it. That’s my life, but every once in a while, I like to remember the thrill that Europe represents for a kid from Texas, and how completely strange it was to see these cathedrals and palaces and museums. It’s important not to grow jaded, and this can happen. When you come abroad, you can lose a sense of who you are. Nobody knows anything about you. And people, as I say in the book, don’t care about foreigners. I decided that I was going to look at that as freedom rather than as a loss. All of this experience is well reflected in the years that I’ve spent walking around museums. If you look enough, you see in art all these questions refracted through all these other people. I felt their companionship. I really did. I feel like they’re friends. Especially if I’m not in Holland, I’m in Malaysia or something and all of a sudden you see Frans Hals hanging on the wall. JZ “Hey buddy.” BM Yeah, exactly. It’s weird how that happens. JZ I was taken by the line “To delve into art is to delve into history.” That seems to be the guiding force of this book. BM You can look at art so many different ways. You can look at it from the structure of the canvas. You can look at who bought and sold a work. But you can also look at how the human mind has evolved. It has expanded and opened through artists. People often think that art reflects science. In fact, art often comes before science, it comes before politics, it comes before religion, it comes before fashion, and it’s the thing that actually drives all of those things. History seems to be this big thing and art history this little subset, but in fact, art history is the history of how people actually live and think. It’s the history of how people thought and expanded their minds, to incorporate things like showing other people in different ways, showing animals, showing daily life, showing different parts of the world, whether it’s a landscape or whether it’s a piece of fruit. You can see all of human history through art.

RACHEL WHITEREAD

. . . AND THE ANIMALS WERE SOLD

An installation by Rachel Whiteread in the Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, commissioned by the city’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo and cocurated by Lorenzo Giusti and Sara Fumagalli, opened in June and ran into the fall. Conceived in relation to the city, the architecture of the site, and the history of the region, it comprised sixty sculptures made with local types of stone. Fumagalli writes on the exhibition and architect Luca Cipelletti speaks with Whiteread. 87

In 2021, when Rachel Whiteread conceived . . .And the Animals Were Sold, her solo exhibition at the Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo, the pandemic was entering a less distressing phase, but the measures to contain the virus were still stringent in Italy, the pain of losing loved ones was still very present, and the vulnerability of our bodies and lives was still a part of our daily existence. The period led Whiteread to connect the experience of conceiving . . .And the Animals Were Sold with House (1993), her casting of an entire Victorian house in East London, a project for which she won the Turner Prize. House preserved traces of the people who had lived there, their history, and their memories, although the preparatory operations for the cast—bricking up windows, mending cracks, removing wallpaper, and so on—produced a result that ended up undermining the sense of protection and security associated with a home. That same year, during a residency at the DAAD Foundation in Berlin, the artist created Untitled (Room), a cast resembling the room of a house but actually made from an armature constructed for the occasion. So this room was devoid of history and emotion, lacking even functional elements such as switches, entrance and exit doors, and signs of a heating system, extending House’s denial of any sense of security and familiarity. . . .And the Animals Were Sold moves within a space that encompasses House and Untitled (Room) to the extent that it evokes feelings of both familiarity and strangeness, desire for closeness and fear of closeness, protection and confinement, sharing and isolation. During the pandemic, in fact, our homes became our havens but also our claustrophobic prisons. They constituted an extension of our body, which suddenly and constantly became the center of our concern: a body to protect, a body to distance, a body to quarantine, a sick body, a vaccinated body, a threatened body. As often with Whiteread, connection with her personal experience was crucial to the realization of the work. In Bergamo she presented sixty seats, each duplicating the empty space between the legs of one of two chairs and each combining three different types of marble and Sarnico stone, materials used historically in local construction. These forms interested the artist as hidden spaces offering a sense of privacy and security within a domestic and familiar environment at a moment of great vulnerability. Not only that: with . . .And the Animals Were Sold, Whiteread aimed to reflect on the disruptive experience of the pandemic and to offer the city of Bergamo a tool for initiating a process of healing. Upon entering the Sala delle Capriate, one got the feeling of crossing the threshold of a sacred place inhabited by lost souls—as the artist herself referred to her sculptures in a recent interview—but resonating with a sense of life.1 The rigorous geometry of the sculptural forms and their restrained and orderly arrangement in space inhibited easy emotional appeals, making room for a reflective and profound emotion experienced in tranquillity. Whiteread has said that on this occasion and others she drew inspiration from Piero della Francesca’s Flagellazione di Cristo (Flagellation of Christ, c. 1468–70), where the master employs proportions and composition to organize his figures as sculptural forms in spatial volume. Whiteread worked similarly and skillfully to arrange the seats within the immense spatial volume of the hall. Comparisons between Whiteread and Piero in the treatment of volume, space, and mass have been discussed often and many connections have been found between the artists, particularly in their

interest in composition, form, and proportion. But a dominant aspect emerges in . . .And the Animals Were Sold: the absence of rhetorical amplification in the figures and construction of the Tuscan master’s painting echoes in Whiteread’s installation, with its solemn calm, its sensitive, dignified sobriety. Piero’s figures are mute, inexpressive; they are presences that communicate solely through the fact that they exist in this specific form and substance. 2 Likewise, Whiteread’s sixty seats speak to the spectator through their sculptural presence, their material and formal qualities, the relationships established between them and the surrounding architecture, the color variations merging into the hues of the hall’s walls, the harmony of the whole—and not because they represent something. Rather, they stand for something else, expressing absence while highlighting a connection with the body: what is the purpose of a chair if not to accommodate a person? Whiteread’s installation was significant not only because it offered an opportunity to process the trauma of covid-19 but also because it served as a discreet admonition, or exhortation, to become aware of our current relationship with the pandemic. Today we are in a moment where, after a period of pain and worry, we are driven by the desire to look beyond, to forget, to focus on the lightness of the present moment. Whiteread’s installation assumed historical relevance by compeling us to consider the shared attitude that makes us impatient with discussions of the pandemic. It constitutes a statement about the importance of stopping to think, to make space, to question what we have experienced, because only by actively processing the trauma will it be possible to move forward with awareness. —Sara Fumagalli LUCA CIPELLETTI On the evening of March 17, 2020,

more than seventy military trucks were seen moving piles of coffins from Bergamo to other parts of Italy, since the local crematoria were already overloaded. These shocking images alerted the entire planet to the fact that covid was not confined to China but was in fact the most devastating global pandemic of the last hundred years. The world was

Throughout: Installation view, Rachel Whiteread: . . . And the Animals Were Sold, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Italy, June 23–October 29, 2023. Artwork © Rachel Whiteread. Photos: Lorenzo Palmieri

unprepared to fight such a difficult battle, and Bergamo became a symbol, the epicenter of the pandemic in the Western world. In 2021, you were invited to create an exhibition in Bergamo. For decades now you’ve been working with the concept of memory—the memory of buildings, their architectural elements and furniture: staircases, doors, windows, chairs, mattresses—the memory of souls. When you received this invitation, what were your preliminary thoughts before traveling to Bergamo? RACHEL WHITEREAD When I was asked to make this exhibition, there wasn’t a preconceived idea—I wasn’t invited to make a memorial for those who died during the covid pandemic, for example. If I’d been asked to do that, I probably wouldn’t have accepted, to be honest. These things are so emotive and complex. And for me, when I make a memorial, I have to feel it’s the right moment in time. The pandemic was still so fresh and so complex in everybody’s minds at that point; no one had really figured out how to deal with it, and no one really knew the sort of emotional and physical damage it had done to the world. So when I went to Bergamo, I went with a very open mind. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I just wanted to go and have a look. I journeyed there with my colleague and we were shocked, actually, by how people reacted. The city had been so wounded by what had happened that they hadn’t in any way come to terms with it. In the hotels, in the restaurants, in the shops, walking down the street, we were treated with a lot of suspicion. It was really odd, and I was very surprised because I know Italy extremely well and I’d never felt like a sort of alien there. So when we went to see the space at the Palazzo della Ragione for the first time, within fifteen minutes of walking into the place I knew what I could make happen there. I knew that I could do something that might aid in the healing of such a catastrophic scar. LC When you went to Bergamo, you met Lorenzo Giusti and Sara Fumagalli, the director and curator of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, as well as the local authorities. Just as important, you had the chance to meet the citizens of Bergamo and to grasp the aftermath of the battle. What was your feeling after visiting the site, and how did your preliminary idea develop? RW The original idea was to keep the space open. In a lot of Italian cities in the summer, as you know, there are public spaces that are used almost like salons, there are poetry readings and musical performances and all sorts of things happening there. When I left Bergamo and returned to my studio in the UK, I was thinking about that, and about how people could and would move around the space. Initially I wanted to use as many chair pieces as I could. The chair pieces are motifs that I’ve used for a very long time. They stand for an architecture of the people, in a way—I wouldn’t say they’re stand-ins for humans, but they have to do with how we’ve developed in the world. They seem to be a very good way of trying to bring a form to the very abstract notions of disease and catastrophe. LC You made sixty stone pieces, each the shape of the space beneath a chair. You’re primarily known for casting but in this case the pieces were carved or cut from the stone, using two different forms. How new is this for you? RW I normally cast things, but I’ve made handcarved works before as well. I knew that in Italy, master craftsmen have been dealing with stone for 89

centuries. It has to do with the way in which Italy was built, the way in which the architecture of the surrounding area and the cathedral and the square were built. Obviously when these things were constructed five hundred years ago, they were built by hand, and now we use machinery. But there are experts who really know how to make the stone sing and play. Right from the beginning, I felt it could be very much a sort of concerted effort by the entire community to join in and make this together. People really got on board and wanted to be a part of this healing situation for the whole community. I was very touched by that, actually; I felt that it had hit a nerve, and that it was powerful and the right thing to do for the situation. LC As an architect, I have projects in the Bergamo area and I’m familiar with the local stones you used, all with beautiful names. They’re very Italian words and sound like the names of the people portrayed in the medieval paintings in the ancient palazzo housing your exhibition. More important, these local marbles, which were used in the actual building of the palazzo, are sort of multipliers for the two different forms you used for your sculptures. Each form was made using all four marbles, but sometimes with different finishes—smooth, sandblasted, et cetera—giving you the opportunity to generate an incredible number of pieces that are both very similar and slightly different. This seems connected, in a way, to the idea of humanity in its similarities and its diversity. RW I’d say that my objects and sculptures have a way of representing humanity—from the mattresses to the chair spaces to the bars, they’re all objects that we’ve made for our bodies to use. From very early on, I’ve tried to develop that idea. The different materials that I’ve used over time as well—I always push the materials. I wouldn’t say that I’m trying to reflect the diversity of humanity with the materials, I think it’s more that the materials are reflecting the diversity of materials [laughs]. LC You clearly have a deep feel for materials and textures, yet you don’t seem to allow yourself to be seduced by overattention to look, surface, shine, color, or extravagant materials. The various stones used in Bergamo, and the slight variations in their surface finishes, are things one notices in the quiet of looking. Their beauty reveals itself slowly, would you agree? RW Yes [laughs]. You know, to me a lump of plaster is one of the most beautiful surfaces in the world. Other people might think it looks like a bit of white chalk. I think it’s very much how the individual interprets the world, and I don’t like to overcomplicate a surface. I like to try to use a material for its materiality. I occasionally color things and I occasionally patinate things, but that’s to bring out other elements. For me the beauty of something lies in its imperfection and in its ability to be what it is— to be honest. It’s about an honesty and a depth. I suppose it’s how I kind of live my life. LC The way you arranged the pieces in the enormous hall of the Palazzo della Ragione was incredibly powerful: they were in groups of varying sizes, some aligned in front of architectural elements or frescoes. What was the relationship of these groups to the space? Was it related in any way to the distance we were forced to keep from each other during the pandemic? RW Originally I thought maybe the show would be titled “Two Meters Apart,” or something like that—that was such a rigid rule that almost the whole world was following during the pandemic, 90

so I had that very much in mind for part of the work. But I was also very influenced by looking at the piazza outside the museum, which Le Corbusier said was the most perfect piazza in the world and that no stone should be changed. It’s an incredibly beautiful thing, with a fountain in the middle that serves as a focal point. I would stand there and just watch people gather: there would be someone with a flag taking a tour group through, there’d be schoolchildren walking across in lines, there’d be a little family unit with a buggy . . . there was always a theatrical element going on. And you know, I’ve always been very intrigued by the way people look at sculpture, because it’s such an interactive thing— people are kind of curious and inquisitive and they may look under something, or lie on the floor to look at something. So I think I was trying to somehow develop those ideas and put them together. I was also thinking about Renaissance paintings where you have groups of figures and the perspective is slightly skewed—you maybe have five people in the background standing very rigidly next to each other and then maybe one slightly forward. As an artist of my age, when you’re someone who has been working for so long, you have this incredible lexicon of ideas drawn from your experiences of looking at art and culture around the world, and all of that stuff goes in. I always try to talk to my kids about that when I’m showing them around—to never take an experience for granted when you’re looking at something because it all adds information to the next thing you look at. We’re very lucky as humans to have memory, in that we can always work with it and play with it. LC Something magical happened every time I walked into your exhibition. The installation inevitably created many layers of conversation: the conversation between the sculpture and the volume of the room or the paintings along the wall, the conversations between the pieces themselves when the room was empty. As soon as a visitor came in, they became another actor, allowing another layer of conversation. The structure was very theatrical, but open-ended—you left visitors completely free to experience the installation in their own way. RW As humans, we’re animals of great curiosity and fearfulness and joy and sadness—you know, we have all of these emotions. I’m not religious but I go into churches a lot; they’re among the most ritualistic, almost theatrical places, and you see how people behave looking at things. A lot of it is a sort of felt reaction, a lot of it is something people do because they feel they ought to, or through great belief or whatever those things are. And this piece for me was probably the most, in a way, religious work that I’ve ever made. When I made the piece, I just sort of made it and left, because I knew that it was going to be very emotive for me. When I came back for the opening, I just sat there and watched people, and they were coming in and they were crying and they were sitting down and then they’d be chatting to someone else and then someone would be laughing. You know, it just meant so much to so many different individuals. It was very moving. LC Memorials are often depictions of specific events or individuals. Your memorials in Vienna and Bergamo refer not to specifics but rather to a presence, or indeed an absence. They’re representations of things you recognize but that don’t physically exist: the space around books in a library, the air beneath a chair. This seems an appropriate way to bring attention to the incomprehensible number of people who died in the

Holocaust or because of covid. How do you approach an issue like this? RW When I made the memorial in Vienna, I’d lived in Berlin for eighteen months, and I think if I hadn’t had that experience, I would never have tried to approach such a complex subject. When I lived in Berlin, I’d been to a number of the Holocaust sites and camps and was very affected by it. I’ve always tried to understand what makes a place, and in Germany I observed the deep shame over what had happened and the attempt to learn from it and sort of heal what had happened. I also went to look at the site of the Normandy landings, looking at bunkers. I’d been to see Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in America. I always do a lot of research. I’m sort of curious, but I also see that it’s part of my job. If I’m going to interpret something that was so devastating, I need to be armed with the information to try and transcribe that experience. LC After millions of deaths and more than two years of lockdowns during the pandemic, it seems, weirdly, that there aren’t any lessons that have been learned and that everyone is now back to a so-called normal life. What are your thoughts about what happened? Did your life change? Did your work change? RW I think my life changed to a certain degree, and I’m still struggling to try and hold on to that— you just think, well, certain things matter and other things don’t, and you just need to be more mindful of those things and be more present for the people that you love and want to be present for. This extraordinary thing happened, and everybody I know feels like time has sped up in a way—it’s like there are twelve gears, suddenly, and we’re all going along in twelfth gear. I’m really trying to find a way of slowing that down. It’s not healthy; we can’t work at that speed. It’s something that young people in their teens and twenties are really struggling with—they don’t really know how to fit into this new world, which is about working from home and not really interacting with people in the same way. There’s an enormous amount of mental-health problems among young people because of what happened. And older people. It did an incredible amount of damage, and I think we all need to learn from this. We have a great responsibility to the younger generations to slow down. We’re all responsible for it, as we are for climate change and everything that we’re doing to our planet. It really, really needs to change. In terms of my work, I think it’s too early to tell, really. I normally work in periods—I’ll do certain things and then I’ll kind of move on. And I don’t feel like I’ve left that period and moved on to the next one yet. I’m trying to think about the next half of my life—no, not half but third, maybe [laughs]. The last third of my life. I suppose one of the things the pandemic made us all think about in a way that we never had to before is our mortality. covid certainly hasn’t disappeared. I hope people have learned some lessons and we react differently in the future. But, you know, as humans, we’re very stubborn. Incredibly intelligent, but also incredibly stupid. We’ll just have to see.

1. See Mara Accettura, “Rachel Whiteread e l’installazione sulla pandemia a Bergamo: ‘Decifrare ciò che è accaduto aiuta a guarire,’” La Repubblica, July 8, 2023. 2. See Bernard Berenson, Piero Della Francesca or The Ineloquent in Art (New York: Macmillan, 1954).

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AM E

RIC

A’ S

CO LLE THE ART

& AR

CHITE

T H E D I P LO M

N O I T C

CT U R E O F

AT I C R

EC E P

TION ROOMS

Former Secretary of State John Kerry calls the top floor of the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, DC, “diplomacy’s penthouse.” He’s referring to the sweeping suite of galleries that house the Diplomatic Reception Rooms. In September, Rizzoli published a tome, America’s Collection: The Art & Architecture of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S. Department of State, devoted to these vast treasures of decorative arts from the early decades of the United States of America. All collections have a mission but these rooms mix purpose with patriotism: they are designed to tell the story of the nation. Virginia Hart, the museum’s director and curator, spearheaded the book, and invited other scholars of art to contribute to the stories that explain how portraits, furniture, silver, porcelains, and other arts from the time of our Founding Fathers are used to explore and endorse the American story. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stacy Schiff wrote about Benjamin Franklin, the fledgling country’s first diplomat, who landed in France to try to gain support for what was essentially a bunch of rebelling colonials. “Franklin spent nearly nine years in France, all of them in and just outside of Paris. For much of that time he traveled weekly to Versailles, along with the rest of the

Previous spread: Attributed to Charles-Gabriel Sauvage, Figure Group of Louis XVI and Benjamin Franklin, c. 1780–85, bisque porcelain, 12 ¼ × 9 ½ × 6 inches (31.3 × 24.1 × 15.2 cm). Photo: © 2022 Bruce M. White Above: Thomas Jefferson State Reception Room, Washington, DC. Photo: © 2022 Durston Saylor Right: Attributed to Victor de Grailly, Early View of the Capitol, n.d., oil on canvas, 23 ½ × 29 inches (59.7 × 73.7 cm). Photo: © 2022 Bruce M. White

glittering ambassadorial corps. Not only did they balk at how plainly he dressed—one reported that Franklin, in his drabness, could have passed for a farmer,” she says. “He was the most celebrated man of science in the world; he seemed to have touched down in France like a meteor. His image blossomed on mugs and wallpaper and walking sticks and candy dishes. ‘My face,’ Franklin wrote his daughter, not long after his arrival, ‘is now almost as wellknown as that of the moon.’” Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, the recently retired curator of American paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, says she’s always intrigued by works that haven’t been completely figured out. “One of the most powerful works in the collection, which was added recently by their director, in an effort to broaden the collection beyond heroes and presidents, is an anonymous portrait of a flutist. It is a Black subject holding a f lute and a piece of music,” she says. She reached out to the curators at the Met to source historical data on the piece, which they were able to date to around 1785 to 1810, based on the flute, music, costume, and hair. “I just love mystery,” she says, encouraging viewers to continue to readdress the history of this country.

I’ve always been intrigued by the social aspect of art, how looking at something makes you feel. At the US State Department, it’s feeling with a specific intent, the social blending with the political. Has that always been the vision of these galleries? VIRGINIA HART Absolutely. It’s a story of America’s history. It’s a story about our founding and our country. The Americana Project began in 1961, but to go back before that: the spaces that we’re in right now [in the Truman Building] were planned in the 1950s and opened in the 1960s, a time when we were the second-largest federal-government building after the Pentagon. The eighth floor was allotted for diplomatic entertaining but no money was left over to furnish the spaces. DB Of course! VH So you can imagine if we’d opened up these rooms for the first time to entertain, how disappointed people would have been with the state of the rooms. That’s why the Americana Project was created, which had the mission that we would furnish these spaces to tell a story of who we are as Americans. DB John F. Kennedy was president in 1961, and as we all know, his wife had an incredible impact on DEREK BLASBERG

the decor in the White House. How involved was Mrs. Kennedy with this? VH That work was happening concurrently: when she was redecorating the White House, we were redecorating these spaces. But we focus our collections on the colonial and Federal periods and the White House focuses its collections on the nineteenth century and on. There is intentionally no overlap between our collecting and between our statements of who we are. DB When did you start working at the State Department? VH Seventeen years ago! Which is a long time, but I’ve only been here as director for a little more than a year. DB Is there a part of the job, or an aspect of what you do, that you find especially intriguing? The art or the politics, or melding the two? VH I’m drawn to the idea of service, and there’s no greater job in the world when you get to serve your country. I love coming to work every day because with the collections there’s constant discovery. I also love just being able to share a good story. DB Speaking of service, there’s a chapter on Benjamin Franklin, a man of service himself.

I would say he was the country’s first diplomat; we call him the father of the American foreign service, and certainly his presence here looms large, in the rooms that we have named after him and in the likenesses of him that we’ve collected over the years. And there are so many incredible stories about him. Stacy Schiff talks about what it was for an American to set foot on foreign soil and to try to convince a monarch to support rebelling colonies, and what that conversation would have been like. How masterful he really was to do that! DB The Truman Building, where this collection is located, looks like a very governmental structure. It’s imposing in its architecture, with square windows and thick gray cement walls. It’s a surreal juxtaposition to take the elevator up to the top floors and find all these treasures. VH It is surreal, for me and most people too. You walk into these rooms and you see such a transition into what the architects were able to accomplish within a modern structure. We have here the work of Edward Vason Jones, John Blatteau, Walter Macomber, and Allan Greenberg, architects who were able to choose moments from American architectural periods and reinterpret them in these spaces so that you really do get the full array of VH

experiences in American architecture from 1740 to about 1840. It’s extraordinary. DB What’s the most surprising thing in the book from the collection? VH I’m constantly amazed at how modern and sculptural some of the pieces are. We often think of eighteenth-century pieces as antiques, yet some of the design here is very modern. We try to present elements of those pieces that allow you to observe the details and begin to see the beauty and the craftsmanship of it all. It’s a world-class collection but it’s also a collection that was entirely donated by Americans. No funds were allocated to the furnishing of these rooms, so everything that you see is a gift of the American people. DB That’s an incredible point. The US government did not allocate a budget to any of this? VH None. DB So how has everything in the collection come to you? VH We get gifts from families who have these beloved objects and wish to see them in a museum. Often someone will turn to us, and we are so delighted when we receive those phone calls. DB Do you know when they’re calling? VH No! Most of the time there are really wonderful,

Above: Benjamin Frothingham, Desk and Bookcase, 1753, mahogany, white pine, Eastern red cedar, and Spanish cedar, 98 ¼ × 44 ½ × 24 ¾ inches (249.6 × 113 × 62.9 cm). Photo: © 2022 Bruce M. White Right: American school, unidentified artist, A Flutist, c. 1785–1810, oil on canvas, 35 × 28 inches (88.9 × 71.1 cm). Photo: © 2022 Bruce M. White

surprising phone calls. We also fundraise actively and the fundraising endeavors enable us to go out and to continue to acquire. I got a call last week about an American silver porringer and they mentioned, “We think it’s the work of Elias Pelletreau.” And they gave me the provenance and information and I said, “We actually have one just like it in the collection and the likelihood is that ours are a matched pair.” To think that there’s 200 years of separation and now we’re finally able to see these two pieces come back together is exciting, and definitely not something that the family or anyone in the museum would have ever thought about. DB I’ve spoken to some of the other contributors to the book and they remarked how, since 2020, art spaces everywhere have been taking a closer look at representation, what it feels like to be an American. From your point of view, how has that experience been reexamined or represented in the museum? VH It’s been wonderful to see our audiences asking, “Where am I represented in these rooms?” For us, that means looking at our acquisitions policy and planning and commissioning new voices to begin to tell a more diverse and representative history of who we are. It means working with modern

artists. It means engaging with contemporary voices and asking them to rethink these spaces as a celebration of artistry from the eighteenth century up until our present day, and inviting a new generation to tell this story. In the end, it makes it all more powerful and more meaningful, and that’s inspiring to see. DB For me, the coolest thing about some of these objects is that they look used. Some of them are worn. There’s a set of spoons that have Paul Revere’s name stamped on the back. VH Absolutely! DB How does it feel to work with so many objects and works of art that have actually been in the hands of our Founding Fathers? Do you ever have a surreal moment? Do you ever get the chills when you think about some of this stuff? VH One of my favorite pieces in the museum is a lap desk, which is sort of a portable box that you would have carried with you to allow you to write correspondence on the go. That belonged to Thomas Jefferson. He would have owned several in his lifetime, but for us to have one of those in our collection is exciting. You feel a closer personal connection to him, seeing the actual ink drops from his pens, the dings and wear and tear. It gives it a

sense of history that’s more personal than anything you might read in a book. DB You also have more grand desks in the museum. VH I imagine you’re thinking of the desk where the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution, was signed. Of course. Often, when visiting dignitaries come to the museum, we witness really wonderful moments where people are walking through these glorious rooms and encounter this incredible piece of history, which is so important to our own nation’s founding. DB Of course, most things in DC are politically divisive. What’s the role that the kind of fine art and objects you have in this collection can play in American politics? VH We are nonpartisan. In that regard, we don’t make any partisan statements or comments. We serve every secretary of state, no matter what party. DB John Kerry, a former secretary of state, often quotes Benjamin Franklin. Specifically, he retells a story about the early days of our country’s independence and a woman asks Franklin if we’ve got a monarchy or a republic? And Franklin, responded, “A republic”— VH “If you can keep it.” What a good line.

Left: John Singleton Copley, Frances Tucker Montresor, c. 1778, oil on canvas, 30 3 ⁄8 × 25 1 ⁄8 inches (77.2 × 63.8 cm). Photo: © 2022 Bruce M. White Above: Cover of America’s Collection: The Art & Architecture of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S. Department of State (Rizzoli Electra, 2023) Photos: courtesy Rizzoli Electra

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THIS IS

PULP, AND THE MAKING OF AN IMAGE

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of This Is Hardcore, the sixth album by the band Pulp. A new book by Paul Burgess and Louise Colbourne celebrates the occasion by bringing together behind-the-scenes imagery and anecdotes from the creation of the album and its music videos. Author Young Kim reflects on the album’s impact, both musical and visual, on the late ’90s and speaks with the primary collaborators—Pulp lead singer Jarvis Cocker, art director Peter Saville, and artist John Currin—behind the iconic imagery. The blonde caught my eye. She looked like an intriguing casualty from a film noir. There was something unnatural and slightly wrong about her: a kind of fallen angel, creamy skinned, with full makeup including cherry-red lipstick that matched the cherry-red leather pouf she lay over, face down in profile. She was semisupported by her arm, revealing only deep cleavage. There was a weirdness in the angle of her neck and an awkwardness in the position of her hand. She was wearing nothing other than a thin chain around her throat and three words, in harsh bold hot-pink Helvetica type stamped cruelly over the side of her face and arm as if to warn you off, yet by doing so lure you in: “This Is Hardcore.” In the top-left corner, jumping out of the black background, was the name of the people responsible: Pulp. I loved it. I found her in Paris, at the giant Virgin record store that was on the Champs Elysées in 1998. Remember those? It was a huge space—one of the biggest record stores I’ve ever been to—and somehow completely filled with records, CDs, cassettes even, books, and videos galore. It’s hard to imagine now but it used to be a normal pastime to trawl through a record store, looking to discover or rediscover audible and even possibly visual delights. You’d pick up an album and judge it by its cover before you took it home to actually listen to. The seductive power of this blonde might have seemed simple enough, but unknown to me, behind her perfect veneer was the conscious effect of layers of artistry. Only now, twenty-five years later, upon the 100

HARDCORE

101

Previous spread, left, above: John Huntley and Jarvis Cocker, Hilton Hotel, London, 1998. Photo: Horst Diekgerdes Previous spread, left, below: Dancers — “This Is Hardcore” video shoot, directed by Doug Nichol, Pinewood Studios, London, February 1998. Photo: Paul Burgess

Previous spread, right: The album cover for This Is Hardcore, 1998. Art direction by John Currin and Peter Saville; photography by Horst Diekgerdes; design by Howard Wakefield and Paul Hetherington; cover model: Ksenia; casting by Sascha Behrendt; styling by Camille Bidault-Waddington

forthcoming occasion of a wonderful book documenting this album and its artwork—Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp, by Paul Burgess and Louise Colbourne—did I peek under the covers to discover the cast of incredible talent (some whom I know personally, I realized) in just the album artwork alone: the renowned art director Peter Saville, the great painter John Currin, the magical stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington, and the acclaimed photographer Horst Diekgerdes, all masterminded by Jarvis Cocker, the brilliant lead singer of Pulp. I bought the CD and excitedly examined the insert on my way home. It was as gorgeous as the cover had promised. More louche images of men and women lounging about in a hotel—at the bar, in a room, in an elevator, all exquisitely dressed but slightly off, what Saville calls “so wrong that it’s right.” Everything and everyone was fashionably cool but also a bit thrillingly lurid with that late ’90s decadence. When I played the music, I was enthralled. It was so sexy and lush, with an undercurrent of glamorous danger. I listened to the cover track over and over again. The album came together from all directions—the music, the imagery, the mood. This was the era of CDs yet record artwork still mattered, unlike today, where it’s nonexistent. I don’t mean it doesn’t actually exist, it just doesn’t exist in the awareness of the generations growing up in the virtual world, who see just a tiny variegated square they ignore on a screen. In Anton Corbijn’s documentary Squaring the Circle (2022), about Hipgnosis, the influential graphic-design company behind many iconic record covers, Noel Gallagher of Oasis realizes that when he mentions a record’s artwork his daughter has no idea what he’s talking about. How sad. They are missing out, as album art can be great, and for a while, during its heyday, the latter half of the twentieth century, it was “like the poor man’s art collection,” as Gallagher puts it. Or as Saville explains, “Covers were the contemporary art medium for young people.” Even so, it’s not every day that the album artwork jives so well with the music or is so aesthetically pleasing. Saville notes, “The scope of a record cover is limited by the bandwidth of the principal artist— the aesthetic awareness of a musician.” So perhaps it’s fitting that Cocker originally planned his band, Pulp, by imagining his stage outfits and went to London’s Saint Martin’s School of Art even after he’d been working in music for quite a long time. He explains poignantly, “I was desperate to escape Sheffield and I managed to get onto the Saint Martin’s film course with two pieces of work I’d made with a camera I’d found in a jumble sale. I was extremely lucky to be able to do that. That gave me a second chance at life, coming to London.” 102

Opposite: The Shoes of Jarvis — “This Is Hardcore” video shoot, Pinewood Studios, London, February 1998. Photo: Paul Burgess

Steve Mackey — “This Is Hardcore” video shoot, Pinewood Studios, London, February 1998. Photo: Paul Burgess; montage: Louise Colbourne

Indeed, one can feel Cocker’s connection to film not only in the album artwork but of course in the song’s fabulous video, which is beautifully detailed in Burgess and Colbourne’s book. Its pages contain many previously unseen photographs of the group that Burgess took on set, using an analogue camera, just as the video was shot on celluloid film. The team behind the record art started, surprisingly enough, with the figurative painter John Currin. I say surprisingly because Currin’s paintings, which are generally highly erotic and delightfully perverse, verge closer to kitsch and caricature, rather than pop and cool, which is what This Is Hardcore is. In 1996, Currin had yet to have the enormous success that he’s had since, so it was astute of Cocker to pick up on his work. But then again, it was his world: “Having been at St. Martin’s with other artists I became aware of what was going on at that time,” Cocker explains:

Because Pulp was around the same time as when the YBA thing happened, we would socialize together, so I got to know them. And still, a lot of the people I know socially are from the art world, maybe more than other musicians. . . . I developed a kind of border[line] obsession with [Currin] I suppose. I’d seen some of his work and I bought an orange catalogue from an exhibition that he did in France. It’s got the picture [The Neverending Story] that was used for the single of ‘Help The Aged’ on the cover. I was reading the introduction and it mentioned his date of birth. His date of birth is the same as mine, the 19th of September, but he’s one year older than me. For some reason that struck me as a big deal. Also he’s got the same initials as me. I liked his work. It had a connection to me. Not long after, Cocker was struck by Currin’s Martini Man series. These were collages using ads that

had appeared in Playboy magazine to attract advertisers—photographs of powerful men being admired by women with the slogan “What kind of man reads Playboy?,” with catchlines such as “40% of them buy stereo equipment.” Currin mischievously changed the admirers’ faces with gouache: “I made it so everyone hates him,” the artist recalls. “There’s one where even the dog is frowning at him.” This resonated with Cocker: “I was feeling like that [man in the ad]. I’d achieved success, but I felt a bit of an idiot. I don’t know. It didn’t work out the way I thought it was going to. I was going through a dark time.” At first, Cocker only wanted to use The Neverending Story for the cover of “Help The Aged,” and to use further paintings in the video for that song, but then he had the inspired idea of enlisting Currin to work on the artwork for This Is Hardcore, the album that “Help The Aged” would appear on. Less surprising is his engaging Saville, a legend in the world of record sleeves, especially those for Joy Division and New Order during his years at Factory Records. But it wasn’t Saville’s design skills that initially drew Cocker to him for This Is Hardcore, but Saville’s Apartment. Cocker had noticed the Apartment in Elle Decoration (“I’ve always been obsessed with pictures of interiors”) and phoned Saville up. The Apartment was a live/work/salon space designed in 1995 by Saville and his friend the interior architect Ben Kelly, with whom he had worked with during the Factor y Record years. (Kelly designed the famous Hacienda nightclub, part of Factory Records.) With the support of Peter’s colleague Mike Meiré, the two refurbished the former “shag pad” of an overseas millionaire in Mayfair, around the corner from the Playboy club. It came with a magnificent floor-to-ceiling Verner Panton chandelier, smoky mirrors, tinted glass, and midnight-blue-suede walls. The two touched up the flat’s 1970s look and turned it into a den of sensual chic. It was, in fact, a style that was returning to vogue, with the likes of Tom Ford at Gucci, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Boogie Nights (1997), and Pulp’s work-inprogress This Is Hardcore. “[Cocker] told me he was working on a cover for an album called This Is Hardcore (a title which I liked very much) and that he was working with John Currin,” says Saville. “Problem was that they had a meeting of minds of ideas—Jarvis knew what he was writing about and John had an interpretation of that—but neither knew how to go about a photo shoot to bring their vision to life. My job was to bring the idea into reality.” So Saville joined the group. Although Currin and Saville might seem very different, Cocker had picked up on something. Currin and Saville discovered that their sensibilities converged. Both had an “unhealthy awareness of 103

This page: Steve Mackey and man in white turtleneck, Hilton Hotel, London, 1997. Photo: Horst Diekgerdes Candida Doyle, Hilton Hotel, London, 1998. Photo: Horst Diekgerdes Opposite: Two book covers for Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp by Paul Burgess and Louise Colbourne (Volume Publishing and Thames & Hudson, 2023)

mainstream porn,” as Saville put it, and they were able to get on the same wavelength quickly. The Apartment was the inspiration. Any plans for a painting were abandoned for creative reasons. Saville explains, “There was an obligation for some members of the group to be on the sleeve. . . . Had John done a painting, there would have been a slightly uncomfortable dichotomy, like, ‘Here is the painting, here is the band,’ which is not the kind of polarity I would have wanted. I wanted it to be one coherent work.” So Saville organized a photo shoot around the corner at the Hilton Hotel, which was a sort of time capsule that had not changed since the ’70s and ’80s, not unlike the Apartment, and put together the team of Bidault-Waddington and Diekgerdes. Cocker explained, “It was kind of luxurious but not very nice. That was the brief. I wanted it to look like it was expensive, but it wasn’t pleasant. And at some point, in the middle of while we were actually taking the photographs, I thought, Why? Why are we doing this? It cost a lot of money to do the whole sleeve. Why are you spending money on something unpleasant? We could have spent the money doing something that made somebody happy.” When I met Currin to interview him about This Is Hardcore, he looked happy remembering the experience. “It was a superexciting time to be in England. . . . The funny thing about England is that you meet everyone right away. You walk into a bar and all the people you’ve heard about in the art world are there. . . . Damien Hirst said something like, ‘You better not fuck this up. This is the best opportunity since Peter Blake got Sergeant Pepper!’ I’m like, Shit!” “It was a totally fascinating thing to be involved in, but I did the least amount of work,” Currin insisted. When I told him that I’d read that he’d done the casting, he said that he and Saville had done it together and laughed, “I established a certain kind of sleazy mood. I cast some of the less-glamorous people. Peter was able to come up with the superglamorous sleazy people. . . . This guy [the man sitting next to Cocker at the bar in one photograph], I thought he was the perfect alter ego—opposite of Jarvis . . . a kind of Tom Jones . . . a different English type. He was supposed to have the ‘perfect’ back or something. I didn’t cast the girl [on the cover]. What I did was cast all the older people. . . . Sadly the girl showed up after my session. . . . my idea was much less attractive. If it was up to me, I would have destroyed the album. I liked the shot of the man in the elevator [wearing a white turtleneck] with [Pulp bassist] Steve [Mackey]. . . . There was a strange formality to that, and Steve was so handsome as well. . . . [The record company] said it would be 20 percent off sales right there!” Interestingly, Saville had wanted the same photo of the two men for the cover: “It was 104

great—Steve and the older guy. It was brilliant combined with the words ‘This Is Hardcore.’ But Steve said no, for obvious hetero reasons.” Another shoot was scheduled without Currin or Cocker at Saville’s Apartment to do the pickup shots. “We ended up with this very misogynistic shot of Steve with Ksenia [the blonde cover model] on the pouf. . . . When I look back, it’s so questionable,” says Saville. “But Ksenia looked wonderful on the red pouf, so we also shot her [alone] on the pouf and that ended up being the cover.” A filter called “Smart Blur” was used to flatten the photographs, giving them a pseudo-painterly feel. Saville chose the typography carefully to mimic government warnings like “adult material.” As Currin puts it, “It’s weirdly offensive without figuring out why. Just the way the words sit on there is both very elegant and strangely provocative. And the ugly Helvetica.” Though it wasn’t consciously intentional, the image foreshadowed Currin’s artistic path: “Funny thing is this is way before I did paintings [in this way] . . . like the odd hand—it’s the kind of thing I would do. This is before any kind of Photoshop. . . . Peter’s styling and Camille anticipated where my work was going.” Cocker didn’t see the image until it was finished. I wasn’t there because I had to go to Japan [to do] publicity. The first I saw the cover for the sleeve was it being sent through on a fax. . . . I was kind of surprised. But then I knew it was right because it had what we had been trying to go for in the

pictures—like I say, in the hotels was the feeling of something supposed to be glamorous but [with] something wrong with it. It doesn’t make you feel good. . . . Like the guy I sat next to in the gatefold . . . he kept telling me two things: he had the most flawless back in London and when one of [the notorious London gangsters] the Kray Twins died, he had led the funeral procession. He kept showing me a picture of that so I [felt] kind of awkward when I was having my picture taken as I didn’t have anything in common with him at all. Which fitted in with the whole thing, really. Similarly, the picture of the woman on the pouf is kind of sexy, but also she looks like she could be dead or not even a real person. It needed to be an image that superficially seemed to be attractive, but also there was something a bit repulsive about it. So as soon as I saw that, I knew that that was a good cover. Obviously when it was used it got quite—some people said it was degrading to women and stuff like that. But I’ve always felt the sleeve wasn’t that because the whole point of it [was] it was supposed to be something that you felt was wrong— there was something wrong with it. I had my own reasons wanting it to be like that, but I knew that it had the similar effect on other people when they saw it. It wasn’t just a cheesecakey sexy image. It’s got something dark about it. You can’t quite say why, but it makes you feel very strange. In fact, Transport for London refused to allow their buses to be wrapped with the intact cover image.

Pulp could choose either the image of the girl and the name of the band or the album title and the name of the band, but not the girl, the album title, and the name of the band. The image and album are obviously a nod to porn, visually and aurally, from the album’s title to the seductive crooning of the cover track, whose lyrics refer explicitly to porn: “You are hardcore, you make me hard.” But at the same time, they don’t necessarily celebrate it. As Saville points out, the context has to be taken into consideration. This Is Hardcore has irony. Much as Currin’s Martini Men subverts Playboy, making fun of preening male chauvinists, This is Hardcore portrays in sound and image the dead emptiness and, one could even say, the kind of patheticness of pornography: “Then that goes in there/And then it’s over.” To me—and I have never watched more than a few snippets of porn in passing—the cover looks like a still from a film noir, a character from a Raymond Chandler story: beautiful, sexy, mysterious, and going perfectly with the dark, sexy music. I don’t see why we have to assume the worst: the model could just as well be focusing intently on a pleasurable sexual moment, or playing make-believe, as Cocker sings, “I want to make a movie, so let’s star in it together.” Despite the darkness of that period in his life, Cocker was positive when reflecting on the experience of making the artwork: I didn’t have a clear idea, but it was good to work with both John and Peter. They both have amazing ideas about images because that is what they work in. That was actually quite educational for me—for them to take my vague idea and turn it into something that was real. I’m glad to say that I still am friends with them now all these years later, and I’d say both of them probably taught me more about art than I learned in art school. Because John was not that well known [at the time], but was becoming better known and would talk about pictures that he liked, and Peter obviously was very well known and [had] done things like the Joy Division covers and all the Factory thing. I’d never really met somebody with such an attention to detail before. At first, we used to go for meetings and I’d think, Why are we talking so much? We just should get it done. But then I started to enjoy the conversations—a lot. That was one of the pleasurable parts of that time, getting to know those two people. When I ask Cocker how he feels about it today, he says, “It still looks good now so that’s the most you can hope for, really!” Hear hear! 105

PERCIVAL A R O N O E L A VERA TATUM NOVEL E A R McC EVERETT

The morning was extremely cold but Vera was in her house. That was all that mattered. She walked the dogs up the mountain. Mutt was favoring a foreleg. She would have to take him to the vet in town. Still, he bounded in and out of the brush happily. To her surprise, flakes of snow started to appear. The last thing she wanted to see was more snow. When she returned to her house, she learned from the weather report that a heavy snow was coming that night. She decided to take her dog down to Taos before they were trapped up there for a few days. As she was preparing to leave, her phone rang. It was Sheriff Montoya. “Vera.” “Sheriff.” “I’m driving up your way today. I have someone I’d like you to meet. Would you mind?” “As a matter of fact, I’m heading down to Taos myself. I have to take my dog to the vet. I’ll meet you there. May I ask who you want me to meet?” “His name is Askook Daisy.” “That’s some name.” “We can explain everything when we see you,” Montoya said. “Okay, Robbie.” His first name felt odd in her mouth. “Thanks, Vera.” They made a plan to meet for lunch at Ernesto’s. Vera fed the horses and came back to the side of the house to see that the garbage can had been destroyed. There had been nothing in it except the stink of waste, but it let her know that the bear was hungry. She was surprised she hadn’t heard the animal. She had always been a light sleeper, even lighter since her husband’s death, but lately when she slept, it was deep, dark. The dogs must have barked but she hadn’t heard them. Again, the Bronco balked. She pushed the gas pedal to the floor and tried again and the car started. Her drive down to town was uneventful, though the snow was beginning to fall a bit harder. She would definitely be finding her way home before late.

smooth face of so many Native men. They stood as Vera approached them. Montoya shook her hand with both of his hands. “Vera. Thanks for coming down. This is Askook Daisy.” “At your service, madam,” the man said. His voice was deep, a kind of rumble, but clear. “Mr. Daisy.” His name didn’t sound like a real name. It made her want to laugh. The man seemed so familiar. “Mr. Daisy, have we met before?” “I would remember that,” Daisy said. They sat. Vera looked around at the sparse crowd. “Vera, Askook is from Shiprock. He’s a scholar of sorts.” “Of sorts,” Daisy repeated. “What kind of scholar?” Vera asked. “I’m a member of the Diné. You might say I’m a detective.” Vera nodded. “I’m not a medicine man, but I study our ways very intensely.” “Okay.” Montoya leaned in. “Vera, we found more parts of people. Not just torn apart, but partially devoured, we think.” A chill ran through Vera. “There might be an Andy or an Opie, but there is no Andy and an Opie. Like I told you before, as far as we can tell, there is no one named Andy or Andrew or Anders Kedi. Anywhere.” Vera listened. “You didn’t see a man on that bus, did you?” Montoya asked. “I mean, you didn’t get a clear look at him, but you don’t think it was a man?” Vera shook her head. “Sort of a man.” “A man can’t tear through a bus,” Montoya said. “Did he have a tool, an axe or something?” “I didn’t see one.” “There were no tool marks on the bus roof,” the sheriff said. He shifted a bit in his seat. “An examination of the bus showed no signs of foreign metallurgic evidence. Only skin, fur, and blood.” Vera looked at him. “Analysis of the blood and fur suggest feline.” “Yee Naaldlooshii,” Daisy said. “Skin-walkers.” “Just listen,” Montoya said. “In my world we have what we call skin-walkers. They are evil people who have succumbed to dark forces. They can shape-shift. That means they can assume other shapes, forms.” “What does that mean, other forms?” Vera asked. The waitress came, hovered there, waited. She coughed to interrupt them. They ordered quickly and she left. Daisy watched the server leave. He looked at Vera’s eyes. “They can become other things. Wolves. Lions. Some believe they do this by wearing pelts of those animals. Some believe they can just do it.” Vera looked at Montoya. “You don’t believe this, do you?” “I wouldn’t have before. I also don’t believe what I’ve seen this past week.” “So you think what I saw was a Navajo guy who can turn into a cougar.” “Do you know what it was?” Montoya asked. “And you think Andy is a walker thing.” “A skin-walker,” Daisy said. “But he’s white,” Vera said.

The vet’s office was crowded but they took Mutt in quickly. It was decided that she would leave him while they took blood and X-rays. She left her car there and walked the four blocks to the plaza. She was early for lunch so she stepped into the Sunset Gallery. She paused at the little table at the door. There was a box of face tissues and a large pump bottle of hand sanitizer. “Crazy, right?” a young woman said. Vera disinfected her hands. “It’s getting bad in some places. They’re talking about closing everything in New York and Seattle.” “Scary,” Vera said. “The masks don’t help, but they don’t really know. Surfaces, they say.” Vera nodded and made her way through the gallery. She had never really liked the local art—bright landscapes all in the same broad-stroke style, coyotes and wild-maned horses. There was a painting by a guy named R. C. Gorman. When she was younger she had liked his work, but now that she was shaped more like the Navajo women he depicted, she liked it a bit less. “Come back,” the young woman said as Vera left. Vera nodded to her as she applied more sanitizer to her hands. At Ernesto’s she found Sheriff Montoya already seated with an older man, a big man. Montoya was dressed in neat street clothes, not his sheriff’s uniform, and the other man wore a suit with no tie. He had the

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“A skin-walker can turn into a lion or a bear, a raven,” Daisy said. “You don’t think he can just turn into a white guy? And you should know, there are shape-shifters who aren’t evil.” “This is crazy,” she said. “You’re saying some Navajo guy did this.” “I didn’t say he was Diné.” “Crazy,” Vera said. “Absolutely,” Montoya said. “Why are you telling me all this?” Daisy cleared his throat. “Apparently you made a connection with the demon. He was alone with you and he didn’t kill you. There’s got to be a reason.” “I don’t like this,” Vera said. “And you shouldn’t,” Daisy said. “Skin-walkers don’t leave loose ends. They kill everything in their path and their paths are extensive. They thrive on fear. They feed on fear. They need fear to live. The intensity of it. Can I hazard a guess? You’re a person who doesn’t scare easily.” “Robbie,” she complained. “That’s enough, Askook.” “Why are you doing this?” she asked. “You don’t believe any of this.” “I don’t know, Vera, but I thought you ought to know.” “Well, I don’t believe a word of it.” “I understand,” Montoya said. “I don’t think I do either, but there’s so much I can’t make right in my mind.” Vera drank some water. She looked at the snow falling on the plaza. “How would it even know where I live?” Vera asked.

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Daisy shrugged. “Maybe he doesn’t. But they can run a hundred miles in a night. They have exaggerated senses.” Vera looked at them. “What am I supposed to do?” “I’m sorry to scare you, Vera.” “I’m sorry you’ve scared me too,” she said. “This is real,” Daisy said. “What should I do, Mr. Daisy?” she asked. “If I can find out his name, all you need to do is say it aloud to him.” “Okay, this is a big joke. Very funny.” Montoya raised a palm to stop Daisy. “There is probably nothing to any of this, Vera. Did Andy or Opie say anything else to you that you remember as odd? The name of a place, maybe?” “No.” The food came, but Vera couldn’t eat. She couldn’t really look at it. She looked at Daisy’s face again. He was so familiar. “Gentlemen, I’m going to pick up my dog and go home.” “I’m sorry, Vera,” Montoya said. “I’m trying to find his name,” Daisy said. “Bye.” Vera left the restaurant and felt unsteady. She closed her eyes for a second and felt the cold wet snow on her face. She was terrified, but also certain that everything she had been told was bullshit. Daisy was a nut. And now she thought Montoya was, too. But she hadn’t thought that about him before. In fact, she trusted him. She walked back through the snow to the vet’s office.

The X-rays of Mutt’s leg showed nothing. The vet suspected a pulled muscle, but said that it was probably age. Wasn’t everything age?, Vera thought. Mutt was exhausted from the examination and lay quietly in the back seat. Vera drove cautiously, fearing ice, skidding, and death. She replayed that strange conversation over and over, by far the most bizarre exchange she had ever had or heard. She couldn’t believe that Robbie Montoya actually believed any of that nonsense. But what was he to do, not tell her any of it? She was caught appreciating the transparency and hating having been made to feel afraid by utter superstition. The snow was falling hard and blowing everywhere. As she drove up the mountain, the trees seemed to crowd her. The snow was near blizzard now. Miguel would have to take out the Cat and plow the road. She thought she saw shadows in the forest through the snow. She was spooked and she didn’t how to shake the feeling. She parked inside the big barn. The walk to the house from there was about fifty yards. She thought of the bear and wondered why he wasn’t napping somewhere in a nice warm cave, but sometimes bears didn’t hibernate, they just slowed down. The vet had told her this and she believed him. Anyway, there was a bear and she didn’t want to see him. She kept an air horn just inside the door and the shotgun was loaded. It was always loaded but it was never cleaned, so it was anyone’s guess whether it would fire. Vera wasn’t certain that Miguel had been up there. With the snow, he

might well have been checking on his mother. She went out into what was now a blizzard to bring the horses into the barn. Mutt was sacked out but she brought the smaller dog, Mongrel, with her—an undersized German shepherd mix, but far fiercer and more protective than the larger Mutt. Of course the horses had parked themselves way out in the middle of the pasture. Vera banged on the grain bucket but they did not come running up as usual. It was at times like this that she wished she had trained her dogs to go fetch the horses. She hadn’t because at one time she’d had a donkey out there who was as likely to turn and attack a dog as she was to be herded. Vera grabbed a halter from a hook by the paddock; where one went the others would go. She told Mongrel to stay and she walked out into the pasture. The ground was wet and muddy, sloppy, and she could see ice forming in spots. She imagined that the bubbler wasn’t working on the trough and since she didn’t want to freeze to death fixing it, it was best to move them inside. They looked up at her approach, but did not move. It was unlike them. As she grew close she could see that the gelding’s left haunch was bloody. She spoke out to the animals and they finally turned their heads. The three of them snorted and stamped. Closer, Vera could see the gash high on the gelding’s rump. She looked around. Perhaps they had startled the bear at the water trough. A bear would never just up and attack a horse, she thought. The horse was suspicious as she reached for the

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wound, but didn’t run. She haltered him and walked him back to the barn. The other two dropped their heads and followed. The snow was stinging her eyes and falling harder than she had ever seen it. There was no sound but the breathing of the injured horse she led. Back at the gate, Mongrel was gone. She called her but the dog must have run back to the house. It was cold out there and Mutt was inside. Vera put the horses in their stalls and gave them some grain and molasses. While the gelding ate she examined his haunch. It was a fairly deep wound, but it didn’t look like it needed sutures or staples. That was good. She resisted the urge to put antibiotic ointment there, remembering what her cowboy horse vet always told her: It’s a horse. Treat him like a horse. He told her not to do to an open wound what she wouldn’t do to her own eye. To Vera, that meant looking for something foreign, washing it out and leaving it alone. So she did. She called out for Mongrel again and started back to the house. She screamed as a figure appeared at the barn door. “Vera, it’s just me, Miguel.” “God, you scared me nearly to death.” “I’m sorry. I thought I should come up and check on you before the road is snow blocked.” “Thank you.” “I’ll leave my truck and take the Cat down. That way I can plow my way back up.” Miguel noticed the blood on Vera’s sweater. “Are you hurt?” “It’s Rusty’s blood. I think the bear clawed him.” Miguel looked across the aisle at the horse. “I’ll check him out. I’ll also put the blankets on them.” “That would be good.” Vera was surprised she hadn’t thought to do that. Exhaustion, she figured. “Don’t spend too much time here.” “I won’t,” Miguel said. “Did you see Mongrel out there?” “No.” “Thank you again.” Vera walked away into the snow and toward the house. She called Mongrel as she walked. There was no sign of the dog.

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She stood at the door and worried. She called out again. “What’s wrong?” Miguel called out to her from the Cat. “I can’t find Mongrel!” “You go inside! I’ll look for her!” She was freezing so she did go inside. Mutt was still asleep on his bed. The phone rang. She picked up. “Vera, it’s Robbie.” “Hi.” “Sorry about today,” he said. She could hear him thinking. “It’s just that I’m really confused about things.” “It’s okay,” she said. But she was a little distracted. She was looking out the big window at the yard, trying to spot Mongrel. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Sorry, looking for my dog. Listen, I understand that this is a tough case and all, but to bring that crazy guy. I don’t need that in my life.” “He’s not crazy,” Montoya said. “Whatever, he sounded crazy.” “Be careful up there, okay?” “Okay.” She hung up. She walked into the kitchen to put on water for tea. She heard the big engine of the Cat start up. She remembered arguing with her husband about how expensive that thing was, but it had turned out to be absolutely necessary on the mountain. She had learned to drive it, but now the steering handles felt pretty tricky to her and with the plow down she had to admit that she couldn’t control it. She poured her tea and sat at the kitchen table. It was still early but it was dark. She would have to make something for dinner but really didn’t want to. Since living alone for so long, she had found that eating was often an inconvenience, something that just had to be done. She found her diet repetitive and boring. She was coming to hate broccoli and asparagus. Tonight she’d just have yogurt and tea and call it good, hope that her stomach didn’t start growling in the middle of the night. She went to the door again and called for Mongrel.

Vera tried to rationalize Mongrel’s disappearance. Maybe she had chased a rabbit or a shadow into the woods; she was a chaser. She had spent the night in the barn on many occasions so she knew how to get dry and warm. Vera hoped that Miguel would find her or that she would find Miguel. She put a big log in the fireplace and decided she needed cozier clothes. She walked upstairs and into her room. She opened the top drawer of her dresser and there were the socks she’d bought in Santa Fe. The socks she couldn’t find at Kachina. She’d unpacked and had no recollection of taking the socks from her bag and putting them in the drawer. Perhaps they could have been folded into something, but here they were, on top. She stepped back and fell to sitting on her bed. Was she going crazy, becoming senile? Was that a senile thing to think? She did not change into cozier clothes. She put on silk underwear,

jeans, a heavy wool sweater, and her cold-weather boots. She was going out to look for Mongrel. The snow was blowing through the yard lights and the vapor lamp over the barn. She put on her husband’s old ski goggles, gloves, grabbed a flashlight, and took the shotgun from beside the door. She knew it was freezing out but she could hardly feel it. Perhaps it was fear, perhaps anger, that allowed her to ignore the temperature. She called out for her dog. The Cat was still idling beside the barn, the headlights shining behind the blowing snow. She called out for Miguel. The snow had hushed everything and she felt like her calls traveled a few yards and fell to the ground. She decided to start at the pasture gate. That was where she had first missed the dog. With the fast-accumulating snow there were no prints to find. Her own tracks were filled in nearly as quickly as she made them. She looked at the lights in her house windows and then over at

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the barn. She walked, leaned into the wind. The rumbling of the Cat’s engine made her nervous. She was looking now not so much for Mongrel as for Miguel. She called the man’s name every few steps. She stopped at Miguel’s little truck and aimed her light inside. She entered the barn and switched on the interior lights. The horses stirred. The gelding whinnied and stomped. She called for Miguel and the dog. Nothing. Her car was sitting in the middle of the aisle. She looked beneath it. She searched through all the stalls, occupied and not. The horses were all on the muscle. She made her way to the far end and called out again. There was a sound outside. A tapping. A pipe on metal perhaps. It was rhythmic, but stopped after about half a minute. It could have been coming from anywhere. She went to the Cat and found the cab empty. She moved the light around and found nothing. There was an old empty beer can from when she’d hired a county worker to use her machine to grade her drive. She’d left it in there because she was amused by the beer’s brand name, Falstaff. There was nothing else to do but return to the house. She was feeling the cold more now and her knees began to complain. The lights in the house went dark. So did the yard lights. So did the lights of the barn behind her. The house and the barn were on separate boards, so it was strange that both would go out. She struggled to breathe. If the power was out, so was her phone. She walked slowly through the

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snow. She switched off her flashlight: if there was a something out here why give away her location? She held the shotgun barrel up and ready. She heard running, an animal running. She backed up a few steps. A light hit her eyes and she put her arm up to block it. “Vera.” It was Miguel. “Damnit, Miguel, I almost shot you.” “I’m glad you didn’t,” he said. Vera smiled for what seemed like the first time in weeks. She saw that the man had Mongrel attached to a lead rope. “I found her. She was chasing something in the woods, I guess, and the rope got caught up in some brush.” “You didn’t put the lead on her?” Vera asked. “No. Didn’t you?” “I must have,” she said. “I’ve been forgetting all sorts of stuff. Maybe I’m having a stroke.” She was half serious. “Want me to take you down to the infirmary?” “Let’s get in out of the cold.” She took the lead and handed Miguel the weapon. “Do you know why the lights went out?” “No idea,” he said. And then the lights came back on. House and barn. “That’s weird,” Miguel said. “Come in and have some coffee before you head down,” Vera said. Really, she didn’t want to be alone.

Sitting at the kitchen table, Vera could see that Miguel wanted to go down the mountain to check on his mother and that he was also concerned about her. She wished she hadn’t made the joke about a stroke. “Vera, it would be no trouble for me to drive you down to the hospital,” he said. “We could use your car and then I’d bring you back up.” “What about your mother?” she asked. Mongrel stayed close to Vera and she stroked the dog’s ears. “I’ll check my mother out while they check you out,” he said. She looked out the window. No, she was fixed on the possibility that she’d suffered some kind of event. She’d had no symptoms of stroke, no headache, no weakness, no loss of balance, but someone had put a leash on her dog and she didn’t remember doing it. However, in a blizzard it would have made sense to do it. Perhaps she had. “Vera?” “I’m sorry, I was thinking. I’m all right, Miguel. You’re kind to worry. Do you want to call your mother and tell her you’re on your way?” “She can’t hear the phone,” he said. “I was going to get one of those phones that flash a light, but then she wouldn’t be able to hear me talking anyway.” Vera nodded. Miguel stood at the window and looked out at the weather. “It might be slowing down a little.” Vera didn’t want him to leave but she knew he had to. “Let me make you a thermos of coffee. It takes a while to drive that Cat down.” “Right now it’s faster than my little truck.”

“I guess that’s right.” “I’ll bring some wood in for you before I leave,” Miguel said. “If the power is going to act funny, then you need to keep this place warm.” “You’re right.” Miguel shook his head. “Crazy dog. She was probably chasing that bear. You know, they say dogs are like their masters.” “That’s what they say.” Vera watched the rear lights of the Cat disappear down the drive. She grabbed the broom that always leaned by the front door and swept the walk. She’d found that if she did that periodically through a snowstorm, the walkway was less likely to become a treacherous sheet of ice. She returned to the kitchen, washed the mugs, and put them on the rack. She stoked the fire. Stood there for a while and watched the flames embrace the new log. Mongrel was now curled up next to Mutt. Vera sat on the sofa in front of the fire. Being near the dogs made her feel more relaxed. She recalled her father saying so very long ago that no one can sneak up on a person with a dog. She fell asleep. She awoke, happy like her dogs. To see that it was daylight and not snowing filled her with relief and some degree of confidence. She looked out at the beautiful scene and then saw the Cat parked beside the barn. Miguel had come back early. He was a good person, she thought. Rare. His truck was still parked in the yard. The windshield and bed were covered in snow. So he was still around. There were no tracks between the barn and

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the pasture, so she was certain he hadn’t moved the horses. She went upstairs, brushed her teeth. She didn’t bother changing her clothes. She walked down to the mudroom and slid into her Wellingtons. She had not been able to get up and sweep through the night so the walkway was indeed icy. She was afraid of falling, but didn’t. The dogs bounded out with her, jumping through the powder and chasing each other like pups. Vera could hear that the horses were nervous as she approached the barn. She would feed them where they were and let them relax before moving them to the pasture. Perhaps Miguel had already given them some grain and molasses. “Miguel!” she called out. There was no sign of the man. She looked up and down the aisle. The horses were looking at her.

by percival everett

They had not been fed. She went to the big can where she kept the grain and found it empty. The can had been half full. She was confused. She didn’t believe a bear would eat grain. Maybe it would, but even if one did, she highly doubted it would replace the lid of the can when done. She looked back and saw that the dogs had stopped just outside. They stood there, refusing to enter the barn. “Miguel!” She walked out of the barn and to the Cat. She could see through the glass that the cab was empty. There were no tracks but hers anywhere she could see. She went back into the barn to check out the gelding’s wound. The bleeding had stopped and she even thought she could see the beginning of some granulation. That made her feel good. “Miguel!” Where was he?

Vera trotted back to the house. The dogs thought she was playing and got in her way every few strides. She got inside and didn’t bother to kick off her boots. She picked up the phone and called Robbie Montoya. “It’s me, Vera.” “Hey.” “There’s something strange going on,” she said. “I think there’s something strange going on.” “I’m in Santa Fe, Vera. Do you need help?” The question of whether she needed help caused her to slow down. “I don’t know if I need help.” “I can call the Taos sheriff and have him send someone up to your place.” She imagined someone driving up and finding nothing. “No,” she said. “I’m just tired and a bit spooked. I can’t find my ranch hand but I know he’s around. His truck is here but I can’t find him.” “Are you okay?” “Much better now that the snow has stopped.” “It’s still falling down here, believe it or not. Separate storms, I guess. It might not be a bad idea for me to have someone sent up there.” “No, really. He’s around here someplace.” She got off the phone and called the vet. She left a message describing the gelding’s wound and hung up. The truth was she was terrified. She didn’t want at all to go back out there to look for Miguel. He would have do whatever it was he doing and come find her. She went into the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove. She hadn’t eaten so she decided to have a yogurt. She opened the refrigerator and the light didn’t come on. She looked at the wall clock and saw that the sweep hand wasn’t moving. She walked to the stove and found that the electric burner was cold. The power was off again. She went to the fuse box on the back porch. The main switch had flipped. She pushed it down and back up. The overhead light came on. This was all she needed, she thought, for the power to go off willynilly like that. She looked out the kitchen window at Miguel’s truck and

decided that it might be a good idea to have a deputy drive up. But the phone was not on the table beside the sofa. It was not on the floor. The cord was there but not the phone. The dogs were outside. How had they gotten out there? Her heart stopped. It had to be Miguel. Perhaps he had taken the phone to the barn to call his mother. There was a phone jack out there. But why hadn’t he said anything to her? Vera walked quickly to the front door and grabbed the shotgun. The dogs were barking as she stepped outside. The wounded gelding galloped past her, through the yard, past the pasture gate, and into the woods. She called the dogs. They ran to her and she put them inside the house. She leveled the shotgun and approached the barn slowly. She heard the other two horses complaining, but about what? “Miguel? Are you in there?” She marched on inside. The gelding’s stall door was swung open. She walked to it and fell silent. Inside the stall, on the straw bedding, amid the piles of horse dung was a human hand. “Oh, my god,” she said out loud. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” She broke open the shotgun and made sure the barrels were loaded. If there was a skin-walker like Askook Daisy had said, and if it did feed on fear, then it was having a feast right now, Vera thought. She looked for any other sign, anything out of the ordinary—an open container, a blood trail, a human head. She looked for and found the phone jack on the wall just inside the tack room door, but there was no phone there. “Shit. Fuck. Shit.” She thought about how much power there was in swear words. Wondered how they worked that way. She heard a squeaky sound and recognized it immediately. It was the bad hinge on the Cat’s cab door. She left the barn, scanned the area, and walked to the Cat. There was blood on the step. She pulled the door open with the barrel of the gun and found the cab empty. She grabbed the handle and climbed up onto the track and sat in the seat. She was disappointed to find out that the door of the machine did not lock. The key was in it, was always

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in it. She turned it and watched the gauges sweep, then turned the key again and the big diesel turned over. The dogs would have to be okay in the house until she got back with help. She was worried about Miguel, of course, but what could she do? She needed help. She turned the throttle switch from tortoise to rabbit and used the left-hand control to move forward. She used the thumb wheel on the left control to set the speed, but the machine didn’t move forward. It tried. She used the right-hand control and recalled how to raise the plow blade, but still the Cat just shook. Her heart was racing. The motor was so loud. She looked all around. Then she remembered the ripper on back that they had never used. It had come with the machine and they just never took it off because they didn’t know where to put it. It had never been down before, but she was certain that was what was keeping her from moving. She studied the control. She was breathing hard. If she hadn’t a stroke before, she was about to have one now. Then she saw the little left switch on the right-side console. She lifted the ripper and rolled away. She drove past Miguel’s truck and as she did she saw more blood in the bed, on the snow. She saw nothing else. She wished she could make the Cat go faster but it was at full throttle, was meant to run at full throttle all the time, but that didn’t mean fast. She steered down the drive toward her road. One had to anticipate turns because the machine was not that responsive. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” The scene was so surreal. The snow in the forest was beautiful but she was flat out terrified. She had seen an injured horse gallop through her yard. She had seen a severed hand in her barn. It had to be Miguel’s hand. All she could hear in her head was Askook Daisy’s voice telling her that a skin-walker fed on fear. She tried to slow her heart. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw something move through the trees. She turned to see nothing. Maybe it was the bear. It couldn’t be a black bear. It just couldn’t be. Moving so fast. She looked back at the road. Brake. He foot reached for the brake that she’d never had to use. She lurched forward almost out of the seat. In the road, stuck in the snow, was a Taos County Sheriff’s Office Chevy Blazer. This was

by percival everett

great, Robbie had ignored her and sent help up anyway. But the rig appeared to be empty. She was just a mile from her house. Vera sat in the Cat for several minutes, not knowing what to do. She called out from inside the cab and wondered if she could be heard closed up in there with the engine running. “Hey! Is anybody there!?” Miguel had joked about putting a car horn on the tractor, but he never did. She looked around and peered deep into the trees for any kind of movement. She was regretting leaving her dogs alone. She held her head in her hands and screamed, an angry scream. She had to get out and check the Blazer. She surprised herself with the agility she showed hopping down from the Cat. The drift was knee deep and walking was difficult. The front seat of the rig was empty. The whole thing was empty. There was a line of boot tracks leading down and away toward the trees. Near the trees the tracks were many and all over the place, so messed up that she couldn’t see clearly the design of the boots she had followed. It looked like someone had been dancing. Or fighting. She looked at the vehicle. She would drive it down the mountain since it was in the way, but when she looked there was no key. She reached inside for the radio but there was no handset. She was going to have to push the truck out of the way with the plow. She wasn’t sure she could do it. She got back into the Cat. The plow blade crunched into the front quarter-panel of the Blazer. She hated the sound, louder than she had imagined. The vehicle moved a few feet and stopped. It had somehow slipped into the roadside ditch and become wedged against a juniper. She backed up and tried with a running start, but the car wasn’t budging and she didn’t know how to get it out of the way. Vera grabbed the shotgun and climbed down. She trotted back up the road. It had been years since she had run. She never should have given it up. The shotgun threw everything off. It was heavy and awkward. The metal of it was freezing and wouldn’t get warm in her gloved hands. And the thing scared her. The sense of something moving in the trees parallel to her grew more profound. She ran harder, if not faster.

Vera ran through the yard into her house. She bolted the door and leaned back against it. She was relieved to find her dogs alive and greeting her normally. She put the shotgun on the desk by the door and started looking through the drawers for more shells. She found a couple in a bottom drawer and also found something else: she saw the coil of cord and realized it was the old phone, the one that had been there when they moved in. It was yellow, with a receiver that was connected to the body of the phone by a cord. She ran into the living room and plugged it in. There was a dial tone. She couldn’t believe it. She found Montoya’s number and used it, but her call went straight to voice mail. “Robbie, this is Vera. I need you. I think he’s here.” She turned the card over and called Montoya’s office. “I need to speak to Sheriff Montoya,” she said. “I’m sorry, but he’s out of the office,” the woman said. “May I take a

message?” “This is an emergency,” Vera said. “You should have dialed 9-1-1.” “Help me, please.” “What’s the nature of your emergency?” “Someone is trying to kill me.” “Where are you?” “I’m north of Taos, up above San Cristobal.” “Ma’am, this is the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office. You need the Taos County—” “I know. Help me please.” “You should hang up and dial 9-1-1.” “I need Sheriff Montoya.” “What’s your name, ma’am?”

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“Vera Tatum. He knows me. Please tell him I need him.” “I will tell him. Now dial 9-1-1.” Vera hung up and did just that. “State the nature of your emergency,” a man said. “I’m in my house and there is someone trying to kill me.” “Can you see the individual at this time?” “No.” “I have you in San Cristobal. Is that correct?” “Three miles up the road from there. The Tatum place.” “You’re Mrs. Tatum? We sent a patrol up there a while ago,” the man said. “His car is here but the deputy is not,” Vera said. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t understand. You say that the officer’s car is there, but the officer is not?” “Yes, that’s what I said. Please send someone up here now.” “Are you safe where you are?” the man asked. “I’ve got a deputy headed your way right now. Are you safe?” “I don’t know. I think he’s already killed Miguel.” “Miguel?” “Miguel Ortiz. He works for me.” “Is he hurt?” “I found his hand,” she said. “What do you mean?” “I mean I went into my barn and found a hand, just a hand.” The man on the phone was silent for a few seconds. “Do you have anything to protect yourself with?” “I have a shotgun,” Vera said. “Okay, Mrs. Tatum, I’m going to tell the deputy en route that you are armed. You must be careful and not point the gun at the deputy. Do you understand?” “Yes, yes, yes.” “Again, are you safe where you are?” “I found a human hand,” she said. “Okay, okay, I understand. The deputy is about thirty minutes away from you. All right?” Vera was pacing, holding the phone. Because she was tethered to the device by the cord she remained near the window. “I want you to try to conceal yourself,” the man on the phone said. “Tell the deputy there’s also a bear running around my place.” “Did the bear take the man’s hand?” “Hell, I don’t know,” Vera barked. “Bears don’t do that. Please, hurry.” “And you say there’s no sign of Deputy Wiggins?” “Who?” “The deputy we dispatched up there earlier.” “No, just his car.” “I’m going to stay on the line with you. Okay, Mrs. Tatum?” “Okay.” “My name is Andy.” “Andy?” “Yes, Vera.” Vera dropped the phone and looked out the window. He had to be in the barn at the other phone jack. Andy? Andy? Vera was shaking.

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“Shit. Shit. Shit.” Vera thought she would be damned if she was going to wait for that asshole to come get her. She grabbed the shotgun and started marching toward the barn. She could see nothing moving over that way. She was trying to not think. She had one plan and one plan only: she was going to shoot the first living thing she saw that was bigger than a dog and smaller than a horse. She could see the door of the tack room from the yard, open as she had left it. Her Bronco was parked in the same spot. If the road didn’t have a giant tractor and a police car blocking it, she could hop in and speed away. But the road was in fact blocked and there was nothing she could do about that. Then she looked across the aisle. Her mare, Sadie, hadn’t been ridden in months. She was not as agreeable as the gelding but she was a decent horse. Vera ducked into the tack room and grabbed a synthetic western saddle that she had used for guests, a blanket, and a bridle. She ran to the mare’s stall. She dropped the shotgun, saw it fall, and was afraid it would discharge when it hit the ground, but it didn’t. She picked up the weapon and kept moving. Her hands were shaking. All of her was shaking. Vera leaned the shotgun against the wall. The horse responded to her nervousness and wouldn’t stand still. Vera got the blanket on but the horse stepped away from the saddle. Vera finally reached underneath and got her cinched up. She had grabbed the wrong bridle and the bit didn’t fit well, but she didn’t have time to fuss or adjust. She walked the horse into the aisle and out of the barn. The house looked so quiet across the yard. The dogs couldn’t be left. She walked toward her door, her eyes searching all around. The horse was as confused as she was scared. Soon she could see the dogs’ faces in the window. At the house, she let out Mutt and Mongrel. They would try to protect her, perhaps. They would certainly serve as eyes and ears. She used the first step of her porch as a mounting block and got into the saddle. She held the shotgun in her lap and led the horse down the drive in a walk. Take it easy, she thought, especially with the loose bridle. She wasn’t going to outrun anything in a trot and it was too dangerous to canter. About ten minutes later the Cat was in sight. Sadie didn’t like the look of the big machine and began to shy. Now, instead of one police car, there were two. And still no sign of anyone. The horse hopped a bit. Then the hopping became bucking as a piercing cry came from the trees. The dogs barked, spun in circles. Sadie reared. The next thing Vera knew she was on her back, looking at the robin’s-egg blue sky. It was only then that she realized that the sky had cleared. She scrambled to her feet and crawled to collect the gun. She sat on her ass on the freezing ground and pointed the weapon into the trees. The cry had faded but now the air above her thumped. A helicopter passed over the trees, headed up-mountain. It was a sheriff’s helicopter. Vera got back into the saddle and gave Sadie a kick. She covered the same ground in a few minutes, the dogs running beside. She kept sensing something in the forest around her. Uphill was always easier, she remembered. The shotgun bounced, hit her in the chest and fell away to the ground. She prayed that the helicopter was for her and imagined that it would be landing in the pasture. Where else?

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The helicopter was not close but it was plenty loud. With that sound and the striking of horse hooves there was no way to hear if anything else might be near her, gaining on her. Vera pulled back on the reins and dismounted at the pasture gate. The machine came down in the middle of the meadow, some hundred yards away. A man hopped out. He held his hat on with his hand and trotted away from the spinning blades. The helicopter rose and flew away. The man’s head came up and Vera could see that it was Robbie Montoya. She ran toward him. He embraced her. “Are you okay?” Montoya asked. “Why is it leaving?” She pointed at the helicopter. “Ground’s too soft,” he said. “He doesn’t have bear paws.” “No, he’s got to get us out of here. He killed Miguel.” “Slow down,” he said. He looked past her toward the house. “Who’s Miguel?” “My ranch hand. He’s dead.” “Who’s here?” “I don’t know. I don’t know. Him. Andy.” “Are you sure? You saw him?” “No. Miguel’s hand is in the barn.” The dogs ran all around. They sniffed, checked out Montoya. They sprinted away and then back. Montoya watched them. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to the barn.” They walked through the mud of the pasture back to the gate. “This is horrible,” Vera said. “Miguel’s mother will be ninety-three next week.” “Let’s figure out what’s going on,” he said. “The Taos County Sheriff sent two men up here. Have you seen them?” “Their cars are down the road. I tried to move one with my tractor but it got stuck. I didn’t see the deputies.” “Two cars and no deputies?” Montoya used his radio. “Taos Sheriff, this is Sheriff Montoya. I’m up at the Tatum place above San Cristobal. Need assistance. Be advised that dispatched units are on site but the deputies are not.” “This is Taos Sheriff, repeat please.” “No deputies here. Their rigs are apparently here but they are not.” There was silence on the radio. “No deputies?” “Have they reported in?” Montoya asked. ‘That’s a negative.” Another voice scratched through. “Robbie?” “Yes. Wilbur?” “What the fuck is going on?” “Damned if I know. Get a bunch of men up here as fast as you can. Please.” “What’s this about my men?” “Can’t find them.” “Roger that. On our way.” Vera and Montoya were in the barnyard now. Vera watched him unsnap the retainer on his pistol. “Where is Miguel?” “First stall on the left. It’s his hand.” “You’re certain it’s his?” “No.”

Inside the barn, Montoya stepped to the stall and looked in over the gate. “It’s not here,” he said. “It has to be,” Vera said. “I mean, that’s where it was.” Mongrel turned to face the tack room and growled. Both dogs barked. Montoya pulled his pistol free from its holster. “Stay here,” he said. Vera didn’t argue. He walked to the door. It wasn’t completely closed. With the toe of his boot he kicked it open. He stepped back, still looking inside. Vera moved forward until she was just behind him. “Miguel,” she said. She rushed to him. Miguel was sitting on the floor. He looked like he had just come to. He focused on the people in front of him. “Vera?” he said. “Oh, my god, you’re okay,” she said. “If you say so,” Miguel said. He rubbed his eyes. Vera looked at his hands. “You have two hands.” Miguel looked at his hands. “Haven’t I always?” “Can you walk?” Montoya asked. “I think so.” Montoya helped Miguel to his feet. “What happened?” “I think somebody hit me?” He rubbed the back of his head. He looked at his hand. “No blood. What’s going on?” “You drove the Cat down mountain last night,” Vera said. “You came back this morning.” “I remember driving down,” he said. “My head.” “Did you see anyone else?” Montoya asked. “I saw the bear,” Miguel said. “Bear?” Montoya asked. “There’s been a bear roaming around here,” Vera said. “He’s been getting into the garbage.” “I got a good look this time. He ain’t no black bear, Vera. He’s a big son-of-a-bitch. Pardon my French.” “You saw the bear,” Montoya got him back on track. “I saw him and he saw me and I ran into the woods. I thought he was chasing me and I got kinda lost in the dark.” “You came back this morning,” Montoya said. “No, I came back last night.” “Why?” Montoya asked. “I left my medicine in my truck,” he said. “Then I saw the bear.” “You found your way back here. Then what happened.” “I don’t know. I went into the tack room to find a flashlight and that’s all I remember.” “You haven’t seen anyone else?’ “Like the guy who hit me? I didn’t see nobody. What’s going on?” “I thought you were dead,” Vera said. “Why?” “I saw a hand in the stall.” Miguel looked at his hands. “Wasn’t mine.” Montoya put his gun away. He looked out into the barn aisle. “Let’s get him up.” He helped Miguel to his feet. “Vera, can we drive your car

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out of here?” “The road’s all blocked with the Cat and the police cars.” Miguel swayed a bit and Vera caught him. “Let’s get him in your house,” Montoya said. “Help should be here soon.” As they left the tack room the dogs became quiet and lagged behind as they walked toward the house. Vera helped Miguel. He seemed steadier. She heard Montoya on the radio but couldn’t hear the conversation. “No contact at all?” she heard him say. “There’s a report of a bear up here.” “There is a big bear up here,” Miguel said. “Maybe the bear got the deputies.” Inside the house, Vera put Miguel on the sofa. The fire had died down to embers. She put in some kindling and two small logs to get it going again. Montoya picked up the phone. Vera moved to stop him. “What is it?” he asked.

by percival everett

“Andy talked to me on that phone?” Montoya frowned. “I thought I was talking to the 9-1-1 operator and it turned out to be Andy.” “Who is Andy?” Miguel asked. “I don’t understand?” Montoya said. “He’s trying to scare me. Like Daisy said.” “Okay, Vera. We’ll figure all of this out.” Now it was Montoya who seemed incredulous. He put the phone to his ear. “No dial tone,” he said. “There was,” Vera said. “I called your office and she told me to call 9-1-1.” “And Andy answered,” Montoya said. “What’s going on?” Miguel asked again. A call came in on Montoya’s radio. He stepped away. Listened. He looked out the window at the drive. “Okay,” he said. “We’re in the house. No, they’re not up here.” He looked at Vera. “They’re walking up now.”

43 In her head, Vera went over everything she was going to report. Her injured horse. A bear that she had not seen. The power shutting down and then coming back on. Her belief that she had seen a human hand in the stall. A hand that was not there now. Her belief that she had spoken to Andy even though the phone wasn’t working. Had she even spoken to a person in Robbie’s office? From there it got bad. Her Cat had been used to push a police Blazer into a tree. There were apparently two deputies on her place that she was claiming never to have seen. Her shotgun was lying in the middle of the road. None of it sounded any too good. Deputies roamed the property. Ten of them walked the pasture, explored the barn, went upstairs in her house, looked under trucks, cars, and propane tanks. Taos County Sheriff Wilbur Larsen stood in the yard listening to Montoya. Larsen was a short square man with a square jaw. Larsen did a lot of nodding and looking off into the trees while Montoya talked. When Montoya stopped talking, Larsen’s head shook. Vera stood next to Miguel who was sitting on a yard chair that had been brushed free of snow. She couldn’t take it any more. She walked over to the two sheriffs. “Sheriff Montoya told me what you went through at Kachina,” Larsen said. “I’m sorry.” He looked around. “Looks like we got us a situation here, doesn’t it.” He looked down the road. “I hate situations.” “Amen to that,” Montoya said. “The report of the body part in the stall is consistent with what you described happened down there, but the fact is there is no hand now.” Montoya nodded. “And I’ve got two deputies missing. This is not good.” Larsen looked at Miguel. “Mr. Ortiz, did you see anyone?” “No. But somebody hit me.” Larsen walked over and looked at the back of Miguel’s head. “Hmph. Still hurt?” “Yes.” “I really want my deputies back.”

Over an hour of searching yielded no deputies, though one of Larsen’s men found Vera’s gelding. The man turned him out into the pasture but Vera didn’t say anything. She spent most of the time sitting just inside her house looking out at the yard. Someone managed to get the Cat going and backed it up the hill. It was followed by several police cars and an ambulance. The paramedics checked Vera’s blood pressure and tended to Miguel, though he didn’t seem to need much tending. “What do you think?” Montoya asked Larsen. “My men are going stay up here until we find something,” Larsen said. “I think I should take Mrs. Tatum down and put her in a hotel,” Montoya said. “She can’t stay up here.” He turned to Vera. “You don’t want to stay up here, do you?” “No,” she said. “I have to check on my mother,” Miguel said. Larsen looked at Miguel. “All right.” He called one of the men over. “Cory, drive the sheriff and these two citizens down the mountain.” “I’ll check in with you when we get situated,” Montoya said, then to Vera, “You should grab what you need.” Vera walked into her house. It felt lonely and cold, like it never had before, not even in the days following her husband’s death. She went upstairs and opened a bag to pack. She stopped and sat on her bed. She wanted to cry. She was so confused. Her head hurt. Her chest hurt. She finally mustered the strength to carry on. She tried to tell herself that she would not be afraid. She opened her drawer and that effort was dashed: the socks that she thought were lost, that had miraculously reappeared. She threw in her clothes and a pocket knife that had been her husband’s. She saw her passport sitting in her underwear drawer where she always kept it and grabbed that as well. Outside, Deputy Cory, Montoya, and Miguel waited by a Chevy Blazer. Montoya sat in the passenger seat. Miguel sat behind the driver, Cory.

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“Crazy stuff,” Cory said. Montoya grunted. Vera was exhausted and hadn’t even realized it. The first bumps of the chewed up road made her sleepy. She imagined it was self defense, to go to sleep like that. She tried to keep her eyes open. “We met once before,” Cory said to Montoya. “It was during that big fire a few years back.” “I remember,” Montoya said. “I heard about what happened down at the Kachina place. That must have been awful.” “Still is,” Montoya said. “I hope they find your friends.” Cory answered his radio. “Cory, this is Larsen.” “Yes, sheriff?” “Why don’t you take Mr. Ortiz to the station, okay?” “Yes sir, to the station.” Montoya looked back through the wire guard at Miguel. “Anything I should know?” Cory asked. “No, just take him there. Make him comfortable.” “Yes, sir.” Vera must have drifted off because she was jolted awake by the car shaking. She saw the fence between the front and rear seats tear open. She looked beside her and everything was a blur. She saw a furry arm. A knife? A claw? Then there was blood on the windshield, spraying blood. Montoya’s shoulder was ripped open by whatever had taken Miguel’s place in the back seat. Vera tried to reach for the door handle but there was none. Cory screamed and that scream became a gurgle. The Blazer hit one tree and then careened into another. The deputy’s foot landed heavily on the accelerator. The car fishtailed wildly, hit a big rock. Montoya’s shoulder was ripped. His door flew open and he was gone. The Blazer fell into the roadside ditch. The car was not quite on its side. The glass of Vera’s door was broken and she climbed through it. The ground was so close. She looked back to see Deputy Cory’s head barely connected to his body. Miguel was gone. Out the other window? But it wasn’t Miguel, was it? “Robbie!” she called. She looked around, trying to get her bearings. She wasn’t even trying to figure out what had just happened. She was simply trying to figure out where she was. She spotted her favorite dead tree. Uphill from here was her house.

by percival everett

A piercing cry came from the forest. She looked down to see that her leg was bleeding. She ran up the road. “Robbie!” she screamed out his name. She could hear Askook Daisy. It feeds on fear, he had said. So she tried not to feed the beast. But how could she not be terrified? Where was Montoya? Was he dead in that ditch? Was he in the ditch needing help? She stopped running and considered turning back. Could it have taken the shape of Miguel? Askook Daisy had said, if it could become a lion, it could become a white man. Then why not a Chicano man? Vera reasoned. Why not Robbie Montoya? He was standing in the middle of the road. “Hurry, Mrs. Tatum,” he said. Vera studied him. She was trying to recall the last time Robbie Montoya had called her Mrs. Tatum. And where was the wound on his shoulder? She had seen that clearly in all the chaos. She backed up a step. “Come on, Mrs. Tatum. That thing is coming.” He waved for her to come with him. “We’ve got to get back to your house.” “Sheriff Johnson will shoot at us,” she said. “Sheriff Johnson wouldn’t shoot us.” Now she knew. She backed away. What to do? There was no doubt a gun in the Blazer, but how could she get to it? The creature tilted its head, smiled. But it was not Robbie Montoya’s smile. She considered running into the trees. The snowdrift between her and the forest was deep. A loud pop came from behind her and she saw the right shoulder of the man in front of her jolt backward. She turned to see Montoya lying on the ground. He dragged himself forward another foot and fired his pistol again. Vera screamed at the report. She turned back to see what looked like a man or a lion disappear into the woods. “Oh my God,” Vera said and ran to Montoya. She sat him up and held his head against her. “I didn’t wake up this morning thinking I was going to shoot myself.” He grabbed his radio. “Larsen, get your ass down the road. Pronto.” “Did you see that? Did you see that?” Vera asked. “I saw it, Vera.” “What was that?” “I’ll be damned if I know.”

Sheriff Larsen observed the scene. He shook his head without moving it, took off his Stetson and ran his fingers through his thinning gray hair. He wasn’t buying what he was hearing. So Montoya told him everything a second time. “You’ve got a concussion,” Larsen said. “I knew there was something funny about that Ortiz.” “It wasn’t Miguel,” Vera said. “Hush,” Larsen said. He looked at Deputy Cory, now covered with a reflective emergency blanket. “I’ve got a near decapitated man and two missing deputies and I refuse to hear this nonsense.”

“But that’s what happened,” Vera said. Larsen looked at Montoya. “Put yourself in my shoes. You expect me to believe that a man became Sheriff Montoya here and that Montoya shot him and then he, it, became a lion and ran off into the forest. Well, I don’t. I need something better than that. Even a goddamn spaceship would be better than that.” “I didn’t do this to myself,” Montoya said, indicating his shoulder. “Maybe you did. I don’t know. All I do know is that ain’t nobody going no place until I get a better story.” “That’s what I said down at Kachina,” Montoya said.

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“Well, I didn’t see what you saw down there and I didn’t see what you said you saw right here,” Larsen said. He looked at and then away from the dead deputy. “And I liked that boy.” “Sheriff?” from another deputy. “Manny says he’s found a blood trail in the forest over there.” “You say you winged him?” Larsen asked Montoya. “He did,” Vera said. “Tell him to follow it. You go with him. Take Gomez, too.” Larsen turned his attention back to Montoya and Vera. “I’m not saying I believe you.” “What now?” Vera asked. “I don’t know. Lady, bad shit just seems to follow you. I think I’ll keep you up here for a while.” Vera felt accused. “Robbie,” Larsen said, “you’re not a part of this investigation so you stay with her. He called to another deputy. “Take Sheriff Montoya and Mrs. Tatum up to her house. Stay with them. Be careful.”

by percival everett

“What’s her middle name?” Montoya asked. “Eliza,” the young man said. “Mine is Francisco.” “That’s easy. That’s my grandfather’s name. Why?” “If I ask you, you tell them back to me, all right?” “Yes, sir.” The man returned to his chair. “What was that all about?” Vera asked. “I need to know that he’s who he’s supposed to be.” Two Blazers came into the yard and stopped. Montoya and Vera walked out to meet Larsen. “They lost the trail,” he said. He looked at the sky. “It’s going to be getting dark soon, dammit.” “Sheriff, we found this,” a deputy said. He was carrying a bucket that Vera used to give the horses grain. He showed it to Larsen and Montoya but Vera could see it also. It was a human hand. “Found it on the other side of the manure pile.” Larsen rubbed the back of his neck. “Is that the hand you saw?” he asked Vera. “It’s very much like it, yes,” Vera said. Larsen looked again. “Was the hand you saw right or left?” Vera closed her eyes and tried to picture it. She used her own hand in space. “Left.” “Well, this is a left hand. Was your man married? Ortiz?” “No,” she said. “Well, my deputies were both married. Both wore rings. No ring here. Of course none of this means a hill of shit.” He looked at his watch. “Get everybody up here,” he said. “I don’t want anybody alone. Even if they gotta take a goddamn leak.” Larsen shot Vera a look that she couldn’t read, but she was guessing that he was starting to believe them. “I want to put a bullet into something before this night is done,” Larsen said. “Colorful,” Montoya whispered to Vera. “I heard that, Robbie,” Larsen said.

At the house, the deputy sat in the front room and looked out the window. Vera sat on the sofa facing the stoked fire while Montoya paced, kept his eye on the deputy. “How did you know it wasn’t me?” he asked. “He called me Mrs. Tatum.” Montoya nodded. “And I mentioned Sheriff Johnson.” Montoya tilted his head. “He didn’t correct me.” “Smart.” He stopped, stared at the man sitting guard. “What is it?” Vera asked. “What’s your middle name, Vera?” “Eliza. Why?” “Deputy,” he called to the man. “Sheriff?” “I want you to remember something. Mrs. Tatum’s middle name is Eliza.” The deputy was puzzled. “Okay.”

“What are we waiting for?” Montoya asked. They were sitting at Vera’s kitchen table. The dogs lay on the floor. “I have no idea,” Larsen said. “A miracle. Inspiration. Maybe my missing men will just walk out of the trees.” He stared at the mug of coffee in front of him. “Good coffee.” “Thank you,” Vera said. “This is a lot to process,” Larsen said. “I still haven’t processed it,” Montoya said. “Sheriff,” a deputy called from the living room. “Look out the window.” Larsen did. “Shit,” he said. Vera looked out and saw that snow was falling. Again.

“Gomez, get me a goddamn weather report.” He looked at Montoya. “I always check the weather and I forgot to.” “A lot going on,” Montoya said. “Lots of snow,” Gomez called back. “Damn.” The lights went out. Vera let out a short scream. “Does this happen a lot?” Larsen asked. “Only lately,” Vera said. “Hey, you men in there, pass the word, everybody on alert. Two of you go check the fuse box.” “The barn is on a separate board,” Vera said. She looked out the window. “It’s dark, too.”

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A man screamed outside. Shots were fired. Vera ran behind the two sheriffs out of the house into the dark yard. Flashlight beams whipped through the night and falling snow, crisscrossing in the sky and dropping to the ground. “What the hell?” Montoya said. There were two men on the ground. One was clearly ripped open. Montoya had his pistol out and pulled Vera to him. “Hang on to my belt,” he said. “Don’t let go.” Deputy Gomez was kneeling beside a fallen comrade. He was talking to the badly injured man, his light on the man’s face. He looked to say something to Sheriff Larsen and his flashlight went flying across the yard and Gomez was rolling across the ground. He shouted something that Vera couldn’t understand. Vera was shaking. She wanted her shotgun. “I want a gun,” she said. Montoya reached down to his ankle and pulled a smaller-caliber pistol from a holster. Handed it to her. “Please don’t shoot me, Vera,” he said. “Come together!” Larsen shouted. “On me, men.” He stood next to the man Gomez had been checking. Vera looked at the man on the ground. His middle was ripped open and she could see his entrails. He was conscious. “Jesus,” Montoya said. “Where are those paramedics?” “They left,” a man said. Montoya removed his jacket, took a knee, and tried to stop the man’s profuse bleeding. He looked at Vera, his face filled with fear. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. Vera was no longer holding on to Montoya. She was on the ground

by percival everett

cradling the head of the wounded man. Two other men lay on the ground yards away. “Where is the son-of-a-bitch!” Larsen shouted. Something ran by, faster than anything Vera had ever seen. As it went by it used something to slash through Larsen’s coat and back. He fell to the ground. “What the hell is that?” Larsen asked. “Shoot it!” he shouted. But it was just a shadow. The lights couldn’t fix on it. Vera looked at Larsen’s back. She couldn’t tell how deep the cut was because of his coat and the dark. She didn’t have a light of her own. Then everything became quiet. They could hear breathing and hissing. The three remaining beams of light found the creature. It was standing by the pasture gate. A man. A lion. On all fours but leaning back on his haunches so that its chest pushed out toward them. No one fired. In the bad light, the face looked like a cougar’s, but Vera could see Andy there. She fired the pistol at him. But they were all frozen. Frozen with fear. The beast roared at them, roared into the snow, the night. And just as quickly as it had moved, it was pulled from the light, snatched. The lights found it again. It was wrapped up in the forelegs of a grizzly bear, eight feet if an inch. The lion cried out. The bear bit the cat’s head, sank its claws into the cat’s chest. “My God,” Montoya said. The bear dragged the cat into the trees and then was lost. No one followed. Silence fell onto the yard. Silence and snow. Silence and snow and darkness.

Part IV of IV

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BY PERCIVAL A VE R TAT A U NO M VE L

MCCRAE Text © Percival Everett

BY LEONORA EVERETT 119

SARAH SZE

Francine Prose ruminates on temporality, fragility, and strength following a visit to Sarah Sze’s exhibition Timelapse at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

TIMELAPSE

Until I showed my grandson the paintings of Arcimboldo, what he’d liked about the Louvre was skating the polished floors. But he stopped in front of the Arcimboldos, transfixed, watching the vegetables turn into a man’s face and the face turn back into vegetables. I can visualize the vintage print in which two women merge to form a skull, the Death and the Maiden meld that has haunted Cecily Brown’s paintings. Above my desk, Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, appears in a lenticular image that changes when you move. Lean to the right, it’s Lord Ganesh, stately and regal, presiding over a table of offerings; lean to the left and the god is in close-up, chubby and sweet, the tributes replaced by candelabras. It’s a kind of magic, and we react like children when the hat produces a rabbit, when the portrait subject’s forehead morphs into a cabbage. These optical illusions remind us—somewhat unsubtly, I guess—of how differently things look when we view them from different angles. That thought—not exactly revelatory, but all too easily forgotten—occurred to us, in new and surprising ways, throughout Timelapse, Sarah Sze’s 2023 show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Sze’s work tells us to look. Wait a minute. Move a little. Stop. Now look again. Timelapse took on questions of perspective (not in the art-historical sense, but as in “point of view”) in a more philosophical way. Shine a flickering beam on that bonsai tree and it’s another plant altogether. These pieces gave us one of the things we most want from art: an invitation, a good reason, an insistence that we pay attention. Sze’s pendulums 122

ticked off time, in case we’d forgotten how rapidly everything is changing even as we made our way down the Guggenheim’s vertiginous ramp. Projected images appeared on one wall, then another. It took only a few heartbeats for something we saw to become a memory. The recurring video of the bird in flight became a kind of friend: we’d seen that bird before! A construction made largely of gossamer blue threads, The Night Sky Is Dark despite the Vast Number of Stars in the Universe suggests a hammock on which ghosts could lounge should their energy falter during the Day of the Dead. Like so many of the pieces in the show, it draws our attention to the fact that everything and everyone is perpetually walking the high wire strung between the opposite towers of fragility and endurance. Flashes of beauty appeared and vanished: there was that bird again! A hand drew a line, a volcano erupted, the sun peeked at us from behind a cloud. There was hardly enough time to think, How beautiful is that ingeniously controlled cascade of playing cards that the hand is about to deal. Something about Timelapse brought me back to the first time I picked up a snow globe and a grown-up said: Shake it. Watch. I must have found it shocking. Even now, it’s startling: a delicate underwater landscape explodes into sudden motion, a storm comes up, but it’s not a storm, the world glitters, the glitter subsides. It’s over in a few moments. Shake the bubble and start again. There’s no single word to describe the feelings these miniblizzards inspire: wonder, giddiness, surprise, mixed with recognition and

admiration for how fragile and how durable that tiny landscape is. How mysteriously this miniature, artificial world resembles the larger world, the so-called real world, the world in which we live. Timelapse took us back to that moment of wonder when we first saw a whole landscape transformed inside an object we could hold in one hand. Among the video images that Sze projected on the wall was a jittering pane of black-and-white static. It’s the last thing we want to see on our laptop or TV screen, a warning that’s something’s wrong, something’s gone blank. Yet here these quaking particles of electronic chaos evoked the silvery sheen of those fleeting, magical, snow globe tempests. At once amusing and deeply serious, pleasurable and challenging, Timelapse—installed on the uppermost level of the museum’s spiral, extending down into the rotunda and out to the exterior of the building, on which video images are projected after dark—reminded us, at every turn, of how much humans have in common with objects. Mutability, for example. Like people, objects age and fray, break and disappear. We share their susceptibility to the beneficial or unfriendly effects of time. We assume that objects are less aware of the passing minutes than we are, but some things—clocks, metronomes, pendulums—are far more skilled at measuring its incremental disappearance. Timelapse surrounded us with things that, again like human beings, depended for their existence on a highly complex balance between delicacy and strength. A kaleidoscopic, futuristic whirlpool, Times Zero was a massive wall piece—part paint, part collage— that reappeared, torn into shreds, on the canted

Previous spread: Sarah Sze, Travelers Among Streams and Cascades, 2023 (detail), installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: David Heald Opposite: Sarah Sze, Times Zero, 2023, oil paint, acrylic paint, acrylic polymers, ink, aluminum, archival paper, tape, Dibond, and wood, overall dimensions variable. Photo: David Heald Above: Sarah Sze, Things Caused to Happen (Oculus), 2023 (detail), video (color, sound, various durations), video projectors, wood, stainless steel, inkjet prints, toothpicks, clamps, ruler, and tripods, overall dimensions variable. Photo: David Heald

floor below it. It was like a jigsaw puzzle assembled by someone only half aware that the pieces should fit, or by a tired child who decided to throw out the unsolved tiles. We looked back and forth from the vertical to the horizontal. What was missing? What happened to those hands that appeared on the wall but not on the floor? The piece provided additional proof: anything that is created can be unmade at any moment. Like so much in the show, Times Zero brought to mind the marvelous quote from Tennessee Williams’s stage directions for The Glass Menagerie (1944): “When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass, you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.” Sze’s installations address change (both desirable and unwelcome) and evanescence: the pendulum hanging down into the rotunda would never mark the same moment or skim the same water twice. The potted plants would grow, the fountain would continue to burble, whether or not we were there to see them. It’s been a long time since I believed that, in order to be a totem, an object has to possess the rarity and beauty—the intentionality—of the Venus of Willendorf, a Benin mask, a Cycladic maiden, a medieval reliquary. Timelapse reminded us that anything—a whirring desk fan, a blinking lamp— can be powerful, depending on where it is and what it can do. Small empty frames, strung on a wire, could mimic ritual objects, prayer flags, or the votive charms of body parts sold outside healing shrines. We can outgrow or cherish objects, spoil them, or treat them with loving care. The photograph that calms and cheers us can be summoned up on our phones, the photograph that breaks our

hearts can be torn into shreds and discarded. In Things Caused to Happen (Oculus), a tiny video, on one of the many small screens that had been set inside in a gleaming armature—a planetary metal globe—lit up with the pearlescence of abalone. We stared as if we’d been given a way to peer into the chambers of a beehive or the beating municipal heart of an ancient civilization. The most elaborate piece in the show, in its own space in the seventh-floor tower, Timekeeper invited us into that place where, like Alice down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass, we enter an imagined world: uncharted territory strewn with objects suggesting that someone has been here before us. We were inside something—but what? Our minds, our dreams, our memories, our attics. We searched for familiar objects—a stack of books, a swivel stool, a digital clock, a water bottle—much as we scan a crowded room for a friendly face. But these objects no longer looked quite the same, removed to another existence on this crowded interior planet. It was as if everything we saw constantly, directly or at the far edges of our peripheral vision—the flickering screens, the ragged snapshots, those tangles of wire and ports and plugs on which our daily life seems to depend—had been collected, repurposed, and gathered in one place. These objects—not only the scraps blown around by the fans—were in constant motion. Things were in a perpetual state of change. Video monitors became goggles, or the eyes of an alien creature hiding among the clutter. Lights flashed on and off, images materialized and vanished. All around us, museumgoers were looking through their screens, using their screens to photograph other screens, in 123

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Opposite: Sarah Sze, Slice, 2023 (detail), installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: Sarah Sze Studio This page: Sarah Sze, Times Zero, 2023 (detail), oil paint, acrylic paint, acrylic polymers, ink, aluminum, archival paper, tape, Dibond, and wood, overall dimensions variable. Photo: Sarah Sze Studio Artwork © Sarah Sze

case we needed more evidence that this is the way we live now. The metronome, ticking, ticking—was it a help or a warning? There was something vaguely ominous here. The low-level thrum of anxiety and anticipation was something like what we feel when the lights in the planetarium go down and the vast, intimidating sky opens up above us. There’s that snow globe rush of excitement spiked by a kind of pride in what the artist has done. Humans are, as far as we know, the only species capable of imagining and fashioning complex alternate worlds. One of my favorite things ever was to climb the staircase of the Breuer Building when it was the Whitney Museum and look out the window through which you could see Dwellings (1981), the miniature settlement sprawled across a landscape, made of clay, that the artist Charles Simonds built in a cornice in an elegant, two-story building on the other side of Madison Avenue. Dwellings provided a similar kind of pleasure as Timelapse. We’re grateful for what reconciles us to the best aspects of what humans are and what we can do. At this fraught moment, we can’t help wanting affirmative evidence of our imagination, our capability, of what happens after that hand, in the recurring video, draws that first line on the page. It’s not as if the natural world was absent from Timelapse. Someone at the Guggenheim had to be watering those potted plants. When I asked a friendly museum guard what she liked best about the show, she pointed to the potted bonsai and said, “I think all the green.” When a friend told me that Sze’s work makes her feel as if she’s looking at lichen under a magnifying glass, I thought of how a

terrarium is another sort of snow globe. It’s mossier, greener, a glass enclosure in which things change and grow—but very very slowly. The fleeting, almost wistful glimpses of nature brought to mind a sentence from Vladimir Nabokov’s essay on butterflies: “I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were forms of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.” Arranged throughout the exhibition were assemblages of studio equipment, presumably left over from the installation and possibly waiting to assist in its deconstruction: ladders, clamps, paint, scissors, spools of thread, brushes, paint, paper, all kinds of tools and detritus. Surprisingly, something about their presence cured me, or almost, of my allergy to the word process. Whenever someone asked, What’s your process, or I heard artists ramble about their process, something in me would die a little. Maybe because it felt like reducing art to a cookbook recipe or a list of satnav directions: do this, add that, turn here, do that. Here’s what I do. Try it. Here, though, I liked the heaps of studio material strategically piled around the show—a welcome reminder that what we were seeing was part of a process, that it was created according to a process. Someone made this, it didn’t just fall here like the gentle rain from heaven. And it could be unmade according to another process, suggesting that what we are seeing is always a work in process. Timelapse reminded us how much work is needed to make something that interests and satisfies the artist—and that someone else might actually want to look at. For all its apparent fragility,

Timelapse carried a lot of weight: the complexities of consciousness, the mystery of time, an inquiry into questions that have no solutions. How delicate and random it looked—and how much labor it must have taken to achieve that. How hard these thousands of moving pieces must have been to arrange and balance and make everything work just right. And at a certain fixed date, the tools and ladders would resume their “true” function, facilitating the complicated move from the museum to somewhere else. Someone put this here, someone would unmake it. Blink, and something else would take its place. The long-running installation will be in the mind of the viewer and on the Internet. In fact, quite a few video clips of the show are out on the web; the amount of movement in Sze’s work lends itself to video in ways that more static art cannot. In an essay for the catalogue that accompanied the show, Kyung Ahn, associate curator for Asian Art at the museum, describes the lengthy process of bringing Sze’s work to the Guggenheim. The idea was first proposed in 2018. The show was scheduled to open in the autumn of 2020—but was postponed until this year because of the covid-19 pandemic. For a project that took so long from conception to completion, Timelapse was very much about the moment—the historical moment, the cultural moment, the planetary moment, what a moment means, the speed or slowness with which each moment passes. The show gave us a lot to think about. As you walked down the Guggenheim ramp you might feel certain areas of your consciousness blinking awake out of sleep mode, just in time to notice how beautiful and fragile everything is, and how easily broken. 125

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MOUNT FUJI IN CINEMA SATYAJIT RAY’S WOODBLOCK ART

In the first installment of a twopart feature, novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri arrives at a more nuanced understanding of the filmmaker Satyajit Ray by tracing the global impacts of woodblock printing, following its perspective and language as it circulated in the last three centuries.

Where does Satyajit Ray come from? Not the filmmaker, whom we know came from India, from Bengal, but the practice we associate with him? Was he a one-off, as he’s sometimes assumed to be? There have been recent occasions for us to think about these questions, most notably, in 2021, the centennial of Ray’s birth. New books of previously unpublished material have also appeared, including Satyajit Ray Miscellany: On Life, Cinema, People and Much More (notes, brief essays, interviews, even LP sleeve notes), put together by his son, Sandip. But the questions these publications raise remain largely unattended to. For now, it seems that the endorsement of the filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, a gifted follower of the director’s, on the jacket of the Miscellany must suffice: Ray is “a most singular symbol of what is best and most revered in India in cinema.” Ray’s first film, Pather Panchali (1955), an anomaly in Indian filmmaking at the time, immediately

placed him in the burgeoning art-house movement—a movement Ray was both sympathetic to and somewhat ambivalent about. But he was an Indian, so the recognition he received at Cannes in 1956 was not for best film but came in the form of the festival’s inaugural Best Human Document award, as if films about India, and Indian villages especially, had to be appreciated primarily in terms of the empathy they demonstrated and only secondarily as cinema. The word “human” stuck, and Ray began to be called a “humanist,” whatever that means in terms of an artist’s contribution. Ray went along with the label from politeness. In an interview with his biographer Andrew Robinson, however (included in the 2021 edition of Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye), Ray, asked “Would you ever call yourself a humanist?,” replies, “Not really. . . . I am not conscious of being a humanist. It’s simply that I am interested in human beings. . . . I’m slightly irritated [laughs] by this constant reference to humanism in

my work—I feel that there are other elements also. It’s not just about human beings. [My emphasis.] It’s also a structure, a form, a rhythm, a face, a temple, a feeling for light and shade, composition, and a way of telling a story.” A “rhythm . . . a temple . . . light and shade, composition”: these are Ray’s words for the “other elements” and histories that direct artistic concerns unaddressable by realism. Ray’s work (“a rhythm, a face, a temple”), like his angularity to humanism, is the product of a shift in thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that’s connected to the emergence of certain practices in the arts. This shift reshapes the world quite differently from the way in which the Enlightenment or imperialism do. For one thing, it’s hardly unidirectional, moving from West to East. And it represents a counter to the human-centered Enlightenment. Its occurrence means we can take few of the terms we fall back on when accounting for our modernity as givens. Ray, and the aesthetic that roughly the first twenty-four years of his work explores (right up to the release of the children’s film Joi Baba Felunath in 1979), should be situated in, and understood as, a radical reexamination of these givens. The eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries were a time of extreme change: this much we know. The conventional narrative emphasizes traumatic dislocation, the consequence, evidently, of religion receding and Western society breaking down. The postcolonial narrative describes the traumatic effect of imperialism in Asia and Africa. The obverse of these narratives, equally well-worn, celebrates the period’s advances in political thought, social reform, technology, and industrialization. To me it seems that the radical cultural change of the last three centuries is impossible to grasp outside the inspiration created by a transformative convergence between cultural and artistic lineages that took place in that period worldwide. We are all, in one way or another, an expression of this convergence. And the history of the convergence frees us from viewing the past through the narrative of breakdown (in the West) or repression (in the rest of the world); it allows us to grasp why our experience of much of what we know of the last three centuries is liberatory and revivifying, but in a way quite unconnected to our reverence toward the miracles of “progress.” To say that this convergence merely comprised the meeting of “East” and “West,” or of Europe and the rest of the world, is lazy. These separations become increasingly difficult to make. After all, something like the Enlightenment view of the human being’s place in the world is establishing itself everywhere by the eighteenth century: through contact, new mercantile opportunities are creating new ambitions, new educations, and new colonial pedagogies. By “colonial pedagogy” I mean not only the use of knowledge and education as an instrument of power in various parts of the Empire, I also mean their use in Europe as disciplinary and disciplining tools to homogenize Europeans and their pasts. In this sense there isn’t that much difference between colonial pedagogy and pedagogy itself. In the midst of this, the intercultural shifts that begin to happen at this time create, gradually, an alternative pedagogy that might be called poetry, or, later, modernism. It involves the fragmenting of various Renaissance types of monumentalism, among which “the real” may be the biggest monument of all.

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Previous spread: Satyajit Ray, 1970. Photo: ullstein bild Dtl./Getty Images Opposite: Utagawa Hiroshige, The Residence with Plum Trees at Kameido, from the series One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo, 1857, color woodcut on paper, 10 × 14 ½ inches (25.4 × 37 cm), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Photo: Album/ Art Resource, New York Above: Vincent van Gogh, The Sower with Setting Sun, 1888, oil on canvas, 28 ¾ × 36 ¼ inches (73 × 92 cm), Emil Bührle Collection, on permanent loan at Kunsthaus Zürich. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, New York Below: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, The Courtesan Komurasaki of the Kadoebi House Compared to Taira no Tadanori, from the series Six Poems of Love and Valor, 1879, woodcut on paper, 10 5 ⁄8 × 7 ½ inches (27 × 19 cm), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, New York

So, in opposition to the oil paintings of the late Renaissance, and the works of neoclassical sculpture that seek or achieve the quality of the monument, arise the frayed aesthetics of Impressionism, nonrealistic modernist figuration, and the sparse, clean lines of the Bauhaus. In opposition to the realist novel arise modernism and the idea of poetry that Roland Barthes identifies as a condition of language no longer dependent on markers such as rhyme or ornamentation. It’s impossible to understand these changes without the cultural encounters that begin to open up escape routes, escape routes made possible after writers, critics, and artists come into contact with, for instance, the Upanishads, the Gita, Buddhist notions of “reality” (without which Ezra Pound could not have compared experience to iron filings on a mirror), the “African mask,” Chinese poetry, and the Japanese print. Some or all of these and more were studied closely by Barthes, Pound, Matthew Arnold, William Blake, John Cage, T. S. Eliot, Vasily Kandinsky, D. H. Lawrence, Agnes Martin, Henri Matisse, Friedrich Nietzsche, Pablo Picasso, Arthur Schopenhauer, Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, and others, eventually allowing them to position the arts, and thought, as contra-Enlightenment practices. This is why, when we look at the transformation that the arts represent in this period, we feel not panic (as we would if fragmentation simply represented breakdown), or improved (as we would if change comprised only development): we feel energized and delighted. The delight is connected to two things: to being offered an alternative to the Enlightenment’s masterful relationship to the world; and to the nature of the world-affirming, defamiliarizing provenances (the “African mask,” a raga, the Upanishads, a mid-nineteenth-century Japanese print) of some of modernity’s most liberating projects (Wordsworth’s The Prelude [1850], Woolf’s To the Lighthouse [1927], the paintings of Matisse, the songs of Rabindranath Tagore, the aleatoric compositions of Cage). The unprecedented cross-cultural give-and-take from Romanticism onward, and the alluring problem of creative practice since then, remind us that

modernity is not only a time of disenchantment or of progress, it’s also a time of liberation from the habitual constraints of consciousness. This—rather than technology—is what enlivens us about modernity. One of the most important bits of this story is largely unknown, or insufficiently discussed; or our knowledge of it, despite new scholarly work, is, ironically, decreasing in our globalizing world. The fact that Picasso took a cue from the “African mask” is familiar to droves of museum-goers today (though Picasso downplayed his indebtedness later in life). But what might a Senegalese contemporary of Picasso, or the descendant of that contemporary, have made of that mask? What, for that matter, did they make of Picasso? I refer not to the question of cultural appropriation or ownership but to the matter of creative reuse, which turns all creativity, whether it’s taking place in Central or West Africa, in Spain or Paris, in Kolkata or Tehran, into a form of appropriation and renewal, located in, and actively contributing to, history and historical change. The twentieth-century Senegalese modernist is in a situation, then, of significant complexity and excitement, a situation encompassing the mask, Africa, and Paris in a way that’s similar to, and emerges from, but is also different from, the situation of Picasso. Picasso turned to the mask because he felt that neoclassicism and Renaissance realism were dead. As a boy and a trainee, he had devoted himself to mastering their idiom; the result is The First Communion, a lucid scene in oil from 1896, when he was fifteen years old. To the post-Trocadéro, post-1907 moments belongs the decisive movement away from representational traditions, as well as such provocations as “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” The sentence contains both a personal and a cultural history. “Child,” “primitive”: these are code words for a nonrepresentational art of extraordinary sophistication. In Art, published seven years after Picasso’s visit to the Trocadéro, the critic Clive Bell (an almost exact contemporary of Picasso’s) decried the overwhelming body of representational art that had become synonymous with the Western tradition, calling it, somewhat derisively, “Descriptive Painting”: “We are all familiar with pictures that interest

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The faint open sore of the sun in Monet’s picture is not a vanishing point, it’s one among various points of entry—including the boats, the pallid reflection of the sun, the apparition of chimneys, and the ghostly outlines of dinghies—into this world.

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us and excite our admiration, but do not move us as works of art.” This, like Picasso’s “four years to paint like Raphael,” is the end of a tradition speaking. A couple of pages later we encounter an account of an unshackling as well as its provenances: As a rule, primitive art is good . . . for, as a rule, it is also free from descriptive qualities. In primitive art you will find no accurate representation; you will only find significant form. Yet no other art moves us so profoundly. Whether we consider Sumerian sculpture or pre-dynastic Egyptian art, or archaic Greek, or the Wei and T’ang masterpieces, or those early Japanese works of which I had the luck to see a few superb examples . . . at the Shepherd’s Bush exhibition in 1910 . . . in every case we observe three common characteristics—absence of representation, absence of technical swagger [Picasso’s phrase for this is “learning to paint like Raphael”], sublimely impressive form. And what was the Senegalese artist fighting? I wonder if, at some point, it would be something similar to what Bell, Picasso, and their contemporaries in Kolkata were fighting: “academic” conventions in art that, via Enlightenment pedagogy, become a default way of understanding art and representation almost everywhere by the late nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, for instance, the very Japanese prints that presented Van Gogh with a means of escape are becoming deadened by an oil-painting-like heaviness and sheen as the Renaissance ethos and neoclassicism move eastward and southward. The oppositional art movements that emerge in Asia and Africa don’t necessarily intend only to wrest indigeneity from the

grasp of Western convention. In fact, the greater, say, the Indian artist’s quest for authenticity in the early twentieth century—that is, the greater the urge to represent a “pure” India—the more neoclassical or Western their aesthetic. No, the aim is to enter a conversation: with the Japanese print; with Japan; with classical and vernacular India; with the mask; with Picasso; with Paris. Picasso engages in this kind of conversation too, but one restricted to Europe, “Africa,” and the Palais du Trocadéro; for him, there is no Senegalese modernity that would add another resonance. The conversation his Senegalese contemporary or successor (Iba N’Diaye, Théodore Diouf) enters has to be a little more tantalizing, a little more real in an experiential, immediate sense, a little less utopian. Already, for the latter, categories like “Africa” and “Europe” are qualified in their usefulness. It’s in this conversation that I would place Satyajit Ray. He is the last of the artists, beginning with Van Gogh and Monet, who worked, in a sense, as makers of block prints. We know of Van Gogh’s discovery of Félix Régamey, a Frenchman working as a faux-Japanese-woodblock-print artist in his capacity as a magazine illustrator. Van Gogh subsequently became a collector of Japanese prints (newly available in Europe in the late nineteenth century) and, for a while, served his apprenticeship by becoming a Japanese artist: that is, producing work identifiable by a “Japanese” subject matter and style. This enthusiasm was shared by his friend Paul Gauguin and certainly by Claude Monet, owner of a vast collection of Japanese block prints. Van Gogh called the Impressionists the “French Japanese.” This means that the Japanese modern is to be found not only in Japan—in Hiroshige, Hokusai, and their contemporaries—but also in Paris, in a different incarnation:

Opposite: Katsushika Hokusai, Lake Suwa in Shinano Province (Shinshū Suwako), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei), c. 1830–32, woodblock print; ink and color on paper, 9 ¾ × 14 7⁄8 inches (24.8 × 37.8 cm), Henry L. Phillips Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Art Resource, New York Right: Henri Rivière’s photograph on the construction site (third level) of the Eiffel tower, Paris, 1889 © Henri Rivière/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Adoc-photos/Art Resource, New York Below: Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), 1872, oil on canvas, 19 × 24 7⁄8 inches (48 × 63 cm), Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, New York

as the French and Dutch Japanese. (Picasso, in Van Gogh’s terms, would be a French Spanish Senegalese or sub-Saharan.) But the field and its antagonisms are complex and intricate. They must also include, for instance, the Japanese from other epochs with whom Hiroshige was in dialogue: “modernity,” even as it was being articulated, was becoming period nonspecific. And it must include those Japanese artists who by the end of the eighteenth century were embracing Renaissance oil-painting-like realism. Among the most evocative of these are Maruyama O�kyo and Kawahara Keiga; these too are “moderns,” though not modernists. Hokusai’s practice would be antithetical to a work like Keiga’s Nagasaki Harbour (c. 1833) and to the more reductive, quasi-photographic legacies of this lineage, as would the practices of Van Gogh and the French Japanese. This means that, from Asia to Europe, battle lines were being drawn whose demarcations and interests were separate from racial and colonial ones. On one side were the artists across the world who wielded realism as an instrument of power, on the other were those who were engaged, between themselves, in

a give-and-take, an exchange of media, technique, and vision that created escape routes and intimations of freedom. What does the exposure to Japanese prints and other lineages of texture and color do to Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Monet? First, it leads them to use a Renaissance inheritance—oil paint—against the grain of the purpose it served, of glossy verisimilitude and hyperrealism; to paint pictures not only composed of blotches but animated by the effervescence and lightness of illustrations and caricature, pictures possessed, however ostensibly melancholy their subject matter (such as Van Gogh’s bedroom), by a levity and warmth that is pleasurable without in any way being either comforting or uplifting— that levity being the gift of cultures that have long had an exposure to the idea of ananda, or bliss, or joy. Being a faux woodblock-printmaker is a joyous occupation, and it also means freedom from having to be a proper artist. Second, it allows a painter like Monet to jettison the burdensome Renaissance legacy of perspective without necessarily creating paintings that look like flat surfaces. In his 1872 Impression, Sunrise, Monet, very subtly, gets rid of the vanishing point, the endpoint essential to the illusion of depth and distance, an illusion that allows painters to fashion their work as a window and, crucially, enables the viewer to stand outside the painting. The faint open sore of the sun in Monet’s picture is not a vanishing point, it’s one among various points of entry—including the boats, the pallid reflection of the sun, the apparition of chimneys, and the ghostly outlines of dinghies— into this world. We don’t examine these details for accuracy; we grow absorbed in them. The vanishing point, David Hockney points out in his comparison of a work by Canaletto to a depiction of an emperor’s visit in a fifteenth-century Chinese scroll painting, keeps the viewer in control and in a deliberate state of exclusion; the scroll, with its lateral unfolding, its unobtrusive undermining of the conventions of perspective, allows the viewer multiple entrances in. The sun is not an overlord in Monet’s picture any more than we are, or than any detail in the painting is. The weight between sun, boat, shadow, reflection, water, and viewer’s vantage point is equally distributed. 133

It’s only when we go back to the emergence of modern nonrepresentational art, and to its provenances in the block print and visual and philosophical traditions around the world, that we experience the liberation, the jouissance, of rejecting the outside, where the outside comprises the observing subject.

Hokusai borrowed from the perspectival techniques of the Dutch painters whose works became available in Japan in the eighteenth century, but his various takes on Mount Fuji, especially Fuji in the distance, aren’t really “perspectives,” in that their focus isn’t the mountain. Where the vanishing point in Canaletto’s Regatta on the Grand Canal (c. 1740) draws everything toward it and then presents the consequent arrangement to the owner of the painting, or the viewer, Hokusai’s Mount Fuji draws nothing toward itself. When we look at The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831), our eyes begin to move not toward the distance but from left to right, with the wave, the edges of froth, the chameleonlike Fuji (which, though immovable, mimics the wave through its white peak and blue body), the boats, and the endangered, battle-ready boatmen. The picture contains distance but the movement that interests it goes sideways. The blues and white of the wave and of Fuji, and the beige and light beige of the boats, comprise not depth but surface. This gives the print an extraordinary lightness, an absence of ponderousness. Fuji remains an interloper. You notice it suddenly. In his 1964 essay on the Eiffel Tower, Barthes quoted Guy de Maupassant’s dry remark on why he lunched regularly at a restaurant at the landmark “though he didn’t much care for the food”: “It’s the only place in Paris where I don’t have to see it.” That is, in Paris, the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the two poles of the Renaissance painting: the vanishing point and the viewer as overlord. Hokusai’s Fuji is hidden. It is Maupassant going into the tower. It won’t stand outside. 134

Monet, in whose block-print collection Hokusai figured, is reworking the great wave in Impression, Sunrise. The blister of the sun is his Fuji, eschewing centrality in, or exteriority to, the painting or the world. Maupassant was ten years younger than Monet, and his observation would not have been possible without Hokusai’s Fuji having entered the Parisian consciousness and—Monet’s painting is a living example of this—enabling an escape from the viewing subject: “It’s the only place in Paris where I don’t have to see it.” Fuji’s interface with the Eiffel Tower led Henri Rivière (fourteen years younger than Maupassant) to create the print series Thirty Six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1902), views seemingly occurring at various points in Paris and depriving the city, the tower, and the viewer of a sense of locus. In 1964, Barthes writes, “In order to negate the Eiffel Tower . . . you must, like Maupassant, get up on it and, so to speak, identify yourself with it. Like man himself, who is the only one not to know his own glance, the Tower is the only blind point of the total optical system of which it is the center and Paris the circumference.” Barthes is formulating a critique of the subject, the viewing “I,” that wouldn’t have been possible without the block print and Fuji. “What sees,” Barthes continues, “remains hidden,” while “spectacles” comparable to the tower are “themselves blind”: that is, they are looked at but themselves cannot see. “The Tower . . . transgresses this separation, this habitual divorce of seeing and being seen”; and here he’s thinking of Hokusai and Mount Fuji. Rivière, in his own slightly twee way, is tackling the same problem: of making

Opposite, top: Gaganendranath Tagore, Boat Padma with flock of birds, n.d., watercolor on paper, 8 × 7 inches (20.3 × 17.8 cm), Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata Opposite, bottom: Gaganendranath Tagore, By the sweat of my brow, I try to be mistaken as Sahib, n.d., ink on paper, 12 × 15 ½ inches (30.5 × 39.4 cm), Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata This page: Abanindranath Tagore, The Passing of Shah Jahan, 1902, oil on board, 14 × 10 inches (35.5 × 25.4 cm), Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata

the tower present but hidden, neither entirely an observer nor entirely an object. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus (1922), had said, in effect, that you can’t “stand outside” language. Barthes’s meditation on the Eiffel Tower is a riff on this rejection of “standing outside,” and is prescient of Jacques Derrida’s “There is nothing outside the text” (De la Grammatologie, 1967). In Western philosophy and post-structuralism, these positions—especially Derrida’s pronouncement—begin to seem to punitive, cautionary: they take on the Judeo-Christian sternness and the air of Enlightenment control that they wish to critique. It’s only when we go back to the emergence of modern nonrepresentational art, and to its provenances in the block print and visual and philosophical traditions around the world, that we experience the liberation, the jouissance, of rejecting the outside, where the outside comprises the observing subject. The poet Tagore met the artist and art historian Okakura Kakuzō in 1902: they grew close, and Tagore invited Okakura to Visva-Bharati, the school and university he had created in the location he called “Santiniketan” (The home of tranquility).

Okakura introduced Tagore’s nephews Gaganendranath and Abanindranath (both key figures in what’s called the “Bengal School” of art) to light brushstrokes in the Japanese style. The result was striking. Gaganendranath, whose gifts were already evident in the late nineteenth century, began to paint or draw verandahs, seated figures, and riverbanks—all from his milieu in Kolkata and Bengal—in a subdued wash and often in a blackand-white, comprising shadow and outline, that was replete with memory: a way of painting that was not so much representational as a type of formalism through recollection. Gaganendranath’s younger brother Abanindranath, who studied at the Government School of Art, Kolkata, in the Western academic manner, turned early to the idea of, and quest for, an indigenous way of painting. He borrowed first from Mughal miniatures, as in The Passing of Shah Jahan (1902, an important year where these coordinates are concerned), a combination of miniaturist flatness, block-print-type dimensions, and, already, a Fuji-like Taj Mahal off-center in the distance that the dying emperor (who had had it built upon the death of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal) is looking toward in exhausted yearning. The painting is undecided between the respective allures of Mughal flat surfaces, Renaissance situations and perspective, and Hokusai. Acquaintance with Okakura and, through him, with the tutelage of Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunsō (who was both a painter and a maker of woodblock prints) deepened Abanindranath and Gaganendranath’s attempts to create a hybrid “Indian Japanese” style (Shunsō’s mōrōtan or “vague” style is of particular interest to Gaganendranath, I think, in his illustrations to Tagore’s memoir Jiban Smriti [1912]); even the signatures that the younger artists at Santiniketan—many of them Abanindranath’s students— began to use in their paintings originated in the seals presented to Abanindranath and Gaganendranath by Okakura. Nandalal and Sudhir Khastgir reworked their own signatures as seal-inscriptions in small squares, with the Bengali letters resembling Chinese hieroglyphs. With Gaganendranath, experiments with brushstrokes led to bolder outlines in his satirical caricatures of the grotesque in Kolkata’s colonial and babu life: anarchic accounts, among the most remarkable images anywhere, that I think are also a part, in their mix of expressiveness and economy, of the block-print universe. What Abanindranath’s students and Gaganendranath are seeking is not so much an “authentic” idiom, then; they are veering away from the Enlightenment they’ve been schooled in or exposed to and are aiming for a style—and, by implication, a way of living, viewing, thinking, painting—that involves being modern and Bengali at once, a style that is immediate, new, and a departure from the Renaissance proclivities for the spectacular. Line, space, and suggestion are marks of this style, and the Japanese block print and brushstroke are important to the formation of this Bengali modernity. And it’s feasible that Japan, and the Buddhism that the Tagore family is trying to recover from its own country’s history as well as from Japan and China, create meeting-points at which the family begin to become curious about similar projects in Europe: thus, Gaganendranath’s and Rabindranath’s interest in Kandinsky and the Bauhaus painters in the 1920s. This is the Bengal that Satyajit Ray is born into in 1921. To be continued in Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2024. 135

Philosopher Federico Campagna and artist Carsten Höller came together, on the heels of Höller’s exhibition Clocks in Paris, to consider the measurement of time, the problem with fun, and the fine line between mysticism and nihilism. FEDERICO CAMPAGNA Carsten, perhaps we could begin with your Decimal Clock [2023], which is calibrated to mark time according to a decimal system of tens, as was originally proposed during the French Revolution. One of the things I collect, when I have a little bit of money, is books from the French Revolution that utilize the revolutionary calendar and time-keeping systems they sought to impose. CARSTEN HÖLLER So you have a little library already? FC Very small. CH Like three books? FC Yeah, something like that. Five. CH Okay. Five. They’re expensive, I assume. So you know a lot about the decimal clock. It always struck me as a great idea. If you compare the metric system to other measuring systems, you think, Why are some people holding onto something very complicated? The idea of measuring time in a different, more pragmatic way, in terms of ten hours instead of twenty-four, with a hundred minutes and a hundred seconds each—decimal time is a very good idea. But—and it’s a big but—if you want to implement it, it needs societal backing. It’s like

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money in that it requires a common agreement, now on a global scale. But they did reorient the measurement of time during the French Revolution. They started with a new calendar and a new way of measuring time on a daily basis, or on a second basis, if you want. And from what I know, it ended in utter chaos. FC Yeah, mostly because counting on bases six and twelve has a long tradition. I think the difficulty lies in the fact that you’re trying to insert your new measuring of time within a tradition that also makes sense, and it makes sense exactly because measuring time is such an arbitrary decision. Apart from the technical problems of dividing in base ten, for general use, to continue believing in something as implausible as time, you need to have a big investment of belief. And the suspension of disbelief is aided by the fact that people are encouraged by the idea that it’s part of a long tradition— this tradition of societies counting in base six goes back to the Babylonians. As we know in politics, for example, to make people believe in implausible ideas, like “nation” or “time,” linking back to an old tradition stretching back seemingly to the infinite makes an impact. CH Strangely, when it comes to food at least, the twelve unit only persists with oysters and eggs, which are both very soft— FC And roses. CH And roses too? I don’t know, I never buy roses. I don’t like the idea of looking at dying flowers. But that’s another story. Softness in eggs, oysters, and time—there’s an interesting cohesion for twelve. But getting there strikes me as mysterious. Time is a concept, yes, but on a larger scale it’s based on the rotation of the earth around the sun, the rotation of the moon

around the earth. So we have a calendar that’s seasonal—you need that to calculate for agriculture, when you put your seeds in the soil in order to make the crop grow, and so forth. But when it comes to defining a smaller unit of time than a season, in terms of hours or minutes or seconds, then it becomes implausible, as you said. So why do we need this? Do you think this time—beyond seasonal or planetary time—really exists at all? I think there’s also something you could call evolutionary time, something that, because of a process that’s been going on over a long period, is creating change in many different forms. Then there’s also biological time, which I find very interesting because it’s the only real time I think we have and we don’t even know what it is. FC The problem of whether time is real is a very ancient problem. Saint Augustine used to say, Time is the thing that I know what it is as long as you don’t ask me. The second you ask me, I no longer know what it is. Which I think is spot on. Time refers to change. Going back to the ground zero of the meaning of the term, it refers to change plus observation of change. The fact that there is, to a certain extent at least, visible change, this is something we can say is real. It’s real that we can observe transformations. Now, how much reality or value do we want to give to these transformations is one initial problem, and how much do we want to give to our observation is the second problem. We can disprove both these parts. If we do, then we start really putting time to the side. What’s the problem with the reality of change? We can see that there are many changes, but we can question whether these changes are substantial or just accidental, cosmetic, illusory. Many philosophers see them as illusory, of course. Gregory

Previous spread and opposite: Carsten Höller, Decimal Clock (Blue and Orange), 2023, neon, cables, aluminum structure, DMX boxes, and controller, 91 3⁄8 × 91 3⁄8 inches (232 × 232 cm). Photo: Thomas Lannes This page: Carsten Höller, Half Clock, 2014, neon, cables, stainless steel, acrylic glass, DMX boxes, and controller, 24 7⁄8 × 31 ½ × 31 ½ inches (63 × 80 × 80 cm). Photo: Attilio Maranzano

Palamas, a Byzantine theologian of the fourteenth century, made a distinction between two aspects of God. One is the essence of God, the ousia, which is invisible and we don’t see it. One is the energy of God, the energeia, which consists of visible transformations. The world is one of these energies. Now God has to be located in both parts, but let’s say the fundamental part is the ousia, the essence, the unchanging one, the eternal one. So if we focus on change, we’re focusing on the illusory aspect, not in the sense that it’s false but in the sense that it has no substantial reality. You find a similar intuition in Buddhism, of course, especially in Chan Buddhism, where one must consider both aspects but appreciate that the aspect of change is not substantially important. You cannot rest your case on it. We could say in a sense that what we have is a reality that in itself is outside of time. But this unchanging, eternal reality, it’s as if it were constantly—since you were talking about food—digesting itself. And this infinite process of self-digestion is change. We can observe this change, and notice regularities in this process of endless digestion of reality, and on the basis of these regularities we can try to find a certain rhythm. From there we slowly move toward the idea of meaning. The observation of these changes, and the counting of these changes as we observe them, that’s what we call time. And you see that at this point we’re far removed from the ground zero of reality. We’re so many layers removed that we’re talking about a matter of administration of our lives rather than a matter of metaphysics. CH You speak about something outside of change. I don’t really understand what you mean by that, because it seems to me that change is the only

constant factor we can absolutely rely on. Nothing can evade change. Just like time, there’s no way out of it. Or do you think there’s a way of stepping out of time? Can you somehow break this dominance and this hierarchy of something you’re subjected to—because it’s not really you who’s deciding about the change you then call time, but it’s something you have to deal with. To go back to the idea of biological time in terms of a biological clock, there’s some kind of internal mechanism, something that counts time because it has to make you die at some point. At some point—not yet for you, as far as I can see—it makes your hair gray. It’s an active process. Genes have been counting time inside your body to the moment when you start this peculiar aging process, which means that at a given moment in time, you have to die. This seems to be common to all forms of life. So this connection between time and being alive, isn’t that the main thing? FC You bring up many interesting things. I’d like to start from the beginning, though: how can there be anything unchanging if change seems to be the only sure thing? Now, thinking logically, if we have something that exists and that undergoes endless transformations, then the transformations might continuously modify the shape of what there is. That thing never has the same shape, the same form, but it’s constantly there, so there’s a continuum of existence through change. Existence itself, which in a sense is the most important thing, is what keeps us all up, and it’s unchanging. Just as, in order to have observation, you need to have an observer at a distance from the object being observed to a certain extent, to have transformation you need a substratum, an unchanging ground. So, paradoxically, change is only made possible by the

fact that there’s a bedrock that doesn’t change. So there is, in a sense, something that’s already outside of time, and we find it precisely at the heart of what changes. In reference to the later questions, when you were talking about biological time, of course we see, for example, that organisms that are these conglomerates of matter are conglomerates of change. I agree with you there: what we fantasize as stable matter is in fact in constant change. It’s a constant fluid. But this fluid tries to create patterns. The particular pattern that is me has a certain regularity, it seems, more or less, that makes me undergo certain transformations. And inasmuch as I can observe it, okay, I can see that this begins being observable at a certain point and then stops being observable as that thing at another point, like the beginning of life and the end of life. It’s also related to memory: what we say is that our biological life is a series of changes and transformations as we observe them, as we catalogue them, as we define them. Do we really want to assign to that pattern the word “life”? It’s an arbitrary decision that we put together the term “life” and the term “biology.” But I think we might be missing something: that thing in me that observes these transformations is alive, equally alive as the rest of the body. That thing being capable of observing is also separate. Then it’s somehow part of life, but being separate is outside of time. Do you see what I mean? CH I don’t agree. But go on. FC Limiting the definition of life simply to the pattern of biological changes might be hindering in the sense that we’re assigning the term “life” to something accidental and not substantial. CH If there’s only planetary movements around 139

Carsten Höller, Divisions Circle (Prussian Blue Lines on Orange Background), 2018, linen canvas, Flashe Vinyl paint, diameter: 35 ½ inches (90 cm). Photo: Carl Henrik Tillberg Artwork © Carsten Höller

the sun, and there’s maybe only change but no time, then what this implies is that you have time as a circular movement, not as a linear thing that progresses. If so, then I don’t think you can really step out of it. If it’s a circular thing, it’s not really change in the end. It’s just endless repetition of an infinite number of possibilities. It just goes around and around and around and it never gets anywhere. So in that sense, maybe the biological clock is the only clock that really counts; it’s the thing that makes us come and go, appear, disappear. FC Yes. I mean, the biological clock, a clock that basically sets the pace for your movement toward death—that clock is fundamental. That was also, for example, Heidegger’s way of understanding time. In Heidegger, the idea is that you live an authentic life, as opposed to an inauthentic one, when you realize that as long as a person is born, he’s old enough to die. All creatures are thrown toward death, but human beings are the only ones who are aware of this. And we have to understand time as measuring the distance toward this event of death, which could come at any moment. But I would contend, once again, that even the case of how we understand that in Heidegger is very similar to the idea of measuring time toward eternity, because the event of death is also an event at which you’re not present. It’s an event that is somehow outside of your immediate experience. It’s detached from you. With all these things you were mentioning, all the different types of time, I’d say that technically they’re just observation of changes. So you’re measuring changes, then you’re observing them, then you’re tracing patterns, and then you’re giving a value judgment to your observations—you’re saying my observations are, first, correct, second, 140

real, and important in that they say something. But you know, the degrees of mental pathology are assigned in relation to the extent to which you give importance to patterns. When you give too much importance to identifying patterns everywhere, that’s pareidolia, which goes toward schizophrenia and is considered a form of pathology. But you can also decide to go to the other side and give no importance to patterns whatsoever, and to simply say, I have these observations, sometimes I see these patterns, but they count for nothing. And that’s mysticism. So what I’d suggest is that you can decide to what extent you want to assign importance to these observations. It might be limiting to somehow identify the fantasy or ghost of life, which is a concept we hold very important, with certain pattern recognitions. We can do it, there’s nothing against it, but we can also not do it, and that would be equivalent. Do you see what I mean? I think concentrating on the unchanging aspect rather than on the changing aspect has a strong practical value: It makes you focus on the fact that you can continue observing this change while controlling your emotional reaction to your observations. It’s very similar with psychedelics: you observe changes that are outside your control. Sometimes they seem to have patterns or tendencies, and some of these tendencies may seem terrifying; and at that point the challenge is to try to observe them and not lose your well-being. It’s like a meditation: you need to detach yourself, at least metaphysically. You can do this by identifying with the aspect of eternity rather than with the aspect of time. CH Also with psychedelics, they show you that the perception of time is mutable. We think our perception of time is something that happens while

we’re awake, but it’s not really true, because even when we wake up after sleep, we know roughly if it was a long sleep or a short one. But psychedelics can dramatically alter that perception, which is revealing about the flexibility of our experience of time. 5-MeO-DMT, which is a psychedelic found in plants and in a toad—the whole experience is fifteen minutes or so, but it’s very, very, very strong, it blows you away: it makes you perceive those minutes as hours, if not days, or even some kind of glimpse of eternity, which is remarkable because normally that experience would mean pathology is lurking. It’s really an excursion into a pathological state of mind that’s unable to deal with time anymore, and gets out of it. And once you’re out of it, you’re really lost, because you lose all functional ability. A way to measure time also is a way of getting a grasp on life in some way. Here I think we can make an interesting turn to your book Prophetic Culture [2021], where you speak about the necessity of dividing things into units. If you just perceive the world as a big continuous whole, a big ever-changing whole, you won’t be able to relate to it, you won’t be able to understand anything. FC What you were saying about the perception of time, and its shifting through the use of psychedelics, is key. I think those chemicals give you an immediate sense of to what extent time is a function of attention: depending on how you exert your attention, then somehow time seems to be stretching around it. It’s as if attention were equivalent to what in physics is the gravitational pull. At a point of high gravitational pull, time moves very fast, while outside only five minutes seem to have passed. This is connected to the necessity of dividing.

We tend to have this immediate—it seems almost automatic—tendency toward dividing what’s around us. What is around us approaches us as indistinct, even just visually. The image that you see of the room around you is indistinct. It’s one image, but then you divide it into many different, discrete elements, each of which has certain qualities, a particular name and way you interact with it. This is how we’re able to functionalize the space around us. The ground zero of our perception is not like that. The ground zero is simply there is one. The risk with psychedelics sometimes, of course, is that if you take them with a wrong attitude, that experience can be hell, you know? So eternity can be home or a terrifying place where you’re lost. For mystics, usually the world of time is defined as a foreign land, so that you live inside time as if you were a foreigner in a foreign land. Hugh of Saint Victor, or Saint Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, writes that we have to live in the world as if we weren’t there. We’re resident aliens, in that common phrase. So home is eternity. Home is the dissolution of everything. Time is the function of all these things. So how we direct our attention, how we invest our belief toward our observations, and how we judge them as relevant, plus to what extent we invest our attention and our belief in the coincidence of this particular pattern with associated social life, creates many different variations. (One reason we divide is to maintain a social life; we must somehow be able to identify each other as distinct individual units, and then everything follows from there.) If you pull some of these levers, time starts to bend until it shatters. If you pull them up to the maximum, then time becomes a real prison, which is precisely what late-capitalist society does. Late-capitalist society is very high on self-identification, on identity, on cataloguing, on associated social life as something that if you get out of it, you’re destroyed. There’s zero belief in eternity. And then time becomes what the American philosopher Jonathan Crary calls the twenty-four/seven hellscape, a constant function that goes together with constant division, constant engineering of everything. CH Getting over this divisional aspect of understanding is one thing that’s been attempted in many different ways through the course of human culture. But there’s another way I’d be interested to hear your opinion about, which is that you do the opposite. You take the object, so to say—whatever you’re looking at, or thinking about, or measuring—and you go on dividing this thing into smaller units until in principle—in mathematical terms it’s not really possible, but in philosophical terms it would maybe be possible—you divide it and divide it and divide it again until nothing is left, which would happen in infinity. Then you would have a similar result as the undivided route. I’ve been using this principle quite a lot, for instance in the Division Paintings series. FC We can get to the same place via two completely alternative routes. I have to say I prefer a mystical route, going toward this idea of existence as an infinite eternal void. But if we go the other way, if we have the contemporary hyperspeed and we push it to the extreme, we accelerate to the maximum, we get to the same position the other way. You can enter it from two ways; it’s the same room, but how you inhabit it is very very different. Nihilism and mysticism are very close, but they’re categorically different. CH It’s always the same pattern. You go to the extremes and then you meet again.

And then you meet again—but you don’t meet again. That’s the difference, though. Entering infinity through the angle of nihilism by accelerating, dividing to the extreme and finding nothing, is very different from the other way, in which you find the root of existence. CH Why is that so? I understand what you’re saying, but is it a qualitative difference or is it really just a division in space, so to say? FC It’s a qualitative difference. If we’re talking about time, we’re touching one of the roots of metaphysics in general. There are very few things that we can say for certain exist. One of those things is existence itself. Another is our awareness, because we are it: we exist and we are aware. That’s all we know. And the third category we can say for certain exists is pleasure and pain, joy and suffering. In Buddhism, the noble truths recognize the ontological existence of suffering. So whether something is approached in a way that enhances suffering or whether something is approached in a way that brings suffering down and enhances joy is not just a matter of “stiff upper lip” and “suffer through it.” It’s the fact that we’re touching one of the ontological components of reality. And then it’s a qualitative decision whether we want to go down the route of maximization of pain. We can accelerate the rhythm of our production infinitely, and basically destroy ourselves through the route of a suicidal kind of acceleration of time and infinite identification with names, with languages, with society, with division. It will be a route of infinite suffering. And since we’re talking about one of the few things that we know exists in reality, we have to be careful how we handle it. I’d suggest qualitatively to take the other path, the one that goes toward the eradication of suffering, which, by the way, is the basis of not only Buddhism but many aspects of other Indian religions. CH I’m not a philosopher, but our decision-making in principle is mainly based on the avoidance of pain, which we have been actually quite successful at, if you think about it. If you compare how we lived in former times with how we live now, the avoidance of pain has become a stronger motivation—the avoidance of pain and the maximization of fun. Wouldn’t it be good enough to say, you know, we need neither pain nor fun, we can live perfectly well without them? We don’t need the pleasure principle as something governing all our lives, we can just organize ourselves and get our things done and try to find something in the middle unlinked to these emotional states. FC In Latin, you would say the aurea mediocritas, the golden mean. But that is epicureanism, and this is something worth considering. At some point in the ancient Mediterranean, you had a very developed society with a lot of poor people on the margins. Inside there was a lot of wealth, but political action was completely out of possibility for everyone; you basically had a situation like ours today, a constant militarization. In that world, philosophy moved away from metaphysical speculation to the problem of how we live, how we deal with suffering, and they generated many different solutions, such as stoicism and aspects of cynicism and epicureanism. And that was fantastic because then, philosophy was self-help in the best meaning of the word. Basically it was the equivalent of psychotherapy, mathematics, and philosophy today, but all combined in one. The problem was exactly what you were mentioning: how do we deal with suffering? And the solution was what you mentioned: in a sense, it’s not detaching ourselves FC

completely, denying the reality of the physical world, of changes and transformations in the patterns that we recognize and so on and so forth, but rather regulating how much we want to attach ourselves to them. We need to avoid the pit of desperation in which we attach ourselves to something so much that when we lose it, we’re destroyed, the peak of gluttony. Epicurus himself, for example, used to say that his happiness was a glass of water and a piece of cheese, but not too much cheese. Today the problem is that we don’t seem to be considering the aspect of suffering seriously enough, in a way. CH Why is this collective recognition of suffering not happening? Is it something that we don’t see or—because it’s very obvious, no? Why aren’t we able to focus? It’s like we’re all busy with so many different things at the same time, and if we get something done, we begin three more things to get even busier. The fear of free time and then the necessity of filling it with fun—I’ll say clearly that I’m against fun—is a remarkable phenomenon. FC I think the way we’re acting today makes sense in relation to a particular idea of reality and of our life. This crazy continuous attempt to expand our life, to live until we’re 120 . . . the fact that you never retire, that you work every day of your life, that you’re impoverished, paying rent every day, that doesn’t matter. It’s going to be a shit life, but the important thing is that it’s as long as possible. This makes sense through the idea that basically life, reality, is just a thin crust over an abyss of nothingness in the hellish sense. And the point is that we’re trying to sustain this crust, which is constantly breaking so we infinitely have to mend it. And this is a very anxious feeling. It’s like certain forms of self-care, such as training and the gym. Some people have this relationship with their body—they want to go beyond the process of aging, as if they were constantly trying to mend this rotting fabric. That reflects a particular belief that what’s outside, beyond time, beyond the world, beyond the identification, is not something, it’s nothingness. It’s a devouring monster, like Apophis in Egyptian mythology, the big snake that devours all the worlds. Another way to farm time more intensively, to focus it differently, is to believe—and once again, this is just a belief—that what surrounds our time is not this devouring monster that we must constantly fend off, at the cost of renouncing the pleasure of life, but something else, and that something is fundamentally the thing that is holding you up. The difference is everything. You don’t change the condition of reality—reality remains as it is, whatever we think of it—but you completely change the experience of life. You have it in Sufism, the idea that there’s always one person in the world who is basically a saint, and that person is holding up the world with his or her own enlightenment. The enlightenment of this person living in hiding is sustaining everyone, but nobody perceives it. In order to farm time differently, it’s not enough to restructure society, because then you try to impose on it, police it, which is not only ethically wrong but just doesn’t work. The French Revolution, for example, worked so-so, and actually failed precisely because it failed to do that. You need to modify the metaphysical.

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��REEN TIME A CONVERSATION WITH NEIL LEACH

BY �SHLEY OVER�EEK 147

ASHLEY OVERBEEK SPEAKS WITH ARCHITECT AND THEORIST NEIL LEACH ABOUT THE LIGHT AND DARK SIDES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SHAPING OUR BUILT ENVIRONMENT. ASHLEY OVERBEEK: You’re publishing two books on AI and its impact on the field of architecture: Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, which you call “a celebration of the positive contributions of AI,” and The Death of the Architect, a more cautionary tale of the “dark side of AI” that outlines the risks AI poses to “unemployment, surveillance, and the loss of personal freedom.” How do you balance the utopian and dystopian visions of this technology? NEIL LEACH: In a nutshell, I would say that I find AI amazing, but terrifyingly amazing. And I think about these two volumes, one white, one black, a bit like the yin/yang symbol: each contains a bit of each other in some sense. I think the dark side comes out of the light side. AI has amazing potential—after all, ChatGPT already knows 10,000 times what any human knows, and AI will soon be a billion times smarter than us. But that itself is a little scary. Also, with any tool, much depends on who uses it and for what. You can use a kitchen knife to slice up vegetables or to murder someone. But when tools become autonomous, they become even more scary: [Berkeley computer-science professor] Stuart Russell Previous spread: Neil Leach, Monolith, 2023, digital image generated using Midjourney v 5.2 Below: Neil Leach, Brazilian Mies, 2023, digital image generated using Midjourney v 5.2 Opposite: Neil Leach, Red Villa in Yosemite, 2023, digital image generated using Midjourney v 5.2

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produced a movie called Slaughterbots [2017] that shows how autonomous drones could be incredibly dangerous by using AI to identify, select, and kill human targets without human intervention. AO: What about AI in the hands of artists and architects? NL: I’m not sure that I’m qualified to talk about artists, but architects such as Zaha Hadid Architects are currently using AI to brainstorm possibilities at the beginning of a project and to come up with a far greater range of potential options than they could otherwise have imagined. Of course, at the moment AI is only generating 2D images, but new AI software is currently under development that will radically transform the entire design process. In two to three years time, we’ll be operating in 3D on a single platform, with all constraints—building codes, cost, structural performance, and so on—built into the system, so that design itself will effectively become automated. This will make design so much easier. Eventually AI might be able to design a building completely autonomously. But there’s a dark side to this too: once we have self-driving cars, we might not need drivers, and once AI is able to design a building by itself, perhaps we won’t need architects anymore. AO: You argue that AI is a prosthetic that augments humans to become superhuman. How can we think about this blend of human- and machine-created design? NL: Mario Klingemann, a pioneering German AI artist, uses the analogy of a piano player: when a song is played, you don’t say that the piano is responsible, you say the pianist or the composer is responsible. Klingemann uses a computer the way someone uses a piano, but instead of striking the keyboard to make music, he strikes his keyboard to make code. In the end, the author is a person who uses a machine. On a related note, on the topic of copyright; AI doesn’t copy. The architectural historian Mario Carpo recently published an essay called “Imitation Games” [Artforum, Summer 2023] on the subject, claiming that AI is all about imitation. But he got it wrong: AI absolutely doesn’t copy. It searches and synthesizes images in often highly novel and unpredictable ways. I’ll give you a personal example. I once was doing a design exercise based on Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion [1929]. I generated, maybe, I don’t know, 10,000 outcomes. None of them were the same. None at all. The AI application I was using, Midjourney, treated the building like some kind of language-

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AI SERVES TO EXPAND THE RANGE OF POSSIBILITIES OF WHAT WE CAN IMAGINE SO THAT IT BECOMES A PROSTHESIS TO THE IMAGINATION.

of-shape grammar that could be transformed into any number of different permutations, but it never replicated the original building. Now humans copy. This is fundamental to how we operate, as people like Theodor Adorno have recognized: “A human only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.” It’s how culture catches on. You see someone wearing the latest fashion and you start wearing the same. You pick up expressions, tunes, and so on—that’s how culture propagates, through mimicry. So it’s endemic anyway. I think it becomes very murky in any case when it comes to the world of art, because where do you draw the line between collage, where you’re allowed to lift elements from others, and an original artwork itself? Copyright law is a little vague on these issues. The only really obvious contravention of copyright law would be if these companies were to scrape information or data from the Internet that’s copyright protected. AO: It sounds like the decisions made are ultimately human but the number of choices that a human can make are broadened with AI, like your 10,000 outcomes generated from Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion. NL: Exactly. I wrote in my book about what’s called a gan, a Generative Adversarial Network, which before these diffusion models was the best method for using AI to generate images. And what’s interesting about a gan is it’s made up of these two neural networks competing against one another. One is a generator churning out stuff, right? Then one is the discriminator saying, “That’s not good enough, that’s not good enough, that’s not good enough.” You can think of it a bit like the generator is someone producing fake art, a fake Van Gogh for example, and the discriminator’s a bit like the critic saying “No, that’s not a Van Gogh, that’s not a Van Gogh.” In the process, the discriminator trains the generator to improve. And it’s actually quite similar to the model of how we humans operate: creative people need feedback, criticism, to improve 150

their work. Now obviously diffusion models, such as DALL·E and Midjourney, have now replaced gans and operate in a fundamentally different way. They’re massive pretrained generic models and generate outcomes based on verbal “prompts.” And they’re much better than gans. They’re quicker than gans, generate better outcomes, and require no advanced technological understanding on the part of the user. But nonetheless the model of the gan still helps to explain what’s happening when we use diffusion models to generate images: AI effectively becomes the generator and we take on the role of the discriminator. Human beings are very, very good discriminators. You sniff a perfume, you can immediately say “I like that.” You sip a cocktail, you immediately know if it tastes good or not. You see a painting, immediately you can judge it. But although we like to think we’re good at generating new ideas, we’ve actually got a relatively limited range of imagination. AI serves to expand the range of possibilities of what we can imagine so that it becomes a prosthesis to the imagination. And what’s

Opposite, top: Neil Leach, House by a Brook, 2023, digital image generated using Midjourney v 5.2 Above: Neil Leach, Villa in the Austrian Alps, 2023, digital image generated using Midjourney v 5.2 Opposite, bottom: Neil Leach, Beverly Hills, Case Study House, 2023, digital image generated using Midjourney v 5.2

happening now is that AI is enhancing our ability to imagine and create. AO: So does that mean that it’s a shift away from human creativity and more into human curation? And does the creativity now lie within the machine? NL: What’s interesting is that you need to be a good designer to use Midjourney effectively to create good designs, because you’ve got to have a “good eye” to pick the best option out of all the outcomes the program will produce. It’s generating options but you’re the final discriminator. So what AI is doing is shifting the nature of production itself: instead of producing designs all on our own, we now become the curator, the discriminator, the critic evaluating outcomes generated by AI. It’s like with a camera: in the old days we would carefully set up the perfect shot, but now we take a range of sample shots, select the best, and then edit and enhance it. The question of creativity is a really interesting one. ChatGPT and Midjourney are based on pretrained neural networks called Large Language Models. Now these work incredibly well, but we don’t know quite why they work so well. They appear to have developed somewhat mysterious “emergent capabilities.” By this I mean they’ve taught themselves to write, translate, generate code, and—I would maintain—design without being specifically trained to do so. Again, this is amazing but also somewhat terrifying. In fact, the historian Yuval Harari observes that AI has now hacked our human operating system: language. And once you control language, you control everything. I would go further and claim that they’ve also hacked our visual operating system: art and design. Just look at these AI-generated images. I didn’t specify any detail in the prompt beyond a term like “house,” but AI generated

the whole composition all on its own. Effectively, it designed everything. And that I find astonishing. Now, if you think frankly about what these machines are doing, they’re just operating efficiently as machines and coming up with a range of options. That’s very much a mechanical task in some sense, and maybe what we call creativity—which, again, we don’t all fully align on a universal definition—is a bit like magic. Of course, magic doesn’t technically exist. A magician simply does a “trick,” concealing the operations at work, so as to dupe the audience into thinking that it’s magic. Now Arthur C. Clarke is reputed to have said that magic is simply whatever science has not explained yet. So perhaps these mysterious skills— these “emergent capabilities”—that AI has developed are simply the result of a process that science has not explained yet. In other words, magic is not magical, and creativity is not magical. We just use this vague term, “creative,” because we don’t actually understand what’s happening. And I would say what we call “creative” in this sense is simply a logical process in searching out the best solution. AO: So does this critique of AI creativity also relate to human creativity? NL: Yes. I think actually what makes AI interesting in many ways is it becomes a mirror in which we can understand ourselves. And that I think is one of the issues coming out, the whole question of, Are we really so creative? Neural networks are one way to train an AI model, and they’re loosely modeled on the way our brains work. Loosely. But every now and again, these processes give us a sense of how we operate. So if we take the ChatGPT example, of the GPT model just predicting the next word, and out of that, out of that simple process, predicting the next word, for everything else that comes after—if its process is so straightforward, then maybe the human composition of sentences is more straightforward than we ever thought? And might the same principle also apply to images? Might we generate images in a manner not so dissimilar from how Midjourney generates images? So AI processes become an interesting mirror in which we can see both similarities and differences between ourselves and AI. AO: In what other ways is the philosophical conversation around AI evolving? NL: I think we need to step back and realize that actually not only is AI different from human intelligence, it’s also superior. And I think our real problem up until now is that we’ve been taking a human-centered view on developments in AI, saying, well, it can’t do what we can do, it has no consciousness, it can’t do this, it hasn’t done that, and so on. I think we need to change our approach and think about what AI can do that we can’t do. That’s why in some of my writing and my lectures I talk about the second Copernican revolution. In other words, we need to stop thinking we’re the center of intelligence in the universe and recognize that there’s something out there that’s much smarter than us; and realize that, you know, really we have our limitations. 151

ART OF BIOGRAPHY:

COSMIC

SCHOLAR

HARRY

THE LIFE & TIMES OF

SMITH BY JOHN SZWED

When Harry Smith died impoverished in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel in 1991, few could have imagined the posthumous fame that would follow. He was a legendary figure in the rarefied world of underground film, but his Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) would not be reissued for another six years and his visual art was completely unknown. Those works of his that were not long destroyed in the chaos of his life were scattered far and wide. But artists’ works have a way of making a space for themselves, and with each passing year Smith’s accomplishments—in film, painting, anthropology, musicology—have become increasingly germane to our time. His work is now enjoying a retrospective survey at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art (Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, October 4, 2023— January 28, 2024). Organized by the esteemed curator Elisabeth Sussman, the show is cocurated by Dan Byers, Director at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; the artist Carol Bove, one of Smith’s most important advocates, and the designer of the exhibition; and Rani Singh, head of the Harry Smith Archives. John Szwed is one of the preeminent music biographers of our time (Sun Ra, Billie Holiday, Alan Lomax, Miles Davis). His most recent book is the improbably best-selling biography Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith. Few people are better qualified to tackle Smith’s multiple artistic personalities. Former professor of anthropology, African-American studies, and film studies for twenty-six years at Yale University, Szwed was also a professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University and served as the chair of the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, Raymond Foye sits down with him to discuss his book and approach to biography. Foye has written extensively on Smith’s work, was a personal friend, and with Singh curated the first exhibition of Smith’s visual art, at the James Cohan Gallery, New York, in 2001. RAYMOND FOYE John, you write amusingly in the

preface to Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra [2020] that Sun Ra denied being born, avoided using words like “birth” and “death,” disallowed any earthly origins, and in fact rejected being human. His timeline stretched between ancient Egypt, Alabama, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Saturn. This sounds like very good preparation for writing about Harry Smith. JOHN SZWED There are a number of similarities between Sun Ra and Harry Smith: both were Previous spread: Allen Ginsberg, Harry Smith in profile, April 22, 1996, New York City. By permission of the Allen Ginsberg Trust This page: Harry Smith, Study for Film 9, Prelude B. Lost work, 35mm slide, courtesy Estate of Jordan Belson/ courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Harry Smith, Study for Film 9, Fugue C. Lost work, 35mm slide, courtesy Estate of Jordan Belson/ courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

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Opposite: Allen Ginsberg, Harry Smith demonstrating string figures, March 21, 1988, New York City. By permission of the Allen Ginsberg Trust

unique, long lived, and created a mythology unto themselves. Both were virtual unknowns for much of their careers, who gave their lives, often risked their lives, for art that they knew was unlikely to be acknowledged. The complexity and effort that went into their life’s work was astonishing and daunting. I felt I should give as much as I could to their work, all the while knowing that my efforts would be meager and incomplete. Keep in mind that Sun Ra was a virtual unknown when I began that book. RF Like Sun Ra, you were born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. Is there some aspect of your childhood, growing up in that place, that shaped your vocation as a biographer? JS Oh yes, in so many ways. I have a strong memory of life in the South, from the bottom up— raised by struggling parents, living in a shotgun shack, visiting country relatives in even worse

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straits. Even as a child it seemed to me weird that they saw themselves as at least one step above their Black nonneighbors. Even weirder, that they admired so much about the lives of those they disdained. Then there was the music. It was impossible not to hear Black music of every kind on the radio, from gospel quartets to string bands, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues. The radio dial was the one place that wasn’t segregated. RF You’ve written some of my favorite biographies, yet every time I talk to you, you seem so disillusioned with the genre. JS I’m not a fan of biographies, generally. There’s too much speculation, amateur psychologizing, that sort of thing. Martin Amis said it very well: “The trouble with life . . . is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending.” What I always learn after writing a biography are my limitations as observer and writer, and the arrogance of attempting to represent another person. RF Come on, John, we’re supposed to be plugging a book. Cosmic Scholar has become hugely successful. JS It’s really weird. Harry’s carrying me, man. Both the Harry Smith and the Sun Ra books were hard sells, because they were virtual unknowns who had pretty much given their life for art. In each case only about two publishers were interested in either one of them. The editors said either that they hadn’t heard of him, or else they had heard of him and didn’t want to hear anymore. RF There’s something about Harry that just never ceases to fascinate, because the questions he asks are the questions of our times. But do you have a little bit of concern, as I do, that he’s going to be subsumed into the culture, the way our culture consumes everything and everybody? I guess it’s inevitable. JS Well, I saw this happen with Sun Ra, who is now being celebrated as a forerunner of Afrofuturism—and I can buy that. But this image of him as a sort of Mister Rogers in space, a kindly, affable figure—the guy was scary! Even the musicians were afraid of him at times. It’s hard to get that across. He would change gears in a blink. RF I know what you mean. I saw a photograph the other day of Harry in the Chelsea Hotel from the 1960s and it really brought back a side of him that was scary, manipulative, nefarious, diabolic. Not the genial figure he has become for most people today. I don’t think people understand just Opposite: Harry Smith, Aleph, c. 1953, ink on paper, 7 × 5 inches (17.8 × 12.7 cm), private collection. Photo: courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York This page: Harry Smith, Film No. 3, c. 1947, 16 mm hand-painted film, 10 minutes. Image: courtesy Anthology Film Archives, New York Harry Smith, Film No. 3, c. 1947, 16 mm hand-painted film, 10 minutes. Image: courtesy Anthology Film Archives, New York

how dangerous and crazy he was. Were there any things you learned about him in writing this book that really surprised you? JS Oh, there were so many. It’s not a big thing, but the fact that he had no FBI file really surprised me, because everybody in the ’60s counterculture had a file, sometimes thousands of pages. On Harry they had absolutely nothing. RF Another good example of his magic. Was there a part of the stor y that was especially problematic? JS I don’t think I ever got New York in the ’70s entirely right. It was overwhelming. It becomes very easy to forget that you have a subject in front of you. RF One thing I like about your books is that even though they’re about legendary figures, you strip

a lot of the myth away, without diminishing your subjects. JS To see Harry as the quintessential hippie, or Sun Ra as a paragon of Black nationalism, it’s just too easy. It’s important to realize that no life is ever lived in the way a biography is written. RF Were there any aspects of Harry that you couldn’t come to grips with? JS The occult and alchemy I never really got. There’s no end to figuring that one out. These were things I knew nothing about. I had to apologize to Harry’s friend Bill Breeze, who spent a long time with me, giving me documents and talking about Aleister Crowley and the occult. It would have taken me a year to get up to speed on that subject. Plus, what do we do when Harry is making fun of those things? 157

Harry Smith, Untitled [Zodiacal hexagram scratchboard], c. 1952, India ink on cardstock, 7 × 5 ½ inches (17.8 x 14 cm), Lionel Ziprin Archive, New York. Photo: courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

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This is a common trait of the shaman: on the one hand a magician, but on the other hand a huckster and a charlatan. You find this all through anthropological accounts. It’s all wrapped up into a very confusing and contradictory package. JS I had to realize that I didn’t know enough about Harry to explain a lot of things about him. I even had to get up to speed on things that I knew about. I would beware of anyone who said they understood Harry’s whole life, or make that claim about anyone. I mean, what does it mean to know? The anthropologist Franz Boas notoriously told his students, who were collecting every bit of information in sight, that it was up to them to figure it out, and Harry said the same thing. He named all the things he was doing and said, Let somebody else figure out what it means. RF A biography is many things: an outer life, an inner life, the work, the friends and colleagues, the times. As a biographer, how do you manage all these things? JS How did I manage it, if I did? It was by reading and listening to people who had lived in those eras and seeing if I could shine a light on the background without going off subject. Harry must have faced this problem too. You’ve got a lot of good stuff, but you’ve got to ignore some of it. And that’s always the challenge for the biographer. How does one stay on track while at the RF

same time branching off to explore these other lives? The people around the main subject are in effect character actors, yet often so appealing in their own right, and this was especially true for Harry. How do you avoid drifting off subject when you’re obliged to introduce them? With figures like Lionel Ziprin, Bill Heine, and many others, I kept putting the book down to research more about them. The curiosity becomes contagious. In many ways a biography is not so much about the person as about all the people who knew that person. RF Another question that comes up with biographies is, Where does the biographer draw the line in terms of the personal/intimate/erotic side of their subject’s life? What is off limits? What matters and what is simply prurient? JS One of the most-asked questions about people I’ve written about is their sexuality. I was accused by one reviewer of being too timid to “out” Sun Ra, so he did it, based on what he’d heard some people say. But we’ll never know what those people said, or if they even said anything. I think I could write a whole book about what I’ve been told about Miles Davis, for instance. There was a whole array of claims and contradictions on all sides of the subject. When once I asked where a person got a story about Miles, the teller said, “What, you want proof? Miles belongs to everybody.” And that’s the good and bad part of the story, right? Some things are too hard to write about convincingly. RF You must have a few favorite biographies by others? JS Actually, one book I really like in the genre is Bill Heward’s Some Are Called Clowns: A Season with the Last of the Great Barnstorming Baseball Teams [1974]. The team was called the Indianapolis Clowns and they were the last surviving team of what was known as the Negro Leagues, where many great major-league players got their start. They went from town to town and they were paid to play, and they would challenge local teams, what was known as barnstorming, and they were bizarre. The shortstop was seven feet tall, the first-base man only had one arm, some were clowns, contortionists, midgets. When they came out in the first inning the pitcher and the catcher were all they had. In the course of telling the story, all kinds of crazy stuff comes up, like wandering around South Carolina looking for the legendary Dr. Buzzard, a voodoo witch doctor who baseball players went to to up their averages. It was a large picture of this world outside of professional baseball where these people came from. Now a similar thing in another book is Nick Tosches’s Where Dead Voices Gather [2001], which was supposedly a book on a white minstrel singer, Emmett Miller, but Miller doesn’t appear very often because the writer wanders so much. It’s not a conventional biography but it’s fascinating and it tells the story of an America that isn’t there anymore, a complicated mix of races and styles and cultures. Anyway, I call those “big picture” books and I really like how they set their subjects in place inside a much larger social milieu. RF Well, both these books describe Harry’s life in a curious way: the traveling circus, the social irritant. That’s what makes for a great biography for me—a sense of the milieu, the social and cultural environment that the subject emerges from and is part of, and how the subject butts up against these norms.

STANLEY WHITNEY

How High the Moon

February 9–May 27, 2024

The catalogue for Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon was produced with support from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. The exhibition is supported by a grant from the Robert Lehman Foundation.

DEUTSCH

RECOLLECTIONS 160

LAND 83

OF A CURATOR 161

Forty years ago, Richard Calvocoressi made a temporary move to Berlin as part of his role as a curator at the Tate. There he was able to observe and encounter the city’s evolving art world. He now reflects on that time and on the artists who were revolutionizing aesthetics in the fraught years preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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How long after the end of World War II did it take German and Austrian artists to reflect on their countries’ recent shared history? How long for the myths of Stunde Null or das erste Opfer to be challenged? Stunde Null, or “zero hour”—implying that Germany’s surrender marked a complete break with the past, a new beginning, as if nothing bad had happened—became something of a mantra in postwar Germany, while Austria successfully portrayed itself as Hitler’s erste Opfer (first victim) rather than a willing participant in Nazi crimes. Forty years ago, in 1983, I had an opportunity to find out answers to these questions. Living in Berlin at what turned out to be a vital moment both politically and art-historically, I had a growing sense that the art being produced in Germany and Austria was unprecedented, and as authentic as anything coming out of London, Paris, or New York. As a thirty-something curator at the Tate Gallery (as it was then called), I had German art as my main responsibility. The director, Alan Bowness, was more sympathetic to the German school than his predecessors, and supported my efforts to represent it in the collection. He dispatched me to West Berlin to make contact with artists, dealers, and collectors and to brush up my German at the Goethe Institute, whose London director had kindly offered me a bursary. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, and the reunification of Germany a year later, Berlin was a surreal place. Governed by the Four Power Agreement of 1971, it was

divided into sectors: its highly militarized eastern half (the Soviet sector) was the de facto capital of Communist East Germany (the GDR), while the security of its western half, where I was heading, was guaranteed by the presence of over 12,000 American, British, and French soldiers, each stationed in their own sectors. They had the right to send patrols into the Soviet sector, leading to some tense standoffs, while Russian troops in turn had the right to patrol the three western sectors. An island of democratic freedom, West Berlin was heavily subsidized by the Federal Republic (West Germany). I met up with a cousin married to a colonel in British military intelligence who sometimes invited me to dinner in their luxurious villa in the wooded suburb of Grunewald. I had been to Berlin before. The first time was in 1967, as a fifteen-year-old, on a school trip to the Soviet Union, when we stopped for a day to sightsee in both halves of the divided city. We crossed from West to East in a bus through Checkpoint Charlie, observed by border guards from their watchtowers. In the evening we caught the night train to Moscow from East Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse station. What I remember most about that visit is the sad condition of many of the historic buildings in the East. You couldn’t get near the Brandenburg Gate for barriers and armed police; but in the nearby Gendarmenmarkt, the French and German churches and the Schauspielhaus, the magnificent theater designed in the 1820s by the great Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel,

were still in a semiruined state, more than twenty years after the end of the war. Ten years later, in 1977, I spent nearly a week in West Berlin touring the Council of Europe’s memorable series of exhibitions Tendenzen der zwanziger Jahre (Trends of the twenties), which I reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement. But I had never lived there long enough to get to know the city well. Now I discovered a lively art scene in Kreuzberg, a working-class district with a substantial immigrant population enclosed on three sides by the Wall. A favorite haunt of artists was Café Exil, which had been founded by the Austrian experimental writer Oswald Wiener and his wife, Ingrid; Exil’s chef and manager later took over the more famous Paris Bar in Charlottenburg. In the 1970s, Exil was the spiritual home of, among others, Günter Brus. Angered by the culture of denial and repression in his home city of Vienna, Brus had staged provocative “actions”—extensions of action painting involving white paint, self-mutilation, and bodily fluids—that earned prison sentences for him and his collaborators Wiener and fellow artist Otto Muehl, causing Brus and Wiener to flee to Berlin. I had already acquired works by the radical Vienna artists Hermann Nitsch and Arnulf Rainer for the Tate—and would later visit these artists in Austria—and on my return to London I added Brus to the list. Bowness had come to an arrangement with his trustees that he could buy up to a certain sum without reference to the full board, and the work of most contemporary German and Austrian artists in the early 1980s fell below that figure. In the early 1980s the group known as the “Junge Wilde” or “Neue Wilde” (the young, or new, wild ones or savages) were all the rage in West Berlin, artists such as Rainer Fetting, K. H. Hödicke, Helmut Middendorf, Luciano Castelli, and Salomé. Turning their backs on avant-garde movements such as conceptual art, installation Previous spread: View of Martin-Gropius-Bau and the Berlin Wall, with the former Nazi Air Ministry building in the background, 1985. Photo: Michael Steiner/imageBROKER Opposite: View of Georg Baselitz’s studio with some of the paintings he showed at Zeitgeist, Schloss Derneberg, West Germany, September 1982. Photo: Richard Calvocoressi

This page: View of one of A. R. Penck’s paintings specially commissioned for the staircase of the MartinGropius-Bau’s Zeitgeist, 1982

art, video art, and so on, they painted pictures. These were mainly executed in a confrontational figurative style using unconstrained brushstrokes and a high-keyed, feverish palette reminiscent of German Expressionism. Their subjects ranged from urban alienation and violence to the hedonistic subculture of Berlin’s punk, nightclub, and gay scenes. Fifty years earlier, the Nazis would have pilloried their work as “degenerate” and they would have been banned from teaching and exhibiting, or worse. Their most persuasive champion was the art historian and critic Wolfgang Max Faust, whose book on contemporary German art, Hunger nach Bildern (Hunger for pictures, coauthored with Gerd de Vries), was an indispensable guide. The cover reproduced a collaborative painting by Walter Dahn and Ji�r í Georg Dokoupil; members of the anarchic Mühlheimer Freiheit group—named after the Cologne street where they shared studios—their paintings owed as much to the absurdism of Dada as to German Expressionism. In 1982 I bought a drawing by the Czech-born Dokoupil—who had escaped from Prague with his family after the Soviet invasion of 1968—from Paul Maenz, the first to exhibit these artists at his gallery in Cologne. Examples of this vibrant, uninhibited art adorned the walls of Faust’s apartment in Berlin, where he invited me for a drink. The Junge Wilde and Mühlheimer Freiheit artists were well represented in Zeitgeist (Spirit of the age), a huge, eclectic show of the latest in contemporary Western painting (and some sculpture),

held from October 1982 to January 1983 in Berlin’s neo-Renaissance Martin-Gropius-Bau. Curated by Norman Rosenthal and Christos Joachimides, the show was a successor to their and Nicholas Serota’s pioneering exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at London’s Royal Academy eighteen months earlier, but put more emphasis on younger artists. Originally built for the applied-arts museum of the Prussian state, the Martin-Gropius-Bau had recently been partly restored and reopened as an exhibitions venue. Scarcely a stone’s throw from the Wall, it was also in the same street that had once housed the headquarters of the SS, the Gestapo, and the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that massacred some two million civilians, mainly Jews, in German-occupied Europe and the Soviet Union. Its upstairs galleries provided an uninterrupted view of Hermann Goering’s monolithic air ministry, one of the few Nazi buildings to survive the bombing of Berlin and still very much in use by the East German regime. (It was where it was founded in 1949.) In June 1953, during the shortlived uprising that year against the Communist government, the building had been targeted by striking workers before they were brutally suppressed by Soviet tanks. On my final visit to East Berlin, in early 1990, after the fall of the Wall but before the elections in East Germany that resulted in reunification, I was able for the first time to walk round the outside of the Reichsmarschall’s former power base—acres of monotonous unadorned classical architecture designed to intimidate—and to 163

Above: Anselm Kiefer, Dem unbekannten Maler (To the Unknown Painter), 1982, emulsion, shellac, acrylic, straw, and woodcut (paper) on canvas, 110 5 ⁄8 × 134 3 ⁄8 inches (281 × 341.5 cm), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Atelier Anselm Kiefer

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imagine the garden party that Goering had held there for more than 2,000 guests during the 1936 summer Olympics. Now that the Wall had been demolished and the “death strip” running alongside it ploughed up, the building was in the middle of a wasteland. I took our twelve-year-old son, feeling that he should see a segment of history before it all disappeared. This charged location was not lost on participants in the Zeitgeist exhibition. Andy Warhol, for example, showed his Zeitgeist series (1982), in which photographic images of Prussian neoclassical architecture such as Friedrich Gilly’s 1797 design for a monument to Frederick II, and of Albert Speer’s “Cathedrals of Light” propaganda spectacles, were silk-screened onto canvas in combinations of bright synthetic colors, and multiplied. Their cool irony was in conspicuous contrast to the subjective character of much of the figurative expressionism on display. In addition to Warhol, Zeitgeist featured an impressive roster of American artists, including James Lee Byars, Robert Morris, Susan Rothenberg (the only woman in a show of forty-six artists from eight countries), David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Frank Stella, and Cy Twombly. Salle was one of eight artists commissioned to paint four large canvases, each four by three meters, for the building’s two-storied atrium. Another was the British artist Bruce McLean, then

resident in West Berlin on a daad (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship. Since the 1960s, this program, funded by the Federal Republic, had enabled hundreds of artists, architects, writers, composers, and filmmakers from abroad to spend a year working or studying in West Berlin, helping to give the marooned city not only a raison d’être but a cosmopolitan cultural identity that it hadn’t enjoyed since the heady days of the Weimar Republic. The scheme continued in a reduced form after the end of the Cold War, its recipients including the British sculptors Rachel Whiteread (1992–93) and Mona Hatoum (2003–4). My wife [Francesca] and I stayed with McLean for the opening of Zeitgeist. He and his family occupied an enormous studio-cum-apartment in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, a nineteenth-century former hospital in Kreuzberg that the daad used to accommodate visiting artists. It was not unheard of for artists to stay on in West Berlin after their year came to an end. Ed Kienholz, for example, having been awarded a daad grant in 1972–73, lived for half of every year there until his death, at his home in Idaho in 1994. On a scouting trip for the Tate in 1981 I spent a memorable afternoon in Berlin with Kienholz and his wife, Nancy Reddin. He was in the process of finishing In the Infield was Patty Peccavi, a haunting assemblage on the subject of contraception, guilt, and

the Catholic church, featuring a life-size figure of a seated naked woman. His studio was littered with objects that he had picked up in the Trödelmarkt, Berlin’s flea market, to use in future works. His Volksempfängers (People’s receiver) series, for example, incorporated old radio receivers, used as propaganda instruments during the Third Reich, that he had bought in the market along with other memorabilia of the period. He said he was fascinated by the war, which he felt had destroyed a whole generation. Francesca joined us and that evening we all met up with the kinetic sculptor George Rickey (another former daad scholar) and his wife. The six of us dined in a restaurant chosen by Rickey that specialized in Franconian cuisine. Rickey was a fund of information on what to do and see in Berlin. Unlike Rickey, Kienholz spoke hardly a word of German, but his ample frame exuded bonhomie and he was clearly popular with the restaurant staff. In his cowboy boots and Stetson hat, he looked like a prosperous farmer (he told me he was a farmer’s son). The next morning Francesca and I crossed over into East Berlin to see the Schinkel bicentenary exhibition at the Altes Museum (which Schinkel designed) on the Museumsinsel. We joined a long queue snaking round the Lustgarten in the piercing March wind, but when a young couple in front of us heard us speaking English, we were ushered to the head. Afterward we walked to the Gendarmenmarkt, where I was pleased to see that Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus was at last being restored. Having each had to exchange twenty-five West German marks into East German currency at Checkpoint Charlie on our way in, we were flush with money, but there was little to spend it on. Lunch for two at the opera house on Unter den Linden, half a dozen classical-music LPs, a lavishly illustrated monograph on El Lissitzky published in the GDR, and a pair of thick woollen socks still left us with several banknotes that we knew we couldn’t change back again at the border crossing on our way out. The daad had its own gallery in West Berlin, This page: Joseph Beuys, Felt Suit, 1970, felt and wood, 65 3 ⁄8 × 26 × 10 ¼ inches (166 × 66 × 26 cm) © Joseph Beuys/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: bpk Bildagentur/ Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany/Art Resource, New York

on Kurfürstenstrasse. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the “antiart” movement Fluxus, three small exhibitions were held there throughout the first months of 1983. The first was dedicated to the Korean artist Nam June Paik, a founder of Fluxus, and the American composer John Cage. The gallery’s exhibition program was directed by René Block, who published extensively on Fluxus and collected many of its artifacts. From 1964 to 1979 he had run his own gallery, the Galerie René Block, in West Berlin, making it a forum for the avant-garde. Its first exhibition included works by Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Wolf Vostell—artists who, in their different ways, did not shirk from the subject of Nazi criminality and genocide. A friend of Vostell, Nitsch staged one of his happenings with Block in 1965. Another artist to show with Block was Joseph Beuys, who performed one of his earliest actions, The Chief, in the gallery. I visited both the daad gallery and Block’s former gallery, which his wife, Ursula, had reopened as a record shop named Gelbe Musik (Yellow music), reminding one that the “sound” aspect of Fluxus lived on in the work of a growing number of artists. Another shop I frequented was Bücher Bogen, the recently opened art bookshop under the arches of the S-Bahn in Savignyplatz. Here one could buy the witty political posters and postcards produced by the left-wing graphic designer

Klaus Staeck, whose artist collaborators included Beuys, Vostell, Polke, Hans Haacke, Dieter Roth, and others. Beuys was of course a leading figure in Fluxus. On the last day of Zeitgeist, in January 1983, I heard him conduct a two-hour public question-and-answer session before going to visit one of the many squatters’ houses in West Berlin, much of his time now being spent in “alternative” politics. He had a spellbinding effect on his audience and could be very amusing. His environmental work Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch (Lightning with stag in its glare) occupied the atrium of the Martin-Gropius-Bau in the Zeitgeist exhibition. A bronze cast of it is the only work to have remained on permanent display at Tate Modern since the museum opened, in 2000. In his use of materials associated with the Holocaust—for example, felt and fat—Beuys was the first and for a long time the only German artist to tackle the enormity of Nazi genocide, in an attempt, perhaps, to expiate it. As a volunteer in the Luftwaffe, first in Poland and later in the Crimea, he may well have heard about or even witnessed atrocities. In 1981 I had bought for the Tate a Felt Suit (1970) by Beuys for about £800 from the Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London, originally published by Block in an edition of 100. I asked Block what he knew about Beuys’s multiples; he told me that Beuys took to producing them after 165

an unsuccessful period of trying to make prints. He had always wanted to make a suit, and Felt Suit was tailored from one of his own suits, its sleeves and legs lengthened. With its absence of buttons, it resembles a prison uniform. Anselm Kiefer, born two months before the war in Europe ended, was briefly Beuys’s pupil. With his quotations from the poems of Paul Celan, Kiefer has made the Holocaust one of his principal subjects. Before going to Berlin, I persuaded Bowness that the Tate should acquire Kiefer’s Parsifal triptych (1973), the central canvas of which alluded to a recent period of violence and instability in German society: in the upper left are inscribed the names of members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, who had recently been arrested. In Zeitgeist I was struck by Kiefer’s To the Unknown Painter (1982), another multilayered work that acknowledged its painful surroundings. Mounted on a tomb in the center of a courtyard modeled on Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, a fragile painter’s palette appears to challenge the pretentious austerity and rigid order of Speer’s architecture. As an attribute of the artist, it also suggests his powerlessness in the face of aggressive historical forces. The painting’s distressed surface not only evokes the destruction of the Chancellery, which was a few hundred yards north of the Martin-Gropius-Bau, but symbolizes the hubris and catastrophe of the Third Reich. Since part of the Chancellery’s footprint was later used for the no-man’s-land of the “death strip,” its remains were inaccessible until 1989. Appropriately, the site is now adjacent to the 2,711 concrete stelae of Peter Eisenman’s affecting Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, inaugurated 166

in 2005. Regrettably, my recommendation that the Tate purchase To the Unknown Painter was not taken up. At the Neue Nationalgalerie, West Berlin’s museum of modern art, I met a man with a strong Saxon accent and an interesting history. Jürgen Schweinebraden was a print publisher and dealer who held an honorary position at the museum. He had earlier run his own small gallery in East Berlin, specializing in Western avant-garde art. Closed down by the authorities, he emigrated to West Berlin in 1980. He was a friend of the artist A. R. Penck (they were both from Dresden), whose work he had exhibited. From Schweinebraden I bought a print by Penck signed with his real name, “Ralf,” for “Ralf Winkler”—“Penck” being one of several pseudonyms he adopted to confuse East German officialdom. After years of harassment from the Stasi, East Germany’s state security service, Penck too had emigrated in 1980, or, rather, was sold for foreign currency via the notorious Häftlingsfreikauf (sale of prisoners’ freedom) system. In 1981 the Tate, on my initiative, acquired a pair of paintings by Penck from 1980, Osten (East) and Westen (West), which I had recently seen at the Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne. Werner (with Benjamin Katz) had originally opened his gallery in West Berlin, where in 1963 he gave Georg Baselitz the first of many shows. He had previously worked for Rudolf Springer, the legendary dealer in international contemporary art who had established his own gallery in Berlin as early as 1948. Now in his mid-seventies, Springer still had a gallery, where I went to see him; I was struck by his humor and charm.

Above: Richard Calvocoressi and Georg Baselitz, Schloss Derneburg, West Germany, February 1983. Photo: Daniel Blau Opposite: Guard of Honor outside the Neue Wache, Unter den Linden, East Berlin, March 1967. Photo: Richard Calvocoressi

It was Baselitz who told Werner about his close friend Penck, stuck in East Germany and increasingly at odds with the regime. In Osten and Westen Penck deploys his inimitable language of graphic signs and symbols to contrast his first impressions of life in the capitalist West with the less open, more rigid structures he had endured in the socialist East. I got to know Penck soon afterward when he came to live in London. In 1984 I curated his first museum show in Britain, at the Tate, for which he made a new, multipart sculpture, Memorial to an Unknown East German Soldier, reflecting sardonically on his national service in a nuclear-weapons unit of the Volksarmee. In Zeitgeist Penck showed two enormous canvases flanking the main staircase of the Gropius-Bau. Among the older generation of Germans, he and Baselitz stood out for the raw energy of their contributions. Like Penck, Baselitz had grown up under two dictatorships, Nazi and then Communist, before emigrating to West Berlin in 1957, shortly before his twentieth birthday. By renouncing—while ironically borrowing from—the hollow figurative imagery of Socialist Realism as well as the ubiquitous tachism that he encountered in the West, Baselitz forged a new artistic language born of his interest in existentialism and outsider art. His identification with a Gothic tradition of Hässlichkeit (ugliness), at a time when his contemporaries were emulating American trends such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, was a conscious move to embrace rather than deny his German roots. On a cold, snowy weekend in February I took the train from the Zoo station, through East Germany, to West Germany, in order to visit Baselitz and his wife, Elke, at Schloss Derneburg, the abandoned castle in Lower Saxony that they had bought and were restoring as their home. I had been to Derneburg the previous summer when I saw paintings in Baselitz’s studio that he would later show in Zeitgeist. On that occasion, on my advice, the Tate acquired Rebel (1965), one of the series of impotent, disheveled antihero pictures emblematic of a defeated “master race” that marked a breakthrough in Baselitz’s art. I was now following up to see if we could acquire a more recent upside-down painting—that is, a work that signified Baselitz’s engagement with the process of painting rather than its narrative content or meaning. The Tate’s purchase of Adieu (1982) was the outcome. Rising above dense woodland and half surrounded by water, its snow-capped turrets and spires glinting in the low winter sun, Derneburg seemed straight out of one of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Another guest that weekend was Wolfgang Hahn, chief conservator at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne and a serious collector of Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, and other avant-garde movements. He subsequently bought works by Baselitz. On my way home through East Germany, the train paused at Potsdam, the last stop before the Wall and the safety of West Berlin. It was dark and snowing but the station floodlights silhouetted East German border guards with long-handled mirrors on wheels that they were sliding under the train in case anyone was clinging to the underside of the carriages in a desperate attempt to escape the GDR. Having drawn a blank, they waved us on. In my German classes I met refugees from the Soviet bloc. It was an anxious time in Central and Eastern Europe, with the first stirrings of the popular movements that later contributed to the downfall of the Communist dictatorships and the fall

of the Wall. From 1981 on, the Stasi cracked down hard on members of the unofficial peace movement who, supported by the East German churches, demonstrated against the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles on East German soil. Some were imprisoned, others expelled. Meanwhile the official peace movement in western Europe objected to the stationing of nato cruise missiles in West Germany but, as far as I can recall, was largely silent about the hundreds of Soviet SS20s in the GDR pointing at western cities. All this was overshadowed, on January 30, 1983, by the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and the Nazis’ “seizure of power” (Machtergreifung). For the next year throughout West Berlin, an exhaustive program of exhibitions, lectures, discussions, guided tours, publications, concert performances, and film screenings revisited this national upheaval, analyzing its causes and assessing its disastrous consequences. To give just a couple of examples, the public book burnings organized by the Deutsche Studentenschaft, the German student union, that took place in Berlin and other university towns on the night of May 10, 1933, formed the subject of a poignant exhibition at the Akademie der Künste. Even more heartbreaking was an exhibition devoted to the destruction of the city’s synagogues during Kristallnacht in November 1938. Although very few of the buildings survived, it was possible to form an idea of their size, design, and, in some cases, considerable age from plans, drawings, and photographs. A handful of religious treasures and objects connected with Jewish domestic life that had escaped despoliation were also on view. The exhibition was held in the Berlin-Museum, which, a few years earlier, had established a department of Jewish history. This eventually became the Jüdisches Museum Berlin, with its discordant, angular extension in pierced titanium zinc, designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 2001. At the Goethe Institute I was fortunate in having an inspiring teacher, Reinhard Strecker, a political activist and historian who in the 1960s had publicly exposed former Nazis in the West German judiciary and civil service. Most of them had been reinstated during the chancellorship of Konrad Adenauer. I will always be grateful to Strecker for introducing me to the biting satirical songs of Wolf Biermann, the East German dissident (and close friend of Penck’s) who was stripped of his citizenship in 1976 while on tour in West Germany. I still have my copy of Biermann’s album Chausseestrasse 131, recorded secretly in his apartment in Berlin-Mitte, against a background noise of traffic from the street. Banned from recording or performing in the East, he had to smuggle in equipment from the West. Strecker also gave me a copy of the hefty catalogue of an exhibition that had just opened at West Berlin’s Kunsthalle, 1933—Wege zur Diktatur (1933—paths to dictatorship), and urged me to visit it. The show was organized by Dieter Ruckhaberle, the Kunsthalle’s energetic director, known for sociopolitical exhibitions in which the art sometimes seemed to have slipped in as an afterthought. Reviewing the exhibition for the London Spectator, I later wrote, “With its uneasy mixture of works from the period and contemporary paintings and sculpture, [1933—Wege zur Diktatur] was no exception. . . . The temptation to draw parallels between 1933 and the present is evidently too strong to be ignored. . . . Works of art alluding to unemployment, big business and Turkish

Gastarbeiter (identified, intentionally or not, as the Jews of today’s Berlin by this exhibition) were specially commissioned by Ruckhaberle.” The exhibition’s sensational aspects proved to be more controversial: the four twenty-foot-high red banners emblazoned with black swastikas hanging above the stairs to the gallery’s cafeteria, for example, or a reconstruction of Hitler’s dressing room including shop-window dummies wearing the uniforms of the SA and the SS, nooses suspended from the ceiling, and a whip pinned to the wall. Aside from these arguably gratuitous bits of theater, the exhibition had a serious didactic purpose, using documents and objects from a wide range of sources to tell its story of takeover, consolidation, and absolute control of all the key spheres in public life. I lodged with a widow near the Olympiastadion, the stadium built by Hitler for the 1936 Olympic games. Since the end of the war it had been the headquarters of the British military administration. My landlady’s late husband, I discovered by chance, had had a “brown past”: a senior member in the press department of Goebbels’s propaganda ministry, he had written books with titles such as “World War and Propaganda” and “The English Propaganda of Lies in World War and Today” (my translations). Uninvestigated after the war, he went on to pursue a successful career as a theater director, critic, and playwright. The public soul-searching that exercised West Berliners in 1983 would never have been possible in the eastern half of the divided city. As far as the Communist regime was concerned, there were no former Nazis in the socialist utopia of the GDR, and therefore coming to terms with the National Socialist past was not on the agenda. The idea that 17 million people were either “victims of Fascism” or heroes of the “anti-Fascist resistance” was of course another myth, but one essential to the foundation of the East German state. The truth was somewhat different: a number of top posts in the Communist regime had been held by former Nazis, who switched from brown to red totalitarianism with surprising ease. I crossed over to East Berlin on foot a few times through Checkpoint Charlie. On Unter den Linden, outside Schinkel’s neoclassical Neue Wache (new guard or guardhouse), which the GDR had designated a memorial to the “victims of Fascism,” steel-helmeted, jackbooted soldiers would periodically goose-step back and forth, apparently oblivious to any sense of irony. It really was another country.

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A HORSE, OF COURSE

Alix Browne considers the enduring presence of horses in the contemporary imagination. Apelles of Kos, artist at the court of Alexander the Great, was a legendary perfectionist. So true to life was his work that when shown one of his horse paintings, real horses whinnied in recognition. (In an alternate telling, a stallion views the painting and attempts to mount it.) But one day Apelles painted himself into a corner. While trying to finish another equine masterpiece, he struggled to get the frothy spittle around the horse’s mouth to his exacting standards. In a fit of frustration, he picked up the cloth or sponge he had been using to clean his brushes and hurled it at the offending spot. And, well, this being the stuff of legend, you can probably guess the result: Nailed it! It’s not a stretch to read this story of the artist hellbent on perfection as an allegory for the mindset of the artist more generally. The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus would refer to Apelles in his discussion of ataraxia, a serene calmness untroubled by mental or emotional disquiet— something Apelles achieved only after literally throwing in the towel. Ataraxia was considered the ideal state for soldiers going into battle, but also, it would seem, for the artist staring into the abyss of a blank canvas. Fun fact: this story provided the title for artist Carol Bove’s 2011 installation The Foamy Saliva of a Horse. Anyone looking for an actual horse in that Bove work may be disappointed. But that Apelles was attempting to paint a horse, rather than, say, a bird, or an ass, or a person, does not seem incidental. The relationship between artists and horses— between Homo sapiens and Equus ferus caballus, if you want to get right down to it—is long, complex, rich, storied, and copiously illustrated. The horse ranks among the most popular subjects in the history of art, second perhaps only to humans themselves. When that first anonymous artist walked into a cave in France more than 30,000 years ago, what did he choose to paint? A horse, of course.

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Many artists have made horses their life’s work, including the eighteenth-century British painter George Stubbs—who arguably one-upped Apelles in the maniacal pursuit of realism, dissecting nearly a dozen horses in order to better understand their anatomy—and more recently the American artist Susan Rothenberg, who held the horse up like a mirror. “The horse was a way of not doing people, yet it was a symbol of people, a self-portrait, really,” she said. Rubens was a prolific painter of horses as well as an avid equestrian. Reviewing an exhibition of equine-themed works by Giorgio de Chirico, the writer Jennifer Krasinski speculated that as an artist devoted to the classics, de Chirico might have painted horses because, well, historically painters painted horses. But the truth is that pretty much every major artist living today has at one point or another had a horse walk into their purview. Name an artist and I will—with some luck—rustle up a horse.

Previous spread: George Stubbs, Whistlejacket, c. 1762 (detail), oil on canvas, 116 ½ × 97 ½ inches (296.1 × 248 cm), The National Gallery, London Above: Maurizio Cattelan, La Ballata di Trotski, 1996, installation view, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2018. Artwork © Maurizio Cattelan 2023. Photo: Marc Domage © Fondation Louis Vuitton Left: Mamma Andersson, The Horse, The Ghost, The Sun, 2020, oil on canvas, 37 3 ⁄8 × 57 ¼ inches (95 × 145.5 cm) © Mamma Andersson, courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery. Photo: Per-Erik Adamsson

Matthew Barney: Cremaster 3 (2002). Saratoga race track. A heat of zombie horses, all running dead, their flesh falling off of their bodies. Hard to forget that one. Maurizio Cattelan: The Ballad of Trotsky (1996). A taxidermied horse hangs limp from the ceiling—“a monument to the paralysis of a universal utopia and the usurpation of romantic idealism by the darker side of human nature,” according to his gallery. Yayoi Kusama: Horseplay (1967). As part of this happening in Woodstock, New York, Kusama covered herself—and a horse—in polka dots. Kara Walker: The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin (2015). Walker’s three equestrian figures refer to the Confederate Memorial Carving at Stone Mountain, Georgia. Bound at the hoof, Jefferson Davis’s horse, Blackjack, is being carried on the back of a female slave. Christopher Wool: Untitled (1988). trojnhors. His first stenciled word painting. Nick Cave: Heard (2012). This enchanting soundsuit performance piece brings a herd of horses to life. Mamma Andersson: The Horse, the Ghost,

the Sun (2020). As a child, she yearned to have her own horse. Richard Prince: Untitled (Cowboy) (1989). That’s an easy one. Marlene Dumas: The Horse (2015–16). A small, unexpected jewel. Jeff Koons: Split-Rocker (2000). Half of a horse, anyway.

Below: Rehearsals for Nick Cave’s HEARD•BNE 2016 performance, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Photo: Natasha Harth, QAGOMA

The truly horse crazy (and here I include myself) might delight in the discovery of a lesser-known audio gem recorded by Luc Tuymans and Miroslaw Balka in the lobby of the Porto Palácio Hotel, Porto, Portugal, in 1998 (and released as a limited-edition vinyl LP in 2008), in which the artists deliver their best horse impressions. Clip clop, clip clop. Neeeeiiiigggghhhh. The title of that one is, appropriately, Crazy Horses. In painting, sculpture, photography, film, performance, and sound, we encounter the horse as a symbol of status, power, escape, beauty, fragility, suffering, vulnerability, virility. There are epic monuments and naive girlhood fantasies. Historical figures and unicorns. Studs and nags. And in these wide-ranging depictions of the horse, we also encounter ourselves, at our best and, occasionally, at our worst.

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But are the artists behind all of these works taking on the horse simply because they had no choice? In a way, you could argue, yes. Most of the artists I have spoken to a) have zero interest in horses in real life, or b) are actually afraid of them. The echo of hoofbeats through thousands of years of the history of art and horse-powered civilization aside, the horse nevertheless looms large in the contemporary imagination even as horses themselves have disappeared from everyday life. As Ulrich Raulff writes in his epic Farewell to the Horse: A Cultural History, “The more horses forfeit their worldly presence, the more they haunt the minds of a humanity that has turned away from them.” Every single great idea that fueled the nineteenth century, he argues—including freedom, human greatness, compassion, but also subcurrents of history such as the libido, the unconscious, and the uncanny—can be traced one way or another back to the horse. For centuries, the horse has shouldered not only the weight of our physical demands but also all of our metaphorical baggage. Indeed, the horse is unique insofar it is at once phoros (a carrier of something) and semiophoros (a carrier of signs). “We cannot go wrong,” Raulff writes, “if we describe the horse as the metaphorical animal par excellence.” Ugo Rondinone has returned to the horse at different moments in his life as an artist. The first time was in the form of a rainbow poem sculpture spelling out the title of his exhibition a horse with no name (2002). Rondinone had recently moved to New York from Berlin, and the words, he says, addressed very well his new life in America—all broken dreams and unfulfilled expectations and a life left behind. A year later, in 2003, while on a winter residency in Vienna, Rondinone became mesmerized by a horse he saw walking on a frozen lake, and ultimately took more than 500 photos of it from every possible angle and perspective. He must have seen something of himself in this animal. It became his second a horse with no name. Years later, in a sort of meditation on the primal, Rondinone created an entire herd of 44 palm-sized horses, forming a single animal out of clay each day over the course of more than a month. In a subsequent series, fifteen of those earthbound lumpen horses were reincarnated as vessels of water and air, cast in blue glass, and bisected to form a perfect horizon between the sea and the sky.

Danielle Mckinney also taps into the universal and the deeply personal in her intimate painting Haste (2021). “I want to capture the movement and the spur-of-the-moment energy of making a fast decision,” says Mckinney of her image of a woman riding bare and bareback into a night landscape. There is a dreamlike yearning to the painting. “Haste is also a tribute to my desire to ride a horse naked in a field,” says Mckinney, who admits to a deep fear of and a deep attraction to horses. “I don’t feel like I can do that in real life, but I can do it in a painting.” Carroll Dunham was staring down a blank canvas, trying to solve a formal problem, when the horse that would become the star of his painting Horse and Rider (My X) (2013–15) came to him. “This is quite a large painting for me, and the canvas leaned against the wall of two different studios for a couple of years before I really had a sense of what it should be,” he recalls. “I was involved with a large group of paintings organized around the idea of naked human females in nature. I had to struggle for a time before I realized that a figure couldn’t fill the vertical axis of the plane, and in that moment my mind’s eye saw her on a horse.” A retired draft horse lives down the street from Dunham’s house and studio in rural Connecticut, and he dutifully went to study it, thinking he had some obligation to be realistic. “But soon I realized this was counterproductive and I had to build the horse myself as I made the painting.” Once he fully accepted the subject, he says, the painting almost painted itself. I would not put money on horses whinnying in recognition of Dunham’s cartoonish equine subject. But there is something knowing—and human—in his expression, the way he turns his head to meet us squarely in the eye. What is he trying to tell us? “I think the horse is looking back out of the painting as a witness, a link between the world of the painting and our world,” Dunham says. “Just as the female human is only concerned with her world, that of the painting. I have no idea what this means.”

Opposite: Carroll Dunham, Horse and Rider (My X), 2013–15, mixed media on linen, 115 ¾ × 80 inches (294 × 203.2 cm) © Carroll Dunham, courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery This page, left: Danielle Mckinney, Haste, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 20 × 16 inches (50.8 × 40.6 cm) © Danielle Mckinney, courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. Photo: Pierre Le Hors This page, below: Installation view, Ugo Rondinone, a sky . a sea . distant mountains . horses . spring ., Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly Street, London, April 12–May 14, 2021 © Ugo Rondinone, courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Eva Herzog

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BETWEEN SHADOW AND LIGHT Scholar and researcher Yves Guignard, who is working on Balthus’s archives for a revision of the Balthus catalogue raisonné, examines the artist’s engagement with drawing, arguing for a more concerted attention to these works than scholarship has paid them.

Precocious Illustrator, Little-Known Draftsman Wit h a show of his paint ings at New York ’s Museum of Modern Art in 1956, Balthus set himself at the highest levels of modern art without the public knowing anything about his drawings. It was only in 1963, at the New York gallery of Eugene Victor Thaw—not Balthus’s main dealer, which was the Pierre Matisse Gallery—that his drawings were first exhibited, opening a whole new world for the public and especially for the critics. Balthus was fifty-five years old. Surprisingly, critics and scholars, notably Jean Leymarie, have been fascinated by Balthus’s drawings insofar as they do not reflect or mirror his paintings.1 While the painting, seen as the “main” part of Balthus’s work, is celebrated for its modernity, his drawings have captivated instead through their classicism, which makes the artist timeless, swimming against the current, indefinable, eternal. There lies one of the contradictions of Balthus’s drawings, though not the only one. Another contradition is indeed his classicism, since the painter never attended any academy; he was completely self-taught, having been raised among artists. Another curious fact is that, although Balthus devoted himself to painting as an adult, he was certainly the modern painter who enjoyed the success and widespread circulation of his drawings at the youngest age, while he was still a child. It is less common to speak of child prodigies in drawing than it is in music: either they don’t exist or they lack visibility. But Balthus’s mother, Baladine, was the muse to one of the greatest poets of her time, Rainer Maria Rilke, and he was fond of and admired her children and paid great attention to Balthus’s first drawings. At the age of eleven, the child, Baladine’s youngest son, executed a series of images in ink that depicted a personal misfortune: the disappearance of a small cat, with his owner searching for him everywhere in vain. A book with these drawings, Mitsou: Quarante Images par Balthusz, was published in 1921 (by Rotapfel Verlag, of Zurich and Leipzig) and included a preface by Rilke. The print run is unknown but the book’s distribution and visibility were considerable, especially for a twelve-year-old child. Some might remark that because these works were intended to be printed, they should be

considered illustrations rather than drawings. In this regard, before entering further into the world of Balthus’s drawings, we should mention another series he created to be printed, a group of illustrations of 1933–34 for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Balthus was not someone scattered in his interests; he had fascinations and radical passions to which he devoted himself. In painting it was Piero della Francesca; in music, Mozart; in literature, Emily Brontë. The same exclusivity manifested in his travels: he spent some of his childhood in Berlin, served in the military in Morocco, traveled to England for an exhibition, and in 1962 visited Japan, where he met his future wife, Setsuko, but otherwise his life unfolded in France, Switzerland, and Italy, as if the rest of the world did not exist. His admiration for Brontë prompted an exception, a few short visits to London in around 1936 to work on exhibiting the series inspired by her in her own country. The Brontë series includes the only works on paper that Balthus showed in exhibition before he was fifty-five. They barely represent the classicism that critics would speak of later: they’re expressive, modern, sometimes harsh; the proportions of the figures are slightly caricatured; the hatching, while skillful and rhythmic, is free and wild. These are ink drawings and lack the nuance made possible by graphite and charcoal. The Myth of Disdain and the Confidential Production The art historians John Rewald and James Thrall Soby helped perpetuate a myth that Balthus belittled drawing and focused only on painting. Rewald wrote, “He was at pains to satisfy my wish to see his drawings. A number of them were strewn on the floor where they had been walked over to such an extent that they were no longer presentable. . . . Most of his drawings are preparatory studies for compositions, working sheets, so to speak, in which he loses interest as soon as they have been transposed to paintings.”2 And Soby, curator of the MoMA show in 1956, quotes him, “When I have finished my paintings, I put the drawings for them on the floor and walk on them until they are erased.”3 But we must be careful. Is this really true? Even if it is, many researchers later learned to be wary of Balthus’s statements. In any case, the artist was

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photographed by Loomis Dean in 1956 for Life magazine, and there is not a single piece of paper in those photographs, not even on his studio table. Nevertheless, to declare that Balthus disliked drawing is mostly untrue, although there were certainly drawings he destroyed. The catalogue raisonné clearly documents that he practiced drawing regularly from his early years on. The great majority of his drawings are studies for compositions, means to an end. With significant talent and authority, Balthus sought the best posture for his models—whether it was the position of a leg, the tilt of a head, or the direction of light, he was constantly searching. Such drawings are literally studies, but sometimes a drawing goes well beyond a study, with the artist demonstrating the utmost care: the pencil line caresses the paper in subtle shadows, and it is as if the figure—or tree, or still life—emerges from the flatness of the paper, as if it had been carved. In this way Balthus brings form out of the whiteness of the paper like a sculptor giving life to marble, employing the same stroking gestures, and the grace of the image that appears seems to have always been there. When did Balthus decide to make drawings as works in and of themselves—drawings intended to be framed and hung, or at least stored in a portfolio? Relatively late, but well before 1963. Format is a clue to identifying these works: when the drawing is large, very much finished, and not associated with a known painting, it is a “pure drawing,” the intention of which is the beauty of the line and the final representation. It is no longer a means to an end but is its own purpose. The first documented drawing of this kind is La Villa Diodati of 1946. Here, it is interesting to consider the context: Balthus had recently married an aristocrat, was the young father of two sons, and was renting a beautiful home not far from Geneva. One might enjoy seeing this work as the beginning of a “return to order,” similar to what Pablo Picasso experienced between 1915 and 1925, after his first marriage. Balthus’s most refined and noble self-portraits also emerge from this period, small in size but perfectly complete. Balthus quickly turned away from bourgeois life, however, and less than a year later returned to the solitude of his uncomfortable studio/apartment in Paris. His next drawings in the vein of La Villa Diodati were portraits of his mistress and muse at the Previous spread, left: Balthus, Autoportrait, 1943, graphite crayon on paper, 24 ¾ × 18 5 ⁄8 inches (63 × 47.5 cm) Previous spread, right: Balthus, Nu endormi, 1969–70, crayon and fusain on elephant skin paper, 27 ½ × 39 3 ⁄8 inches (70 × 100 cm) Above: Balthus, La Villa Diodati, 1946, fusain on paper, 26 3 ⁄8 × 21 5 ⁄8 inches (67 × 55 cm) Right: Balthus, Portrait de Frédérique, 1949, fusain on paper, 24 ¾ × 17 inches (63 × 43 cm)

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time, Laurence Bataille. While there are two or three painted portraits of Bataille, several drawings present attitudes—a singular tilt of the head, even bare breasts—that do not appear in the oils. They can therefore be considered finished, autonomous pieces parallel to the paintings. Balthus then discovered Burgundy, where he first rented and then bought a medieval château in Chassy, living there from 1954 to 1960. He first shared the château with Léna Leclercq, a poet who served as a housekeeper, and then with a new muse and mistress, Frédérique Tison. His portraits of Tison include beautiful, incredibly pure drawings like those of Bataille. They attest to a fascinating encounter, a game of hide and seek between shadow and light. Certain larger works on paper are watercolor studies for known paintings, for example the well-known views of Tison seen from behind at a window. In those cases Balthus executed drawings while painting, drawings that are more like variations, or alternatives, than studies. The Drawing Exists in and of Itself and Photography Comes into the Mix The next major stage in Balthus’s life began in Rome in 1961, when André Malraux, the French minister of culture, appointed him director of the Villa Médicis, Académie de France. Staying there over fifteen years, Balthus became passionate about the old Renaissance building, concerned not just with renovating it but also with restoring it to what it once was. That cause even took precedence over his painting: an artist whose production was already slow, he would realize very few canvases during this period. Drawing, however, would gain in importance. Balthus drew a lot during his time in Rome and followed the market trends that emerged after his gallery exhibitions of drawings began in 1963. Some fifteen paintings at most, but hundreds of drawings, can be counted from his Roman period. A few years after his first drawings show in New York, the phenomenon won over Paris: in 1966, in conjunction with an exhibition of his paintings at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Galerie Janine Hao held an exhibition of his drawings. Five years later the Galerie Claude Bernard followed suit. Above: Balthus, Étude pour “Le Rêve II”, 1956, crayon on paper, 20 ¾ × 16 ½ inches (53 × 42 cm) Right: Balthus, Étude pour “Golden Afternoon”, 1957, crayon on paper, 21 3 ⁄8 × 17 ¼ inches (54.5 × 44 cm)

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Balthus’s son Stanislas took note of this new market and of its relation to the artist’s financial needs in terms of his wish to restore the Villa Médicis to its former glory, both in its decor and as a site for receptions: “He began drawing frenetically because it was the only thing he could do quickly enough. . . . the drawings had been sold to Claude Bernard, and the funds weren’t for Balthus but for the Villa Médicis. However, the proceeds from the sale of these drawings were used to cover the costs of representations and a way to make up for a lack of financial means . . . to receive people properly.”4 The best-known large drawings from this period are those dedicated to Balthus’s two favorite models, Katia and Michelina Terreri, the daughters of an employee at the Villa Médicis. Remarkably, during the sessions in which the young girls posed for Balthus, a collaborator and boarder at the Villa, Brigitte Courme, took photographs, leaving us a few rare images of the artist at work, or posing for the photographer. Balthus had a complex and long-lasting relationship with photography.5 There are photographs of his models dating from the 1940s, of landscapes such as the Gottéron valley, Switzerland, and of groups of figures, such as the series of three sisters executed over the course of the 1940s and 1950s. Finally, the Roman period was notably when Balthus began using elephant hide paper, a kind of marbled paper that resembles parchment and gives the false impression of a rough surface. Yet the surface of this precious paper is actually very smooth, allowing Balthus to develop infinite nuances and gradations in Conté pencil or graphite. This dimension of more “precious” paper gives rise to new questions. Posing Sessions . . . Posing Problems The full complexity of this area of Balthus’s work is demonstrated in a series of drawings in which the artist sought to resolve a composition of several figures, one that never culminated in a painting. He drew the model during live sittings in his studio and sometimes worked from photographs taken during these sessions. There was no plan; photographs were not an indispensable part of the process but often accompanied it, like a parallel path, and were sometimes used for inspiration later. It is almost certain that when Balthus envisioned this composition, he combined sketches

Above: Balthus, La séance de pose, 1975, graphite crayon on elephant skin paper, 39 3 ⁄8 × 27 ½ inches (100 × 70 cm) Right: Brigitte Courme, Séance de pose dans l’atelier de Balthus à la villa Médicis, c. 1966–70 Opposite page: Balthus, Étude pour “La Séance de pose”, c. 1975–76, graphite crayon on paper, 14 1 ⁄8 × 18 7⁄8 inches (36 × 48 cm) Brigitte Courme, Séance de pose dans l’atelier de Balthus à la villa Médicis, c. 1966–70 Balthus artwork © Balthus

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and drawings from different modeling sessions and photographs. Accordingly, a recurrent title for this group in the catalogue raisonné is “La séance de pose” (Posing session), as if that designated a painting project that never saw the light of day. The series focuses on a model lying on the back of an armchair with her leg bent. Sometimes the artist paints her standing up, bent over a table; sometimes another figure, who seems to be the painter himself, turns away from the scene and looks out a window.6 The series La séance de pose comprises works on fine elephant hide paper. There are other, equally refined drawings from notebooks that the catalogue raisonné describes as “studies for La séance de pose.” Why is one a study and the other not? If a drawing is from a notebook, is it then a study? Does elephant hide paper automatically indicate a larger intention? Clearly this distinction does not apply in every case, since certain drawings can belong to both categories, no matter what the support.7 We have but touched on such issues as a way to demonstrate the need for an in-depth reconsideration of Balthus’s catalogue raisonné for the purpose of revising it, as is the family’s wish, with the support of Gagosian. Besides the fact that many new drawings have been authenticated since that book’s publication, in 1999, the revision will reinterpret Balthus’s practice in the light of discoveries that have been made since then, preserved in the artist’s archives. To be continued.

1. Jean Leymarie, an art historian, wrote on this theme several times, the first occasion being a catalogue published by the Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, in 1971. 2. John Rewald, Balthus Drawings, exh. cat. (New York: E. V. Thaw & Co.), 1963. 3. James Thrall Soby, Balthus, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1956). 4. Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, during “Balthus: Les Décors Peints,” on the first study day of the conference “Balthus à la Villa Médicis,” Villa Médicis, Rome, 2013. 5. The first to consider this question was Jean Clair in his article “Balthus photographe,” Connaissance des Arts 586 (September 2001). Recently, in 2021, Colette Morel defended her thesis on this subject at the Sorbonne. 6. This although photographs show that Balthus made his model pose in this position at the window. 7. Several ideas at the root of this article emerged from the exhibition of drawings from the Fonds Balthus at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, in 2023, and from conversations with its curator, Camille Lévêque-Claudet.

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Kiss Me, Stupid

Carlos Valladares mines the hiﬆory of the romantic comedy and proposes an expanded canon for the genre.

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“It’s about time we brought back the rom-com.” “The what?” demanded one of my students, for whom English is a third language. “Romantic! Comedy!” I answered, with a tinge of shame. I’d fallen into the classic trap: needless, buzzy belittling of perhaps the last sacred film tradition we have left. “Rom-com”—oh, ugly in its very sound, like a sinister piece of foreign policy from the Reagan years. No! Start again: it’s about time we brought back the romantic comedy. It’s what I think we need more of in movies: A) the romantic. That is to say, uplift, levity, but a serious levity, bubbles where you can hear the cork pop, commitment to this here-today-here-tomorrow? thing called love—which can be more than just a sexual relationship between at least two people. B) the comic. That is to say, the anarchy of the guffaw, which relieves tension at the same time that it stokes it. In a world deluged by bitter/dumb irony, you gotta make ’em laugh, reel ’em in, and inject ’em with (gasp) sincerity and (here we go) taste. What goes into a romantic comedy? Billy Mernit, who teaches UCLA students how to write the foolproof Hollywood rom-com, says it follows, without fail, a meet-lose-get formula: girl and boy (and he assumes the norm is girl-and-boy, and white at that, given that he lists “ethnic” and “gay” as rom-com subgenres) have “significant encounters,” girl and boy separate, and girl and boy reunite. 1 Yawn! For one, you don’t even have to meet to fall in love: just check your DMs on Instagram from randos all over the world. Too neat for our purposes. Mernit concludes that people watch rom-coms “to have their feelings—to experience the full range of emotions we all carry inside of us and the cathartic effect of letting such feelings loose,” that is, to “feel what it’s like to love and be loved . . . without being embarrassed,” to “give free reign to [our] sappiest, gooiest, most exalted expressions of love,” and “to believe in love and its transforming power.”2 Double, triple, quadruple yawn: the treacle drips too thick. Yes, our culture needs love stories. We need lift and levity, we need to feel something deep and holy, and love at its highest is the much-vaunted answer. But not as sap or sentimental bosh, not as an unswerving belief in an eternal maxim; I say:

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embarrass me! Make me guilty that I’m caught— again—in that vulgar web of passions and attachments. Yes, embarrass: after all, the French word for “kiss” is “embrasse.” The classical practitioners of the romance-comedy film (Stanley Cavell identifies Leo McCarey and Frank Capra by way of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, I identify Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder by way of Miklós László and Oscar Wilde) have a half-phlegmatic, half-bloodthirsty side.3 In their pictures, falling in love is not an excuse for lightweight enchantment. It’s a ruthless battle of wits. Stubbornness—not a wistful, clean, sigh-filled “oh-why-aren’t-they-together”-ness—is the overwhelming tone. A showdown of egos, observed either with the detached old-world bemusement of a retired court jester (McCarey, Lubitsch) or the sadistic mania of the new one (early-to-middleperiod Wilder, all of Blake Edwards). There are stakes to what they do that go beyond strings of gags or buoyant laughs. Our problem: we have defiled, through frivolity and irony, the romantic comedy, defanging the romance and flattening the comedy. Take no prisoners in love—which, 99 percent of the time, we’d do better to call “desire,” “lust,” “the drives.” Utter selflessness goes into love, yes, but oh how often it backfires. Show that; be honest. Dating apps and social media have made partner choices as banal as an Amazon Go cart of bananas. How sad. Okay: we’ll bring back the romantic comedy. Here’s our next problem: fresh ideas. The new watcher or filmmaker must have a syllabus that crackles, one highlighting movies that are honest about the mess and morbidity and clumsy repugnance of desire, yet one that doesn’t shy away from those stray rare miracles of life: elegance, economy, grace. Dissuade the blanket nihilist: there’s enough of that for the terminally online. It’s not enough to have been in love. It’s not enough to have seen When Harry Met Sally . . . (1989), fun and fine as it is. Knowledge should expand. Go back into cinema’s history: it’s not that long, it’s only a hundred years and change. As the Ronettes sang, it’s so young. So dredge up the forgotten, the decontextualized, and the unheralded. The following list is an attempt at that. Mer n it ’s c a non

of rom-coms prizes box office above all—Pretty Woman (1990), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), There’s Something about Mary (1998)—while the American Film Institute list appeals to an unsurprising nostalgia, as in Roman Holiday (1953) and Annie Hall (1977). Masterpieces, but we know them already. My list is more idiosyncratic, and pushes the boundary of what we consider a romcom. It’s certainly edgier than your classic Nora Ephron fare. My only requirements: there must be romance, there must be comedy, the balance between levity and gravity is heavenly, love must be taken seriously . . . enough to be either vanquished or elevated to the highest possible plane of human existence. C’est comme ça. The drawbacks: too many heterosexual couplings, too many white couplings, not enough films have been made about the zany romance that constitutes friendships. 4 It’s the structure of the films, their themes and strange vibes and the larger-than-life people within them, that matter to me.

The 1930s and ’40s: Er nst Lubitsch No education in the arts of either “rom” or “com” would be complete without Ernst Lubitsch, the German-Jewish émigré who took over Hollywood and changed the rom-com playbook. Anyone who wants to make a romantic comedy must have sophistication and Lubitsch is the source. His silent films should be studied for not only their grasp of the potential of a new art form (the motion picture) but also their crucial principle for getting around the whole no-talking thing: less is more. Show (or symbolize), don’t tell (or proselytize). When Hollywood embraced sound in the 1920s, many directors used it as a mere supplemental crutch, falling into the hoariest clichés: leaden dialogue, a dullard’s lack of imagination in moving the camera. But not Ernst. If anything, sound made him more elusive, more enamored with whispers, with rerouting the disruptive force of the erotic into flirting lines and visuals of sumptuous tact: shimmering moonlight on river water, lovers’ shadows draped across the sheets, sword and stocking kept neatly crossed at the foot of the bedroom. To paraphrase Billy Wilder, Lubitsch’s biggest acolyte, Lubitsch added two and two and made you come up with four yourself. It is unwise and impossible to single out one essential Lubitsch film5 but one in particular cuts to the peculiar modern confusions of promiscuity and the libidinal abundance of choice: 1933’s Design for Living, starring Miriam Hopkins, Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and based on the dazzlingly randy Noël Coward play. Miriam cannot decide between struggling playwright Fred and unrepped painter Gary; she likes both. Conclusion: date both. “A gentlemen’s agreement . . . but no sex!” Further conclusion, according to the dream team of Coward and Lubitsch: throuples work. But to see how they make it work is a wonder of the cinema of comedy romance. In Lubitsch’s sound-era masterpieces, from Monte Carlo (1930) to Cluny Brown (1946), relations are messy, delayed, overlapped, in a perpetual state of collapse due to staid habit or overstimulation. But in the triangular machinations of Design for Living, they reach—with the destabilizing logic of dreams— the much-longed-for illusion of balance.

Late Billy Wilder

Previous spread: Poster art for Avanti! (1972), directed by Billy Wilder. Photo: United Artists / Entertainment Pictures / Alamy Stock Photo Opposite: Still from Design for Living (1933), directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Photo: United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo Above: Still from Avanti! (1972), directed by Billy Wilder. Photo: United Artists / United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo Right: Still from The Heartbreak Kid (1972), directed by Elaine May. Photo: © 20th Century Fox-Film Corporation, courtesy Everett Collection

“Kiss Me, Stupid.” These three words give us Wilder’s sweeping view of humanity—and it’s a wise one: “kiss me” with all the love you’ve got, but don’t forget that you’re “stupid.” Wilder is my ideal of both grace and jadedness, sweetly realist (or is he really sweet?). He always wanted to be Lubitsch but was poised with more acidity: Lubitsch could never have made something as deliciously scummy as Ace in the Hole (1951) or Double Indemnity (1944). Yet Wilder got those out of his system early and ended his career almost exclusively making romance comedies, his true bread and butter. Yet just as Wilder could never make something as unashamedly heart-on-sleeve as The Shop around the Corner (1940), Lubitsch could never have gone so far into the muck of the garish US bourgeoisie as Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), a cynical takedown of marriage whose sunny view on the unheralded glories of adultery is marvelously cockeyed. (Spoiler alert: adultery works sometimes.) And Lubitsch never showed the Proustian Sturm und Drang of desire quite as Wilder shows it in Irma la Douce (1963), a successful merge of the Shakespearean comedy of tangled identities and the violent jealousies of Swann in Love and The Sweet Cheat Gone, set and partly shot in a Paris where the prostitutes speak in Brooklyn accents. Irma came out in 1963, the same year as Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, and the two films pose similar questions of the cultural moment (what is a marriage? what is a relation between two people?), pairing off with each other well. And Irma la Douce was a favorite of Godard’s, who named it one of the ten best films of 1963. A marriage forms in one film, collapses in the other, but the same inability to communicate, the same untogetherness, wails in the saturation of Wilder’s Technicolor and the vacant horizontal spaces of Godard’s CinemaScope. If there’s one film where Lubitsch’s European elegance and decadence emerge, phoenix style, from the

ashes of the past, it’s Wilder’s Avanti! (1972), shot on the Italian island of Ischia. Juliet Mills is a poor woman unsure about her body (she’s disgustingly called “fat” and “fat-ass” by every man in the film), while Jack Lemmon is a rich man too sure about his own—one of those fat-cat industrialist Americans, chummy with Henry Kissinger and Spiro Agnew. Both their hang-ups disintegrate over a magical weekend in Ischia where they’ve gone to pick up the corpses of their respective parents: his businessman dad and her manicurist mom were having a steamy affair, egged on by the employees at the beautiful seaside hotel where they did the deed for the past ten summers. Son and daughter soon start an affair of their own, mixing the ghost of Freud with the insouciant buoyancy of that other lovely Wilde. Wilder didn’t like Avanti! much himself because “it stank of Italy,” and he preferred, like Lubitsch, the Paris of Paramount over the Paris of France. But we need not share his preference. I love the open air, the smell of Italy, and the slowburn love on display in Avanti! I have seen Avanti! ten times. I plan to see it ten more. Its allure, its charm, are limitless. Kiss Me, Stupid, Irma la Douce, and Avanti! were coscripted by the dream team of Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, with whom the director worked on all his comedy films from Love in the Afternoon (1957) to Buddy Buddy (1981). To summarize a Wilder/Diamond script is a hopeless effort, for they spin labyrinthine plots that you must experience for yourself in real time. They stand on their own as literature.

Elaine May’s The Heartbr eak Kid (1972) Take the piss out of men: that’s the Elaine May way. But also take the piss out of women. Look at these dumb little lovers with their dumb little rituals of courtship. Look through a detached eye. Look as if you were at a zoo. But the zoo is a Miami Beach hotel, it’s a wedding, it’s a diner, it’s a class with that cute girl you see each day in passing, it’s a snug cabin in the woods: it’s anywhere where desire crouches, lying in wait to pounce on unsuspecting dreamers. It’s anywhere a sentiment is allowed to bloom. Stamp it out, cries May. Look, assholes, look! For all the disenchanted, this is the one. And who has not been disenchanted, at least for five minutes? And five minutes is all it takes for Lenny (Charles Grodin) to fall out of love with

Following spread, clockwise from top right: Still from That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), directed by Luis Buñuel. Photo: Greenwich / Galaxie / In Cine / Album /Alamy Stock Photo Still from On the Rocks (2020), directed by Sofia Coppola. Photo: A24 / American Zoetrope / Album / Alamy Stock Photo Still from Who Am I This Time (1982), directed by Jonathan Demme. Photo: © PBS, courtesy Everett Collection

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his new Jewish bride, Lila (Jeannie Berlin, daughter of Elaine). And five seconds is all it takes for Lenny to fall in

lust with the shiksa blonde shedevil of his dreams, leggy freshman Kelly (Cybill Shepherd). No one is safe from May’s withering eye. And it’s a cruel eye: she observes her scenes in long takes, letting the newlywed’s marriage proposal to the shiksa’s wasp-y parents play out in an unbroken five-minute take, letting the “I want a divorce on our honeymoon” conversation between Lenny and Lila run an excruciating ten minutes, interrupted by the farcical arrival of an elusive pecan pie. The inhuman speed of the drives becomes May’s subject: we see love deflated in real time. And good riddance, says May! No one knows what it is anyway. So you don’t deserve it. Harsh, but true. The basic cornball premise is a frivolous Neil Simon joke, but it’s extended by May’s realism and timing, her bemused and detached yet never uninvolved contemplation of losers in love. She shares a grimness with my other favorite American comedian of the era, Jerry Lewis: those long, long takes stick with her unappealing characters until the bitter end. Thus we see revealed the whole gamut of society. Safety is not an option: no oasis. Everyone is obnoxious and grueling. Which Screenwriting 101 professor said you need likable leads? Ptui! You can have total SOBs and it still works. The SOBs need only be funny.

Luis Buñuel’s �at Obscure Object of Desire (1977) Luis Buñuel’s final film—a rom-com? A rich Spanish sexagenarian (Fernando Rey) regales a train car of passengers—little men, tall women, children—with the story of his disastrous love affair with a tempestuous nineteen-year-old maid, Conchita. The hook: every time the Spaniard gets close to sealing the deal with his virginal objet du désir, the actress who plays Conchita steps out of the room and is replaced by a new, different woman who is still playing Conchita. Buñuel claimed that there was no logic for when and why one Conchita was replaced by the other. Ha! The classic prattle of an auteur. Carole Bouquet plays Conchita as “Gallic”—vaguely, cool, frigid, husky-voiced. When Buñuel wants a Conchita who signifies (crudely) passion, fire, rockiness, the 184

vulgarly “Spanish,” he sends in the flamenco-dancing Angela Molina. The hapless man is none the wiser: he cannot see, though we do, that Conchita is not a singular being, but rather two warring currents: attractive and repulsive, potential and kinetic, forward and back. The man, too, is a split being. Though played physically by Rey (a stalwart of t he Buñuel ensemble), Rey’s French was so thick that his voice was overdubbed by an uncredited M ichel P iccol i. S o b o d y a nd voic e are misaligned. No smooth wholes exist in Buñuel’s riveting deflation of the male libido, of reality itself. I take that back: of what is confused with reality. It’s high time That Obscure Object of Desire was admitted into the snug rom-com canon, since yes, the lovers win each other’s hearts in the end, and it leaves you singing the pleasure of life—by reminding you of the hell of the thought of flesh, not even the real thing.

Jonathan Demme’s Who Am I �is Time (1982) What moves me to romantic tears? I admit: the tears produced by most of the films on this list veer at times too close to the reptilian sardonic. Love, it’s clear, is a silly state; it’s far more cinematically fun—more spiritually honest, too; but perhaps easier—to see it fail than to witness it errantly and irrationally triumph, as we see in the Lubitsch/Wilder canon. Yet there are times that demand tendresse. Which is supplied by the films of Jonathan Demme, but he adds a crucial adjective: kooky tendresse. Demme understood that life is nothing without kook, getting off on it in films like Citizens Band (1977) and Melvin and Howard (1980), but nowhere more so than in an hour-long American Playhouse episode he made for public television in 1982: Who Am I This Time? A haunting, beautiful question, since the drama enacted

here by the two top-of-their-form stars is no less than their own individual hang-ups as actors. I do not see Helene Shaw, I see Susan Sarandon. I do not see Harry Nash, I see Christopher Walken. I see, in other words, not a fiction with characters but a living drama that spills into my world. I am moved— terribly. Who is the actor? Who am I, who are we, when we put on those age-old roles: lover, artist, dreamer, public figure? To what gestures and to which memories am I, in the end, reduced? Demme drew his profound points from a master of US kook, Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote the short story “Who Am I This Time?” in 1961 and whose sense of the pointless, anguished fragility of life and love is kept in check by his rampant thirst for the absurd. Sarandon plays a traveling phone-company lady who intends to stay in the small town where the film is set for only eight weeks. But her low-key movie-star aura—don’t we all possess it secretly?—is attractive to the town locals, who rope her in to their amateur community-theater production of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire. She plays Stella opposite the Stanley of a painfully withdrawn hardware-store clerk: Walken. His is the sort of performance that would be “masterful” only by the standards of a public high school in Pasadena. And lo! Sarandon finds herself drawn to Walken, drawn into his boorish, leering, drawling Stanley, a parody of a bad Marlon Brando parody. Yet Walken is so parodic that he emerges as sincere, original, true. We get why she’s into him. He plays it as a bit without meaning it as a bit. That’s hot. The townsfolk warn Sarandon: Don’t get too attached—he’s like that with every performance. Yes: as soon as a rehearsal or a show’s run is over, he goes back to being his normal, schlubby, gormless self. What I love is that the story is told with limited settings (a store, a storefront, a fake New Orleans storefront, and a library), no flash, and is acted with the sense that this wildly mediocre, overacted production of Williams’s melodrama is a matter of life and death. Because it is. And you know what? I prefer it to the Elia Kazan film! Yes! So does Sarandon’s Helene, who prefers Walken’s Stanley over “the real thing,” Brando. That is love.

Should Sarandon go back to her regular job? Or does this weird performative relationship, so transitory and wonky, hold the key to her life? Ultimately she feels like she needs to stay on in the town in order to understand Walken’s complex, to try to see why he’s so painfully shy and withdrawn and can only be “himself” in roles that bear no relation to who he actually is. Every minute counts. The seconds tick away. Rehearsal—then opening night—then two more matinees—then closing night—then: strike the set and go back to your silly little humdrum lives. Hardly any time to stoke love. So Demme, Vonnegut, Sarandon, and Walken make you feel, in commercial-free miniature, that anxiety of waiting for a beloved to emerge. They make me see: to encounter a shy one’s face is just about the most mysterious, cataclysmic event that we can ever hope to experience.

Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks (2020) And so we come to a not-really-rom-com comedy of romance. As expected, Sofia Coppola nails the effervescence of rom-coms but plays none of the familiar notes, hits none of the “right” beats. But who wants to be right? Off is in. The beau? None other than he to whom my heart belongs, Daddy (Bill Murray). Psychoanalysis nods: “This is where we came in.” The premise: “Dad,” says Rashida Jones. “I think my husband is cheating.” “The fink,” hisses Bill. “Let’s catch him with his Gucci trousers down.” The reality: maybe there’s no cheating. Maybe it’s all in our heads. And maybe Dad knows it’s all in our heads. And maybe he’s letting this happen because he wants his little girl back. Maybe. On the Rocks recalls, with subtlety, a host of masterpieces: lunatic Blake Edwards romances such as The Tamarind Seed (1974) and 10 (1979), Henry James’s novel The Sacred Fount (1905), the fantasy worlds of the haute riche as seen in films like George Cukor’s Holiday (1938) and Coppola’s own Lost in Translation (2003) and Somewhere (2010; my two favorites of hers). That’s frighteningly good company. That’s a dinner party. I can toast a glass of Chianti to all of them. Clever people being clever? Nothing new under the sun. But now we see that the cleverness is a front for avoiding the void: facing your partner square in the eye. A 1930s absurdity and elegance are transposed, surrealistically, to the modern day, as in the films of Whit Stillman. This is not nostalgia; we know the world is not like this. This is fantasia. But we still have the same hang-ups in fantasia: will he be faithful? Will I? On the Rocks is like The Sacred Fount in the fact that its two principals, father and daughter, talk themselves to death trying to figure out what’s happening in a marriage that’s going unlived by both parties. It’s a strange, charmingly archaic world where guys (yes, white; yes, old) can still get out of a criminal rap because the cop realizes that his arrest is buddies with his own papa. Coppola wanted to create, I think, something like a 1930s screwball but ended up—whoops!—creating an achingly sad romance peppered with freeing laughs. But On the Rocks is unthinkable without the history of the romantic comedy. It does what all great

rom-coms do: it is precise with language, it hears the gaps. It’s not simply about rat-atat lines of grating precocity and cleverness: “I’m a man!” “Well, nobody’s perfect.”6 Zing. Tee-hee. Got ’em. So what. What comes in between? What comes before? What, after? Life, and love, swirl in the pauses required to let the event of a belly laugh ease gracefully into a memory. It’s about how Murray, explaining why he’s gone deaf to women’s voices, swishes the word “pitch” in his mouth, rolling the “p” as if it were the Spanish “ñ.” It’s, in short, about waiting, and observing, and waiting some more. And then: the anarchic guffaw. Perhaps the sudden tear as well. They belong together.

O t he C a r l r i nc l u s i os R o m - C o n s i n t he om C a no n Me a : nd M y Love Gal (1 A 9 Chris ffair (1939 32) t ma s ) The M in 1 Billy Mernit, Writing the Romantic ore T July (1940 T ) he M he Lo Comedy. From “Cute Meet” to “Joyous e Defeat”: How to Write Screenplays That Bells ng Long rrier (194 T 2) A Sell (New York: Harper Perennial, Lolit re R ingin railer (195 2000), 13. a (196 4 g ) ( 1 960) 2 Love 2. Ibid., 252. s of a ) 3. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Blon A rab de es Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy A Co que (1966 (1966) of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: untes ) Harvard Film Studies, 1981). s f r om The Y o 4. I prefer the modern Spanish Two ung Girls Hong Kon word for “friendship,” amistad, fo g o Stole r the Roa f Rochefo (1967) since the root of the word is amor, d n r ( t (196 or “love.” Though “friend” has Claud K isses (1 1967) 7) 968) its root in the Middle English ine (1 10 (19 974) word “fre�ond,” which also 7 means “loved one” or “lover,” They 9) A ll L this meaning has been augh Moon softened in modern English. ed s 5. My favorites: The Student Cros tr uck (198 (1981) si 7 Prince in Old Heidelberg A C o n g D e la n ) (1927), The Smiling uc h i cey (1 n New 988) The L Lieutenant (1931), Trouble Y a in Paradise (1932), Broken Dow st Days o ork (1996 n ) f Lullaby (1932), Design It’s C w ith Love Disco (199 for Living (1933), Angel ompl 8) ( icate 2003) (1937), The Shop around S i lv e d r ( L 2 the Corner (1940), To 009 inin Fern Be or Not To Be (1942), y and gs Playbo ) Lu ok D ia r y Heaven Can Wait of a F ca (2021) (2012) (1943), and Cluny leetin Brown (1946). g A ffa ir (20 6. The final line of 22) Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959).

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