Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2019

42 Nathaniel Mary Quinn Anderson Cooper spoke with the artist at his Brooklyn studio about his childhood and the visionary nature of his art.

58 Discovering Dora Maar: Found Object Brigitte Benkemoun’s newest book, Je suis le carnet de Dora Maar, takes a novel approach to the art of biography.

For the Quarterly,

Benkemoun recounts her discovery of the mysterious Hermès address book that would bring her into the world of the singular Dora Maar.

62 Eilshemius & Me: An Interview with Ed Ruscha Leta Grzan and Viet-Nu Nguyen sit down with Ruscha to discuss the idiosyncratic American painter Louis Michel Eilshemius.

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Robert Therrien: The Causal Link to the (Un)Real In honor of the extraordinary life of Robert Therrien (1947–2019), Aimee Gabbard writes about her time with the artist and explores his lifelong interest in photography.

68 The White Originals: Cy Twombly’s Sculpture In the July 2000 edition of Art in America, David Sylvester considered the Kunstmuseum Basel’s then recent exhibition of Cy Twombly’s sculptures.

We revisit the text here in celebration of the publication of the second volume of Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture.

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John Currin: Men In light of recent conversations around the definition of masculinity in American culture, Alison M. Gingeras, the curator of John Currin: My Life as a Man at Dallas Contemporary, Texas, looks closely at the artist’s depictions of male subjects.

74 Building a Legacy: The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Jack Cowart, executive director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, talks to Alison McDonald about the Foundation’s evolution.

78 Objects of Desire

98 Tatiana Trouvé: In Time

On the occasion of the exhibition Appearance Stripped Bare: Desire and the Object in the Work of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons, Even, at the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Koons and Massimiliano Gioni discuss the persistent influence of Marcel Duchamp, the eroticism of objects, and hope’s relationship to desire.

Jenny Jaskey discovers Tatiana Trouvé’s Between sky and earth in upstate New York. Begun in 2012, this multifaceted installation is a crucial nexus in the artist’s career, both a result of her ongoing practice and a generative source for continuing investigations.

84 Christopher Wool: Part I In the first part of a two-part essay on the artist, Richard Hell explores the formal and conceptual unities and divisions between Wool and a group of German painters.

104 Artists’ Magazines Gwen Allen recounts her discovery of cuttingedge artists’ magazines from the 1960s and ’70s and explores the roots and implications of these singular publications.

Herbie and Dibi Fletcher have been central members of the American surfing community since the 1960s. They met with Ken Maxwell to discuss the early, pure days of surfing in Hawaii, the evolution of the industry, and the connections between art and surfing.

126 Sterling Ruby: Disjointed Monuments to Nothing Alessandro Rabottini investigates the theoretical and formal underpinnings of Sterling Ruby’s career through the lens of the artist’s latest body of work, acts.

134 Setsuko Setsuko reminisces about her first meeting with Benoît Astier de Villatte, at the Villa Medici, Rome, when he was an infant, and the two discuss her new terra-cotta works, made at Astier de Villatte’s Paris workshop, with Gagosian’s Elsa Favreau.

138 Henry Moore: To Look More Intensely Sebastiano Barassi, the head of collections and exhibitions at the Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, England, speaks with Roger Malbert about the evolutions in Moore’s drawing practice.

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144 Carsten/ Karsten: The One and the Many

The Art of Perception: Richard Serra’s Films For eleven years, from 1968 to 1979, Richard Serra created a collection of films that felt out the uncharted phenomenological boundaries of the medium.

Carlos Valladares explores a selection of these works.

A conversation written

by Daniel Birnbaum.

150 Piero Golia: Mythmaker

Photo credits: Cover: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sinking, 2019 (detail), oil paint, paint stick, oil pastel, and gouache on linen canvas over wood panel, 36 × 36 inches (91.4 × 91.4 cm) © Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Rob McKeever Top row, left to right: Robert Therrien, No title (studio staircase), c. 1994–99, Polaroid Type 100, 3 ⅜ × 4 ¼ inches (8.6 × 10.8 cm) © Robert Therrien/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

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Albert Oehlen: Maximum Chance Maximum Control The artist met with the art historian Christian Malycha to discuss his newest paintings.

Richard Serra, Hands Tied, 1968, film, 16mm, black and white, 3 min. 30 sec. Camera: Robert Fiore. Film © Richard Serra Bottom row, left to right: John Currin, The Producer, 2002, oil on canvas, 48 × 32 inches (121.9 × 81.3 cm) © John Currin.

Photo: Rob McKeever Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2019, watercolor on canvas, 83 ⅞ × 72 inches (213 × 183 cm) © Albert Oehlen. Photo: © Jeff McLane Studio, Inc.

Alexander Wolf explores the economic, social, and methodological concerns of Piero Golia’s practice, revealing the real-world implications of the artist’s experiments with form and process.

158 Love Is Not a Flame: Part III A short story by Mark Z. Danielewski.

164 In Conversation Former guitarist for The Band and songwriter Robbie Robertson met Derek Blasberg in his LA studio to talk about his decades-long career making music and more recently art.

170 Leonardo da Vinci: Nothing Gets Cold The year 2019 is the fifth centennial of the death of Leonardo da Vinci. Mary Ann Caws takes the opportunity to reflect on the polymath’s enduring legacy, tracking his obsessions and temperament into the present era.

190 Game Changer Wyatt Allgeier describes the incredible life of gallerist and artist Betty Parsons (1900–1982).

TABLE OF CONTENTS FALL 2019

112 The Fletcher Family: A Lifetime in Surf

T

he striking image on our cover is a new work by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, who speaks in this issue of the Quarterly with the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, a collector of his work, about his early life and the visionary nature of his art.

We are thrilled to highlight the films of Richard Serra here and greatly look forward to presenting these works at Anthology Film Archives, New York, this October.

We join Jenny Jaskey on a trip to upstate New York to see Tatiana Trouvé’s ongoing sculptural installation Between sky and earth, which serves as a generative source of new works in her practice.

Quite a few articles in this issue reexamine figures from the past. An article on Dora Maar was prompted by a writer’s chance discovery of her address book, filled with the names of important artists and thinkers from the France of her time.

Ed Ruscha speaks about his fondness for the idiosyncratic paintings of Louis Michel Eilshemius, who worked in New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Christopher Wool and Richard Hell discuss Wool’s early encounters with German painters including Dieter Roth, Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger, and Albert Oehlen.

In a strongly feminist take, Alison M. Gingeras discusses the work of John Currin, focusing on paintings of men that may surprise viewers by cleverly undermining traditional archetypes of masculinity.

Our Building a Legacy feature is an interview with Jack Cowart, executive director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Cowart discusses the Foundation’s origins, the mission it set, and the path it took, as well as the decision to sunset it.

On a more personal note, in June we lost Robert Therrien, a brilliant artist whose work charmed me endlessly. Here, Aimee Gabbard, who worked closely with Therrien for Gagosian, beautifully presents the essence of his wonderfully unique mind in an article about the consistent influence of photography on his art and thought since the beginning of his career. It was a privilege to work with Bob over the years and he will be greatly missed.

Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2019

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald

Founder Larry Gagosian

Executive Editor Derek Blasberg

Business Director Melissa Lazarov

Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier

Published by Gagosian Media

Text Editor David Frankel

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Online Editor Jennifer Knox White Design Director Paul Neale Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility Website Wolfram Wiedner Studio

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Cover Nathaniel Mary Quinn

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Contributors Gwen Allen Wyatt Allgeier Sebastiano Barassi Brigitte Benkemoun Daniel Birnbaum Derek Blasberg Mary Ann Caws Anderson Cooper Jack Cowart Mark Z. Danielewski Elsa Favreau Dibi Fletcher Herbie Fletcher Aimee Gabbard Alison M. Gingeras Massimiliano Gioni Leta Grzan Richard Hell Jenny Jaskey Jeff Koons Roger Malbert Christian Malycha Ken Maxwell Alison McDonald Viet-Nu Nguyen Albert Oehlen Bill Powers Nathaniel Mary Quinn Alessandro Rabottini Robbie Robertson Ed Ruscha Setsuko David Sylvester Carlos Valladares Benoît Astier de Villatte Alexander Wolf Christopher Wool

Thanks Dean Anes Julia Arena Andisheh Avini Chloe Barter Holly Braine Charlotte Bullions Michael Cary Serena Cattaneo Adorno Kitty Cleary William N. Copley John Currin Mary Dean Jean-Olivier Després Julia Dinella Kyle Dorosz Victoria Eatough Kate Fernandez-Lupino Lauren Fisher Richard Alwyn Fisher Douglas Flamm Emily Florido Mark Francis Hilde Gahlen Brett Garde Gregory Gestner Darlina Goldak Piero Golia Kat Hamrock Carsten Höller Delphine Huisinga Jacqueline Hulburd Luke Ingram Sarah Jones Joe Kitchen Claire Kremer Roxane Lagache Jared Levine

Perry Levine Lauren Mahony Pepi Marchetti Franchi Susannah Maybank Rob McKeever Trina McKeever Adele Minardi Olivia Mull Louise Neri Elena Pinchiurri Donna Quinn Stefan Ratibor Michele Reverte Nicola Del Roscio Lauran Rothstein Sterling Ruby Alexandra Samaras Zoë Santa-Olalla Clara Serra Richard Serra Isabel Shorney Sarah Sickles Rani Singh Megan V. Sprenger Kristin Steiner Rebecca Sternthal Molly Stevens Ashley Stewart Andie Trainer Tatiana Trouvé Stephen Twilley Lily Walters Emily White Kelso Wyeth Guillaume Ziccarelli

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CONTRIBUTORS Gwen Allen

Jenny Jaskey

Gwen Allen is professor of art history and director of the School of Art at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (MIT Press, 2011) and the editor of The Magazine (Documents of Contemporary Art series, MIT Press and the Whitechapel Gallery, 2016).

Jenny Jaskey is director and curator of the Artist’s Institute, New York, where she has organized exhibitions with artists including Hilton Als, Tauba Auerbach, Pierre Huyghe, and Carolee Schneemann. She is also distinguished lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at Hunter College, New York.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Anderson Cooper In his collagelike composite portraits derived from sources both personal and found, Nathaniel Mary Quinn probes the relationship between visual memory and perception.

Fragments of images taken from online sources, fashion magazines, and family photographs come together to form hybrid faces and figures that are at once neo-Dada and adamantly realist, evoking the intimacy and intensity of a face-toface encounter.

Anderson Cooper is the anchor of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°, a global newscast that goes beyond the headlines with in-depth reporting and investigations.

Richard Hell Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ 1977 LP Blank Generation was rereleased in 2018 by Sire/Warner in a remastered facsimile edition. Hell’s books include two novels, Go Now (Scribner, 1996) and Godlike (Little House on the Bowery, 2005); his autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (Ecco, 2013); and the essay collection Massive Pissed Love: Nonfiction 2001– 2014 (Soft Skull Press, 2015).

Jack Cowart Jack Cowart, founding executive director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, was previously deputy director/chief curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1992–99) and head of the department of twentieth-century art at the National Gallery of Art (1983–92), both in Washington, DC. He previously held curatorial posts in St. Louis and Hartford. Cowart, who won his PhD in art history at Johns Hopkins University in 1972, is a widely recognized authority on Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, and other American and European twentiethcentury modern and contemporary artists. He was made a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2001.

Mark Z. Danielewski The New York Times has declared Mark Z. Danielewski “America’s foremost literary Magus.” He is the author of the award-winning and best-selling novel House of Leaves, the National Book Award finalist Only Revolutions, as well as The Familiar and the novella The Fifty Year Sword, which became a performance at redcat, Los Angeles, for three consecutive years.

Albert Oehlen Albert Oehlen’s oeuvre is a testament to the innate freedom of the creative act. Through expressionist brushwork, surrealist methodology, and self-conscious amateurism he engages with the history of abstract painting, pushing the basic components of abstraction to new extremes. In this issue he speaks with Christian Malycha about his newest paintings.

Photo: Oliver Schultz-Berndt

Christian Malycha Christian Malycha is an art historian, curator, and member of the executive board of Kerber Artbook Publishers.

Former artistic and executive director of the Kunstverein Reutlingen, since 2002 he has produced many exhibitions and publications on twentieth- and twenty-first-century painters and sculptors, among them Georg Baselitz, Albert Oehlen, and Franz West.

Christopher Wool Christopher Wool may be best known for his paintings of large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases, but he actually works in a wide range of styles and with an array of painterly techniques, including spray painting, hand painting, and screen printing.

Wool’s work sets up tensions between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. He was born in 1955 in Chicago and lives and works in New York.

Photo: Aubrey Mayer

Alessandro Rabottini Alessandro Rabottini is an art critic and curator who lives and works between London and Milan. He has been the artistic director of miart—International Modern and Contemporary Art Fair, Milan—since 2017. Rabottini has curated many exhibitions in European museums and institutions.

Photo: Mark Blower

Mary Ann Caws Mary Ann Caws is distinguished professor emerita of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright fellowships, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Officier in the Palmes Académiques.

Alison McDonald Alison McDonald has been the director of publications at Gagosian for sixteen years. During her tenure she has worked closely with Larry Gagosian to shape every aspect of the gallery’s extensive publishing program and has personally overseen over 400 publications dedicated to the gallery’s artists.

R A LPH L AUR EN

r a l p h l a u r e n . c o m

Jeff Koons Since his emergence in the 1980s, Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of Pop art, Conceptual art, and the readymade with popular culture to create his own unique iconography, often controversial and always engaging. Working with everyday objects, his work revolves around themes of self-acceptance and transcendence.

Photo: Branislav Jankic

Massimiliano Gioni Massimiliano Gioni is the artistic director of New York’s New Museum, where he has curated numerous exhibitions including major solo shows by John Akomfrah, Sarah Lucas, Marta Minujín, Albert Oehlen, Chris Ofili, Raymond Pettibon, Pipilotti Rist, Nari Ward, and many others.

Photo: Scott Rudd, courtesy New Museum, New York

Carlos Valladares Carlos Valladares is a writer, critic, programmer, journalist, and video essayist from South Central Los Angeles, California. He studied film at Stanford and will start his PhD in History of Art and Film & Media Studies at Yale University in the fall.

He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Film Comment, and the Criterion Collection.

Photo: Cindy Shorney Pearson

Brigitte Benkemoun Brigitte Benkemoun is a French writer and journalist who lives between Paris and Arles. A reporter who has long been a director of political television shows, she is now dedicated to writing—especially since she bought by chance on eBay an incredible address book. Je suis le carnet de Dora Maar is her third book.

Alison M. Gingeras Alison M. Gingeras is a curator and writer based in New York and Warsaw. Her curatorial history spans from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, to the storefront curatorial space Oko in Manhattan’s East Village. She is currently an adjunct curator at Dallas Contemporary, where she will open the exhibition John Currin: My Life as a Man on September 14, 2019.

This summer, independent publisher Heinzfeller Nileisist published Totally My Ass and Other Essays, a collection of Gingeras’s writings.

Photo: Piotr Uklan´ski, Untitled (Gingerass), 2003 (detail)

Bill Powers Bill Powers runs half gallery, New York. His writing has appeared in GQ, the New York Times, Artnews, Purple Fashion, and Muse magazines.

The author of five books, including Interviews with Artists (Gagosian, 2013) and What We Lose in Flowers . . .

(Karma, 2012), he organized the group show Domestic Horror, currently on view at Gagosian, Park & 75, New York.

Sebastiano Barassi

Roger Malbert

Sebastiano Barassi is head of collections and exhibitions at the Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, England. Before joining the Foundation he was curator of collections at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, and worked at the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London.

The writer and curator Roger Malbert was head of Hayward Gallery Touring at the Southbank Centre, London, until 2018, and was previously assistant curator at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. He has an MFA in drawing from the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Leta Grzan

Viet-Nu Nguyen

Leta Grzan joined Gagosian Beverly Hills in 2011 after working at MitchellInnes & Nash and Christie’s. She has worked closely with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, mounting exhibitions of the Times Square Mural in 2002 at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, and later resurrecting the Greene Street Mural in 2015 at Gagosian’s Chelsea gallery.

Viet-Nu Nguyen has been the curator of the Ovitz Family Collection in Los Angeles since 2007. In this issue, she speaks with Leta Grzan and Ed Ruscha about the life and work of Louis Michel Eilshemius.

Benoît Astier de Villatte

Elsa Favreau

Ed Ruscha Ed Ruscha’s deadpan representations of Hollywood logos, stylized gas stations, and landscapes distill the imagery of popular culture into a language of cinematic and typographical codes that is as accessible as it is profound.

Ruscha has had twenty-one solo exhibitions with Gagosian since his first exhibition with the gallery, in 1993.

Photo: Gary Regester

Setsuko Setsuko was born in 1942 in Tokyo and lives and works in Paris and at the Grand Chalet de Rossinière, Switzerland. She has exhibited in Tokyo, Paris, London, Rome, Geneva, and New York, and her work is included in institutional collections such as that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Since 2002, Setsuko has served as the honorary president of the Fondation Balthus, and in 2005 she was designated unesco’s Artist for Peace.

Photo: Yuko Yamashita

Benoît Astier de Villatte and Ivan Pericoli, founders of the atelier Astier de Villatte, Paris, are renowned for their signature approach to ceramics, following in the tradition of the city’s great eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury ceramic studios.

Photo: Julie Ansiau

Elsa Favreau graduated from the Sorbonne, Paris, with an MA in French literature, and from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, with an MA in art history and as the author of a thesis on the Chinese artist Pan Yuliang. She lives in Paris and has been with Gagosian, Paris, since it opened in October 2010.

D I O R .C O M

Alexander Wolf

Ken Maxwell

Alexander Wolf has written for Modern Painters, Art in America, The Last Magazine, and The New Republic. In 2013 he joined Gagosian, New York, where his projects have included advising private and institutional collectors, communications, and online initiatives. In this issue Wolf examines Piero Golia’s theatrical and socially inclusive approach to making paintings, sculptures, and other works.

Born and raised in New York City, Ken Maxwell graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting. Since joining Gagosian as a director in 2007, Maxwell has worked with several artists, been instrumental in the production of numerous exhibitions, and is a member of Gagosian’s Advisory Board.

Daniel Birnbaum

Aimee Noelle Gabbard

Daniel Birnbaum is the artistic director of the VR production company Acute Art. He was previously the director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Städelschule, Frankfurt, as well of the city’s Kunsthalle Portikus. He was artistic director of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.

Photo: John Scarisbrick

Aimee Noelle Gabbard has been with Gagosian for seven years. During this time she worked closely with Robert Therrien, organizing exhibitions of his work in London, Austin, Denver, New York, and San Francisco. In this issue she addresses the role of photography and the unexplored extent of its influence on the late artist’s legacy.

Dibi Fletcher

Derek Blasberg

Wyatt Allgeier

Daughter of big-wave pioneer, Walter Hoffman, wife to surf icon, Herbie Fletcher, mother to surf innovators, Christian and Nathan Fletcher, and grandmother to outstanding transition-skateboarder Greyson Fletcher, Dibi Fletcher has been at the center of the surf and skate culture her entire life. However, it is not just her association to these great individuals that has made Dibi Fletcher such a symbol within these communities. An artist in her own right, Dibi is also an author and the president of the Fletcher family business, Astrodeck. With the recent exhibition of their family’s lifework in New York, Dibi and her family will continue to carve out their unique position in the surfing and skateboarding culture.

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

Wyatt Allgeier is a writer and an editor for Gagosian Quarterly. He lives and works in New York City.

Herbie Fletcher Herbie Fletcher was born in 1948 in Pasadena, California, and lives in San Clemente, California. Exhibitions include Harder. Betterer. Fasterer. Strongerer, Brucennial, New York (2012); Wrecktangles, the Hole, New York (2013); Path of a Wave Warrior: Selections from the Fletcher Collection, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA (2014); and Barry McGee: SB Mid Summer Intensive, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, CA (2018). Fletcher is globally recognized as a surfing legend and a pioneering inventor who helped shape the way surfing is practiced today. He has produced and starred in numerous surfing films, and in 1976 founded Astrodeck, a company that produces equipment for surfers.

THE ART OF PERCEPTION: 34

RICHARD SERRA’S FILMS

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Text by Carlos Valladares

A

A white hand, black with soot, clamps open and shut. It lets pieces of lead fall through its gnawing f ingers.

Sometimes it catches the pieces, sometimes not. It always allows the lead to leave below the frame. The body is framed as a fragment, the hand floats. It would seem there is no end result to all this hand-grasping: as soon as a lead is caught, it is let go.

Process is the central point of interest, and three minutes later this short film meets its end in a peterout as sudden as its start. The film extends the “termite-art” tradition championed by the painter-critic Manny Farber in 1962, in which there is “buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has passed.”1 The film’s title is just as unflashy and to the point: Hand Catching Lead (1968). It suggests that the tasks on display could theoretically extend to infinity, but then this action-with-a-lowercase-“a” film would lose the crucial material that gives it its form and its definite endpoint: that mysterious, human element of plain tiredness.

For eleven years (1968–79) Serra felt out the uncharted phenomenological boundaries of film, pushing it to exciting heights in line with the watershed period in cinema history out of which his moving-image work sprung. Hand Catching Lead was made less than a year after the appearance of the Canadian artist and filmmaker Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), a landmark event that,

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as Annette Michelson pointed out, “came at a time in the history of the American avant-garde when the assertive editing, superimposition, the insistence on the presence of the film maker behind the moving, hand-held instrument, the resulting disjunctive, gestural facture had conduced to destroy that spatio-temporal continuity which had sustained narrative convention.”2 No longer were film’s unique qualities and effects chained to the flourishes of plot or psychological identification with the action and figures on-screen. Snow announced a visionary way of sensing-throughfilm that no one else in the medium had been able to articulate so forcefully yet coolly. As Serra said, “Wavelength was the most interesting thing that was happening [in film],”3 and the “aspect of unpretentious, indigenous American poetry that was difficult to deny”4 in Snow’s and others’ work (Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie, both of 1966) encouraged Serra to pick up the camera and use it as a device in a series of remarkable studies of moving-image perception: the hand films he made for Leo Castelli’s gallery; a Snow-type work in a New York loft in which a seemingly rectangular window is revealed to be a trapezoid (Frame, 1969); ideology-revealing videos in which he parodied and “expose[d] the structure of commercial television”; 5 certain process films that burrow deep into the lives of bridges or of factories that have pulverized the ears and souls of men for untold generations. Serra’s films work in the tradition of “unpretentious, indigenous American poetry” that he sees in areas such as Jackson Pollock’s paintings, Snow’s Back and Forth (1969), and “those bridges [that] were built during a ten- or twelve-year period [between 1905–06 and 1925] for efficiency and support and nothing else.”6

Most of Serra’s early film work focuses on tasks in short bursts: a hand catches lead, two hands untie themselves from a rope bind, two pairs of hands pick up lead filings, Tina turns. The length of time it takes to complete a task is based on elements that are hard to quantify but solid enough that one can expect an endpoint (two or three minutes): the hand will stop when it gets tired, Tina Girouard will spin until she’s dizzy. Serra’s early work wasn’t shown in a traditional theatrical setting such as Anthology Film Archives—New York’s church of film, which, in its early years, had built-in “cabins with side panels aimed to maximize optical and acoustic focus on the screen”—but in the then new Leo Castelli Gallery at 420 West Broadway, in a loft of 740 square meters divided into three exhibition areas, with a separate space for film and video screenings.7 On September 25, 1971, Hand Catching Lead, Frame, Hands Scraping (1968), and Tina Turning (1969) were screened at the Castelli Gallery as part of a show that included sixteen works on 16mm film by Serra and his contemporaries Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Keith Sonnier. The viewer was placed in “an environment where the projected image was presented in a more open way that both activated and distracted the viewer’s body,” the films being screened simultaneously around the space “with no fixed choreography, their visual and auditory combinations unplanned, left to chance.”8 The presentation of Serra’s films in such a setting is important to establish, but only insofar as it highlights the unique bodily demands they made on viewers who first encountered them. In the past—usually at the expense of what occurs in the films—some critics have tried to link the experience, material concerns, or aesthetic boundaries of these works to those of Serra’s best-known practice,

Previous spread: Richard Serra, Hands Scraping, 1968, film, 16mm, black and white, 4 min. 30 sec. Camera: Robert Fiore Opposite: Richard Serra, Hand Catching Lead, 1968, film, 16mm, black and white, 3 min. 30 sec. Camera: Robert Fiore Below: Richard Serra, Frame, 1969, film, 16mm, black and white, sound, 22 min. Camera: Robert Fiore

Following spread: Richard Serra, Railroad Turnbridge, 1976, film, 16mm, black and white, 19 min.

Last page: Richard Serra, Steelmill/ Stahlwerk, 1979, film, 16mm, black and white, sound, 29 min. Collaborator: Clara Weyergraf Artwork © Richard Serra Film stills courtesy Richard Serra Films and videos courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York

sculpting. Serra himself has been adamant in his hostility toward such connections: “I did not extend sculptural problems into film or video. I began to make sculptures, film, and video at about the same time, so it can’t be a question of developing one form into the other. My involvement with different media is based on the recognition of the different material capacities and it is nonsense to think that film or video can be sculptural.”9 Serra’s films and videos constantly call attention to themselves as films, but always with the political and the artistic on nearby parallel tracks— that is to say, never esoterically. Perhaps the ones that most demand our attention today are Anxious Automation (1971) and Television Delivers People (1973). The former works in the territory of Hand Catching Lead: we’re made aware of the hundreds of still images that come together to form an illusion of a whole filmed subject (though video has a synthetic, blurry grunge that even 16mm resists). A languid Joan Jonas sits on a sofa. She makes throwaway, bored gestures with her arms, cocking her elbows at bizarre angles. Two cameras are trained on Jonas, and they switch off every other second, creating a sense of the space around Jonas collapsing in a chaotic but consistent jumble. The cuts— more aggressive and space-splitting than anything in a mid-’70s Ken Russell sequence—never let you linger or dwell, the zone of most of the Serra films.

It’s a video whose playfulness contributes to the bitter point: it relies on an oblique, deadpan humor to mock the synthetic techniques that Hollywood uses to keep the viewer’s attention span short, to degrade space, to depict time as a grotesquely foreshortened linear stream. It’s a parody of MTV avant la lettre. Serra does in termite-sized short form what the British director Peter Watkins (La Commune

(Paris 1871) [2000], Strindberg 1849–1912: The Freethinker [1994]) does in symphonic swaths: he finds a way out of what Watkins calls the “Monoform,” that “repetitive TV language-form of rapidly edited and fragmented images accompanied by a dense bombardment of sound, all held together by the classical narrative structure.” Serra and Watkins rebel against a wall-to-wall mass media schema that “gives no time for interaction, reflection or questioning.”10 Serra’s jabs at mass-media find their peak in Television Delivers People (1973; made in collaboration with Carlota Fay Schoolman), a six-minute tape where what’s being brashly exposed is the gullibility of a populace that doesn’t realize it’s being sold up the creek as the shiny object of a diseased capitalism. The cagey humor comes in the inspired offsetting of a dead serious scrolling text (“Popular entertainment is basically propaganda for the status quo”) with mind-numbingly cheery Muzak.

Serra’s intellect here is brutal, cutting. Just as the Hollywood film director Frank Tashlin vented his withering love-hate relationship with American pop culture through the very medium that propped it, and him, up, Serra needed to bring TV’s rotted, invisible ideology back home to roost. So he and Schoolman arranged to have the tape aired on broadcast television—first in Amarillo, Texas, as a brief sign-off to regular programming (1973), then in Chicago on WTTW (1979). (“It received newspaper reviews the next day, which made me very happy.”)11 Serra mentions that the tape has a touch of Jean-Luc Godard, in the French director’s didactic Dziga Vertov mode (Godard was also one of the earliest proponents of Tashlin’s barbed satire in the 1950s), and indeed there is, as in Godard’s Vladimir and Rosa (1971), an elegant and unfussy

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dialectic between the image and the idea, between pared-down text in yellow on blue and the concretely abstract ideas it’s exposing in real time. 12 Serra’s ideas are not concealed in the tape; they are rudely visible, working to jolt viewers out of their drugged “Everything is Awesome” state and into mental action. The tape hinges on a disturbing resituation of the word “deliver,” the subversive proposal that we are not the recipients of the products we use but, rather, the passive beings traded off by those same products (and their makers). “In commercial broadcasting, the viewer pays for the privilege of having himself sold,” it tells us. Much of Serra’s and Schoolman’s ideas haven’t changed in the digital era, when sites like Facebook, Amazon, and Google track our every search—who we’re friends with, what music we listen to, which Ike or Mike we like—in order to best tailor their nonsentient products (Alexa) to their sentient ones. “In America,” Serra said in 1973, “probably one of the few things that people can believe in is entertainment. If you give definitions, political, economic, whatever, through entertainment, people believe them; I don’t know why.”13 In the two Serra films of the late 1970s, the brash, murderous, expose-the-bastards drive of the videos is mixed with the earlier process films’ need to stick with a task-object-setting over a hypnotic, Warholian stretch of time. 1976’s Railroad Turnbridge (“there was really a need to investigate what ‘bridgeness’ meant to me”) grants the titular structure a touching cement-footprint presence by squaring all sides of its existence.14 It ennobles, without phlegmatic nostalgia, a structure that people usually ignore because its entire function is predicated on inconspicuousness. Presenting a turnbridge over the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, Serra’s camera halves, twists, bisects, and frames the bridge in such a way as to make birds, cars, and freeways seem to pass impossibly and cleanly through its center. The turnbridge is a sturdy entity that doesn’t call attention to itself, doing its job of supporting heavy vehicles and no more. Serra captures it as it turns; his shots don’t explain how the bridge literally bridges, since he’s more concerned with evoking the sensation of bridging—the meeting of two points—and with all the by-details that give the connection-event a solidity and a presence in the physical world.

What sticks in the mind is a shot of a patch of still rail as a train whizzes across it—the quietly buzzing rail barely noticing the whirling kinetic energy coursing through its steel. The turnbridge columns crumple like an accordion. As the bridge turns, the camera remains planted, so that it looks as if the sky and the horizon (an illusion within the illusion) are moving, not the bridge. A train crosses the railroad span and nears our eye, in the style of the Lumière brothers’ film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895). In the bridge film, something of the primitive purity of vision is restored, a vision lost in the early twentieth century when people and filmmakers turned toward D. W. Griffith’s narrative whirligigs and away from the raw, tough, premontage act of Lumière looking.

A few years later, Serra and the art historian Clara Weyergraf made Steelmill/Stahlwerk (1979), probably the least sentimental workers’ film in existence. Ostensibly detailing “working conditions in a German steel mill,”15 this is a funky, undeclamatory work in which art, commerce, and labor are harmonized by a rigorously assured composer’s eye rarely seen since 1955, when Jay Leyda compiled the rushes for Sergei Eisenstein’s unrealized 38

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¡Que Viva México! (1930). The twenty-nine-minute, 16mm film is divided into two halves: one in which Weyergraf interviews a group of anonymous German factory-workers about their conditions and one in which Serra’s camera tracks through the space of a steel mill where an object (Serra’s sculpture Berlin Block [for Charlie Chaplin], though its identity is never made explicit) is being forged. There’s again the focus on the fragment that defines Serra’s film practice: never give the viewer the whole factory, don’t have the sensitive, thoughtful, talking laborer and the silent, efficient, machinelike laborer in the same body or frame. The men and their labor symbolically exist in Steelmill either as text—disembodied voices—or (in one unforgettable shot on the level of Chantal Akerman) as the forearm of a foreman that pulls a lever back and forth and back and forth.

The film’s first half—Weyergraf ’s questions in German, the workers’ answers in German with white English-language subtitles against a black screen—evens out all the responses (only her voice is distinguished) to create an allover collage of experience, hewing as close to the truth of a situation as one possibly can in montage-based film. “If I had more money, I’d spend it on my hobby: gardening and rabbit-breeding.” “Well, what is freedom exactly? Freedom would be there only if I had enough money to live freely. Whether I’d be free then, I don’t know.” There’s a brute matter-of-factness to the workers’ responses that transfers over to the second half, in which Serra wields the camera around the factory and radically respects the space à la Akerman or Warhol. Garbled German orders sometimes fly out of the din of the factory, but otherwise the soundtrack is dominated by a

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harsh buzzsaw/f lametorch drone—the punishing sounds that render the workers nearly deaf.

Though it’s clear that the filmmakers are gravely concerned for the day-to-day grind of these laborers, this concern isn’t spelled out in hectoring, pity-please tones—a restraint made apparent by the film’s lack of Soviet-type cutting into the space, no voiceover, no factoids about the Ruhr Valley mill.

It has the look of a documentary, but little context is given to sway us into feeling one way or another about these images. This was an intentional effect: in his 1979 interview with Michelson, Serra noted that “if a film is made about [workers], there is a narration explaining to the class that is in the film what they are doing in a way that is beneficial to the union, or the administration, or the power that is funding the film. So most documentaries flagrantly support the status quo, thereby keeping the worker oppressed, or they function as advertisements for the class that wants to sell the products to the class that is dying making them.”16 What distinguishes Railroad Turnbridge and Steelmill is their remarkable historical consciousness. Yve-Alain Bois has written on Serra’s St. John’s Rotary Arc sculpture (1980) that “one has only to reread the pages Serra has written on Rotary Arc to be convinced that film fragmentation is an apt metaphor with which to describe his work”17—an interesting observation when one realizes that Serra’s films crawl along in the exact opposite direction: blocks of long takes at odds with the Vertov– Eisenstein–Alexander Dovzhenko rush. The films have Eisenstein in their DNA (Snow is most present), but it’s the Eisenstein of the unfinished ¡Que Viva Mexico!, in which the frenetic montage that links history, art, politics, and philosophy occurs

inside the viewer’s head, incorporating her range of experiences, his mental montages. The work thus becomes collaborative and open in a way that defies the typical process of presenting movies to viewers—tossed or flung at us, forcing us to engage with a drab, bullying, closed Monoform system that condescends to our intelligence.

1. Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” 1962, in Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, 1971 (reprint ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), p. 144.

2. Annette Michelson, “Toward Snow,” Artforum, Summer 1971, repr. in Michelson, On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), p. 174.

3. Richard Serra, in Michelson, “The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview,” with Clara Weyergraf, 1979, in Serra, Richard Serra: Writings/Interviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 63.

4. Ibid., p. 62.

5. Serra, “Prisoner’s Dilemma: Interview by Liza Bear,” 1974, in Serra, Richard Serra: Writings/Interviews, p. 20.

6. Serra, in Michelson, “The Films of Richard Serra,” p. 69.

7. Tom Holert, “The Task Is the Task,” in Manual No. 7: Richard Serra Films and Video Tapes, 20 Mai—15 Oktober 2017 (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, 2017), p. 11.

8. Ibid.

9. Serra, in “Interview: Bernard Lamarche-Vadel,” 1980, in Serra, Richard Serra: Writings/Interviews, p. 116.

10. Peter Watkins, “Notes on the Media Crisis,” 2010. Available online at www.ocec.eu/cinemacomparativecinema/index.php/ en/11-materiales-web/387-notes-on-the-media-crisis (accessed July 16, 2019).

11. Serra, in Michelson, “The Films of Richard Serra,” p. 74.

12. Serra, in “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” p. 20.

13. Ibid., p. 21.

14. Serra, in Michelson, “The Films of Richard Serra,” p. 69.

15. See Harriet F. Senie, The Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 65.

16. Serra, in Michelson, “The Films of Richard Serra,” p. 79.

17. Yve-Alain Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara,” trans. John Shepley, 1984, in Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes, eds., Richard Serra (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 88.

A retrospective of Richard Serra’s films and videos will be shown at Anthology Film Archives, New York, over the course of three days: October 17–19, 2019. The final night will be accompanied by a panel discussion. For more information please visit: anthologyfilmarchives.com.

NATHANIEL MARY QUINN 42

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ndy Warhol once said never trust someone with three names—John Wayne Gacy and Mark David Chapman spring to mind—but in the case of Nathaniel Mary Quinn an exception to Andy’s rule must be accommodated. At first blush, it’s easy to speculate that Quinn’s middle name, Mary, reflects some form of gender fluidity, but then you hear his backstory and come to understand that the self-naming was actually a loving tribute: his late mother’s given name was Mary, and this woman’s commitment to her youngest son’s welfare far surpassed standard parental obligations to border on sainthood.

Determined to keep Quinn away from the darker influences prevalent in the Robert Taylor Homes, the notorious, now demolished Chicago public housing project where he grew up, when he was in middle school Mary enrolled him in the Jesse White Tumblers athletic program, a juvenile-delinquency-prevention outreach serving inner-city kids. During his tenure as a gymnast there, the Tumblers performed at Chicago Bulls’ halftime shows as entertainment. Y’all ready for this! This fortuitous timing meant that the teenage Quinn was witness to the amazing feats of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman firsthand. The exposure left an indelible impression on him, remembering these basketball legends after a game glistening with sweat as they strode back to the locker room “like Greek gods come to life.” The epiphany was profound: a person’s circumstances at birth need not dictate the limits of what they might achieve in adulthood.

Mary Quinn died suddenly while Quinn was in his first year at Culver Military Academy, a boarding school he attended as the recipient of a full scholarship. It was only when graduation approached, and his guidance counselor asked him what name he wanted printed on his high school diploma, that this young kid with bad teeth from the Bronzeville section of the South Side decided formally how he would be addressed henceforth: Nathaniel Mary Quinn.

I first noticed your work on Instagram and initially thought it was collage. Then I came to your studio and was blown away to discover that it’s actually charcoal, pastel, gouache, gold leaf, all these different mediums.

NATHANIEL MARY QUINN At my opening in LA last Saturday I was doing a walk-through with some collectors and one guy says, “These are really interesting collages.” I had to correct him that the work is all done by hand. So yes, even in person it’s not always apparent.

AC I know some artists—Adrian Ghenie, for insta nce—w ill make collages as st udies for paintings.

NMQ I’ll tape things up to the wall of my studio, images I’m inspired by. But my paintings come to me as visions.

AC Your work reminds me of t he Willia m Faulkner quote “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Every day I think about my own past, my childhood. I think about my dad dying and my brother dying; I carry them with me. I sense that quality in your work, the importance of reflection upon your past. It seems like you draw from the well of people you knew as a kid: family, neighbors, even the musicians and comedians who influenced you.

NMQ Something definitely changes in you when you lose your family as a child.

AC My mom often quotes the writer Mary Gordon’s remark, “A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.” I believe that applies to boys as well; I know it resonates with me, having lost my dad young. Do you see ways that the trauma you experienced still informs your work?

ANDERSON COOPER

It’s not at the forefront of my mind. However: I definitely think those experiences, which I don’t like to identify as either good or bad, impact your identity. I try to find ways to articulate visually that which is often unseen. When people watch you, Anderson Cooper, on CNN, you seem transparent, but the reality is that you’re incredibly opaque, like every other human being. The transparency disallows for the investigation of your structural identity, which is what I’m after.

AC You talk about having visions. What does that actually mean? Do the paintings come to you in a flash?

NMQ Sometimes it starts with a feeling. The paintings I’m working on now are all based on people in my community, my interactions with them. People share stories with me, tell me about their lives.

Some of the guys have been in jail. You need to have a high level of empathy so that you can really feel what they’re conveying. For me, that’s the pathway to their internalized world.

AC In some ways your method is similar to what a reporter does, speaking to people, trying to understand how they see the world around them.

NMQ At Frieze New York 2018 I showed a new painting called Preciate It, Unk! [2018] about a young guy, maybe twenty-five years old, from the neighborhood. We were talking out on the street one day. His cousin had died recently. Now this kid is a gang member, eager to retaliate. I talked to him about his pain and the sense of abandonment he felt by his friends. After a while he started crying. This whole conversation was right outside of my house. I got the sense this kid was grappling with the struggle he found himself in, to break free NMQ

from his old behaviors. I reminded him that he has a young daughter in school and a new job, good stuff. I was trying to help prevent something violent from happening. At the end of our talk he said, “You like an uncle for me. Is it okay if I call you Unk?” I said sure and we parted ways with a hug and a goodbye of “Appreciate it, Unk!” I was surprised by how open and vulnerable he was with me, probably because he felt safe. So yeah, my portraits are really an attempt to record that which is not seen.

AC There was an artist named Howard Finster who I remember going down to see outside Atlanta in my early twenties. He turned his home and property into what he called Paradise Garden. He talked about having visions as well, though his were more of a religious nature.

NMQ I’ll get a vision of a completed work, I’ll see it in front of me. Or it’s a series of images that build up in my mind.

AC But you also use source material, so in the visions are there sometimes elements of a picture you’ve already seen?

NMQ It could be. Normally the vision happens first and then I’ll do research to find those components.

I’ll look for the gorilla’s arm, or the man’s torso, or the woman’s boots, or the black hat. It’s not a religious thing, although I do believe that as an artist I am merely a messenger and it’s my duty to bring these works to life. That’s why my studio practice has to be as intuitive as the visions themselves.

AC The very first work you made in this style was a painting called Charles [2013], but it came from being on deadline, right? I believe the backstory is that the mother of a student of yours was having a 45

Intro text by Bill Powers Opening spread: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Brooklyn, New York, 2019.

Photo: Kyle Dorosz Previous spread: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, First and Fifteenth, 2016, black charcoal, gouache, soft pastel, and oil pastel on Coventry Vellum paper, 50 × 38 inches (127 × 96.5 cm)

This page: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sinking, 2019, oil paint, paint stick, oil pastel, and gouache on linen canvas over wood panel, 36 × 36 inches (91.4 × 91.4 cm) Opposite: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Big Rabbit, Little Rabbit, 2017, charcoal, soft pastel, oil pastel, paint stick, and acrylic silver powder on paper, 72 × 56 inches (182.9 × 142.2 cm) Following page: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Duckworth, 2018, oil paint, paint stick, oil pastel, and gouache on linen, 36 × 36 inches (91.4 × 91.4 cm) Artwork © Nathaniel Mary Quinn

show in her home and you’d been invited to participate. They asked for five works to exhibit but you only had four works prepared, so you found yourself with only a few hours to complete the last piece.

NMQ Yeah, I only had five hours to do it. The way I used to make paintings before that, I tended to overintellectualize things. In this instance I didn’t have the luxury of time so I picked five photographs that resonated with me and I put up the drawing paper. I didn’t even think I’d be able to finish the work; I limited myself to the eyes, nose, lips, and a fur hat. I used construction paper to isolate areas, to cover up the sections I’d completed. It was very much a faith-based endeavor. Once I’d finished the painting, I removed the top layer of paper and boom, there was my brother Charles staring back at me.

AC And you knew right away that it was your brother? How did you know?

NMQ The piece always tells me who it is. Something about the smirk, the way he was smiling, I knew it was Charles. Now remember I hadn’t seen my brother since I was fifteen. It’s amazing the memories lodged in the depths of your subconscious.

AC For people who don’t know, you grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side of Chicago. They’ve since been torn down, but it was a tough place to grow up, to say the least.

NMQ It was a violent community, impoverished, perhaps 100 percent black.

AC Another world from the Chicago most tourists experience.

NMQ Completely different. A world where gangs and drugs were the norm. Rape. Fights after school.

AC So how did you start making art?

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NMQ I remember drawing on the walls of the apartment and my mom would spank me for it. Then one day Charles—now this is according to what he explained to me later on—told my mother to stop spanking me and look at what I was doing.

AC Who recognized that talent? Because for high school you got a scholarship to a military academy, starting in ninth grade.

NMQ My father was my first art teacher. Here was a man who could not read or write, by the way, but every weekend he would sit me at the kitchen table and we would draw together. He would rip up shopping bags to use as drawing paper. Then we’d take out comic books and try to draw the characters for ourselves. My father was the person who taught me “Your arm is your tool. Don’t draw with your wrist. Use the whole arm.” I think he saw some innate ability in me and was doing his best to hone it. He would break the erasers off the ends of my pencils and say, “Every mark you make, you will make it count.”

AC I used to collect comic books as a kid. In fact, I used to sell them at comic book conventions.

NMQ I remember drawing Cloak and Dagger, Wolverine. . . .

AC I loved the X-Men. And I think it’s interesting how often comic books show up in contemporary art to this day. I was recently at Mark Bradford’s show in LA and he’s been incorporating them into his paintings since 2007, I believe.

NMQ The comic books allowed us to live vicariously through these characters. As I grew older, I learned how comic books were also commentary on social constructs. The X-Men are mutants, and mutants—in my opinion—are black folks, a minority that the world is trying to clamp down on. The

X-Men used to be called the Uncanny X-Men—what a great use of language there. And Magneto was the personification of Malcolm X, while Dr. Xavier was the personification of Dr. Martin Luther King.

AC I’m pretty sure the Black Panther comic even predated the formation of the Black Panthers as an organization. If we can get back to your own story for a moment, at fifteen years old you go away to this boarding school in Indiana, and how long was it before your mother died?

NMQ My mother died during my first semester at Culver Military Academy, toward the end of September 1992. I was playing intramural football when the news came. I remember my dorm counselor, Mr. Klindinen, told me I had a phone call from my dad. I knew instinctually that my mom had passed. I just felt it.

AC Were you able to go home for the funeral?

NMQ Yes, I went home that night. Miss Pilcher and Miss Jackson were two teachers of mine who came to the campus to bring me back to Chicago. I went to the service and there was my mother lying in a casket. I couldn’t deal with the reality of her being dead—I was heavy laden with pain—so I convinced myself as I left the church that my mom had gone on vacation.

AC That allowed you to carry on?

NMQ To remain sane, yes. Then shortly after that I went home for Thanksgiving break and found that my dad and my brothers had moved out of our apartment without telling me.

AC The door was ajar and no forwarding information was given. No note?

NMQ The apartment was empty except for some articles of clothing on the floor and maybe half a loaf of bread in the fridge. I went to my neighbor Diane—who I later made a piece about—and I asked

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her, “Diane, what happened to my family?” And she said, “Oh, they didn’t tell you, baby? They left two weeks ago.” And that was it.

AC And they never reached out to you?

NMQ Tumbleweeds. Nothing.

AC What did you do in that circumstance?

NMQ First, I ended up despising poverty. I hated being poor. I knew I was poor and I hated it. Second, from as far back as I can recall, I always felt different from my peers. I felt like I was special for some reason. I just believed that. I was on a different path. These projects would not be the final chapter for me.

AC Which is pretty remarkable because a lot of people have no idea who they are at fifteen.

NMQ I used to look at Sears Tower and I’d say to myself, “Someday I’m gonna make it there.” Maybe it was a survival mechanism, but I just thought, “Someday I’m gonna make it to the top.”

AC You survived the ultimate abandonment. But now I’ve heard you say that your feelings about that experience have changed.

NMQ After grad school, I met [my future wife] Donna in 2010. We started dating and before that I’d always thought of myself as a victim. It’s a feeling that terrorizes you and takes stock of your soul.

It bankrupted me. I ruined all my romantic relationships—nice women, too. I never believed that anybody would stay with me; hey, my own family abandoned me. It even changed the way I looked at myself physically. As a child, you don’t have the language to abstract yourself from that abandonment, you only have a literal read on the situation. I thought my dad and my brothers left me because I wasn’t good enough. I was ugly and not worthy of love. High school became my refuge—I recognized that a good GPA was essential for my 48

survival. It was either succeed academically or end up homeless.

AC Did you tell the other students at the military school what had happened to you?

NMQ Oh yeah, everybody knew at Culver. But then I realized that was a futile pursuit, because most of these kids were from rich families; my story felt to them like a movie script, they couldn’t relate. So I stopped talking about it. I was looking for a comfort that I could not find. Every Sunday at school we’d have a parade. I was in the marching band.

After the parade I would go sit on the golf mound and listen to my Walkman. I’d play that Al Green song “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” over and over again to unburden myself. I’d think about my mom. That was how I grieved, every Sunday for four years.

AC Of your four brothers, Charles did eventually contact you?

NMQ Fast-forward twenty years later, my career starts to have some traction and I’m a guest on this podcast called The Brilliant Idiots. [The rapper and producer] Swizz Beatz had come to my studio and hooked me up with Charlamagne, the host of the show. Apparently my brother Charles heard it and reached out to me.

AC I can’t even imagine what that conversation was like?

NMQ I was happy to hear from him. He was excited that I knew Charlamagne, but then asked, “Why you telling all these people we abandoned you?”

That comment let me know right away, this is not going to go well. I didn’t curse him out or anything, but I definitely was not interested in reforming a relationship.

AC What was his excuse for them leaving you to fend for yourself?

NMQ According to him, once my mother died, because she was the breadwinner of our family, there was no more money coming in. Charles and my other brothers and my dad all went their separate ways after that. But I asked him, “Did you not know I was coming home for Thanksgiving break?

What happened?!”

AC Also, they knew where you were living at school. You were the one with a fixed address. They could have reached out to you.

NMQ He just couldn’t own up to it. He couldn’t accept the responsibility. This conversation was about thirty minutes total. He was living in Springfield, Illinois, at the time. He said he had a little girl, which I congratulated him on. I told him that I forgave him, and then I explained that this was the last time he’d ever hear from me. I hung up the phone and that was it. I thought they were dead anyway.

AC That abandonment changed the course of your life, but it may also have saved your life.

NMQ I went into therapy for four or five years— learned how to be introspective—and that’s when it dawned on me that had I gone back to the Robert Taylor Homes, I might have followed the same path my brothers fell prey to. Perhaps, in fact, I was delivered from my own destruction? God, or the universe, set in motion a series of events that gave me all these experiences I can now use in my work.

AC You had already made the Charles painting before he called you?

NMQ That’s right. I had already presented my first solo show with Pace London in 2014. Prior to making that Charles portrait, though, my work was focused on the black experience and race relations.

AC Did you feel a certain pressure early on as a black artist?

NMQ Of course, because my peers—Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, all these artists of color—were making work about being black in America. I saw painters making critiques of hip-hop culture or black culture, and I thought, “Huh, maybe that’s what I should do? To get some recognition?” And I did try it, but somehow that wasn’t fulfilling or didn’t feel real to me. I didn’t know why. But then I went into therapy and it became more clear. I think a lot of my work still deals with social issues, but through more of a personal filter.

AC Can you think of one painting in particular?

NMQ I painted The Making of Super Nigga [2015] after the Trayvon Martin shooting and all the other unarmed black men killed by cops. I thought, “Wow, this is all being driven by fear.” The cops were trying to become superniggas to kill niggas, which is why I painted the Superman S on the figure’s chest. You are becoming the embodiment of that thing which you fear. In order to kill the “dangerous men” you have to yourself become a killing machine. And you have the law behind you! Eric Garner, who was choked to death in Staten Island selling cigarettes a few years ago? I consider that a snuff film that was shown on national TV. AC Your mother’s name was Mary, which you took as your own middle name after she died.

NMQ Because my mother never had an education.

She never had a high school diploma or a college degree or a graduate degree from New York University. It was important for me to take her with me. I sign the back of each work “Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Love Mom. Jesus,” and three hearts: a heart for me, a heart for my mom, and a heart for God. Every painting I make is dedicated to the memory of my mother. And now everybody has to say her name.

Joséphine Collection A i g re t t e I m p é r i a l e

GR ACE AND CHAR ACTER

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Mansplaining: Figuring Masculinity in the Age of #MeToo In light of recent developments around the definition of masculinity in American culture, Alison M. Gingeras, the curator of “John Currin: My Life as a Man” at Dallas Contemporary, Texas, looks closely at the artist’s depictions of male subjects.

The Best a Man Can Be?

Middle-aged men glare at themselves in middle-class medicine cabinets. A fragmented, cacophonous assault of talk radio provides the soundtrack for their introspection: “Bullying . . . the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment . . . masculinity.”1 The familiarly velvety voice of the ad’s narrator interrupts the sonic wall of the news cycle, asking “Is this the best a man can get?” as a clip of the Gillette tagline from a 1980s commercial flashes on-screen. This gendered promise is incarnated by stock characters, an all-American white guy being kissed on his freshly shaved cheek by his generically pretty white girlfriend.

Then our culture war bursts through the screen, personified by a herd of marauding tween boys who dramatize the social Darwinism that undergirds capitalist society: the weak are justifiably terrorized by the strong. Cut to a close-up of a blue text bubble: social media rears its ugly head in the narrative with the epithet “freak!!!” The scene dissolves to show a mother comforting her bullied boy while more text bubbles ping with menace: “You’re such a loser.” “Sissy!” “Everyone hates you.”

The montage of footage continues at a rapid pace, evoking systemic sexual harassment and teens passively consuming the girls who sell stuff on TV by dancing in skimpy bikinis.

The narrator reprimands, “We can’t just laugh it off.” The mantra “Boys will be boys” is chanted by a seemingly endless row of paunchy dads, each standing behind a smoking backyard grill.

The camera pans down this Busby Berkeley chorus line of suburban toxic masculinity.

“But something finally changed . . . ,” the narrator intones, as cable-news clips decry headlines about “sexual assault and sexual harassment.” Without calling out the most egregious offenders, such as Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein, the ad takes on a transformative, even redemptive tenor: 52

Previous spread: John Currin, The Shaving Man, 1993, oil on canvas, 36 × 30 inches (91.4 × 76.2 cm). Private collection.

Photo: courtesy Andrea Rosen Opposite: John Currin, The Nursery, 1994, oil on canvas, 32 × 26 inches (81.4 × 66.2 cm). Laura and Stafford Broumand Collection Left: John Currin, Untitled, 1992, watercolor on paper, 10 ¾ × 10 1/8 inches (27.3 × 25.7 cm). Private collection Below: John Currin, Hot Pants, 2010, oil on canvas, 78 × 60 inches (198.1 × 152.4 cm). The Broad, Los Angeles

has had less to do with the liberation of women than with the restraint of men. Whereas the feminist political exigency of the 1960s and early ’70s was centered on concepts of what a woman could be—politically outspoken, sexually liberated, freed from the traditional burdens of domestic life—our current moment is fueled by a radical questioning of male identity.

The bra-burning of those years has given way to similarly inflammatory, career-scorching social media campaigns and the CEO-toppling “Shitty Media Men” online spreadsheet.2 Consciousnessraising groups that provided safe spaces where women could share the intimate details of their oppression have been superseded by the public self-flagellations of men ashamed to have participated in systemic misogyny. Public intellectuals such as George Yancy have penned mea culpas that were unthinkable in even the most liberal circles years before. In his New York Times polemic “#IAmSexist,” he confesses, “There are times when I fear for the ‘loss’ of my own ‘entitlement’ as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.”3 Man-hating was once the exclusive domain of radical feminists; now it’s been co-opted by men themselves.

“And there will be no going back,” the narrator promises. The collective article we dominates the rest of the spot: “Because we, we believe in the best of men . . . to say the right thing, to act the right way.” Evangelical in the delivering of these correctives, the edit continues with vignettes of bros checking other bros’ behavior—breaking up street fights, cutting short catcallers, serving up positive reinforcement for their daughters, saving the kid from getting bullied. Gillette’s de facto manifesto for today’s manhood ends with the woke corporate slogan: “Because the boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow.”

This capitalist court métrage ends with a new pitch line: “The best men can be.” Rather than just finesse a sales jingle, Gillette has felt compelled to dramatize the current crisis of traditional manhood. In this landscape of gender war, it’s impossible for them merely to peddle men’s hygiene products; first they must sell men on the new confines of their identities. In under two minutes, this rebranding hinges on a deceptively simple grammatical move: swapping the verb get for the verb be. In simpler times, men were just men; all they had to do was obtain the accoutrements needed to enforce their manhood.

Nowadays men are the object of scrutiny: they must be deprogrammed, reeducated, and remade to “be” a better version of their gender.

This fragment of pop culture encapsulates a much larger zeitgeist. Masculinity is under the microscope. Fueled by shocking revelations of high-profile men abusing their power, a phenomenon epitomized by the election of the notoriously misogynous Trump in 2016, a populist groundswell has finally emerged that seems to have absorbed certain feminist ideas. Simultaneously, the very bedrock of traditional gender constructs has come to be questioned in even the most mainstream quarters of American public life. While many pundits have heralded this moment as a triumph for feminism, our current societal paradigm shift 53

What Sort of (Wo)Man Reads . . . ?

Reading men’s magazines was once considered a normal rite of passage for boys. In the spirit of Camille Paglia’s argument that “men become masculine only when other men say they are,” the consumption of pornography was one of those acts that externally qualified one’s virility.4 Thanks to the eclipse of print media by Internet porn, the natural audience for men’s magazines has evaporated since the heyday of Hugh Hefner, but back in the day it would have been almost an exercise in obviousness to profile the average consumer of such normative manly material.

This did not stop PR executives from trying to: “What sort of man reads Playboy?” was the tagline for an ad campaign that ran from 1958 to 1974.

Playboy published the sophisticated ads with this headline as a way to distinguish and elevate its editorial product from the smuttier periodicals that competed for its readership.

Targeting potential advertisers, these print ads featured a seductive yet unthreatening photographic tableau of a successful, confident American guy in a leisured setting. Urbane straight men between the ages of eighteen and fifty—each model pictured was white, seemingly upper class, and surrounded by attractive women—were depicted at play: lounging on the beach, reading on the deck of a sailboat, buying an expensive suit, riding a horse, mixing a cocktail in a wood-paneled rumpus room, fueling up a shiny convertible. The text below the image would answer the lead question “What sort of man reads Playboy?” with a dazzling description

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Right: John Currin, Untitled, 1996, watercolor and ink on paper, 8 ¼ × 5 ¼ inches (20.8 × 13.3 cm).

Private collection Below: John Currin, The Jackass, 1997, gouache on magazine page, 8 ½ × 8 inches (21.6 × 20.3 cm).

Private collection Opposite: John Currin, The Dream of the Doctor, 1997, oil on canvas, 78 × 61 inches (198.1 × 154.9 cm). Private collection

of the typical Playboy subscriber: “A young executive with an event-full calendar. A Playboy reader knows where he’s going and the best way to get there.” This copy would boast facts and figures about the desirable demographic that the magazine regularly reached—vaunting the readers’ high salaries, their metropolitan addresses, the number of credit cards in their wallets—and would urge companies to advertise in Playboy to reach this affluent, aspirational class of men. While the ads just echoed the magazine’s propaganda that Playboy was read “for the articles”—the perfect alibi for its porn-hungry audience—they have now become sociological time capsules in the way they enshrine a golden age of traditional masculinity that has been slowly eroding since the later part of the twentieth century.

In 1997, John Currin appropriated these iconic Playboy ads as fodder for a series of works titled The Jackass. In an act of Situationist détournement, Currin used gouache to overpaint the expressions on the faces of the nubile young women whose longing gazes are invariably trained on the men who star in these ads. Comehither looks and coquettish miens have been transformed into horrified scowls, furrowed brows, and expressions of utter disgust. With but a few strokes of the artist’s brush, these trophy women have turned against these men— in essence neutering Playboy’s construction of a certain type of masculinity as highly desirable and readily monetized. With Currin’s minor yet socially scathing modifications, the Jackass works humorously deflate the performance of gender that these men’s magazines were selling to their subscribers while also performing a semiotic reversal. Currin’s overpainted women hold all the power in the battle of the sexes, while these

In the most zealous corners of our current political zeitgeist, this simple reversal of the gender/power binary effectively prevents us from learning from the voices of those men who actually offer critiques of their own gender.

Playboy readers have been transformed into clowns.

With the male protagonists positioned as the punch line of the joke, one might be forgiven for mistaking these gouache modifications for the handiwork of a feminist artist. Given that they were made some two decades before our current gender war, it is tempting to read the Jackass series as a curious anticipation of the current public scorn for so-called toxic, even normative forms of masculinity. But if not prompted by the current feminist groundswell, why would Currin turn to mocking his own kind?

Instead of anachronistically sweeping up the artist’s work in a revisionist narrative of the battle of the sexes, it is more accurate to reinsert Currin into a long tradition of male authors the very substance of whose art revolves around probing the foibles and excesses of their own masculinity.

The novels of Philip Roth impose themselves as the literary equivalent of Currin’s work when it comes to representations of masculinity. Both Roth and Currin are artists “who make great comedy of male sexual appetites and failures.”5 While it is impossible to compare literary and visual depiction exactly, both have created works that oscillate between the ravenous sexual desires embedded in the male gaze and the exploration of crippling anxiety produced by masculine vulnerabilities. Both have been criticized for the “thinness of female characters,” while both have also centered much of their narratives on an “obsession with women’s power over men.”6 Satyriasis seems to be an affliction shared by many of their fictional protagonists—whether the strange black-gloved man grabbing at the pneumatic breasts of Currin’s The Wizard (c. 1994) or Roth’s character David Kepesh, who awakes to find himself metamorphosed into a six-foot-tall breast.

Roth’s humor and cultural references are bathed in the Jewishness of his native Newark, New Jersey, 55

whereas the cultural texture of Currin’s paintings is rife with the sociological details of an East Coast wasp imaginary. Despite this ethnic divide, both Currin and Roth expertly apply the high language or technique of their craft to subject matter inspired by low culture.

“The sick jokes and borscht-circuit vulgarity”7 that pepper Roth’s novels find their echo in Currin’s appropriations that mix “leering, lightheaded kitsch with old-masterish weight as if there were no distinction,” producing what critic Michael Kimmelman named “a dizzying feat that makes every picture seem wholesome and evil at the same time.”8 Roth and Currin are each master portraitists of the male condition.

Yet it is not the best time to advocate for the legacy of Roth and his ilk. With heteropatriarchy under a cloud of suspicion, creators like Roth and Currin who have for decades trained their authorial gaze upon the condition of their own sex have also been caught up in the revisionist backlash. It is a fair question to ask, to borrow the phraseology of the Playboy ads of yore, “What kind of (wo)man reads Philip Roth today?” And further yet, why specifically contemplate the depiction of men in Currin’s

work? This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue have been conceived at a time when the primacy of the male author is more fraught than ever. My Life as a Man borrows its title from Roth’s novel as a conceit to prompt reading of the full span of male iconography in Currin’s thirty years of work through the lens of gender politics.

After five decades of feminist struggle, to believe that achieving gender parity is tantamount to censuring male voices altogether would be a travesty. Yet in this era of understandable #MeToo rage, many women (as well as members of other groups that have been historically oppressed) feel compelled to radically rewrite the canon so as to silence or downgrade the cultural contributions of men—especially white heterosexual cis-gendered men. In the most zealous corners of our current political zeitgeist, this simple reversal of the gender/power binary effectively prevents us from learning from the voices of those men who actually offer critiques of their own gender.

There is immense value for feminist movements—and for humanity as a whole— in carefully examining the portrayals of the masculine psyche that operate in much of Roth’s

John Currin, The New Guy, 1994, oil on canvas, 16 × 12 inches (40.6 × 30.5 cm). Private collection, Paris. Photo: courtesy Sadie Coles HQ , London Artwork © John Currin Photos: Rob McKeever unless otherwise noted

and Currin’s oeuvres. Their fictional men are more often than not antiheroes. The minutiae of their sexual drives, narcissism, or misogyny are ultimately the subject of brutal lampooning— whether embodied in the portrayal of a lecherous medical professional in Currin’s Dream of the Doctor (1997) or in Roth’s profoundly sexist character Nathan Zuckerman. Both artist and author allow themselves to transgress the confines of political correctness to probe the masculine grotesque; their “mansplaining” takes the form of a ribald autopsy of the flaws, conflicts, and anxieties that dominate contemporary manhood.

While our revisionist urges attempt to downshift men’s status from the first to the second sex, any renegotiation of gender politics must involve both halves of humanity. When read as a whole, Currin’s work may be animated by the same existential desire as Peter Tarnapol, the central figure in My Life as a Man: “I wanted to be humanish: manly, a man.”

Full essay originally published in the 2019 exhibition catalogue John Currin: Men. Published by Gagosian. Distributed by Rizzoli.

1. Kim Gehrig, “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” Gillette commercial, January 13, 2019, video, 1:48. Available online at www. youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0 (accessed June 22, 2019).

2. See Moira Donegan, “I Started the Media Men List: My Name is Moira Donegan,” New York, January 10, 2018. Available online at www.thecut.com/2018/01/moira-donegan-i-started-the-media-menlist.html (accessed June 22, 2019).

3. George Yancy, “#IAmSexist,” New York Times, October 24, 2018.

Available online at www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/mensexism-me-too.html (accessed June 22, 2019).

4. Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 50–51.

5. Elaine Blair, “Men’s Lib,” The New York Review of Books, February 21, 2019. Available online at www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/02/21/ henry-miller-mens-lib/ (accessed June 23, 2019). A review of John Burnside, On Henry Miller: Or, How to Be an Anarchist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

6. David Gooblar, “Roth and Women,” Philip Roth Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 2012):9.

7. Morris Dickstein, “My Life as a Man,” New York Times, June 2, 1974. Available online at www.nytimes.com/1974/06/02/archives/mylife-as-a-man-by-philip-roth-now-vee-may-perhaps-have-begun.html (accessed June 23, 2019). A review of Philip Roth, My Life as a Man (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974).

8. Michael Kimmelman, “John Currin,” New York Times, November 12, 1999. Available online at www.nytimes.com/1999/11/12/arts/ art-in-review-john-currin.html (accessed June 23, 2019). A review of Currin’s exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, fall 1999.

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Found Object

by Brigitte Benkemoun Before the found object, there was the lost object: a small Hermès datebook that my husband had for years. A miracle he kept it so long; he spends his time losing things. A second happy chance was the salesperson’s polite but definite response when he wanted to buy the same datebook again: “They don’t make this leather anymore.” Another man would have been satisfied with a different leather—fullgrained, striated, crocodile . . . but my husband never gives up: he found his bliss on eBay under “vintage leather goods.”

It arrived by mail, well packed in Bubble Wrap.

Same size, same leather, a bit redder, a bit older. Of course I opened it; a little address book was still slipped into an inside pocket. I leafed through it absentmindedly before noticing a name: Cocteau.

Then below it, Chagall. . . . Then Éluard, Giacometti, Ponge, Poulenc, de Staël. A frenzied return to the first page: Aragon, Breton, Brassaï, Braque, Balthus.

Twenty small pages listed the greatest European artists of the postwar period in alphabetical order. At the very end, a calendar gave me a date: 1951.

Obviously I wanted to know: who had written these numbers in brown ink? Who could have been the friend of all these geniuses? A genius him- or herself, surely. I wasted several weeks trying to find the seller. After a dozen or so e-mails back and forth with an auctioneer in southwestern France, I realized that I’d have to find the answer alone, by subjecting the book to a kind of interrogation.

Like an investigator facing a key witness, I began with careful observations of the book, then tallied the information it was willing to give me with an old telephone directory that I found in a secondhand shop. The book told me about painters, poets, gallerists, patrons, and a psychoanalyst. I found a hairdresser, a beauty salon, a furrier, a canvas man. Things were coming into focus: I suspected a woman, a painter, in Lacanian analysis, and with close ties to the most famous of the Surrealists.

Yet it was an illustrious unknown, Achille de Ménerbes, who ended up betraying the book’s owner. I spent a crazy amount of time researching online, but all I really needed was a magnifying glass: she hadn’t written “Achille de” but “Architecte,”—“Architecte de Ménerbes” (Ménerbes architect). So she had a house in that small village in the South of France and she needed an architect to oversee construction. The Wikipedia page on Ménerbes notes only two painters having lived there. The address book’s owner hadn’t been Nicolas de Staël, because he was listed in it. So it was Dora Maar!

Everything was coming together, it all made sense, even the absence of her lover Pablo Picasso, who had left her in 1945. The address book I’d purchased by accident was Maar’s.

At the time, I only knew the basics of Maar’s story: Picasso’s “weeping woman” portraits, of course, and the photographs she took of the artist, on the beach or while painting Guernica. Bless Google! I learned more about her in twenty minutes than I had in twenty years: “Dora Maar, the great photographer and French painter, Picasso’s partner.” “An influential figure of the twentieth century.” “Friend of André Breton and the Surrealists.”

“Pablo Picasso’s lover and muse, a role that overshadowed her work as a whole.” “Picasso left her in 1945 for the young Françoise Gilot.” And so forth.

Bits of life, shards of suffering: institutionalization, electroshock treatments, madness, psychoanalysis, God, isolation. I also read the Paris gallerist Marcel Fleiss’s account of his dealings with Maar, written a few years ago—it was Fleiss who had organized the last exhibition during her lifetime, in 1990. He responded immediately to the e-mail I sent to his gallery: “Come see me at fiac,” the annual Paris art fair.

It took Fleiss less than five minutes to authenticate Maar’s handwriting. He equally immediately passed on his memories of her, an old woman when he met her, a recluse in an unkempt Paris apartment, cantankerous and distrustful. He would never forget the copy of Mein Kampf in her library, and that terrible moment when, before agreeing to sell him photographs, she asked him to swear that he wasn’t Jewish.1 But who could resist the call of those names:

Brigitte Benkemoun’s newest book, Je suis le carnet de Dora Maar, takes a novel approach to the art of biography. For the Quarterly, Benkemoun recounts her discovery of a mysterious Hermès address book, the subsequent realization of its genius former owner, and her journey to learn more about the life, friends, and art of Dora Maar.

DISCOVERING DORA MAAR 58

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Previous spread: Dora Maar, Double Portrait with Hat, c. 1936–37, gelatin silver print, with montage handwork on negative, 11 ¾ × 9 3⁄8 inches (29.8 × 23.8 cm). Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. Gift of David Raymond. Artwork © Dora Maar/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Image: courtesy the Cleaveland Musem of Art, Ohio Left: Dora Maar’s address book.

Photo: Roxane Lagache Opposite: Man Ray, Ady Fidelin, Mary Cuttoli, Man Ray, Paul Cuttoli, Pablo Picasso, and Dora Maar at the Cuttolis’ home, Antibes, 1937 © Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, 2019

Breton, Louis Aragon, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Lacan, and especially the ghost of Picasso. And so I found myself dragged into that battalion of women who for years have taken a passionate interest in Maar: biographers, writers, art historians, gallerists, and more.

My path would be different: besides the fact that I had not chosen her, I had the miraculous address book as a guide. I would ask the same questions of every name: What is this person doing in this book?

What was this person doing in her life? I hesitated before deciding where to start, wavering between chance and alphabetical order, and finally opted for a vague chronological order: “Lamba, 7 Square du Rhône.” Jacqueline Lamba is everywhere described as Maar’s oldest friend. They met as young and ambitious students at the Union centrale des arts décoratifs, very committed to left-wing causes. Their charm was incredibly effective: one married Breton, the leader of the Surrealists; the other became the partner of the century’s greatest painter. But whereas Maar, after Picasso left her, devoted herself to God and became a conservative, Jacqueline left her genius spouse of her own accord and stayed true to her first rebellions to the end of her life.

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I was considering the astounding trajectories of these two twentieth-century women when an e-mail from Fleiss put an abrupt end to my wanderings: “I had dinner with Aube, Jacqueline Breton’s daughter. Her mother never lived at the address in the book.” Again, bless Google! It was Jacqueline’s sister, an obscure piano teacher called Huguette, who had lived there. Luckily, before her death, Huguette Lamba told an art historian, whom I was able to track down, about the connection between herself and Dora. In September 1940, after France had surrendered to Germany and half the country was occupied, the Bretons, having taken refuge in the south, finally obtained a visa for the United States. From the boat that allowed them to escape France, Jacqueline wrote a last letter to Maar, imploring her friend to take care of Huguette, who was pregnant and alone in Nazi-occupied Paris. Maar had just learned that she was infertile, for which Picasso reproached her relentlessly. Through Huguette she would now experience a kind of proxy pregnancy, and when the child was born, she naturally asked to be its godmother. Unfortunately the little girl lived only five months, and this was when Maar first became

interested in religion, initially Buddhism, then Catholicism. To flesh out the story, I asked for the name of Huguette’s child. My confidant hesitated, then whispered, “Brigitte.” I confirmed with public records: the girl did indeed have the same name I do. I’m too rational to see this as anything but coincidence, but it was unsettling. Would I dare tell my confidant that Jacqueline’s letter was mailed from Ghazaouet (then called Nemours), Algeria? Ghazaouet is a small fishing town on the Moroccan border, no one knows it—but I lived there for the first three years of my life.

Other surreal coincidences would punctuate and facilitate my investigation. A friend, for example, remembered that she knew an art historian working with an important Picasso biographer in New York: “I can put you in touch if you’d like.” And that’s how, thanks to Delphine Huisinga, I met John Richardson. I can see him still, hovering over the little address book, bringing it up to his tired eyes, and finding friends in it: Marie-Laure de Noailles, Balthus, Óscar Domínguez, and especially Douglas Cooper, the great collector and Cubism expert who was once his partner. Richardson died before I could get back to New York to see him again, but one of the last things he said to me has continued to haunt me: “You’ll never understand Dora Maar if you don’t remember that she was a masochist.” I found nothing about this in Lacan’s archives, but other psychoanalysts to whom I sent my Dora dossier came to the same conclusion as Richardson.

In following the book word for word, I also met some twenty heirs of various artists: in Ménerbes, the son of Nicolas de Staël; in the English countryside, the son of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller; in Paris, the daughter of Breton, the daughter of the poet Francis Ponge, the niece of the painter André Marchand; and others. I consulted historians, museum directors, art dealers, experts, and enthusiasts. But I never imagined that I would be talking directly to any of the friends of Maar’s named in the book; after sixty-eight years, I was sure, they would all have passed away. When I came to the Belgian filmmaker Étienne Périer, though, I found that no death date appeared for him anywhere online. And for good reason: at the age of eighty-seven, he was alive and well in the South of France, and he even answered the telephone. Périer remembered Maar well, having met her in Saint-Tropez in 1950 through

a friend who was a sculptor. He was not yet twenty years old, while she was in her forties; he got the impression of someone charismatic, dark, temperamental, and self-centered. No one was allowed to ask about Picasso, but she talked about him sometimes: without actually speaking ill of him, she managed to complain about him, insinuating that the genius was letting her live in misery. Périer did not know that she had put down his name in her address book.

A few names remained a mystery to me: Katell, Camille, Madeleine, probably scribbled down to be read only by the writer. I also gave up on relationships that seemed too distant: Aragon, Ponge, the composer Francis Poulenc, for example. Other, more unexpected characters emerged: a graphologist, the poet André du Bouchet, the painter Marchand. Today Marchand is forgotten, but in the 1940s he was often seen as one of Picasso’s most brilliant heirs—and for fifty years he lived in Arles, that little Provençal city where I myself grew up. It was easy to find a few of Marchand’s old friends. They told me that one day after a bullfight he almost got into a brawl with Picasso, over a woman—Marchand claimed that Picasso had stolen Gilot from him. That version of the story doesn’t quite match the official one, but I ended up finding a reference to it in an old issue of Life magazine, from 1947.

A few days before handing in my text, I finally received permission to consult Maar’s private archives—eight boxes of books, mail, photographs, and more, stored in a genealogist’s basement. The letters from Picasso cannot be consulted, but all the others can, including the notable ones from a Benedictine monk who, after Lacan, became her spiritual advisor and pushed her toward a practically fundamentalist form of Christianity. In one of those boxes, I also found her Mein Kampf, with a postcard of Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower tucked into it as a bookmark. But after two years of research, I ended up deciding not to reduce the great artist Maar was to the obsessions of a woman crazed by years of isolation, suffering, and bitterness. She was sure that her talent as a photographer and painter would be recognized posthumously. Perhaps that day has come.

Translated from the French by Molly Stevens.

SHE WAS SURE THAT HER TALENT AS A PHOTOGRAPHER AND PAINTER WOULD BE RECOGNIZED POSTHUMOUSLY. PERHAPS THAT DAY HAS COME.

1. For more on this, see: Marcel Fleiss, “De Guernica à Mein Kampf,” La règle du jeu, February 22, 2013, https://laregledujeu. org/2013/02/22/12471/dora-maar-de-guernica-a-mein-kampf/

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Eilshemius & Me An interview with

Ed Ruscha

The American painter Louis Michel Eilshemius remains one of the most idiosyncratic figures in twentiethcentury art history. His enigmatic paintings caught the attention of Marcel Duchamp in 1917, but the rest of his life’s tale is largely composed of derision and indifference from the art world of his time. By his death, in 1941, he had largely abandoned painting. It was only posthumously that his singular career—including paintings, poetry, astounding letters, and more—found a wider receptive audience of artists, writers, and curators. Here, Ed Ruscha tells Viet-Nu Nguyen and Leta Grzan how he first encountered Eilshemius’s paintings, which of the artist’s aesthetic innovations captured his imagination, and how his own work relates to and differs from that “Neglected Marvel” Louis Michel Eilshemius.

ED RUSCHA I was introduced to Eilshemius’s work

Previous spread, left: Ed Ruscha, Spied Upon Scene: Oh/Ho, 2017, acrylic on museum board paper, 40 × 60 inches (101.6 × 152.4 cm) Previous spread, right: Louis Michel Eilshemius, Fanciful Landscape, 1907, oil on canvas, 30 ¾ × 36 ¼ inches (78.1 × 92.1 cm) Above: Ed Ruscha, Spied Upon Scene: Window, 2017, acrylic on museum board paper, 40 × 60 inches (101.6 × 152.4 cm) Opposite: Louis Michel Eilshemius, Dreaming of Temptation, 1918, oil on canvas, 29 ¾ × 40 ¼ inches (75.6 × 102.2 cm) Next spread: Ed Ruscha, Spied Upon Scene: So, 2017, acrylic on museum board paper, 40 × 60 inches (101.6 × 152.4 cm) Ed Ruscha artwork © Ed Ruscha Photos: Jeff McLane Studio, Inc.

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by my friend Paul Karlstrom, a scholar from San Francisco who is with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. In the late ’70s, Paul had taken great pains to make a book about Eilshemius’s life and art, and it was there that I saw the first reproductions. Later I found out that some of my friends, like [the artist] Peter Schuyff, collected his work.

LETA GRZAN What was your initial reaction to the work?

ER The first few times I saw the works in person, I would sort of grab myself and say, “Well, this is not my type of art, is it? Why would I be interested in this man’s work?” But it did interest me, primarily, in the beginning, because he was interesting. He’s almost like a character out of a Victorian novel. He was born wealthy and lived well almost all of his life until the end of it, when he was destitute.

VIET-NU NGUYEN Yes. He was a lifelong bachelor and completely infatuated with his mother.

ER Exactly. In addition, he pictured himself as knowing a lot about the world. He would write these letters to the editor of the New York Sun, using pseudonyms like “God of Art” and “Neglected Marvel,” “Versatile Inventor,” “The Very God of Lyricism,” “Wonder of the World.”

How about that? There’s also something unpredictable and contrarian about him that I was drawn to—I’ve read a few of those letters and they’re very funny. He finishes one off by saying, “The tendency of the New York press to brush me aside continually will not be tolerated by, Yours sincerely, Louis Eilshemius.” I like that sign-off.

This complexity makes him—alongside his work—a very compelling voice in the art world.

There was something dark and clumsy about his work. At the turn of century he was painting pictures that very much reminded me of Marcel Duchamp’s paintings. I could see right away why Duchamp would single this man out for attention. People were quick to call his work primitive and undisciplined, but he actually went to beauxarts school, he had formal training, but he just went off on his own. He painted so many pictures in the first two decades of the century and then suddenly, in 1920, stopped painting altogether, except for his last two paintings from 1937. The one of the burning zeppelin, a nod to the crash of the Hindenburg zeppelin in New Jersey that year, is a particular favorite—what a way to cap off your life as an artist, to be doing all these little nymph paintings and then finish it off with one of a zeppelin burning [laughter].

VN His biography definitely adds to his likability.

The art world loves an eccentric, a tortured soul.

He was a voluntary outcast. It’s interesting that he cared so much about what critics thought. After all, why bother writing those letters if you didn’t really care to be part of the established art world?

ER Well, he didn’t like to be put down. I don’t think he appreciated that, so maybe he did care about how he was received. And for a long time, he was just a product of neglect from the art world. He would try to get anybody to come to his studio, to the point of writing to people saying, “Come by my studio.” And then he’s got all these little side interests, like he writes poetry, he publishes a magazine, and he offers classes at his

studio on how to make frames [laughter]. Have either of you seen this personal publicity handbill from 1910 that he put out? I’ll read it to you: “You make money by making your own picture frames. How to make picture frames your own self can be learned by taking lessons at 20 dollars an hour of Louis Eilshemius, MA, who has recently discovered an easy way to create them.

His self-made frames are very light in weight, do not break, are attractive, no wood is used, made with little labor, are luminous. learn.” The word “learn” in all caps. But what did he use, plaster or something? What would he use?

VN Maybe he was referring to his practice of painting frames onto the actual paintings.

ER Yes, perhaps. He had this unique way of painting frames with a shadow on two sides and a flash of reflection on the other two sides. And he did that with most of his paintings. The dark is usually at the left and the top and the light is on the right and the bottom.

Beyond the uniqueness of his character, my interest continued as I started discovering other things in his work that were really pretty good, like the way he deals with trees. He’s got trees that kind of talk, you know, the way they’re growing and pointing, and they seem to gather and grow in from surprising places in the composition, almost forming frames of their own around the picture.

VN Most of his paintings are deeply American in location, and the titles make this even more clear.

He seems to have preferred woods, forests, and waterfalls, whereas much of your work depicts mountains and deserts.

My use of those types of terrain is not based on love of mountains necessarily, but love of thinking about mountains. It’s more from memory and invention.

VN They’re not drawn from life.

ER No. VN Do you think Eilshemius drew from life?

ER Well, he certainly grew up with that thinking in art—that an artist would go out to a scene and set up a canvas and paint that scene. His work suggests that but I don’t know, there’s so much fantasy . . . certainly he wasn’t seeing satyrs and nymphs out in New York.

LG He was quoted as saying “A landscape without a nude is incomplete,” and he recommended that other artists take his hint and place their nudes outdoors. Looking at Eilshemius’s work with the frames and your Spied Upon Scene works, you’ve not heeded this advice—there’s an absence of the figure entirely. Could you tell us a bit about that?

ER I think there’s just a coincidence of imagery that plays against my work and his work that I began to wake up to. It was mainly this idea of the picture frame. My drive in this series was not to create a picture frame but to create an idea that you would be focusing on a trapped vision, like you’re being shown something. This big round black thing with a hole in it could have gone over there, but it doesn’t. They’re just these plastic picture-making methods that seem to coincide.

LG Many of his paintings have—within the frame—this circular motion of bringing you into the center. It’s another way of controlling the composition and the viewer’s eye.

ER

Is there any sort of idea of surveillance in your work?

ER I don’t know whether I would call it surveillance or not, but I’m interested in an open view.

With the Spied Upon Scene series, the thing I’m interested in is that maybe there was just black to begin with and then it began to open up and suddenly there’s a scene there. It’s like slow storytelling.

VN When you look at Duchamp’s work now that you know of Eilshemius, do you find yourself seeing any interesting overlap?

ER Well, when I look at Eilshemius’s work, I definitely think of Duchamp’s work. Some of Duchamp’s earliest paintings were little waterfalls, scenes in the woods with trees, and that sort of thing is quintessentially Eilshemius. Maybe that’s why Duchamp appreciated Eilshemius.

They’re two unusual characters.

LG You were once quote d s ay i ng ab out Duchamp’s Chocolate Grinder [1914], “It was like a mystery that did not need explaining to me. I’ll never need to take an intellectual delving into that subject—not because I’m afraid to, but because I don’t think there would be that much to offer over something that just has its own power.”

Do you feel that way about Eilshemius’s work as well?

ER I think that people have tried to dissect Eilshemius’s thinking. They certainly did with Duchamp, especially scholars; but that’s unlike the reaction to Eilshemius. Most people view him as a kind of parlor painter. They were interested in him but they never really dug into him. I’m sure there are people I haven’t read of who have found VN

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He’s an artist’s artist.

He’s completely vanguard. I put him in the category of somebody like George Ohr, you know, the Mad Potter who also was a self-proclaimed genius.

—Ed Ruscha

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really interesting things in his work, but the truth of it is that he was obscure for a long time.

VN I think he was, and continues to be, really misunderstood. Due to the subject matter of his work, many thought he was a creep and a pervert, but I bet he never even saw a naked woman in his life, because these nymphs are so perfect: their smooth buxom bodies and their long flowing hair. They read as an idea of woman to me.

LG They seem to be floating. None of them are quite grounded, so there’s not a reality to them in the picture.

VN The way Eilshemius depicts women is almost like how you depict mountains. It’s an idea of a woman and an idea of a mountain.

ER Yes, that’s a good way to put it. But you can look at these little nymph ladies that he’s painted and they begin to talk to you. I mean, they look like there’s some kind of frustration and some pent-up secrets in this man’s life that prevented him from really opening up, but I think he did through paint. I mean, we could go at it like a psychoanalyst, couldn’t we [laughter]?

VN I think there’d be a lot of sessions involved.

But there is this distance in the work, and I think there’s this idea of looking and not touching, of living in one’s imagination, that’s a big part of his work.

I’ve noticed this in your work too. You’re looking at those mountains in the Spied Upon Scenes from a distance, almost like a telescopic view.

ER When using that halo effect, of the frame or the peephole, it can be like looking into a window or out of a window. And mine, more or less,

look out the window. You might say his look into the window. That makes him a peeping tom. And that makes me just a common observer of landscape [laughter].

VN Apparently when Pablo Picasso saw Balthus’s work for the first time, he said, “You must be looking at Eilshemius’s work” [laughter].

LG Jeff Koons has cited him in the past and is a fan of his work. Henri Matisse, Louise Nevelson, and Ugo Rondinone, among others, have also expressed admiration.

ER This isn’t surprising. He’s an artist’s artist.

He’s completely vanguard. I put him in the category of somebody like George Ohr, you know, the Mad Potter who also was a self-proclaimed genius. So we’ve got these self-proclaimed geniuses to deal with. We don’t have any of those today, do we?

LG There might be a few I could name [laughter].

VN Do you think he was the most insider-y outsider or the most outsider-y insider?

ER [laughs] Maybe he tiptoed over the top of the whole thing and then in 1941 said, “Okay. That’s enough. I’m leaving.”

LG Do you think if Duchamp hadn’t found him, he would have been found by someone else along the way?

ER Yes. I think it would have been inevitable. He did hundreds of paintings and the subject matter, especially those nymphs, gives his work a consistency that would have been recognized eventually. He was bound to catch the attention of some facet of the art world.

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THE WHITE ORIGINALS: CY TWOMBLY’S SCULPTURE In the July 2000 edition of Art in America, David Sylvester considered the Kunstmuseum Basel’s recent exhibition of Cy Twombly’s sculptures. We revisit the text here in celebration of the publication of the second volume of Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture.

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ome painter-sculptors come to sculpture late—Auguste Renoir, Barnett New ma n, Wi l lem de Koon i ng. A more common pattern for them is to start when quite young making sculpture that is hardly shown till they are old—Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso—or dead—Edgar Degas. One of Cy Twombly’s earliest recorded works in any medium is an assemblage made in 1946, when he was eighteen. His known sculptural oeuvre includes about 150 pieces, yet no more than 20 of them had been seen together in public before the exhibition Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, at the Kunstmuseum Basel [April 14–July 16, 2000].

In one of the catalogue texts, Christian Klemm reports that Twombly has said he finds making sculpture “comes more easily to him than painting pictures. With a painting he has to create the body of the work from scratch, every time, on the canvas; in sculpture, the inclusion of found objects means that the thing starts off with an existence, an objecthood, of its own. Sometimes such objects offer themselves to him; sometimes they are 70

brought to him by others.”

So the process of making becomes more easygoing, more comfortable, when switched on by something given rather than hesitantly started by an unassisted projection of the artist’s energy onto the forbidding surface of a blank canvas. (Indeed, Twombly’s frequent addition to his canvases of a word or words derived from mythology can be seen as an analogous aid—an alternative to collage as a pictorial equivalent for found objects.) The fact that he feels more relaxed and secure when doing sculpture is reflected in how the product’s content overlaps less with that of his paintings than it does in the case of other painter-sculptors. Of course most of the fundamental aesthetic qualities of the work are the same: the luminosity, the lightness and the energy of the form, the air of spontaneity, the nervousness of touch, the casual-looking execution, here the line that is flowing and yet taut, there a trembling stillness. But where the painting fuses euphoria and anguish and desire and panic, the sculpture is altogether more serene. It transmits delight—delight in things and in how light delights in things and things in light.

The curators of the exhibition are Katharina Schmidt, who has also written the main catalogue text, and Paul Winkler, who, when director of the Menil Collection [in Houston, Texas], was the moving spirit behind the creation of the Twombly Gallery there. But the artist also has been an active collaborator—rarely a good thing for retrospective exhibitions, because nine artists out of ten insist on putting in too many works: their works are their children, and they don’t like to see them left out in the cold. On this occasion, however, the collaboration functioned beautifully from the start. Each of the participants compiled a list of desiderata—a task made feasible by the publication of Nicola Del Roscio’s catalogue raisonné of 147 sculptures made up until 1997—and their lists turned out to be of almost the same length and composition. The eventual choice comprised sixty-six items of which seven were bronzes and the rest original plasters, as they tend to get called—but loosely, because the most dominant material in these works is in fact not plaster but wood painted white. The catalogue preface therefore elegantly describes them as “the white originals.”

Previous spread: Cy Twombly in Rome, 1994.

Photo: © Bruce Weber Opposite: Cy Twombly, By the Ionian Sea, Gaeta, 1987, wood, nails, plaster, clay, glue, pencil, and paint, 13 × 24 ½ × 20 ¼ inches (33 × 62 × 51.5 cm). Kunsthaus Zürich, 1994

The actual installation was largely done by Twombly. His modus operandi was to gather all the pieces together in a space apart and proceed to improvise the selection and placing, room by room; there was not even a preconception as to how many of the fifteen possible rooms would be used. When Twombly got to the end without any intervention of second thoughts, all the rooms had been filled. He then retraced his steps making minor adjustments.

The result is a work of art, an unfolding of themes and variations in rhythms that constantly break curatorial rules. The mind behind it is emphatically the mind behind the individual works, a mind at once offhand and precise, with an uncanny instinctive sense of aesthetic rightness and the discretion and discrimination that make for his rare knack of never producing a sculpture that is bigger than it ought to be.

The frequent echoes of Alberto Giacometti and Medardo Rosso detract no more from the insolent originality of Twombly’s sculptures than echoes of de Kooning and Jackson Pollock detract from that of his paintings. The originality resides in an acute awareness of how little an artist can dare to

do in the course of creating great art. Some cursory scribbles scattered across the surface of a canvas can invest it with life and balance and light.

Twombly does as little as possible. The reductiveness is not didactic, as it is with John Cage when he induces us to look at nuances that are usually overlooked. It is more like the economy of effort of an athlete, an economy partly instinctive, partly learned—the economy of the tennis or squash player who turns to his own advantage the speed his opponent has imparted to the ball. Twombly cultivates a garden where the spadework has been done by others. Giacometti and Rosso are not so much influences as sources for finds, archaeological sites. Twombly takes Giacometti’s walking figurine and reduces it to a single slanted piece of wood that has a still greater momentum than its prototype. His art is a shorthand whose signs call to mind existing images created by others that are loaded with meaning—meanings, often rooted in mythologies, that he probably intends, and meanings we see in them that he probably doesn’t.

There are broadly two types of Twombly sculpture. On the one hand are the compact pieces. Some

Above: Installation view, Cy Twombly: Die Skulptur, Kunstmuseum Basel, April 15–July 30, 2000.

Photo: Martin Bühler

are shaped in plaster, often mixed with sand; some combine shaped plaster with found blocks of wood, as in the chunky chariots; some are assemblages of wooden elements partly coated in plaster, as with the melting tombstone. On the other hand are the articulated pieces. Most of them are transparent constructions made mainly from lengths of wood, but they can also be solid, as with Rotalla [1990].

The articulated works are palpably as well as technically assemblages of used parts—as some of the compact pieces also are to a degree. Moreover, we have Twombly’s testimony that appropriating found parts induces him to work. Nevertheless, the fact that a Twombly sculpture is an assemblage is not crucial to its aesthetic impact. We do not as we look at it immediately respond, as we do with an assemblage by Kurt Schwitters or Picasso, to how its parts fit together—to the wit or the drama of their combination. Certainly, we are moved by a sense of the process of its formation, but much less than we are by its presence as an integral image.

These sculptures are paintings, too, when their ubiquitous white pigmentation becomes as essential to them as their structure. The paint here is 71

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Opposite: Cy Twombly, Untitled, Rome, 1959, cardboard, wood, and fabric, painted with synthetic resin, 26 3⁄8 × 13 3⁄8 × 10 5⁄8 inches (67 × 34 × 27 cm).

Kunsthaus Zürich, 1994 Above: Installation view, Cy Twombly: Die Skulptur, Kunstmuseum Basel, April 15–July 30, 2000. Photo: Martin Bühler

Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation Text © 2000, David Sylvester. About Modern Art by David Sylvester is published by Penguin Random House.

Cy Twombly: Sculpture, Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, September 30– December 21, 2019

not used as Giacometti used flesh-colored paint on some of his bronzes: to get a general effect, to lighten the annoying darkness of the bronze casts and recover some of the luminescence of plaster; Giacometti didn’t use paint to create inflections of the form, for these were already there in the solid matter he had worked. Sometimes Twombly, too, depends entirely on his modeling of the plaster to create the form—as in the upper part of the piece I allude to as the melting tombstone. More often he depends on his painting of the surface to complete the form. In Winter’s Passage: Luxor [1985], the contours of the stick figure seem to be dissolving into space, not because, as with a Giacometti, the solid matter is so formed as to suggest this, but because it has been painted to give an illusion of that phenomenon through tonal variation. The form of the sculpture is completed by the illusionistic effect of the painting. But above all that white paint is a materialization of light.

“White paint is my marble,” says Twombly, who for more than forty years has been living in Rome surrounded by marble columns. But his early life was spent—as part of each year is now

spent—among the neoclassical columns of Virginia, wooden columns painted white. Back in 1958, when we in England were beginning to respond to contemporary American art, Lawrence Gowing wrote a remarkable article, “Paint in America,” exploring the crucial role in American experience of wood painted white: It is the quality of wood which has lasted in America and remains as strong as ever, a quality as definite and pervasive as marble ever gave to a country, and one that similarly supplied the base of life and imagination. The classical material of American building is wood and the characteristic structure is clapboard, frame surfaces of overlapping strips. It is painted white. . . . In America the idea of structure envisages a broad assembly of slender parts, standing squarely, but with a quality of light attentiveness, independent but aware. . . . In the balance [of the construction] there is the most lively serenity: it is recognizably embodied in the colour, the white paint.

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Building a Legacy In this ongoing series, we speak with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship to offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. Here Jack Cowart, executive director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, talks to the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about the Foundation’s evolution, from its founding charter through to the decision to disperse its extraordinary holdings and to sunset the foundation in the coming years. It is, Cowart emphasizes, just one possible path of many for an artist-endowed foundation.

ALISON MCDONALD In speaking about your role at the

Roy Lichtenstein Foundation recently, you began by making it clear that your account of what you’ve done during your time there was strictly autobiographical. You were not offering a path for others to follow. If I’m correct, you’ve been at the Foundation since 1999, and it was established in 1998?

JACK COWART Yes, the Foundation was established on paper in 1998 by Dorothy Lichtenstein and her estate advisers. For a while it was just a foundation in waiting because there was no immediate transfer of properties from the artist’s estate. Once it was decided that I would be the founding director, we were able to become operational. It began in a very simple way. We added officers and a board, and then in 2000 we had a board retreat where we spent a couple of days figuring out what this was all about.

We started out with an approach of “Do no harm, just hold the ground, and then the tasks will become apparent.” Happily, they did become apparent, more than we ever imagined.

AMCD You’ve accomplished a lot over the last twenty years. When the Foundation began, was it the plan that there would be a moment when it would no longer continue? Or was that something that happened along the way?

JC No [laughs]. It was a bit of a naive operation and there was no provision for us to say “Mission accomplished, we’re going home.” We didn’t set ourselves a timeline, as many artists do during their lifetime; there was no notion of our wrapping up. We all knew that to some extent the Foundation would not exist in perpetuity, because we didn’t receive the artist’s art estate, nor did we receive any money. But we never gave a terminal point any thought. In fact, paperwork from the 2000 retreat says that in thirty 74

years the Foundation would still be going strong.

Well, that’s ten years from now [laughter]. But we did have an in-house joke that—and this came in Roy’s words and Dorothy’s—when the last person loses interest, go home, turn out the lights, I had a great life.

AMCD What were the initial goals for the Foundation?

JC The founding charter for getting 501(c)(3) status mentioned facilitating public access to the work of Roy Lichtenstein and the art and artists of his time, with not very many details about how that would be done. In our first meetings with the new board, we decided that one of the ways we would do it would be to provide leadership to the next generation of curators, scholars, and others interested in Roy’s work. The other initial, and massive, goal was to publish a catalogue raisonné.

And then, because we were given all the working papers and records relating to the work, we became a gathering point for researchers looking into anything to do with Roy Lichtenstein. We began an oral history program, interviewing anyone who had had an experience of Roy that might be useful for future generations to know. We now have over 300 oral histories and the program is ongoing. We also have a library with 3,000 volumes, including publications that deal with Roy or with Pop art, as well as Roy’s own library. We have a large archive of photographs of Roy, too.

AMCD Whenever we start a publication on Roy’s work, and we’ve made nearly a dozen now, I always start by coming here and I’m able to unearth materials that I wouldn’t have found nearly as easily elsewhere, or wouldn’t have found at all. Access to your archives has made it possible for us to include sections in our books that present the complexity of the

work in a comprehensive way. I wonder how many people there are like me? How many researchers visit the archives?

JC We get ten to forty researchers a year, working on publications of various sorts. But we’ve never had a support staff to respond to people’s requests, and for a long time we didn’t have an archivist, either.

We kind of knew what was in the files and we used to have a staff member who was a trained art historian, she was very good at helping researchers by preselecting materials for them when they came in. We didn’t have a finding aid, we didn’t have any documentation, she just happened to know the files very well. So researchers would ask questions and we would try to give answers, but because it wasn’t an open search it was always somewhat filtered.

We did that for about ten years. Then in 2011 and 2012 we began a formal archiving program, and now, because of our plan to donate the entire paper archive to the Archives of American Art—a gift that is now very much under way—all of the materials will be digitized. The digital files will be much more accessible to everybody, including ourselves, because we’re still finding things every day that we didn’t know we had. We have four people working on this program now.

AMCD I’m curious why the Foundation chose the Archives of American Art in particular for this gift.

JC It was initially our ambition to run our own archive or to find a legacy steward—a university, in all probability—that would set up the Roy Lichtenstein archive. For a number of years we followed the track of setting up a Roy Lichtenstein Foundation study center, with a coordinated art history/ art studio relationship, at a large research-based state institution. Ultimately we decided that rather

than spending money to build a bricks-and-mortar place where Roy’s things would be housed by themselves, those funds might be put to better use helping other institutions beyond ourselves. At that point we realized that the best option was to go to the Archives of American Art. Roy and Dorothy had supported the Archives during Roy’s lifetime, and Dorothy continues to support it. There is also a concentration of works by Roy nearby, at the National Gallery of Art, which has arguably the world’s most complete holdings of work by Roy, including the entire archive of his prints. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpt ure Garden and t he Smit hsonian American Art Museum both have great works by Lichtenstein, too.

We also recognized that the Archives of American Art has a very active initiative to digitize and share. And they’re already set up to support the volume of inquiries that will result from having all of the digitized paperwork available online. On top of that, of course there are other archives there—the Leo Castelli archives are among the most visited archives in the collection—so we thought it would be a good collateral relationship to the rest of the holdings of the Archives of American Art.

There were other options for sure, and there are institutions that sometimes buy archives. But we wanted to gift Roy’s archive.

AMCD Can I ask why that was important?

JC Roy would have wanted it to be a gift, and we have been fortunate to generate enough income over the years to make that possible. There was a fair amount of discussion with the Archives about what our aspirations were for access, what would be restricted, what would not be restricted, how the archive should be made available. Everybody was on the same page.

AMCD The Foundation had earlier acquired, organized, and then gifted materials from the Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender photography collections. That was an amazing gesture—we have often looked to the Shunk-Kender archive for iconic photographic documents of the postwar era for the gallery’s publications.

JC Yes, it was such a bulk of material—hundreds of thousands of photographs and other assorted materials—that we gave it to five institutions [the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Tate, London]. Thankfully, when we acquired the collections in 2008, we’d established a gift-advisory committee, because we knew we weren’t going to hold them forever; we were just a way station to larger institutional access and to restoring Harry Shunk and János Kender to art history. People knew their photographs of art and artists, but they didn’t always know who had created them. We really took on the charge to make Harry and János known as the people who documented and collaborated with these better-known artists.

AMCD You had a mission within a mission.

JC It was an obsession within a mission.

AMCD [Laughs] But surely you learned something from that, which then informed your decisions about Roy’s archive.

JC Absolutely. It was an emotional wrench to place the Shunk-Kender archive where we had always said we were going to put it—out in the world.

We approached some photographic archives that said, “No, this is not going to be our thing. Thank you very much.” But by approaching the Getty Research Institute and the National Gallery of Art and The Museum of Modern Art and the Tate and

the Pompidou, we found these coordinate partners to establish a five-party relationship plus us.

Thankfully, the Getty took an enormous amount of undigitized and otherwise unprocessed material and dealt with contact sheets, negative strips, other miscellaneous collage materials— almost 200,000 items, as well as a complete master set of the photographs, which is about 12,000 images. We knew that for years, through successive directors, the Pompidou had been commissioning Shunk to do work that he said he was going to do but never did, but they kept sending him checks. I thought it was certainly time for them to get some of the work that they had paid for but never received, so they got the second master set of photographs.

And then we asked Tate to make a selection, and MoMA to make a selection. The National Gallery has a lot of Christo material, so we offered the image library there every photograph we had of Christo installations. Through that process, we learned how institutions can deal with divided bodies of material, and that’s when we decided that we would want to set up an equivalent dispersal program for the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation holdings when the day came.

AMCD There’s something to be said for spreading the materials out across so many different places; it builds their legacy in a way that placing them with a single institution maybe would not. But looking at the gift to the Archives of American Art, there’s also something really powerful in keeping all that material together in a single institution. There are different solutions for different situations.

JC Yes, I think it depends on the archive. The depth and identity of a nonart archive are strongest if it’s kept together, because information can immediately be cross-referenced. For other collections the solution might be different.

At our very first board retreat, the question was raised, “What would you like to see happen with Roy’s work?” And his family members said, “We would be very happy if in any major city we were in, we knew that we were somehow close to a work

by Roy.” His work is already found in private collections and institutions around the world, so we’ve always been thinking about whether we would establish new concentrations of his work or simply add to existing collections, and I think the latter is largely what we’ll be doing in the coming years.

After we’d decided not to build a study center, it was interesting to look four blocks up the street and see that the Whitney Museum of American Art had joined our neighborhood. They had a new conservation center and a new study center, and at least a beginning interest in adding more Lichtenstein support material to their collection. There was already a lot of work by Roy in New York City and the surrounding area—enough to ask ourselves, do we really need more Lichtenstein in Manhattan?

And the answer was: of this kind of material, yes, because there was very little of it here. There were no study materials, very few collages, photographs, drawings, preparatory sketches. . . .

Fate presented us with an opportunity for collaboration with the Whitney, and through that for us to figure out a new way to look at our holdings, which are mostly evolutionary materials as opposed to finished products: we’ve received gifts from the family of studio-based materials—sketches, drawings, maquettes, models, collages, first studies, second and third studies, variations, sketchbooks, all of this material that led up to the final product. Roy’s working methods were not like everybody else’s— the way he would use source materials, or enlarge

We have also been working for years with the Getty Museum and the Getty Conservation Institute to establish a study of Roy’s paint systems for his outdoor sculptures. The knowledge gained through this study applies to other artists’ work as well, and we care about the long-term health of artists’ outdoor sculptures, whether they’re Keith Haring’s or Roy Lichtenstein’s or Ellsworth Kelly’s.

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Every artist-endowed foundation is really a world unto its own, and each artist’s work will create a whole set of unique challenges. We’ve done things a certain way, but I don’t know if that’s a logical journey for anyone else to follow.

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images with an opaque projector and then redraw them on the canvas, or work up collages to serve as a model that he would blow up on the canvas and then paint. Roy was hardly a spontaneous artist, except when he was drawing; from that point forward, it became a series of refinements to create the final work. All of that is embedded in this studio archive. And what to do with that? You need a museum that has a connection to the way contemporary artists work, and not all museums of contemporary art are involved in that much granulation of the artistic process.

The sketchbooks we managed to give to both the Morgan Library & Museum and to the Whitney— twenty to the Morgan and eleven shared between the Morgan and the Whitney. We figured they could be shared between these two institutions because it’s easy for a scholar to go between them—they’re both in Manhattan, and they’re basically at the same latitude, so it was do-able.

AMCD The foundation has been philanthropic in a very diverse number of ways. You’ve supported exhibitions of other artists’ work, established curatorial fellowships, endowed professorships, even supported documentary-film production. The Aspen Institute’s Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative has benefited as well.

JC We’re a private operating foundation, so we don’t have to give away a percentage of money in the same way that nonoperating foundations do (the IRS requires that nonoperating foundations give away 5 percent of their net assets every year). So for a long time we made a spot grant here or there, and that was it. But as we began to focus downstream and have been able to sell enough work to generate sufficient funds, we’ve been responsive to areas that have interested us.

One of the ways we facilitate access to the work of Roy Lichtenstein and of the artists of his time is to give money for public programming, especially exhibitions at touring venues, which are often underfunded. We have also been working for years with the Getty Museum and the Getty Conservation Institute to establish a study of Roy’s paint systems for his outdoor sculptures. The knowledge gained through this study applies to other artists’ work as well, and we care about the long-term health of artists’ outdoor sculptures, whether they’re Keith Haring’s or Roy Lichtenstein’s or Ellsworth Kelly’s.

The endowment of professorships was at Ohio State University, in honor of Roy’s relationship with the school—a chair of art history and a chair of studio art. A sculpture will be gifted to the school as well.

We’ve also endowed [the New York cinema] Film Forum with a grant to facilitate the showing of artists’ films, and made a gift that allowed the Foundation for Contemporary Arts to bestow its annual Roy Lichtenstein Award. The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, which was established by John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, and others, has always supported emerging artists. It was important to them that the award carry Roy’s name because he and Dorothy were very early supporters there.

Our interest in the Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative grew out of our own experience starting out as a foundation. In our first year, because we knew so little, we contacted a lot of the other artists’ foundations and said, “How do we get the shared knowledge to understand how to run a foundation?”

And they said, “Well, we never talk to each other, we’re all too busy in our own little worlds.” So we decided to start holding luncheons for all the executive directors of the artist-endowed foundations,

so that we could share problems and solutions. This gradually evolved into something more formalized, and then when Christine Vincent retired as president of the Maine College of Art, and realized that there was an increasing need for professionalization in the running of artists’ foundations, that’s when the Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative came into being. There was a legal study and now a two-volume, thousand-page reference volume detailing how to do it right, so that there aren’t inherent conflicts of interest and so on. We thought that was a perfect extension of our interest in helping our colleagues and peers, and new foundations coming online, to learn from all of our histories.

AMCD And then you have the catalogue raisonné.

JC Yes. It’s going to be an online electronic catalogue, listing every known publication, every known exhibition, the entire provenance histories, the entire technical studies. . . .

AMCD But with the Foundation sunsetting and technology changing— JC Exactly—that’s one of the five or ten major perplexing questions. We realized when we decided on an electronic publishing plan that this raises questions about future support and management. Do we want to keep the publication alive? For how long?

And how do we do that? Who will be the steward?

Or is this going to be a one-and-done, where at a certain point we print off the entire publication in two copies, one at the Archives of American Art and one somewhere else, and that’s it?

It has become crystal clear to us that we don’t want the electronic catalogue raisonné to simply disappear someday—to vaporize in a digital cloud. So we have to devise a mechanism that will give it a reasonable lifetime—and then we have to decide what that reasonable lifetime is. We have people who are advising us on all of this, and we think we’re raising these questions not only for ourselves but for a cohort of other interested artist-endowed foundations. So far, nobody knows how.

AMCD What led you to decide to sunset the Foundation? What made you decide it was time to plan for that?

JC Well, curiously, I think our experience with the Shunk-Kender archive suggested to us that we’d be selfish if we were to hold on to all this Lichtenstein material. Handing it over to other institutions gives future generations the opportunity to interpret the work the way they wish to, relative to new audiences. That was one thing. The second thing was that the board and the family—all of us—ultimately decided we didn’t want to run a study center forever, or in a way that wouldn’t allow enough flexibility to respond to future conditions that we couldn’t know anything about. We just wanted to figure out how to get this resource spread among numbers of other people in a way that could adapt to the needs of future audiences.

And now we know enough about the work— we’ve studied it enough, and we’ve published on it enough, and we have enough documentation on it—that we can make these gifts without burdening our receiving institutions. It has been fully documented, photographed, interpreted, and published.

We couldn’t have done that ten years ago, or even five years ago.

AMCD Do you have any advice for someone thinking about starting a foundation?

JC Every artist-endowed foundation is really a world unto its own, and each artist’s work will create a whole set of unique challenges. We’ve done things a certain way, but I don’t know if that’s a logical journey for anyone else to follow.

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OBJECTS OF DESIRE Museo Jumex, Mexico City, recently staged an exhibition that paired the works of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons. Massimiliano Gioni, the curator of the exhibition, spoke with Koons about the persistence of Duchamp’s influence, the eroticism of objects, and hope’s relationship to desire.

Previous spread: Jeff Koons, Bourgeois Bust—Jeff and Ilona, 1991, marble, 44 ½ × 28 × 21 inches (113 × 71.1 × 53.3 cm). Pinault Collection. © Jeff Koons. Photo: Jim Strong, New York Left: Marcel Duchamp, Le Portebouteilles, 1914, galvanized iron, 23 ¼ × 14 ¼ inches (59.1 × 36.8 cm). Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon. © Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP/ SOMAAP/Mexico/2019.

Photo: Bruno Lopes Opposite: Marcel Duchamp (in collaboration with Man Ray), Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, 1921, gelatin silver print, 8 ¾ × 7 inches (22.4 × 17.8 cm).

The Bluff Collection. © Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP/ SOMAAP/Mexico/2019.

Photo: courtesy Sotheby’s, Inc. © 2012

W hen did you see Marcel Duchamp’s work for the first time?

JEFF KOONS I was born in Pennsylvania and have had an interest in art since I was a young boy. As a child I would go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with my aunt whenever we would visit her in the city. So I probably saw the galleries with Duchamp’s work when I was quite small, by age seven, I would say. But I had no consciousness of his work back then. What I do remember is that the sculpture of William Penn on the top of City Hall had a very big impact on me: just its presence, the way it connected to the past and history, and the kind of awe this sculpture could generate. All these aspects were really inspiring to me.

To view the sculpture, you have to go all the way up the tower on top of City Hall, and the architecture and the whole journey to the top are like being inside a Jules Verne novel. The lantern on top is like a vehicle that takes you to the center of the Earth or to the moon. Many years later I realized that going up the tower was itself a Duchampian MASSIMILIANO GIONI

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experience: not only did it have that feeling of technological mystery one finds in many works by Duchamp but also the whole experience was about wonderment and awe, which to me are the qualities I most admire in his art and that make up anything that is relevant in art.

MG So your primal scene with Duchamp was closer to those turn-of-the-century fantasies of science and technology that inspired both Duchamp and his hero Raymond Roussel?

JK As with many young aspiring artists, I first got involved with Surrealism and Dada. And it is probably through Dadaism that I got to know Duchamp’s work and that of Francis Picabia, who even seemed easier to enjoy at the beginning because I have always gravitated toward works you understand with your body, not only intellectually. In Baltimore I studied with Bow Davis, who has written a book on Duchamp and his interest in thread, and I worked with Sal Scarpitta, who was also very familiar with Duchamp’s work and helped me understand that there was a conceptual

side to works of art, while I was more attracted to the sensual aspects and probably found someone like Duchamp too intellectual and dry at the beginning.

Then I went to Chicago and studied with the Imagists, who opened my eyes to the work of many outsider artists. That’s when I realized that many folk artists used objects in their work and that objects acquired a strange power in their creations. When I moved to New York, at the end of 1976, I became much more alert to the history of modern art. The poet and art writer Alan Jones was a good friend of mine, and he gave me a new perspective—perhaps a more European one—on the twentieth-century avant-garde and helped me realize that what I liked about outsider art and some of the subjective art that I was interested in, like Surrealism, was an interest in everyday life and everyday objects and in the power of transcendence through material objects. I think that’s how I reconnected with Duchamp’s work, through the sense of power that his objects could convey.

This entire exhibition is premised on a note

by Duchamp from 1913 in which he speaks about what he calls “the question of shopwindows” and about the importance of never satisfying one’s own desires. More broadly, I think that interrogating the question of shopwindows means understanding what has happened to objects and to desires in the last hundred years or so.

JK I have always had a close familiarity with shopwindows because my father had a furniture store and I would first show my pictures in his showroom window. That showroom window, or the shopwindow in general, is almost like a skin membrane between our internal desires and our external desires.

MG Yes, it’s like “the great ephemeral skin” that Jean-François Lyotard described in Libidinal Economy [1974]. In one of your early interviews you said your objects don’t absorb desire, they reflect it. I find it particularly interesting that you could make such a statement long before your Celebration [1994– ] series, long before you started working MG

with mirroring surfaces.

JK With the Statuary [1986] work I started to think more explicitly about desire. Already in Luxury & Degradation [1986] I was comparing the desire for luxury products to the cravings of the alcoholic who wants alcohol, but in a sense I was still suggesting that it’s better to maintain one’s own economic and political positions than to fall for that type of desire. In Statuary, desire became more abstract. I believe very much in desire. I believe in optimism and in liking things, and wanting transcendence and wanting to enjoy life, to experience more. But the irony is that personally, I’m not really a shopper. If I go to a store, I’m looking at objects, I’ll want to know what the other options are, and I want to study the alternatives and the various possibilities. I contemplate rather than shop.

MG Art historian David Joselit has spoken of “an erotics of things” to describe Duchamp’s objects.

You’ve often used sexual metaphors to describe your earlier works, like the vacuum cleaners, which you have called “virginal” and “virgins.”

I thought of it as objective sex. It was more distant and at the same time more universal. Before, in my younger work, there were more direct sexual images. Then in The New [1980–87] there is nothing explicit, but there is definitely a sexual presence. In the first works in Pre-New [1979–80] and The New, I was still infringing on the objects: I was combining objects, gluing them together or screwing a Plexiglas tube, for example, to a toaster or a pressure cooker. Things changed when I understood I could let the object exist by itself, showing its purity of birth, its essence. I bought my vacuum cleaners on 14th Street but at the time I was working at The Museum of Modern Art, and the displays in the architecture and design department had a big influence on me. So everything really fell into place when I decided to encase the vacuum cleaners and just put the white fluorescent light underneath them, almost without touching the vacuum cleaners, just lifting them out of their boxes and displaying them in their purity, before they even drew a first breath. It was a play between the JK

The original readymade turned everything upside down and changed everything. I always felt my work could participate in the avant-garde and build on the tradition of the readymade, but at the same time, I have always been trying to be more embracing, less confrontational.

—Jeff Koons

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Left: Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp with Turkish coin necklace on forehead, Hollywood, 1949, gelatin silver print, 63⁄8 × 4 5⁄8 inches (16 × 11.6 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. Gift of Jacqueline, Paul, and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother, Alexina Duchamp, 1998. © Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP/SOMAAP/ Mexico/2019

Right: Jeff Koons, The New Jeff Koons, 1980, duratrans and fluorescent light box, 42 × 32 × 8 inches (106.7 × 81.3 × 20.3 cm). Private collection. © Jeff Koons. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studios, Los Angeles

animate and the inanimate, and I was asking who was better prepared to survive: you, the viewer, or the new.

MG The presence of objects—their aura or their phantasmagorical quality as commodities—is a defining quality in the history of art and culture in the twentieth century. The very definition of subjectivity is built on our relationship to objects.

JK I should say that I have never thought that my work is as philosophical as Duchamp’s. The original readymade turned everything upside down and changed everything. I always felt my work could participate in the avant-garde and build on the tradition of the readymade, but at the same time, I have always been trying to be more embracing, less confrontational. I have always felt an affinity for Duchamp and his objects, but I also wanted my sculptures to be closer to Constantin Brancusi’s objects, to his finish, to the sensuality of his forms.

MG This might be a brutal simplification, but would you say your work is about stimulating desire or fulfilling it?

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Fulfillment, absolutely. It’s about fulfillment.

But it’s also about wanting more, and wanting a higher intensity. I always loved that Duchamp would say art was like a drug, because it really is.

When you focus on things, and you practice art, it affects you physically and intellectually, and you become addicted to it. And then you want to share that addiction with others.

MG I think that for Duchamp, the comparison with drugs was a negative one: he said art was a habit-forming drug, so he was suggesting that we have to be careful with it, as it produces addiction and reduces its own effects. His was an invitation to abstinence, perhaps. Personally, I think both you and Duchamp practice a form of asceticism: for him it was through a sort of via negativa, by refusing the consummation of desire—for which the closed door of Étant donnés [1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage, 1946–66] is the obvious metaphor—while for you it seems that one can reach a form of catharsis by fulfilling every desire. One can attain a state of grace—a state of equilibrium, perhaps—either JK

by withdrawing from desires or by immersing in the flesh and indulging every appetite: a form of ecstatic illumination, a profane illumination.

JK I think Duchamp meant that you need stronger doses of the drug, and that’s just a journey to continue on, a journey of becoming. Desire and its fulfillment keep you growing and keep stimulating you, so the fulfillment needs to produce a sense of hope, a sense of future for viewers. For me, it’s not just excitement but also a sense of meditation.

Ultimately, I think it’s important to give it up to something outside the self, to let go. It’s about participating in love—holding something greater than the self is a form of love.

Excerpt from an interview published in full in Appearance Stripped Bare: Desire and the Object in the Work of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons, Even, exh. cat. (London: Phaidon Press in association with Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, 2019).

CHRISTOPHER WOOL part i

christopher wool and his unlikely heroes or conceptual or not? text by richard hell

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Previous spread: Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1993, enamel on aluminum, 90 × 60 inches (228.6 × 152.4 cm) © Christopher Wool; courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York This page: Christopher Wool, I Can’t Stand Myself When You Touch Me, 1994, enamel on aluminum, 108 × 72 inches (274.3 × 182.9 cm) © Christopher Wool; courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

This page, top: Martin Kippenberger, War Is No Nice, 1985, oil and silicone rubber on canvas, 71 × 59 ⅛ inches (180 × 150 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Emily and Jerry Spiegel. Artwork © 2019 Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY This page, bottom: Martin Kippenberger, Ohne Titel (aus der Serie Lieber Maler, male mir), Untitled (from the series Dear Painter, Paint for Me), 1981, acrylic on canvas, 118 × 78 ¾ inches (300 × 200 cm). Private collection. Artwork © 2019 Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Photo: Rob McKeever

Christopher Wool resists being interviewed and gets frustrated when he does agree to talk about his work. That’s because everything he can say is provisional and partial. After all, his aim, as with most good artists, is to go beyond what he knows.

(Poet’s duty: not to understand.) “That’s why I hate this stuff!

You know, with painting, you can contradict yourself from one painting to the next, you can contradict yourself from one painting and that’s really exciting to me, and you sit here and you say something and if you contradict yourself the next sentence, you sound like a fool.”1 Still, I asked him for an interview because it’s my job and because I wondered about some things, and you can’t talk to a friend like an interviewer. You have to put on your interviewer hat. Wool is a friend and I am one of his greatest admirers. I have a lot of competition in that area—his paintings have auctioned for over $20,000,000—though some of it is partially begrudged.

Peter Schjeldahl, for instance, said in The New Yorker about Wool’s 2013–14 Guggenheim retrospective, “Like it or not, Christopher Wool, now fifty-eight, is probably the most important American painter of his generation.”2 Schjeldahl would have preferred a more sensuous, life-affirming painter.

It’s true that there’s an aloofness to Wool’s art, often disconcertingly mixed with apparent aggression, but Christopher painted some pretty flowers too! Even if they were blotted, heavy, solid-black enamel caricatures on brightly white-painted aluminum. I find his paintings almost intimidating. He gets right to the point. When you see one of his paintings among other people’s in a museum, typically the other paintings in the room are thrown into the shade. It’s surprising that elegance can be so blunt.

Wool has long resented any reading of his work as conceptual; he insists it’s strictly visual—in no way is he doubting or rejecting the classical art of painting (or photography, etching, etc.). This has always made me itch a little, and even more when I found out how much he admires the quasi-Dada-esque Germans Dieter Roth (half Swiss), Martin Kippenberger, and Albert Oehlen, whose work seems so different from his (though there are similarities between Wool’s later gray paintings and paintings of Oehlens’s), along with the equally unexpected Wool heroes, his American contemporaries Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Mike Kelley. I hoped to get him to explain the values that led him to his first breakthroughs as a young painter, namely his paint-roller pattern paintings and then the word paintings, which are also patterns (with a little added literally “expressive” thwack—for instance “get the fuck out of my house if you can’t take a joke”), all almost always in black paint on white ground. I wanted to learn how the values that led to those paintings could be reconciled with his admiration for those other artists, if it wasn’t at all about doubting painting.

I’m only going to guess that it’s possible that the Germans we’re talking about were always influenced by Dada.

RH Of course, the first thing you think of is that. When you think about Kippenberger or Oehlen, they’re picking up almost directly from Francis Picabia in the sense that they’re making paintings that are antiart on some level but on another level are fascinating, and often pleasurable, to look at.

CW I’ll try and answer some of that. I discovered these artists’ works at many different times. I didn’t know about Albert Oehlen’s work until the late ’80s, mid-’80s. The Dieter Roth—okay, here’s a good point, we were just talking about Jean-Michel Basquiat, here’s a way of dating the Dieter Roth stuff: I think I met him in Chicago first [Wool’s father in Chicago had become friendly with Roth after Christopher had already moved to New York to study art]. But he came to New York once, it was 1981 and he came to my studio. It was really important to me. I knew that Basquiat, who I knew, had just hung that small room at Annina Nosei, his first gallery show.

CW

1. Christopher Wool, in Martin Prinzhorn, “Portraits of Artists 78: Conversation with Christopher Wool,” in Artists Talking. Art and Language: Gappmayr, Holzer, Weiner, Wool, DVD (Cologne: Koenig Books, 1997). Available online at museum in progress, www.mip.at/attachments/222 (accessed June 28, 2019).

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Writing on the Wall: A Christopher Wool Retrospective,” The New Yorker, October 28, 2013. Available online at www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2013/11/04/writing-on-the-wall-3 (accessed June 23, 2019).

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3. Albert Oehlen, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian, 2012).

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This page, top: Albert Oehlen, FN 33, 1990, oil on canvas, 107 ⅞ × 84 ¼ inches (274 × 214 cm) © Albert Oehlen This page, bottom: Albert Oehlen, Selbstportrait als Holländerin, 1983, oil on wood, 78 ¾ × 59 ⅝ inches (200 × 150 cm). Collection of the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles © Albert Oehlen Opposite: Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1988, enamel and flashe on aluminum, 96 × 72 inches (243.8 × 182.9 cm) © Christopher Wool; courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

It wasn’t even a one-person show, it was just the small room in the back. And so I got Dieter, who had no interest in looking at contemporary art, I got Dieter to walk from my Chinatown studio over there and look at these paintings. He had to stop in at least four or five bars to get from Chinatown to SoHo [laughter]. It was interesting, he kind of, he wasn’t ecstatic but he was excited by the paintings. So I was still pretty young and Dieter was such an unusual character, I never really thought of him as a German in the same way as those other guys who were peers of mine. But in recent art—I don’t know how far back it goes, ’60s maybe—besides America the most active place was Germany.

RH In a way it kind of reminds me of American punk and English punk. The Germans were actually the originals and the big boom in the ’80s and ’90s in America that appeared to have learned a lot from them didn’t much acknowledge them.

I mean, I sure wasn’t aware of the Germans until I found out later myself. You didn’t hear them talked about much.

CW I had not heard of Sigmar Polke until he was— RH You hadn’t heard of Polke even though he’d been painting since the ’60s?

CW Yes, and when I saw the first show he did in New York, in the ’80s, it had elements of Dieter’s work in it, and what I was hearing about Polke reminded me very much of Dieter and his attitudes. Dieter was antiart. He didn’t believe in paintings, he thought they were fake. So I said, “Why do you do them?” and he said, “Only for money.”

RH But to me this is the interesting thing I’m talking about, that he didn’t respect painting. And that’s true of Kippenberger, that’s true of Oehlen.

CW No, those two tried to make good paintings.

RH They tried to make bad paintings that were somehow still worthwhile. And I think Oehlen succeeded in making very bad paintings. That book that has the interview between you two—I didn’t know that existed, it’s a fairly recent catalogue from Gagosian, and in preparing for this I found it.3 And you know, I’m an admirer of Oehlen’s except now I’m rethinking that in a way: I’m an admirer, that’s unequivocal, but still those paintings are so ugly [laughter] that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near one of those paintings. My ultimate criterion for a painting is would I want it in my house, and I would not want one of those paintings in my house.

CW You might change your mind.

RH I might, I could well. But what I’m getting at though is that lineage, that relationship, Roth–Kippenberger–Oehlen. And I think that feeds into the way you get these art critics and scholars who are horrified by your work because they think you’re putting them on, or corrupting painting, or just being defiant or something, they think there’s some motive apart from making a good painting. And there’s a lot about looking at many of your paintings that would make someone wonder how conceptual they are. And to me, when somebody like Oehlen tries to make a painting that’s bad, that’s a concept. That’s conceptual art. You do look at it too, and you dig what you see on levels, but it’s a concept.

CW He did that one particular body of work, that’s not his lifelong— RH The thing I’m getting at is that you relate to these guys who are antiart in a lot of ways—who are making fun of art, or subverting art. And at the same time, you completely deny that as a way of ever looking at anything you do. You’re making visual art. And I just think that’s interesting, that you feel such a connection to those three Germans while at the same time there are a lot of works of yours that could be read similarly but you insist that that’s completely wrong.

CW First of all, I don’t think Dieter and Albert were all that similar. I think Dieter really believed there was no such thing as a good painting. He also believed that if he put paint on canvas it always looked good. He believed in writing. He believed in writing and music. Painting to him was fake. He said it was eye candy. So let me just tell this story because I think it’s a great story. By chance they both had these projects where they were trying to make bad art.

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You don’t see that as an essence of them in any way?

Yes, I do. But let me tell you the story with Albert, because he’s not trying to make bad paintings so he can hang them on the wall and then make another bad painting after that. It’s more an experiment. And if you’re always trying to make good art, which we don’t know how to prescribe—we can’t list what you do when you go to make a good painting, like make sure it’s a vertical rectangle—there are no rules. We don’t know how to make a good painting, it just happens. So his thing was, what about a bad painting? And he said no matter what he did, there was always something looking good. He couldn’t get away with it until he made paintings just like his Berlin peers the Neo-Expressionists [laughter]. That’s the punchline: then they were really bad. But in the end, he couldn’t stand to look at them and he moved on. Dieter, in a very similar way, tried it with painting and said, I can’t do it—paintings always look good no matter what I do.

RH

Wool told me that what he appreciated in painting was “radicality.” I think the resolution of the question of what he has in common with the Germans and with Gober–Prince–Koons–Kelley is their detachment from, or even opposition to, existing definitions of legitimacy in art. They all wanted to see what radical (and often perverse and funny) twists on the idea of what’s considered art can be carried out and still qualify as good art. That’s the link between the eye-fooling plaster sinks of Gober, the rephotographed ads of Prince, and Wool’s paintings made with hardware store (or homemade) patterned paint rollers or stenciled words. The Germans equally challenged what qualifies as “high art.”

Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art as an art of ideas, dropping the universal existing assumption that art is intended for the eye. Duchamp’s readymades—a signed snow shovel, for instance—were offered as ideas rather than something one is actually supposed to enjoy for its appearance or uniqueness. (Though one might dispute that—Duchamp’s readymades don’t look like other people’s readymades.) But, along with suggesting an alternative to “retinal art,” Duchamp’s original conceptual works were a reconceiving of boundaries, an enlargement of what can be meaningfully described (and esteemed) as art. And this second component is what these contemporary artists Christopher admires have in common with him. All their art is conceptual by virtue of reconceiving the limits of art—while, unlike Duchamp, fully intending to engage the eye, to look good (though the particular forms of looking good might take some getting used to).

About Roth’s painting (“daubing”), from a 1998 interview with him by Peter P. Schneider and Simon Maurer: PS/SM Apart

from that you also made prints. And they’re not daubings.

DR Yes, I made prints for the money. But it’s not that simple.

If you start daubing for a customer they say “Thank you, goodbye.” You have to really work, make nice straight lines.

PS/SM And you could do that at that time?

DR I have the impression that I got by.

PS/SM But then the liberty you experienced, the daubing, always got the upper hand, right?

DR Perhaps it wasn’t that way at all. I saw then that a tempered liberty, a mildly ironic nonparticipation, was possible for timid people like me. I’m a timid person and play the role of an untimid one, say. You can do that on the art market. You can make yourself look like a plucky fellow.

PS/SM And that worked?

DR It seems so.

PS/SM And what’s your aim?

DR [Very fast] My aim is to be able to die without suffering.

That’s my aim. 4 [He was an alcoholic old man who’d been having heart problems, but all his interviews sound like this.]

4. Peter P. Schneider and Simon Maurer, “Conversation with Dieter Roth,” 1998.

Available online at www.dieter-roth-academy.de/dieter-_i_ll_get_through.pdf (accessed June 28, 2019).

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Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1988, enamel and flashe on aluminum, 96 × 60 inches (243.8 × 152.4 cm) © Christopher Wool; courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

CW

wantlesessentiels.com

The artist met with art historian Christian Malycha to discuss his newest paintings.

ALBERT OEHLEN: MAXIMUM CHANCE MAXIMUM CONTROL

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Previous spread: Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2019, watercolor on canvas, 83 7⁄8 × 72 1⁄8 inches (213 × 183 cm). Photo: © Jeff McLane Studio, Inc Opposite: Maya Oehlen and Albert Oehlen in Los Angeles, 2019.

Photo: © Esther Freund Right: Ernst Oehlen and Julian Oehlen in Los Angeles, 2019.

Photo: © Esther Freund

CHRISTIAN MALYCHA

unexpected!

The new paintings are quite

ALBERT OEHLEN By all means, I wanted a change.

You painted them in Los Angeles, right?

Yes, I was in LA and started to paint in acrylics and watercolors. These ten paintings evolved along the way. I didn’t intend to make anything new, though—it was an experiment, rather, and about the employment of different materials.

CM You wanted a change without knowing in advance where it would lead you?

AO The paintings deal with all of that, the whole development. You can see how I’m realizing the possibilities, and what interests me. You can see both ends of the spectrum.

CM The void and the abundance?

AO That’s basically it. And then there are the varying degrees of “mark-making” and “scrubbing about.”

CM Distinct signs or dissected planar textures.

What role does the application of color play in this?

AO That goes hand in hand with your choice of material. The application influences your movements, and that’s where the real fun begins. The colors don’t differ so much in terms of density and radiance. Only if a color sways you to paint differently do things get exciting.

CM In the early 1980s, when you started out, your painting was hard and calculated, emotion was rejected. Looking at the new paintings, one might wonder whether you feel differently today. Is there a sensuous dimension?

AO No, that’s not a category I plan for. Still, things are always coming out that I take delight in, even though I didn’t necessarily intend them. If the paintings are more colorful now, and brighter, I didn’t aim for that, but you know how it goes. And then I say to myself: “Oh my, that’s not so bad after all!”

CM AO

That’s what you can see. The color has enormous presence—it’s clear, it beams—but then again there are nuances and wry contrasts. It’s tender, and due to its transparency it takes on a marvelous depth, opening up the whole pictorial space.

AO What a pleasure to hear! I had no intentions with these paintings, everything just evolved the way it did.

CM Your brushstroke is immediately recognizable but the new paintings are completely different from the Tree Paintings, the Finger Paintings, and your collages. There’s no figure, no object, no writing . . . only color. You told me you’ve been thinking about some of your older paintings. What’s the tie-in? What were you looking at?

AO I didn’t look at anything, it just happened— there’s no conscious reference. But I suddenly just found myself back in the year 1995, 1996 . . . and just like back then, the new paintings arose out of a refusal of certain things: there’s no figuration and I wanted no composition, wanted to disable composition.

CM No preconceived image, but bold gestures?

AO It would be impossible, for example, to execute these things by working from sketches.

CM There’s resistance in their openness?

AO For sure—they refuse composition.

CM You’ve said you see a “reluctant order” in these paintings—what does that mean? Gestures and movements of color carrying and escalating each other within the painterly process?

AO Exactly. A painting has to be “gathered up.”

Nothing is intended but something happens. What evolves hasn’t been aimed for, it grows . . . while you’re struggling to prevent certain things. The painting takes a stance while you’re constantly rapping your own knuckles.

CM What part do chance and control play?

CM

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It’s an everlasting struggle. Brushstrokes, for example, almost never turn out how you wanted them to. The question is what you call chance. . . .

Control may be the choice not to correct anymore, you see something you don’t get rid of.

That’s no longer chance. How something ends up on a canvas is probably chance, but if it stays on, it isn’t.

CM With all their serenity, freedom, and openness, the paintings are astoundingly precise.

That’s contradiction in itself, being both “free” and “precise.”

AO A while ago I read a book on how John Cassavetes made his movies. It was inspiring, or at least affirmative. Anyway, I got the feeling of some kind of kinship. He was very spontaneous while filming; only later, during the editing, did he come close to the real film itself. And there you have it: both maximum chance and maximum control.

I thought, that’s it. I recognized the attitude and rejoiced. But there’s always the ordeal of the process. For Cassavetes it was extreme, and for me it is too. You’re searching for something without knowing what you’re looking for.

CM You could have made it easy for yourself, saying “That’s my painting” and being done with it.

Instead, every time you start over from scratch.

AO That’s true. It really is— CM Is this a perpetual present?

AO I have the feeling that my paintings, that my art altogether, is pretty much in line with my time, AO

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that I’m contemporary. Strangely enough. That conclusion took me quite a while. I’m not flattering myself; I could be dreaming of being ahead of my time, or classic. But I’m not dreaming about anything, I’m reckoning or supposing that I’m in line with my time. Without asking for it or idealizing it, I think that’s how it is.

CM From the very beginning, you’ve questioned any given image.

AO I’ve always been looking for trouble. I’m just a “surfin’ bird,” looking for stress.

CM And still everything comes together?

AO I hope that everything makes sense. But I don’t have to make sense, I just make paintings.

CM E a r l ie r p a i nt i n g s: s e l f-a s s u r a nc e or self-bewilderment?

AO That’s funny, I was just talking with Carroll Dunham about the same thing. For him it’s exactly the same. Somewhere in your past there’s always a period you don’t like, you don’t understand why you painted these paintings at all. But it shifts— five years later it’s a different period you’re doubting. Therefore, self-bewilderment, but not consciously sought out. Personally, I could work very well without ever looking back, but for your exhibitions you’re doing it constantly.

CM Are the ’90s reassuring for your new paintings, then?

AO I’m not sure whether the ’90s paintings might not even be the current period . . . and nonetheless I situate myself close by. Might be possible.

Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2019, watercolor on canvas, 83 7⁄8 × 72 1⁄8 inches (213 × 183 cm). Photo: © Jeff McLane Studio, Inc Artwork © Albert Oehlen

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TATIANA TROUVÉ

In upstate New York, Jenny Jaskey discovers Tatiana Trouvé’s Between sky and earth. Begun in 2012, this multifaceted installation exists as a crucial nexus in the artist’s career, both a result of her ongoing practice and a generative source for continuing investigations.

IN TIME

Tatiana Trouvé, Between sky and earth, 2012– , copper, engraved text, paint, bronze, concrete, stone, and aluminum, dimensions variable © Tatiana Trouvé.

Photos: Guillaume Ziccarelli

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arrived mid-morning as the sun was catching the crest of the hill, making the grass glow an eerie yellowish green. Spring had arrived late this year, we’d all begun to doubt its warmth would ever come, and this shock of green, combined with my groggy stupor—I’d gotten up early to drive a hundred miles north of New York to Dutchess County—made the landscape seem strangely verdant. I live among thick slices of vertical concrete, where trees grow one by one, block by block, and the breeze comes up through subway grates in the pavement. Here I could feel the sky opening up and the earth taking its first gasps of spring air, everything newly awake.

My guide, Matthias, met me near the entrance to the property, some 400 sprawling acres dedicated to a private collection of site-specific commissions. I followed his truck to a barn where I parked my rental. I’d come to see Between sky and earth, by Tatiana Trouvé, an artist whose wide-ranging practice includes sculpture, drawing, and installation but who is known in recent years for constructing elaborate mise-en-scènes 100

rich in psychological and material intrigue. Trouvé often radically transforms the interiors of the spaces in which she works—cutting into floors, creating passageways and hidden rooms, changing the expected scale of windows and doors—then arranges sculptural objects within these environments to create the impression that something of consequence (but what, exactly?) has taken place or is just about to. The strategy recalls the film noir convention in which the detective appears in medias res, has only fragments of information to work with and a client who may or may not be reliable, and must determine what is real and what is false. Unlike detective fiction, though, Trouvé’s immersive installations leave viewers in the middle indefinitely—between real and imagined, past and future, in a kind of uncanny, fragmented surrealism.

I’d anticipated this trip with more than a little curiosity, since Trouvé has rarely shown in the United States and it is rarer still to see her work outdoors. Her major installations have most ly appeared in Europea n inst it ut ions, including ambitious solo exhibitions at the Palais

living, they looked ordinary but were in fact artworks, in this case cast in bronze.

I continued onward, passing a handful of apparently discarded wooden crates and a sawhorse with a headlike stone. Then, in a small clearing, I came upon three fire hoses and a thick dark rope hanging limply on the face of a large rock.

To the right was what could have been a child’s makeshift fort: a hastily constructed cardboard shelter, with a radio hanging off one side and an old towel set out to dry on a branch nearby. These objects, especially the towel, were the surest signs of habitation, yet no obvious narrative could be constructed from the available evidence.

Trouvé spent part of her childhood in Dakar, Senegal, where local folklore tells of djinns, supernatural beings that dwell in all manner of objects— rocks, trees, the earth or air. What interests Trouvé about these mythic creatures, which she referenced directly in her exhibition Djinns, at Cneai, Paris, in 2005, is the way their presence is sensed but not seen. The animism of the djinn involves an enlivening of objects that are on the one hand material and on the other psychic. In Dutchess County a djinnlike presence, an aura of the metaphysical, lingered most palpably around two black chairs I saw, placed back-to-back on a flat plane of rock a distance from the cardboard fort. Each chair appeared to have a padded leather seat, and a long thin copper rod rested flat on one of them and against a side of the other. I recognized the objects as sculptures in Trouvé’s series The Guardian (2013– ). In the visual language of those works, copper rods are a stand-in for a sentinel watching whatever the assembled installation may be, but who has left the premises for an unknown period. This guardian is both here and not here, a felt presence marked materially but never fully embodied. Trouvé returns to this way of working time and again, making things that sit between matter and memory, or, as she describes it, “on the threshold of a physical and mental experience.”1 Like the Guardian works, many of the objects in the woods are familiar forms from other Trouvé installations. She has used casts of mattresses, shoes, blankets, and boxes before. Yet by placing these sculptures in an environment whose conditions change with the season, the weather, or the time of day, Trouvé intensifies their existence in de Tokyo, Paris; the Migros Museum, Zurich; mamco, Geneva; the Kunsthaus Graz; and the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, as well as in international biennials, among them Venice, Istanbul, São Paulo, and Lyon. Her first solo project in New York was in 2010, a site-specific installation that transformed several galleries at Gagosian, and in 2015, commissioned by the Public Art Fund, she created Desire Lines, a huge sculptural archive at the edge of Central Park that connected the park’s official and unofficial pathways with walks of historic and literary significance.

I’d heard that this upstate commission, begun in 2012, was different from anything Trouvé had attempted to date—unique in its engagement with a dynamic natural environment over time, and referencing key works of hers from other times and contexts.

We mounted a black ATV and drove up a dusty path that cut through an expanse of fields. The path narrowed as we entered a patch of woods and we stopped at a grove of trees nestled on a small rocky hill. Quiet and shaded, it was the sort of place that you might look for to rest in after a long

hike, or where, as a child, you and your friends might have played fort.

I spied a couple of weathered mattresses, folded and stuffed between a cluster of trees. Beside them sat a stack of broken-down and blackened cardboard boxes. There was a pile of heavy gray moving blankets too, and, above those, a couple of crusty used water-bottles tied with twine to a tree trunk. Everything looked weathered, grayed and browned, giving the impression of use, though how long this mysterious user had been away—a few weeks? years?—wasn’t clear. Moving around the objects, I noticed a handful of copper rods sticking out like skewers from the blankets and cardboard, the f irst tell that all was not as it appeared. More copper caught my eye in the trees, and Matthias remarked, “Yep, we had a grapevine infestation here.” We looked up together at Trouvé’s sinewy doubles of grapevines, cast in copper and hanging believably among the branches above our heads. Two black tree trunks nearby, which a moment ago had looked dead from rot or a brush fire, were the first thing I touched. Like all of the other objects I would see placed among the 101

both the time of the natural world and a distinctly human dimension, in both a dynamic ecosystem and our ever-changing memory-scape. Working in a white-walled gallery, Trouvé may defamiliarize our sense of time and place by altering a room’s architectural scale, or the way we move through it in space. Here in the woods, changes in architecture—an organic architecture of trees, rocks, and leaves wedged between sky and earth— are interventions among living things, hybrids of organic forms and man-made ones: a bronze copy of a tree beside a living tree, copper bricks wedged between rocks, a copper rod stuck in the ground through which the sounds of organisms deep in the earth can be heard. The latter is part of a workin-progress on the site, a meridian sculpted on a rock that points to high noon. In addition to solar time, the piece will also have a lunar dial that will come to life when the moon is full. With this object and with the entire installation, Trouvé has found a way for things to reveal themselves differently in time, to be both durable and in process.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the work’s relation to time is an area on the back perimeter of the site where large flat boulders cover the ground. Etched on the surfaces of the rocks are dozens of captions of artworks, formatted like wall labels in a gallery: “A Suitcase that Packs and Unpacks Itself, 2005, logic of wandering”; “Prepared Space, 2063, patinated bronze, wood, incision in the floor and walls, dimensions variable”; “Mister, Mrs. Miss., Tatiana Trouvé, 1990–2025.”

Above each entry the artist has pressed copper disks the size of pennies, turning the rocks into a kind of hybrid sculptural form that merges geological time with the discrete periods in which Trouvé’s artworks have or will have appeared. Combining the visual cues of a monument or gravesite with inscriptions memorializing the to-yet-occur, Trouvé’s archive in the landscape manages to overlay time in its varied registers. In many ways this work harks back to one of her earliest and best-known projects, Bureau d’Activités Implicites (Bureau of implicit activities, 1997–2007), a series of thirteen architectural modules recording various activities—activities that might otherwise be seen as wastes of time—in a highly aestheticized way. One of these modules, Module administratif (Administrative module, 1997–2002), takes the form of an office cubicle containing an expanding archive of documents related to the administration of Trouvé’s art practice: grant applications, CVs, rejection letters. Another, Module à reminiscence (Reminiscence module, 1999), consisted of a sealed, mirrored cylinder containing archived memories written on scraps of paper. Between sky and earth is a new, site-specific archive that puts everything outside, etched permanently in stone, yet still manages to evade full disclosure, the artist herself the sole guardian of the imagined future works she promises will one day become memories.

Trouvé has said that she plans to keep working on Between sky and earth indefinitely. Since she began this site-specific project, six years ago, she’s made a dozen or more visits to it, and in addition to the sundial is developing new elements for the trees. Earlier documentation reveals that the fire hoses, a set of birds’ nests, and a pile of books are all new additions since the first objects were installed. This commitment to long-term engagement with the work seems crucial to the ideas Trouvé sets out in it. Since the early days of her 102

practice, she has insisted that “waiting time” is productive, and her work can be seen as trying to give physical form to the act of simply being in process, of becoming a subject. 2 Here, with every new element added, Trouvé is subtly changing what we confront, but also what we remember from a past visit, or what kind of story we might construct from the elements. What will Between sky and earth become? We have to wait and see.

1. Tatiana Trouvé, quoted in an unsigned Gagosian press release, 2010. Available online at gagosian.com/exhibitions/2010/tatianatrouve/ (accessed July 25, 2019).

2. “I believe these waiting moments are quite productive. In this waiting time there is a construction of the self, of the subject.”

Interview with Francesca Pietropaolo, “In the Studio: Tatiana Trouvé,” Art in America, March 2010. Available online at www. artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/tatianatrouv/ (accessed July 31, 2019).

TARYN SIMON AN OCCUPATION OF LOSS Double Album The Vinyl Factory / Artangel Available September 16, 2019

Gwen Allen recounts her discovery of cutting-edge artists’ magazines from the 1960s and ’70s and explores the roots and implications of these singular publications.

ARTISTS’ MAGAZINES 104

When I began working on my PhD in art history in the late 1990s and early aughts, I used art magazines as a means to an end: like most researchers, I saw them as archives of information and ideas that I mined to further my research, which focused on American art of the 1960s and ’70s. Digital databases and other online resources were still in their infancy at the time, and in order to obtain articles from a magazine, past or present, one had to locate the actual printed periodicals, most of which were preserved in bound volumes. At Stanford, where I was a student, these heavy volumes happened to be in the basement of the art library, and to avoid having to repeatedly lug them up to the photocopier on the second floor, I would often sit on the floor between the stacks and skim multiple sources to be sure of their relevance. As I sat leafing through these old magazines to locate the article or articles I sought, I would inevitably become distracted by other pages—neighboring articles, letters to the editor, even advertisements, an entire context of texts and images that constituted both the physical and the discursive setting within which an article originally lived.

I also began to notice unusual texts, and pages that could not easily be categorized. A number of articles by artists such as Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson, for example, seemed to occupy some ambiguous ground in between magazine articles and works of art. They did not fit within the usual run of art criticism, but instead used parody, pastiche, and appropriation in ways that destabilized the reader’s expectations. Even the layouts of these articles were sometimes unusual, stressing their indeterminate status.

Other artists took out ads that again did not quite conform to the standard gallery posting. The January 1967 issue of Artforum, for example, included a full-page ad consisting of a photograph of Ed Ruscha asleep in bed, sandwiched between two women; superimposed over the image, supposedly intended as a cheeky wedding announcement on the occasion of his marriage to Danna Knego, was the text “Ed Ruscha Says Goodbye to College Joys.”

(Not coincidentally, Ruscha happened to be working as a designer for Artforum at the time, under the pseudonym “Eddie Russia.”)

Other artists followed suit, using art-magazine advertising space as a site of artistic and political intervention. In the twelve consecutive issues of Artforum from November 1968 to December 1969, Stephen Kaltenbach placed a series of ads consisting of pithy and ironic phrases, such as “Art Works,” “Build a Reputation,” and “Become a Legend,” that critiqued the role of the art magazine in careerism and promotion. The artist then known as Judy Gerowitz, her married name, placed a fullpage ad in the October 1970 issue of Artforum to announce her name change to Judy Chicago—a decision she explicitly linked to her feminist politics, and her intention, as the ad stated, to “divest herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance.”1 Such examples attest to the fact that the magazine page was beginning to function in a new way during this time. No longer merely a place for art criticism and commentary on art, it was becoming an actual site for art—a new kind of medium and exhibition space. This new site became the topic of my dissertation and subsequently of my book Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art. 2 As my research progressed, my approach to magazines evolved: no longer a means to an end, they became fascinating objects in and of themselves.

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I started to pay attention to their graphic design and typography as well as to their complex “social lives,” a term I borrowed from Arjun Appadurai to suggest how magazines gain meaning through their production, distribution, and circulation through space and time.3 Many of the publications I discovered were produced by artists as alternative sites of distribution and display that deliberately opposed themselves to more mainstream art magazines such as Artforum.

While these magazines find precedents in earlier avant-garde periodicals associated with movements such as Surrealism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and Futurism, the postwar period witnessed an unprecedented expansion of the formal and conceptual possibilities of the magazine, as well as a self-reflexivity about its status as a medium. This new understanding of the artists’ magazine can be traced back to several periodicals from the late 1950s and early ’60s, including Spirale (Bern, 1953– 64), Zero (Düsseldorf, 1958–59), Gorgona (Zagreb, 1961–66), Revue Nul = 0 (Arnhem, 1961–64), Revue Integration (Arnhem, 1965–72), Diagonal Cero (La Plata, Argentina, 1962–68), kwy (Paris, 1958–63), Revue Ou (Paris, 1958–74), material (Darmstadt and Paris, 1958–59), décoll/age (Cologne, 1962– 69), V TRE (New York, 1964–79), and Semina (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Larkspur, California, 1955–64). These publications, many of which had tiny print runs of just a few hundred copies, 106

exemplify a radical new kind of experimentation, as artists utilized unbound, die-cut, and embossed pages, glued objects onto pages, tore them, and even burned them, exploring the temporality and materiality of the printed page. By the late 1960s and ’70s, artists were approaching the magazine as a new kind of artistic medium, exploring the materiality of language and print, as well as the tactility and interactivity of the magazine itself.

One of the most extraordinary examples of this artistic experimentation was the multimedia publication Aspen (1965–71), which arrived as a cardboard box containing Super-8 films, f lexi disc records, critical writings, and artists’ projects.

Founded as a culture-and-lifestyle magazine centering on Aspen, Colorado, it was soon taken over by a series of artist guest-editors. Andy Warhol edited issue 3, the cover of which took the form of a box of Fab laundry detergent; inside the box were flip-books, postcards, a mock newspaper, and a flexi disc record of the first Velvet Underground single, “Loop”—7 minutes and 14 seconds of guitar feedback recorded by John Cale. Functioning as a kind of miniature traveling exhibition, Aspen claimed such contributors as Bochner, Graham, LeWitt, Smithson, John Cage, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Tony Smith, among others. Artists used the publication to document their work and ideas, but they also saw it

as a medium in its own right, taking advantage of its unbound three-dimensional format. Serra, for example, published a handwritten account of an idea for a piece called Lead Shot, which was to involve dropping molten lead from an airplane onto a precise point on the Earth’s surface; Ruscha contributed a poster featuring one of the photographs from his book Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967); and Smith created a cardboard model of his sculpture The Maze (1967), which the reader could cut out and paste together.

Another important artistic experiment with the magazine form was S.M.S. (1968), a bimonthly portfolio, published in New York, containing intricate limited-edition artists’ objects and multiples.

S.M.S. was published by the artist William N. Copley, who invited many artists to contribute, among them Richard Artschwager, Christo, Bruce Conner, Walter De Maria, Marcel Duchamp, On Kawara, Roy Lichtenstein, Lee Lozano, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Meret Oppenheim, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Mel Ramos, and Lawrence Weiner.

Each issue of S.M.S. came in a folder bursting with elaborately designed items: posters, stamps, stickers, toys, games, images and texts reproduced through silk screen and offset lithography, booklets tied with silk ribbons, and tape cassettes nested like jewels in cardboard boxes. Lichtenstein, for example, created a folded hat decorated with his signature Benday dots; De Maria published eight

offset lithographs documenting correspondence, sketches, and a photograph describing his proposal for the exhibition Art by Telephone, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Artschwager designed the portfolio cover for issue 6, faithfully reproducing the stains made when he accidentally spilled his coffee while working on it. Man Ray irreverently added a lit cigar to a reproduction of a self-portrait drawing by Leonardo da Vinci in his Father of Mona Lisa (1967)—a kind of rejoinder to L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), in which Duchamp had drawn a mustache and goatee on a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa. If magazines presented opportunities for artistic innovation during this period, they also gained meaning as sites of social and political protest. Hence, the title of S.M.S. stood for “Shit Must Stop”—an antiestablishment imperative to halt corruption inside and outside the art world. 4 The idea that art could be produced and distributed inexpensively to a wide audience corresponded to the egalitarian ideals that so many artists espoused during these years. In this sense, artists’ magazines and publications functioned as alternative spaces in which to counter the exclusivity of the gallery space and the mainstream art world, and thus radically transform the reception of art. Magazines offered an important new site of distribution and display for the ephemeral and anti-institutional formats and media of Conceptual art, performance art, Earth art, and video, which were challenging to exhibit and commodify. At the same time, they also fostered new artistic communities, audiences, and counterpublics, both locally and globally.

Avalanche magazine (1970–76) was founded by the curator Willoughby Sharp and the writer Liza Béar to support the new forms of art then emerging in SoHo, an industrial section of Lower Manhattan where artists had been illegally living in manufacturing and warehouse spaces since the early 1950s. Styling itself as a hipper, downtown alternative to Artforum, Avalanche sought to put the

Previous spread: Aspen 1, no. 3 (December 1966). Cover design: Andy Warhol Opposite: Aspen 1, no. 3 (December 1966). Design: Andy Warhol Above: Interior contents of S.M.S., no. 4 (August 1968). Cover: Robert Stanley. Image: © William N. Copley Estate/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Left: Interior contents of S.M.S., no. 6 (December 1968).

Cover: Richard Artschwager.

Image: © William N. Copley Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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artist’s voice first, circumventing the critic, and to give artists a place to document their work and to create projects expressly for the page. To this end it published a close-up headshot of an artist on the cover of each issue and eschewed art criticism in favor of lengthy and lavishly illustrated interviews with artists. The first issue, for example, contained a conversation between Smithson, Oppenheim, and Michael Heizer, accompanied by no fewer than thirty-two photographs of these artists’ large-scale Earthworks. Several of the photographs bleed across a spread, lending the magazine a cinematic quality.

Over six years, Avalanche published thirteen issues, featuring interviews and projects by artists such as De Maria, Nauman, Oppenheim, Rainer, Ruscha, Serra, Weiner, Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Chris Burden, Hanne Darboven, Terry Fox, Tina Girouard, Barry Le Va, Gordon Matta-Clark, Meredith Monk, William Wegman, and Jackie Winsor. Beyond their value as primary art-historical sources, the Avalanche interviews attest to the importance of conversation and sociability in the making and viewing of art in the SoHo of the 1970s. They have an unedited, informal quality, suggesting the importance of community above and beyond the commercial and professional relationships that dominate the art world. Instead of exhibition reviews, Avalanche published a section called “Rumbles,” a home-grown compilation of performances, Happenings, exhibitions, openings, readings, and screenings sent in by artists from around the world. Here one could read about performances and screenings by artists such as Burden and Paik. Gossip and information of a more

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Opposite: Avalanche, Fall 1970.

Cover: Joseph Beuys.

Interior spread: Michael Heizer.

Right: Art-Rite, no. 9 (Spring 1975) Photos: Rob McKeever

personal nature were printed in a section called “Messages,” a kind of community newsletter with news of births, deaths, comings and goings, and the like, as well as rumors, such as an anonymous report that Elizabeth Taylor would star in Warhol’s next movie. Before Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, artists kept track of one another and communicated through the pages of magazines such as Avalanche.

Artists’ magazines challenged the visual culture and conventions of the mainstream art press through not only their content but their form. ArtRite (1973–78), for example, emerging like Avalanche from downtown New York, rejected the glossy pages of commercial art magazines in favor of cheap newsprint and a diy, zinelike format. It broadcast young and emerging artists and sought to provide a more authentic, accessible form of critical discourse, featuring artists such as Burden, Matta-Clark, and Ruscha as well as younger, less-established artists. The magazine served as a rotating exhibition space through its artist-designed covers, many of them emphasizing and exploiting the publication’s cheap, disposable format. For issue 6, for example, Dorothea Rockburne created one of her “folded drawings” by simply folding back the otherwise blank newsprint cover.

The magazine file (1972–89), founded in Toronto by the Canadian collective General Idea, pirated the logo of Life magazine to subvert the dominant messages of the mainstream media with campy and irreverent critiques of class and gender.

These are just a few of the hundreds of artists’ magazines founded during these years as

alternatives to the mainstream art press. They also proliferated outside North America, serving as important vehicles of exchange in an increasingly international art world. If they functioned as a kind of alternative art space during the 1960s and ’70s, by the 1980s the very notion of the alternative space was expanding to include venues outside the art world altogether, as artistic communities developed in the context of bands, parties, bars, clubs, and other informal social sites and interactions. A number of important artists’ magazines documented and supported such practices. Real Life (1979–94), for example, founded by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan, centered on the New York community of artists known as the Pictures Generation. It published a diverse range of material, including artists’ writings and projects, criticism, and interviews with such artists as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Jeff Wall.

Like earlier artists’ magazines, Real Life sought to recalibrate the power balance between artists and critics, offering artists recourse against the critic’s authority. Along with a number of other magazines of these years, such as Just Another Asshole (New York, 1978–87), ZG (London, 1980–88), and Tellus (New York, 1983–93), it fostered interdisciplinary crossovers among the downtown graffiti, poetry, garage band, punk, and no-wave music scenes, represented by artists and musicians such as Kim Gordon and Steven Parrino, both of whom published in these magazines. Other artists explored the publicity role of magazines in ways that both harked back to and departed from

the interventions of the 1960s and ’70s, embracing the postmodern blurring of art and commerce. Jeff Koons, for example, turned to art magazines such as Flash Art, Art in America, Artforum, and Arts to take out ads that can be interpreted as both promotional publicity and works of art.

Today, despite (and, perhaps more important, because of) digital culture’s threat to print, artists are returning to magazines and publications as important sites of artistic practice. Artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Douglas Gordon, Damien Hirst, Josephine Meckseper, Aleksandra Mir, the collective dis, and many others have seized on the magazine format to expand their practice and publics. Yet while artists’ magazines and magazine art today surely have different meanings from those of the 1960s and ’70s, they also rely on this history, whether knowingly or not, and make it newly relevant in the present.

1. For a more in-depth discussion of the gender politics of such artist-initiated advertisements see Gwen Allen, “Making Things Public: Art Magazines, Art Worlds, and the #MeToo Movement,” Portable Gray, no. 1 (September 2018):5–18.

2. The current article draws heavily on that book. See Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2011). For primary documents and texts related to artists’ magazines see also Allen, The Magazine, Documents of Contemporary Art Series (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2016).

3. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

4. For more on S.M.S. see Allen, “Artist as Publisher: William N. Copley’s S.M.S.,” in William N. Copley, exh. cat. (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2016), pp. 154–61.

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Herbie and Dibi Fletcher have been central members of the American surfing tradition since the 1960s. They met with Ken Maxwell to discuss the early, pure days of surfing in Hawaii, the evolution of the industry, and the connections between surfing and art.

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KEN MAXWELL You’ve told me some great stories about leaving the crowded, bustling California of the mid-’60s to find perfect waves, and I can’t help but be reminded of Gauguin leaving Paris for Tahiti in his search for paradise.

HERBIE FLETCHER In 1964, when I was sixteen, I got hired by Hobie Alter to be in a short film that was being shot by Bruce Brown. It was the first time I’d been paid to surf. I earned $250 and bought myself a plane ticket to Hawaii. I landed with a bedroll, a surfboard, and 150 bucks in my pocket.

It took hours to hitchhike out to the North Shore on the two-lane highway with almost no traffic.

I finally reached Sunset Beach and my old friend Dewey Weber said I could sleep in the backseat of his Cadillac, which was parked on the point looking down the lineup. The sleeping conditions weren’t great but the surf was perfect, no footprints in the sand and only a handful of surfers on the seven-mile stretch of the world’s greatest surf.

My idea of paradise.

KM Your Blood Water series seems to be reflective of this time in your life. The works seem to resonate with the relationship between man and nature. You said you stained them with iron oxide from the mud in the Waimea River. Can you explain that process?

HF In the early years on the North Shore, the rivers would bust out during the heavy winter rains

and mineral-rich red earth would flow into the ocean, staining everything a soft reddish brown.

“Waimea” means “Red Water” and it’s the largest river on the North Shore. I used to explore it when the rain stopped and I saw how the banks were constantly changed by the water flow and islands were formed from the earth being washed to sea from the north end of the Ko’olau Mountains on the windward side. The local people always considered Waimea Valley a sacred place, and when I paddle up the river with raw canvas on the nose of my surfboard to stain in the iron-rich banks, I feel a sense of timelessness, repeating a process that has been done since man’s beginning.

KM Your arrival in Hawaii, Dibi, was a bit earlier than Herb’s, is that correct? Can you tell me something about what it was like?

DIBI FLETCHER I think my first trip was in 1963. My older sister, Joyce [Hoffman], was competing for the Women’s World Surfing title. My dad, Walter Hoffman, was a longtime big-wave rider and was judging the Makaha contest on the West Side, where I met Herbie for the first time in 1965. My dad had won the tandem event there in ’51 and ’52. He was in the Navy and stationed in Honolulu, where he had night duty. He spent his days on the beach shaping surfboards, surfing, and playing music under the palms.

KM You can’t imagine what the early years were

like from just reading surfing magazines or seeing heavily narrated films. Would you tell me a little about your early years in the surfing community?

DF My dad started surfing as a teenager growing up in the Hollywood Hills in the ’40s. Boards were solid wood and weighed close to a hundred pounds. By the early ’50s my dad had the first board built using materials from the aerospace industry, with a foam core, wood veneer, fiberglass, and resin. This new, semilightweight model, which weighed around forty pounds, opened surfing to a whole new generation, which captured the imagination of a nation after two world wars and the Korean War. People in California were ready to go surfing, and a whole new industry was created with entrepreneurial zeal to feed the fast-growing appetite of the midcentury modern family for the new recreational outdoor lifestyle.

KM Do you think your father’s generation, after going through the trauma of war, was instilled with a sense of fearlessness?

DF I think they’d gained a great appreciation of life and wanted to embrace it. There was a new sense of affluence and optimism in California. Industry that had been geared to making faster, lighter-weight fighter planes were now making molded chairs, catamarans, dune buggies, mobile homes, and everything imaginable to make life fun and easy.

KM So you meet each other in 1965, at the Makaha surf contest?

HF Yes, I was there to compete, but I had to hitchhike to the West Side from the North Shore and I missed my heat. I was looking for my surfboard, which Corky Carroll had given to Joyce, Dibi’s sister, to keep for me, and that’s how we met the first time. We would see each other at all the big surf competitions and started dating on and off, but I didn’t want to get hung up with

a girlfriend—I wanted to surf perfect waves, and that meant spending most of my time in Hawaii.

KM How did you eventually get together?

HF I was living in Laguna Canyon for a couple of months in the summer of ’67 and Dibi knocked on the door and said she’d left home. It was wild times: Laguna Beach was the Haight-Ashbury of Southern California and Laguna Canyon was the epicenter, with small wooden beach bungalows home to what would become one of the most notorious American drug-smuggling rings, which a friend named “The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.”

KM How did that turn out?

HF It was time to get out and get back in the water. So Dibi and I flew to Maui. I had a couple of new surfboards, my shaping tools, a bag of buds, and a few hundred doses of mescaline.

DF What could go wrong?

KM Is that when you started shaping seriously?

HF Af ter we lef t Maui for the Nor th Shore, and rented Dibi’s dad’s house on the beach at Pupukea, I built a shaping room in the back with tin I collected from the old military camp in the hills above Sunset Beach. It was great to get to experiment with design and have the instant feedback by riding the new shape. I could tell exactly how to tweak it to achieve what I was looking for, whether speed down the line or change the shape of the rail to hang high in the wave before releasing it to slide down the face. It’s all about the aerodynamics.

KM When did you start thinking about making the sculptures you call Wrecktangles?

HF In the ’80s, with [the surfer] Gerry Lopez, I bought the third story of a house at the Pipeline.

Dibi and I had two sons, Christian and Nathan, who were completely surf stoked, and I was making the Wave Warriors series of surfboards. Those boards were designed to showcase the greatest tube riders of a wave considered to be the

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proving ground for the new breed of fierce young surfers. I worked with them, testing the traction pads I made for the decks of their boards: I felt the pad was the final touch to a perfectly shaped board, which gave the surfer more fin and rail control than they could ever have with wax alone.

It was a natural progression from my shaping of the early ’60s, from the turned-down rails and concave nose to working directly on the deck, allowing the surfer to stay on the board in critical conditions. Boards had gotten so light for speed and maneuverability, they broke like Popsicle sticks when the lip of a huge wave came crashing down on the deck. Surfers were unable to hold their position tucked safely back in what’s been called the “green room” before being spat out into the light with the wave’s last powerful surge of energy as it came to its natural end and dissolved back into the sea. The surfers would throw the broken pieces of their boards in the yard, many grabbing another from their quiver to charge back out into the lineup. I’d look down from my deck and see all these fascinating shapes, colors, logos, personal drawings, and musings scrawled across the jagged remains of these once perfect, custom-made artifacts of the challenge that makes surfing at that level a mystical experience, and I realized I was seeing something worth preserving.

KM So all the boards in the Wrecktangles have a connection to your years at the Banzai Pipeline?

HF Yes, I used to crawl under the houses and collect the broken boards my friends would stash during the surf season. Now they save them for me and give me a call to come pick them up and share stories with me about the ride that broke the board, their injuries, the crowds, the companies, and we usually end up talking surfboard design.

KM That brings up the similarity with the Wall of Disaster series, which I believe is a more recent body of work?

HF Yes, it’s a continuation for sure. I collect the

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broken pieces of skateboards just like I do the surfboards. It’s like collecting a part of the rider’s life experience. It’s great that the skaters have started saving their boards for me like the surfers.

The look of the boards after being thrashed, with the logos barely visible, reminds me how things have changed and how the act of skateboarding has managed to stay the same. It’s still cool, even with big corporate takeover like I’ve seen in surf— surfers and skaters are still pushing the boundaries on what can be done in a freestyle environment, and I love that.

KM The Wrecktangles’ evolution into the Wall of Disaster series makes perfect sense when seeing

those early pictures of you pool skating barefoot in 1963. It’s reminiscent of how many artists work in a reflective process throughout their careers, going back to the beginning and making something new for the present, where you have that lineage, that common thread where the art is all a part of the same life story and one couldn’t exist without the other.

HF It’s been important for me to stay engaged, it keeps me really pumped. Making these pieces keeps me connected to all the new surfers and skaters who are friends with Christian, Nathan, Greyson—and we have our grandchildren Lazer and Jetson who will keep the family story going.

KM Herbie, you talk about acquiring boards— whether it’s crawling under decks or surfers and skaters saving them to give you, it’s a multigenerational collecting process. These objects that you’ve accumulated over a lifetime embody actual memories from different people’s lives that you’re preserving through your artmaking, re-presenting them and sharing them with the public. In previous conversations you both have said, “These pieces all belonged to our friends.” I find that an incredibly interesting story.

Dibi, let’s talk about the book Fletcher: A Lifetime in Surf.

DF Herb and I have lived a long life together, we’re having our fiftieth wedding anniversary this year. There’s been a lot written about us in the past, but I believe my perspective is completely unique. I’ve had the opportunity to live the most extraordinary life during the greatest time in California beach culture. The book is a wonderful collection of photos that define six decades of surfing, beginning with black and whites of my dad and his friends shaping surfboards on the beach at Makaha. Seeing those images gives me a feeling of nostalgia for a world that’s slipped away.

KM The action of surfing is still the same today, so how do you mean that?

DF When my dad’s generation were young, they surfed for the pure joy of surfing, so that

Opening spread: Nathan Fletcher, Indonesia, 2011. Photo: Herbie Fletcher Previous spread, left: The Fletcher Family, Astrodeck, San Clemente, California, 2015. Photo: Rafael Pulido

Opposite, top: Christian and Nathan, North Shore, Hawaii, 1990. Photo: Tom Servais Opposite, bottom: Greyson Fletcher, Jacksonville, Florida, 2015.

Photo: John Bradford

Previous spread, right, top: Christian Fletcher, Tahiti, 1988. Photo: Herbie Fletcher

Right: Nathan Fletcher, Pipeline, 2017. Photo: Zak Noyle

Previous spread, right, bottom: Herbie Fletcher, North Shore, Hawaii, 1969. Photo: Art Brewer

Below: Herbie Fletcher, Wrecktangle #12, 2014, foam, fiberglass, acrylic paint, and steel, 90 × 264 × 24 inches (228.6 × 670.6 × 61 cm) © Herbie Fletcher All photos courtesy Fletcher Family Archive

aspect seems very real to me. As they matured and wanted to continue enjoying the beach lifestyle, they started creating the businesses that would become the “surf industry” of today, and would change surfing like all things change when they become monetized.

KM Talking with you both about your early years in Hawaii makes the photos in the book really come to life.

DF Yes, those were fun times. In the late ’60s Herb was completely averse to having his photo taken for any of the surf publications, but after the birth of our son Christian the responsibility of being a dad set in. He started working with all the great surf photographers to organize surf trips with a few

other fearless young surf enthusiasts, traveling to exotic locations to catch the perfect wave.

KM It’s interesting to watch the progression of the decades unfold through the photos, each depending on the one before to get to the one after.

DF I always thought of the story as a fragment when it was just about one of the decades. My dad’s style of surfing was called “trimming”: surfers stayed out in front of the white water as far as they could and rode the wave to the beach. In Herb’s generation the boards had gotten shorter and faster and the surfers were riding as far back in the tube as possible. Christian has grown up surfing, skateboarding, and being whipped around behind Herb’s Jet Ski. He was ready to take surfing out of the tube and into the air.

KM When you watch professional surfing now that’s all you see.

DF At the time it wasn’t considered surfing and created quite a controversy. It was new, brash, punk rock, and the industry that was trying to sell clothes for back-to-school wanted none of it.

KM How was that for Nathan?

DF Nathan put on a helmet and went motocross racing. The anonymity gave him the chance to become his own man, out from under the shadow of Herb, my dad, Christian, and the industry. He loved it and helped start the Metal Militia until the siren song called him back to the sea.

He carved out a place for himself as one of the world’s most respected big-wave riders.

KM Do you think Greyson became a skateboarder to find his own voice?

DF Greyson didn’t grow up at the beach, he lived with his mom in Anaheim. Herb would pick him up on the weekends and take him surfing, skating, and snowboarding. He was a natural at everything he tried, but living inland he spent all his free time at the Vans Skatepark and just naturally gravitated toward skateboarding. When you see him skate a big bowl, he has the most beautiful surf style. I guess it’s just in the genes.

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In honor of the extraordinary life of Robert Therrien (1947–2019), Aimee Gabbard writes about her time with the artist and explores his lifelong interest in photography.

ROBERT THERRIEN: THE CAUSAL LINK TO THE (UN) REAL

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I

’m sitting at the table in the kitchen of Robert Therrien’s downtown Los Angeles studio. The table was made by the manufacturer Gunlocke, as were the chairs. He purchased this furniture from a flea market in the early ’90s. Around the same time, Therrien, intrigued by the intimacy and immediacy afforded by instant photography, purchased a Polaroid camera. Was it the impeccable yet understated design of the table and chairs that inspired him to reestablish an involvement with photography? Or was it the photographs that he started taking from beneath the table and chairs that catalyzed the impulse to create what, unbeknownst to him, would turn into his most iconic series? What came first, the photograph or the idea?

Although most celebrated as a sculptor, Therrien actually studied photography as an undergraduate. Finding the technical approaches taught in academia too restrictive, he abandoned the medium, but once his interest in photography was reinvigorated it catalyzed a fresh approach to his working method. Not surprisingly, that moment coincided with a noticeable shift in his art, which became less abstract and more representational. “For about ten years, the process was photograph the object and then do it,” he told me last spring.1 The first Polaroid camera that Therrien owned was the Swinger, which he bought from a drugstore. “It was considered cool to have the low grade,” he said.2 The Swinger, named for the way it moved when hanging from the owner’s wrist, was sold in drugstores rather than traditional camera stores, and was commercially successful as a result. Therrien said that Swingers ran parallel in his mind to the cheap PXL camera for video; “it was the first camera a kid could afford.”

We searched for the PXL camera online and mixed in with the results was Google’s Pixel phone. This seems appropriate considering our discussion of the Polaroid, a company that digital photography eventually bankrupted. To paraphrase Karl Marx, capitalism makes all that is solid melt into air.

In their heyday, Edwin Land’s “one-step” Polaroid cameras were something of a revolution. Liberating in their ease of use and their high-quality yet affordable film, the cameras allowed a unique image to appear in the same time and space where the user pointed and shot. “The film format was square and everything was pretty automatic on it,” Therrien said. “They were fun. Someone might say, What was the attraction to it? It was sort of experimental at first. Polaroid company used some of the most expensive chemistry . . . and their cheap little camera had a really fine, good glass lens. It just looked right. The tonality was better than other blackand-white film. There was a quality to it.”

Therrien spent months shooting hundreds of Polaroids from the floor underneath the table and chairs, an area normally hidden from the visual experience of everyday life.

“I was using those images to see what something would look like from down there. Most people aren’t interested in down there,” he explained. In place of a tripod, he screwed the Swinger to a thin piece of plywood; this held the camera upright and allowed him to shift perspective easily. He treated the camera as his third eye and the alchemical, instant feedback allowed him to see sections of the table decontextualized from any material or spatial signifiers. “The reason the table became big was because I asked, ‘What if people could walk into an environment like that? It would be perfect just to have that as a sculpture.’”3 And have that as a sculpture is exactly what he did. The first work he created using what would become a serial motif was No title (yellow table leg) (1993). Next was Under the Table (1994), a table and six chairs enlarged to almost four times their original size. The title, while suggestive in itself, contained a double meaning for the artist, who had received a fee to cover the costs of a site-specific installation for an exhibition called insite. “I used all my money to build a sculpture, that table. I think you were supposed to use it for shipping, the materials, crating, and the whole thing. I didn’t really use the funds appropriately. . . . I always felt like I had gotten money under the table,” he recalled to me with a sly smile.4 The artist

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made two more table-and-chairs sets in this style, both apparently wooden but actually metal painted to look like wood grain. He had been experimenting with this trompe l’oeil effect since his college days.

Since the 1970s, Therrien had been in the habit of buying objects with the intention of one day turning them into sculptures. Over the years he developed an iconic lexicon of forms that he would create and recreate in both two and three dimensions. Sometimes his drawings became sculptures, or vice versa; sometimes forms morphed and became new ones. A snowman form, for instance, rotated ninety degrees, prompted a cloud form; a chapel eventually progressed into an oilcan. These evolutions were not necessarily linear but more like a desire line; Therrien would seamlessly modify and simplify each form to a point of visual purity, reducing their specificity in favor of a general idea, turning each into a symbol. Within each of his motifs is an inherent history: some became so laden with meaning that the artist himself could not remember their exact origin.

There is an indefinable warmth, an inherent intimacy, in our collective mental image of Polaroid photographs. Separated and categorized by either form or content, Therrien’s Polaroids—shot with several different models of the Land camera besides the Swinger—were securely tucked away in his studio kitchen, almost within arm’s reach of the table and chairs. But it wasn’t only Polaroids that he liked to keep near; small boxes holding thousands of photographs were constantly out on the tables and countertops in the kitchen— photographs of his artworks and installations and works in process, taken by the artist and countless friends over the years. Whether using the camera as a way to explore an object and document its transformation into a subject, as a way to track a formal progression, or to document a temporary, studio-only installation of whose existence his Polaroids would eventually be the only vestige, Therrien always recognized the value that all types of photography played in his process.

Therrien’s studio, which like his work straddled the line between fantasy and reality, was as much a part of his oeuvre as a place for it. The studio was a living environment—a constantly evolving installation, enthralling and specific, home to at least one example of each of his essential forms. Perhaps from an innate desire to show rather than tell, he constantly referenced images of works not currently at the studio. “It’s sort of like a game, where the studio could be a world or a village, and this is sort of a collection of images. Some of them get eliminated, and, for particular ones it seems like the space around me is incomplete if they are missing,” he explained.5 Installation was crucial to Therrien’s methodology; he believed that it enhanced and completed each of his individual works. He also believed that no installation was perfect until it had been photographed. When he installed an exhibition, he would come prepared with photographs of the works that he had shot from all angles, visual aids that helped him to determine what he called the “perfect perspective.” The sculptor Constantin Brancusi, one of Therrien’s heroes, also photographed his own work. While Brancusi originally got interested in photography as a marketing tool, he eventually became further involved, and, with the help of his friend the artist Man Ray, set up a darkroom in his studio. Using photography to recontextualize his sculptures and their interactions in the studio and to rematerialize their existence in pictorial space, he came to realize that he alone knew best how to portray his work photographically.

“I think Brancusi had an ideal view for his works. I realize that my pieces too have an ideal view.”6 Interestingly enough, it was Brancusi’s beard that first inspired Therrien to explore the beard as a motif, in both photography and sculpture, over a seven-year period. Made with synthetic materials such as plaster, wire, and plastic, complete with ear hooks and sometimes massive in size, the beard works were deliberately theatrical. The subject was unmistakably captivating for the artist; over 300 photographs of the beard works were taken in the studio, showing their creation and eventual group installations.

Opening spread, all images: Robert Therrien, No title (cloud above bed), c. 1993–94, Polaroid Type 665, 4 ¼ × 3 3⁄8 inches (10.8 × 8.6 cm) Page 120, top two images: Robert Therrien, No title (pots and pans), c. 1994, Polaroid, 4 ¼ × 3 3⁄8 inches (10.8 × 8.6 cm) Page 120, bottom left: Robert Therrien, No title (dish rack), c. 1995, Polaroid, 4 ¼ × 3 3⁄8 inches (10.8 × 8.6 cm) Page 120, bottom right: Robert Therrien, No title (stacked plates), c. 1993, Polaroid, 4 ¼ × 3 3⁄8 inches (10.8 × 8.6 cm) Page 121, all images: Robert Therrien, No title (under the table), c. 1993, Polaroid, 3 3⁄8 × 4 ¼ inches (8.6 × 10.8 cm) This spread, all images: Robert Therrien, No title (sawing log), c. 1993–94, Polaroid Type 665, 4 ¼ × 3 3⁄8 inches (10.8 × 8.6 cm)

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This page, top: Robert Therrien, No title (beards), c. 1999, Polaroid 100, 4 ¼ × 3 3⁄8 inches (10.8 × 8.6 cm) This page, bottom: Robert Therrien, No title (fake beard), c. 1999, Polaroid Type 665, 4 ¼ × 3 3⁄8 inches (10.8 × 8.6 cm) Opposite: Robert Therrien, No title (self-portrait in kitchen), c. 1995, Polaroid, 4 ¼ × 3 3⁄8 inches (10.8 × 8.6 cm) Artwork © Robert Therrien/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Some of the Polaroids act as the only surviving traces of rooms Therrien constructed in the studio. He would meticulously create scenes, arranging them over and over, adding objects, lighting, clutter, and on and on until he knew they were finished. These temporary environments made for the camera generated perhaps his most prolific groups of Polaroids and were, in retrospect, premonitions of his late “room” works.

In one series of images, the Polaroids document a scene in which a saw is caught in the middle of what appears to be a freshly sawn log, hovering above the double bed in the artist’s studio bedroom. While creating the scene, and photographing it each step of the way, Therrien realized that a readymade saw, split log, and bed would not translate in a photograph.

Seen from the perspective of the camera, the saw dissolved into a straight line. Therrien accordingly created an exaggerated saw, an object that in life looked ridiculous but that translated perfectly in his photographs. He also rebuilt the bed frame over and over, in wild proportions, until it looked like a regular bed to the camera.

“Sawing logs,” Therrien told me, is an old vernacular phrase referring to snoring, and so to being asleep in bed.7 Unaware of this reference when I first saw the photographs, I saw instead two paradoxical concepts combining into a slightly romantic film noir scene. The bed—the space of dreams, the most comfortable space in the house—appears with its floral sheets tousled, as if someone had just left it. A threatening saw, caught in the middle of a split log, hangs over where one’s sleeping head would be. The act of sawing logs is physical, hazardous, laborious. Danger and comfort, two seemingly antithetical concepts, appear as if they were always meant to be together. Knowing that this artistic manifestation only exists in these images only adds to their auratic quality.

In another set of Polaroids, a large black cloud floats over the bed, as if projected from a sleeping mind. In one shot the mattress is on the floor; in the next, it’s back on the bed frame; in another, a stool has replaced the bed, and in another, the empty room is suddenly filled with cleaning supplies, old windows, and a garden hose on the floor.

Another black cloud sculpture hangs above Therrien in one of his only self-portraits—perhaps the only self-portrait. This black cloud—more bulbous, more defined, more three dimensional than the one in the bed photographs—hangs above a doorway in the studio kitchen. The artist can be seen in a mirror framed by this doorway. A camera tripod sits in front of him, but he is holding the Polaroid camera. At first glance the point of the photograph appears to be to show him shooting the new black cloud sculpture, but upon inspection, more black clouds, these ones in drawings hung on the wall behind the artist, appear in the mirror’s reflection. The kitchen table and chairs are doubled, one side caught by the camera and the other in the mirror, and the table is covered in Polaroids, probably shot just before this one. In a single image, then, the black cloud appears above, in front of, and behind Therrien, in all the different mediums he prefers and in photographs covering the table that started this entire approach. The white border of the Polaroid frames the doorway, which frames the mirror—a frame within a frame within a frame.

This photograph allows us a glimpse into Therrien’s multiverse, where each form is its own world. We might imagine him with two of his favored subjects on his shoulders: on one the endearing angel (“a head with halo,” he called it), on the other the mischievous devil. And Therrien is the still point around which everything revolves.

1. Robert Therrien, in conversation with the author, April 11, 2018.

2. Therrien, in conversation with the author, October 4, 2018. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Therrien come from this conversation.

3. Therrien, quoted in Blake Gopnik, “If Gulliver Were a Conceptualist . . . ,” New York Times, July 14, 2013. Available online at www.nytimes. com/2013/07/14/arts/design/robert-therrien-gets-a-solo-show-at-thealbright-knox.html (accessed July 25, 2019).

4. Therrien, in conversation with the author, June 21, 2018.

5. Therrien, quoted in Heather Pesanti, Robert Therrien, exh. cat. (New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2013), p. 21.

6. Therrien, quoted in Margit Rowell, “Private Fables/Collective Histories: The Art of Robert Therrien,” in Robert Therrien, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian, 2008), p. 33.

7. Therrien, in conversation with the author, November 7, 2018.

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STERLING RUBY

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Text by Alessandro Rabottini In 2008 the artist Sterling Ruby began a series of sculptures with the common title acts, an acronym for “Absolute Contempt for Total Serenity”—a studiedly violent title for calmly violent sculptures. All of the works in the acts series employ the same seemingly simple formal juxtaposition: wide urethane blocks are placed atop broad formica pedestals, in a play of equilibrium and statics between the two parts that varies according to the case, suggesting here more, there less dramatically the possibility of a ruinous spill.

If the formica pedestals reveal scattered signs of vandalism (such as scratches, scuff marks, inscriptions, and traces of spray paint), the urethane blocks appear almost lyrically pictorial, innervated as they are with color dyes that seem to have been dripped into the synthetic material and captured permanently mid-descent. If from a visual and tactile point of view the formica seems like a “deaf ” material, almost catatonic in its common, domestic, and entirely unprecious use, the transparency and chromatic exuberance that instead distinguish the urethane blocks and pigments create a sharp break between the two parts of each sculpture, and the imbalance that distinguishes the series ultimately creates a form of psychological tension, almost a state of alert.

Since the very beginning of his prolific career, Ruby has organized his production in bodies of work that he reiterates over time, often returning to a particular typology across several years. But if his various series and media—which range from ceramics to painting by way of sculpture, video, collage, and, more recently, fashion—can at times appear disparate, an intimate coherence dominating Ruby’s practice as a whole is gradually becoming apparent.

To appreciate the scale of the theoretical and formal edifice that the artist has been building for the last fifteen years or so, we can attribute the genesis of the acts series to the video work Dihedral, created in 2006, and thus in the early years of Ruby’s career. Dihedral consists of a fixed shot of what is presumably an aquarium, though the tight framing excludes any visual reference that might help us to understand the true nature of the container of

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liquid that constitutes the space of the action. What we see, more precisely, is a progressive choreography of colored liquids that are successively poured in to dissolve and mix among themselves, creating an unstable, fluctuating chromatic landscape that continually coalesces and disperses before our eyes. Dihedral seems to illustrate the process that we see already completed in the urethane blocks of acts : the pigments that in Dihedral we see in constant motion and becoming are in acts fixed and suspended, almost imprisoned. What once was fluid is now solidly inert.

Things get murkier when we lend our attention to the video’s soundtrack, which consists of a voiceover that, rather impenetrably and in a monotone, ruminates on matters relating to space and form.

The text from which these statements are extracted is an article that Roger Caillois published in the 1930s, in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure, titled “Mimétisme et la psychasthénie légendaire” (Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia), a disquisition on mimicry among insects that argues in favor of a system of knowledge in which rationality and the centrality of the subject are reduced to a possibility equivalent to others, a point like another within an undifferentiated space dominated by dislocation. And so the movement of the colors takes on a different, deeper psychological valence and becomes the image of a force that, by its very nature, is not only mobile and multiform but also struggles to stay contained inside a rigid structure, be it spatial (like an aquarium) or cognitive or moral. We can thus understand how the sculptures in the acts series stage forms of juxtaposition and opposition: if the upper, urethane part represents the immobile and lifeless space that literally contains and delimits something that would otherwise fluctuate in a state of free transformation, the formica pedestals equally suggest a state of frustration and anger, but of opposite sign. Indeed, the urethane blocks display what remains following an expansive movement that proceeded from the inside toward the outside, an attempt that was frustrated; the formica pedestals, on the other hand, are the site of an external aggression that comes up against an impenetrable, closed-in-uponitself monolith.

The principle of opposition (between an impulse and its containment, between what is individual

The gigantism of some of Ruby’s interventions, his very occupation of space, and his formidable output itself suggest a desire to build a congested place where anxiety is expressed as both origin and expression of conflict.

and what is normative), and of the violence that can spring from this antinomy, is a structural element of Ruby’s entire artistic output, something that runs through it like a backbone and is discoverable in several of his bodies of work. widw (an abbreviation for “Window”), for example, is a series of large wall pieces begun in 2016 in which acrylic and oil paint blaze alongside collaged cardboard and fabric elements. A vast chromatic field—expressive and monumental, almost meditative in its quiet disorder of gestures and materials—is barred with an intruding geometric sign that warns of and establishes a distance: we can see, but only through interference, a negation.

Another form of negation—albeit a more subliminal one, so thoroughly interiorized as to be inherent to the specificity of the medium itself—appears in Ruby’s extensive use, since the beginning of his career, of ceramics. Speaking of the medium, he evokes as much the idea of expression as those of inhibition and impediment: “Once fired, the clay becomes a kind of monument to its prior malleability or expression. As soon as it hits the kiln it takes on the status of what once was, and it becomes a

truncated or frozen gesture.”1 This same discourse can be applied to the series Monument Stalagmite (2005–13)—whose appearance of upward thrust is the result of overturning a PVC-and-foam structure upon which a large quantity of urethane resin has been dropped from above (thus here too we find a material that once was viscous)—and to sp (2007–14), in which the instability of spray paint, as an ethereal material, immediately solidifies on the canvas.

In Dihedral we saw pigments left free to fluctuate, then shortly after found them immortalized in fixity in the urethane blocks of the acts series. In the ceramics, too, we find a material predisposed to constant change that has now become immutable.

Ruby has linked the origin of the acts series to his desire to expand not only the scale of the ceramic works but also their sense of monumentality and imbalance: “I did want to think of [acts] as monuments, like civic sculptures or something. I wanted them to feel overwhelming. I wanted them to defy gravity in a way that the ceramics couldn’t. Buried within that was the idea that there is a futility hidden in the creation of large monuments.”2

Previous spread: Sterling Ruby, ACTS/ PRAYING MANTLE, 2015 (detail), clear urethane blocks, dye, and formica, 66 ¼ × 174 ¼ × 35 1⁄8 inches (168.3 × 442.6 × 89.2 cm)

Opposite: Sterling Ruby, ACTS/ PRAYING MANTLE, 2015, clear urethane blocks, dye, and formica, 66 ¼ × 174 ¼ × 35 1⁄8 inches (168.3 × 442.6 × 89.2 cm) Above: Sterling Ruby, ACTS/ KKDETHZ, 2009, clear urethane block, dye, wood, spray paint, and formica, 60 ½ × 62 ½ × 34 inches (153.7 × 158.8 × 86.4 cm)

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Left and below: Sterling Ruby, ACTS/ OSIRIS-REx, 2016, clear urethane blocks, dye, wood, and formica, 67 × 175 ½ × 35 inches (170.2 × 445.8 × 88.9 cm)

Here, then, the artist makes explicit not only the formal and psychological dynamic associating the properties of viscosity, malleability, and fluidity to an inner state of freedom (if one subject sooner or later to frustrating coercion), but also and above all the importance he gives to monumental scale, with its relation to architecture and public space. This is where Ruby expresses his critique of coercion, basing a large part of the grammar of acts on a form of interruption and solidification of fluidity.

There’s something tomblike in acts, which recalls the form of the cenotaph, even if the object of monumentalization in this case seems less the memory of an individual than the opposition between impulse and suppression. The result is a complex funereal and formal allegory exploring space, violence, lightness, falling, and rigidification. We might even hypothesize that the words “absolute” and “total” in the phrase “Absolute Contempt for Total Serenity” refer to a dimension of time that is definitive and irreversible, like that of the end.

The very spilling of the liquid pigments into the urethane invokes the gravitational precipitation of material, one of the principal formal and conceptual strategies for moving beyond Minimalism. Artists such as Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Robert Morris, Robert Overby, and Richard Serra, to name a few, deliberately explored failure to dominate materials and their behavior, loss of control over them, and the dispersion of unity into parts. At the beginning of Ruby’s career, this tendency to articulate a critique of authority took on quite specific narrative content, above all through monumental geometry’s association with both Minimalism and detention facilities. In time, however, even as they remained pertinent, these references have come to form part of a large and complex language, in which certain psychological tensions and formal asperities (the signs of vandalism on the formica, for example) become symptoms of a deeper catastrophe, one not limited either to a critique internal to art history or to a simple evocation of violence and urban marginalization. Indeed, acts evokes not just monumentality but the emptiness of monumentality, signifying a more general dimension of power as an edifice without clear features other than those of obstruction, limitation, imposition, taking up space. It thus becomes clear that Ruby’s project is aimed less at giving form to a series of individual and social states of tension and more at creating a total identification

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Sterling Ruby, ACTS/ALPHA BLOCKER, 2018, clear urethane block, dye, wood, and formica, 40 ½ × 25 × 12 inches (102.9 × 63.5 × 30.5 cm) Artwork © Sterling Ruby Photos: Robert Wedemeyer, courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio

between the exuberant formalism of his works and the representation of a state of ruin.

Ruby’s juxtapositions and antinomies (geometry versus improvisation, rigidity versus malleability, inadequacy versus normativity, just to be didactic) in his hands become formal and pedagogical instruments: he enables an understanding that proceeds by polarization only to then make the poles collapse on each other, revealing more intimate contradictions. If Ruby’s art seems to be an art of conflict, it is more likely an art of confusion—a confusion not only psychological, moral, and social but penetrating into a deeper state of perception and temporality, a space in which the distinctions and coordinates that ensure order gradually fall away and in which “one can be confused of all the trajectories of time.”3 And this is true not only within Ruby’s art but also in the more general context of his cross-disciplinary approach, implicitly free and antihierarchical—his frequent collaborations with the fashion world, for example, which have recently led him to present his first clothing collection as a designer. That certain distinctive signs of his art—the collagist fervor and patchwork, the paint splatters and recycled materials, the references to the vernacular language of folk art and 132

therapeutic art—can easily pass from a piece of art to a piece of clothing is proof of an expansive and radical artistic project, one in which accumulation and dissemination are seen as instruments for the production of meaning.

In Ruby’s ceaseless exploration of the formal tensions coloring the oppositions we have thus far discussed, he seems to produce an art of anxiety for times of widespread control. The gigantism of some of his interventions, his very occupation of space, and his formidable output itself suggest a desire to build a congested place where anxiety is expressed as both origin and expression of conflict. This is a place that expands, and one in which man’s role seems increasingly indistinct, assimilable, and accidental.

Translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley.

1. “Sterling Ruby in Conversation with Catherine Taft,” in Alessandro Rabottini, Sterling Ruby: Grid Ripper, exh. cat., GAMeC–Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2009), p. 110.

2. Ruby, quoted in Katy Donoghue, “Studio Visit with Sterling Ruby,” Whitewall, May 18, 2016. Available online at https://www. whitewall.art/art/studio-visit-with-sterling-ruby (accessed July 18, 2019).

3. Ruby, conversation with the author, September 6, 2018.

I M M E R S I V E P H OTO G R A P H Y A N D V I D EO BY A G R O U N D B R E A K I N G A R T I S T

On view until February 16, 2020 Get tickets at thebroad.org Shirin Neshat, Land of Dreams video still, 2019. Š Shirin Neshat/Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

It might be best to begin this conversation by talking about your collaboration.

SETSUKO KLOSSOWSKA DE ROLA How long have we known each other? It’s been a very long time.

BENOÎT ASTIER DE VILLATTE Yes! SKR I met Benoît when his father, Pierre Carron, was at the Villa Medici. How old were you?

BAV I was born there!

SKR So I met Benoît when he was in a baby carriage. When I realized that Benoît Astier de Villatte of the Astier de Villatte atelier was the Benoît born at the Villa Medici, I immediately picked up the phone to get in touch.

BAV True!

SKR So we met and he gave me a tour of his ravishing studio, on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris.

Everything there is so beautiful! It reminded me of Balthus and his perfect sense of beauty. So I can’t remember if it was your idea or mine to collaborate— BAV At first we thought we’d do something for your home, the Grand Chalet in Rossinière, Switzerland. There’s a lot of crockery in the studio so the idea of art for the home came naturally. But it was when Setsuko came to the studio and started touching the clay that I felt she was in her element.

To make a set of dishes, though, you don’t necessarily need to shape the clay yourself; you can ask the mold-maker to make an initial form and then it’s actually pretty conceptual to make dishes.

SKR The first thing was the cat, an incense burner.

BAV Oh right! And actually you immediately felt you could make something more creative.

SKR What was incredible was that we met there and I immediately began making something. It was almost fate that brought us together and had us do something together. There were also Tibetans in the studio who sang, prayed, and laughed a lot; that positive, peaceful atmosphere, which I consider essential to my life, made me feel at home there.

Benoît and Ivan Pericoli gave me carte blanche to do what I wanted. It was the combination of that freedom and that atmosphere that led me to make Into the Trees.

BAV Those sculptures emerged from the collection we were making together. What I find so interesting about clay as a material is the freedom it allows, and what’s extraordinary is that you began working so quickly on large pieces without a priori experience.

When you’re making something in clay, there’s a lot of waiting around. For the cat, for example, you had to work out a mold, then wait for the mold to be made, then make a first proof, and so on. There are stages when we do nothing but wait. Amazingly, when you were at your workbench in the studio like any other craftsperson, instead of waiting for the mold to come out so you could keep on making the object, you kept working, other things emerged.

The creative energy you had when the clay was in front of you on the bench—you knew what to do with it.

SKR Yes, and it’s that atmosphere of generosity, affection, and total freedom that led me to Into the Trees. At first I sculpted several trees rather naturally; it was like following a path I wanted to go down. When Jean-Olivier Després and Elsa Favreau from Gagosian offered me this exhibition in Paris, I was so surprised and happy! I love the way the work is exhibited: so much space in shades of light green, so luminous and gentle. The works stand on tables made of wood from the forest where I live. Thanks to Jean-Olivier and Elsa, this exhibition truly embodies the image of what I imagine the title Into the Trees to mean.

ELSA FAVREAU

WORK IN PROGRESS

SETSUKO Setsuko Klossowska de Rola and Benoît Astier de Villatte, of the Astier de Villatte atelier in Paris, first met at the Académie de France in Rome’s Villa Medici, where Setsuko lived when her late husband, the painter Balthus, was the school’s director. Here they discuss Setsuko’s newest body of terra-cotta works, produced at Astier de Villatte, with Gagosian’s Elsa Favreau.

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Why did you choose to make trees?

In Japan, many traditional ceremonies take place in the forest and old trees are considered sacred. So when I make a tree, I do it with gratitude.

As I make it I’m thanking it for letting me make it.

BAV A tree grows out of the earth, out of clay.

You had clay in your hands and it grew, almost naturally.

SKR A bit like a child, no? Today, in our technological world, we’re distant from nature and we want to be closer to it. To touch and shape earth is a way to live with nature.

EF What’s so interesting in the exhibition is that it also includes paintings, which come from another period in your life. Could you talk about your initial training? Before working with clay and making ceramics and sculptures, your media of choice were painting and drawing.

SKR When I was with Balthus at the Villa Medici, he was surrounded by young artists, and when we walked in the countryside with them they’d bring their sketchbooks and I did too. I’d drawn a lot as a child, and those contacts with the artists at the Villa Medici reminded me of that. So I asked Balthus if I could paint, and he said I could as long as I didn’t work in oil. When I came across Pompeian painting from antiquity, it reminded me of Japanese painting in its play of light and dark. In copying it, I was able to come closer and closer to what I wanted.

Painting, being a painter, is a way of having a vision that’s varied and stimulating. You can see life as art, friendship and love as arts. You have to cultivate them constantly.

EF

SKR

IN JAPAN, MANY TRADITIONAL CEREMONIES TAKE PLACE IN THE FOREST AND OLD TREES ARE CONSIDERED SACRED. SO WHEN I MAKE A TREE, I DO IT WITH GRATITUDE. AS I MAKE IT I’M THANKING IT FOR LETTING ME MAKE IT. —Setsuko

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Previous spread: Setsuko, Paris, 2019 Opposite: Various clay works at Astier de Villatte atelier, Paris Above: Setsuko and Benoît Astier de Villatte, Astier de Villatte atelier, Paris, 2019 Artwork © Setsuko Photos: Zarko Vijatovic

We create something with the people around us in the same way that we create ceramics.

SKR Yes, the making of these trees, in ceramic, terra-cotta, with Benoît and Ivan: it’s not only the story of our collaboration, it’s a medium that has its own story, and for which Astier de Villatte has its own technique.

BAV Yes, our clay is interesting—it’s the clay that was used by the French sculptor Georges Jeanclos, our sculpture professor at the Beaux-Arts. Jeanclos was one of the first pensionnaires when Balthus was at the Villa Medici, and on his return to Paris from working with Balthus in Rome, he developed this clay. It was made available to us and we of course brought it to the studio. That history is interesting in relation to Setsuko’s trees: they began at the Villa Medici, in this clay with this color. Its relationship to Rome, which has changed over time, isn’t immediately obvious, but Balthus was very interested in the history of Rome, from antiquity to his arrival at the Villa. Something in the clay speaks to that history as well—it wouldn’t be the way it is if it hadn’t followed that trajectory and passed under Balthus’s eye. Jeanclos wasn’t necessarily aware of that but it made its mark.

EF And all of Astier de Villatte’s ceramics are made with this clay?

BAV Yes, this clay is the house signature. It’s a sculptor’s clay, not the kind of clay normally used to make crockery or other domestic objects. When we started making ceramics, all the ceramists told us not to use this clay; they’d tell us to not make fine pieces too fragile, don’t do this, don’t BAV

do that. What’s funny is that in the end, we made everything out of the simple desire to make it beautiful. Maybe that’s what you also see in Balthus’s work, and in your work too, Setsuko.

SKR That makes me think about technology.

Are we trying to stay human creatures using five senses, or are we neglecting our humanity and our five senses so as to aim at something else? It’s a very serious problem now, I think. Feeling clay with your hands, making fragile things . . . is it better to experience a fragile beauty for a second or solidity for a decade? I’ve used bronze to express that solidity.

BAV When they made bronze sculpture in antiquity, it was so that it would be solid and last. Yet when you look at antiquity, you find that the oldest relics surviving are ceramic! Even though ceramics aren’t made to last over time. Bronze can get damaged, but over much longer periods; stone gets less damaged than ceramic and bronze. Even so, our records of the past in ceramic are in every civilization what has best stood the test of time. Once fired, ceramic doesn’t alter much; it can break, but its fragments aren’t going to deteriorate in the way stone or bronze might.

SKR I’m drawn to both materials. And I can paint bronze, and in that way connect to painting. I like to explore those directions; I enjoy that continuity.

Translated from the French by Molly Stevens.

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HENRY MOORE

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Sebastiano Barassi, the head of collections and exhibitions at the Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, England, speaks with art writer Roger Malbert about the evolutions in Moore’s drawing practice.

TO LOOK MORE INTENSELY

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He often returned to earlier ideas, sometimes decades later, starting from one particular execution and then reworking and reelaborating, sometimes all on one sheet of paper.

That’s the beauty of drawing for Moore.

—Sebastiano Barassi

ROGER MALBERT Last week I had the pleasure of see-

ing your exhibition The Art of Seeing here at the Henry Moore Studios and Gardens, Perry Green.

You had the challenging task of selecting nearly 150 drawings from Moore’s incredibly large output of works on paper. Approximately how many drawings did Moore make in his lifetime?

SEBASTIANO BARASSI The catalogue raisonné records approximately 7,500 drawings. As you say, selecting the small group in the exhibition from such a large body was a big undertaking.

RM And your aim was to present a condensed retrospective that was reflective of his entire career?

SB Yes, I was keen to show Moore’s drawings on their own, because more often than not they have been presented in relation to his sculpture. The juxtaposition of sculpture and drawings tends to emphasize either certain sculptural qualities in the drawing or how Moore used drawing as preparatory to sculpture. Whereas when you start to look at the whole body of the works on paper, you rea l i ze t hat h is drawing is much broader in scope and style than his sculpture practice.

RM You start your essay in the exhibition catalogue with a marvelous quote from Moore: “Drawing, even for people who cannot draw, even for people not trying to produce a good drawing, makes you look more intensely. Just looking alone has no grit in it, has no sort of mental struggle or difficulty.

That only happens while you’re drawing.” In other 140

words, drawing, as a tool for looking, brings the world to life.

SB That quotation comes from a 1978 interview in which Moore went on to say, “You wake up every morning in your bedroom, you look through the bedroom window, you have a certain view, can you draw it? Can you tell me, are there two trees, are there two lampposts, are there what? Ninetynine out of every hundred would not be able to tell you at all, although they have probably seen it for twenty years. But let them draw it two or three times and they will understand and look, and they will know.” Moore believed drawing to be a critical exercise for any artist, an essential method to understand fully whatever she or he is looking at, but it was also an activity he thoroughly enjoyed and always found time for.

RM In absorbing the scope of this exhibition, which runs the course of his entire career, I was fascinated by certain elements that recur, ways in which, through drawing, his attention found certain motifs that it would orient itself around. In the late 1970s he even went back to drawing from nature, didn’t he?

SB Yes—not as regularly as in his early career, but he always remained interested in drawing from nature. He occasionally asked friends and photographers, for example John Hedgecoe, to take photos of natural objects in the countryside that he could then draw in the studio. Every so often a

Previous spread: Henry Moore drawing Abstraction, 1961, in his studio. Photo: John Hedgecoe This page: Henry Moore, Tube Shelter Perspective, 1941, pencil, wax crayon, colored crayon, gouache, and watercolor wash, 11 1⁄8 × 9 1⁄8 inches (28.2 × 23.2 cm). HMF (1773). Photo: Sarah Mercer Opposite: Henry Moore, Montage of Reclining Figures, 1928, pencil, oil paint, watercolor, brush and ink, chalk, and collage, 12 × 22 ¼ inches (30.3 × 56.7 cm). HMF (689).

Photo: Henry Moore Archive

package full of photographs of trees or sheep would arrive for him to work from [laughter].

RM What particular parameters, aside from the constraints of the space itself, did you have in terms of your curation of this show?

SB I wanted to show drawing as an autonomous strand of Moore’s practice, one of extraordinary quality and interest in its own right and not just in relation to his work in other media. Reviewing all of his drawings, I was struck by how regularly Moore was pushing the boundaries in his works on paper. The ideas and techniques he utilized were often much more experimental than those in his sculpture. In some ways, in fact, especially in the late years, Moore used drawing to explore ideas that didn’t really fit in with his sculpture. In drawing he was freer to try out different approaches, either with subjects that didn’t quite work in three dimensions or by trying unusual techniques.

When I started to think about this exhibition I wanted to organize it thematically, but I quickly realized that that would risk feeling like a presentation of drawing as utilitarian, playing a subservient role to work in other media. Instead, I opted for a chronological presentation, which I find more helpful to show how over six decades Moore’s drawing evolved and kept acquiring new values in his vision and practice.

RM How do you see his drawing practice evolving over his lifetime?

SB In the early years, drawing for Moore is predominantly a method to observe the human body or develop ideas for sculpture. During World War II you get the sense that he’s using drawing to chronicle a world that was changing so rapidly around him, but he does this only for a short time, perhaps because the approach is too narrative for him. In later years drawing becomes a more intimate and personal exercise, often quite separate from the rest of his practice.

RM There are forms and themes in both the sculptures and the drawings that he revisited repeatedly: the seated figure, the reclining or seated female form, and the family group.

It’s true that Moore focused on a small number of key themes. He said that his obsessions, visually, were the mother and child, the reclining figure, and what he called the internal/external form.

Those were his three main themes from quite early in his career. Moore as an artist belonged to the generation shaped by the ideas of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, by the theory of “significant form.” His visual research and vocabulary were largely about form rather than storytelling. You get a sense that he’s looking at these three themes so consistently because they provide him with specific subjects that allow him to create virtually endless formal variations. The reclining figure is essentially a body with three points of contact with the ground, or the plinth. You can alter the inclination of the torso, the angle of the legs, the way the head is turned, without losing focus on the human figure, which was always his primary interest.

The mother and child, similarly, allowed him to explore the juxtaposition of one large form and one small form and how they relate to each other. So even in his Constructivist period in the ’30s, when they become separate, abstract forms arranged on a base, there’s always a sense that the interaction is what interests him most. And the internal/external form—it can be a head within a helmet, or a figure within a shelter, but it is essentially always the idea of an outer shell protecting a delicate form inside.

RM You begin the exhibition with very straightforward life drawings Moore made at art school, the Royal College. Significantly, that first wall contains some male nudes, but after that they disappear.

When he’s free from art school he can choose his subject, and his subject really is the female nude.

He prefers the roundness and softness of the female nude, and apart from the drawings of Yorkshire miners during the war, he virtually never draws men again, does he?

SB That’s right. Moore always said that he was more interested in the female figure. He talked about the male body being more difficult and too muscular, and he liked, as you were saying, rounder shapes. Even when he was in life classes, SB

141

he said, he often tried to make the model look like what he wanted the figure to look like, rather than rendering it naturalistically. So even in the early drawings there is a sense that he’s already interpreting what is in front of him rather than just merely recording it.

RM You also do get a strong sense that these are sculptor’s drawings, with their great sense of the volume and weight of the body.

SB Moore believed that sculptors draw differently from painters and cited Pablo Picasso as one of the few painters who thought as a sculptor even when he was painting—as an artist who understood form completely, not just in two dimensions.

RM There are a number of drawings in which Moore returns to the same sheet at seemingly different moments. Isn’t there a drawing from the ’30s that he embellished and colored and added other figures to later on?

SB Yes, he often returned to earlier ideas, sometimes decades later, starting from one particular execution and then reworking and reelaborating, sometimes all on one sheet of paper. That’s the beauty of drawing for Moore—it allows him to explore the same idea in so many different ways, and so quickly. There is another example of drawings that he originally made in a sketchbook in 1928, then photocopied and reworked in the late 1970s.

RM The exhibition includes a selection of his best-known drawings, the Shelter Drawings from the 1940s. These works originated from Moore’s personal experience during World War II. During the war, people would seek refuge from the bombings in the train stations of the London Underground, and Moore was witness to this; the image of huddled-together figures struck him very forcefully, and this experience of life coincided with his own formal preoccupations. With the encouragement of Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery, London, he harnessed this experience through a couple of hundred drawings.

What I find fascinating in these works is the correspondence between his experience of objective reality and his own preoccupation with the reclining figure. That night in the Tube when he encounters this stretch of sleeping, recumbent forms on the station platform: that’s such a powerful thing for him and he talks about its emotional impact, which clearly stayed with him throughout the process of making the Shelter Drawings.

SB Yes, it’s quite intriguing that Moore, an artist who’s mostly famous for his sculpture, found his first fame through the exhibition of these drawings in London during the war. They were shown at the National Gallery, which had been emptied of the collection, and at the Leicester Galleries. The series really resonated with the public, who recognized themselves and their plight in these images.

They’re images of suffering but they’re also images of great pride and resilience.

RM They were also a vehicle for him to explore his own formal concerns with enclosed spaces, tunnels, holes, and the sheltering—and the vulnerability—of the human form. They are quite formal drawings in a way. Edward Ardizzone also did some drawings in the Underground; his were anecdotal and perhaps closer to the observed reality, whereas Moore abstracts from this, transforming the human shapes into “Henry Moore figures.”

SB Yes, I think this is partly due to the fact that he’s working from memory. So he has time to reelaborate these scenes and figures in his mind before putting them on the page.

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RM In the final phase of his work, he returned unashamedly to figuration. He got a lot of flack for those drawings from purists who felt that he was abandoning the principles of modernism, didn’t he?

SB Moore developed the sculptural vocabulary that made him famous relatively early in his career, and did not stray too far from it in his later years.

In drawing, he had much greater freedom to try out different ideas. In the ’70s and ’80s there are so many different strands. While he’s making the rather charming sheep drawings, he’s also looking at more challenging subjects, and there’s a growing sense of gloominess, with the palette getting quite somber and dark. And there’s often a feel of nostalgia and melancholy. Remarkably, in the last ten years of his life Moore made almost as many drawings as he had in the previous five decades—about 3,500 are recorded. In his final years, due to his declining health, drawing becomes his only creative outlet and acquires almost a therapeutic value.

He cannot make sculpture anymore, but drawing gives him a way to continue to think creatively.

For an artist so prolific, to stop would have been inconceivable.

Henry Moore, Six Studies for Family Group, 1948, pencil, wax crayon, watercolor wash, pen and ink, and gouache, 20 ¾ × 15 1⁄8 inches (52.5 × 38.4 cm). HMF (2501a). Photo: Nigel Moore All images reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation

Yellow Book

Jens-Uwe Beyer Albert Oehlen

1A

1B

2A

2B

JULIET 22' 41"

ROCKRIDGE 22' 41"

BEARING 22' 41"

BURNING 22' 41"

ZUNGGUZUNGGUZUNGGUZENG 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

WALKING JEWELRY STORE 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

PON-WEE-LINE 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

OPERATION RADICATION 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

3A

3B

4A

4B

PITS 22' 41"

LANDS 22' 41"

BEAM’S PHASE 22' 41"

TRUE X 22' 41"

NOBODY MOVE NOBODY GET HURT 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

NATTY DREAD SOMETHING 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

MORNING RIDE 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

LOVE FAT THING 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

5A

5B

6A

6B

CIRC 22' 41"

EL TORITO 22' 41"

SOLOMON 22' 41"

BRIDGE 22' 41"

KING INNA THE JUNGLE 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

HOW YOU KEEP A DANCE 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

HILL AND GULLY RIDER 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

COME WHEN I CALL YOU 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

7A

7B

8A

8B

SCHOEN 22' 41"

ADDRESS 22' 41"

WAYBACK 22' 41"

STAMPERS 22' 41"

CELEBRATE OUR STRUGGLE 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

BETTER THAN THEM 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

BAM BAM 2018 Lacquer and oil on aluminium 260 × 260 cm

8 × vinyl LP boxed set Edition of 300 Released Fall 2019 magazine.mu

carsten / k arsten

a c on v e r s at ion

t h e on e a n d t h e m a n y

t e x t by da n i e l bi r n b au m

previous spread, left: Carsten Höller, Divisions Square (White Lines on Cobalt Green Background), 2018, Flashe vinyl paint on Caravaggio linen canvas, 35 ½ × 35 ½ inches (90 × 90 cm). Photo: Carl Henrik Tillander previous spread, right: Carsten Höller, Divisions Square (Black Lines on White Background), 2018, Flashe vinyl paint on Caravaggio linen canvas, 35 ½ × 35 ½ inches (90 × 90 cm). Photo: Carl Henrik Tillander above: Carsten Höller, stills from Vicinato I, 1995, 16mm, digitized, duration: 11 min.

persons of the conversation: Daniel, Daniel’s sister, Carsten, Karsten, Rirkrit, Philippe, a Curious Person.

it must be both like and unlike, and that this is impossible, for the like cannot be unlike, nor the unlike like—is that your position?

Just so, said Carsten.

And if the unlike cannot be like, or the like unlike, then according to you, being could not be many; for this would involve an impossibility. In all that you say, have you any other purpose except to disprove the being of the many? And is not each division of your treatise intended to furnish a separate proof of this, there being in all as many proofs of the not-being of the many as you have composed arguments? Is that your meaning, or have I misunderstood you?

No, said Karsten; you have correctly understood my general purpose.

Clear, said Daniel’s sister, and the Curious Person nodded in silence I see, Karsten, said Philippe, that Carsten would like to be not only one with you in friendship but your second self in his writings too; he puts what you say in another way, and would fain make believe that he is telling us something new. For you, in your poems, say The All is one, and of this you adduce excellent proofs; and he on the other hand says There is not many; and on behalf of this he offers overwhelming evidence. You affirm unity, he denies plurality. And so you deceive the world into believing that you are saying different things when really you are saying much the same. This is a strain of art beyond the reach of most of us.

Yes, Karsten, said Carsten. But although you are as keen as a Spartan hound in pursuing the track, you do not fully apprehend the true motive of the composition, which is not really such an artificial work as you imagine; for what you speak of was an accident; there was no pretense of a great purpose; nor any serious intention of deceiving the world. The truth is that these writings of mine were meant to protect Karsten’s arguments against those who make fun of him, and who seek to show the many ridiculous and contradictory results that they suppose to follow from the affirmation of the one. My answer is addressed to the partisans of the many, whose attack I return with interest by retorting upon them that their hypothesis of the being of many, if carried out, appears to be still more ridiculous than the hypothesis of the being of one. Zeal for my master led me to write the book in the days of my youth, but someone stole the copy, and therefore I had no choice whether it should be published or not. The motive of writing, however, was not the ambition of an older man but the pugnacity of a younger one. This you do not seem to see, Karsten; though in other respects, as I was saying, your notion is a very just one.

Rirkrit said nothing and neither did Daniel. His sister remained silent.

Daniel rehearses a dialogue that is supposed to have been narrated in his presence by Karsten, the half-brother of Carsten, to a certain Philippe.

We had come from our home in Stockholm to Venice and met Carsten and Rirkrit in the Giardini. Welcome Daniel, said Carsten, taking me by the hand; is there anything we can do for you in Venice?

Yes, that’s why I’m here: I wish to ask a favor of you.

What might that be? he said.

I want you to tell me the name of your half-brother, which I have forgotten; he was a mere child when I last came hither from Stockholm, and that was a long time ago; his friend’s name, if I remember rightly, was Philippe?

Yes, he said, and the name of my brother is Karsten; but why do you ask?

Let me introduce you to my sister and a friend of mine, the Curious Person, I said; they are lovers of philosophy and have heard that you are intimate with this Karsten, your half-brother, a friend of Philippe, and they remember a conversation between you and your halfbrother, and also with Rirkrit, many years ago, Philippe having often recited it to them. Does this ring true?

Quite true.

And could we hear it? I asked.

Nothing easier, he replied.

Accordingly we went to look for Karsten, who saluted me as an acquaintance whom he remembered from my long-ago former visit, and we asked him to repeat the dialogue. At first he was somewhat unwilling, and complained of the trouble, but at length he consented. He first described to us the appearance of Philippe and Rirkrit: Philippe was nearly forty, tall and fair to look upon; in the days of his youth he was reported to have been beloved by Daniel’s sister. He said that they lodged with Karsten in Paris, whither Rirkrit, then a very young man, had come to see them, and many others with him, among them Daniel’s sister, Carsten, and the Curious Person. The visitors wanted to hear the writings of Philippe, which had been brought to Paris for the first time on the occasion of their visit. These Philippe himself read to Daniel, Daniel’s sister, and Rirkrit, and had very nearly finished when Carsten entered, and with him Karsten and the Curious Person, who heard the little that remained of the dialogue. Carsten had heard Philippe read them before.

When the recitation was completed, Rirkrit requested that the first thesis of the first argument might be read over again, and this having been done, he said: What is your meaning, Carsten? Do you maintain that if being is many, 147

I understand, said Carsten, and quite accept your account. But tell me, Karsten, do you not further think that there is an idea of likeness in itself, and another idea of unlikeness, which is the opposite of likeness, and that in these two you and I participate, as do all other things to which we apply the term “many”; things that participate in likeness become in that degree and manner like; and insofar as they participate in unlikeness become in that degree unlike, or both like and unlike in the degree in which they participate in both? And may not all things partake of both opposites, and be both like and unlike, by reason of this participation?—Where is the wonder?

Now if a person could prove the absolute like to become unlike, or the absolute unlike to become like, that, in my opinion, would indeed be a wonder; but there is nothing extraordinary, Philippe, in showing that the things that only partake of likeness and unlikeness experience both.

Nor, again, if you were to show that all is one by partaking of one, and at the same time is many by partaking of many, would that be very astonishing? But if you were to show me that the absolute one was many, or that the absolute many was one, I should be truly amazed. And so of all the rest: I should be surprised to hear that the natures or ideas themselves had these opposite qualities; but not if a person wanted to prove of me that I was many and also one. When he wanted to show that I was many, he would say that I have a right and a left side, and a front and a back, and an upper and a lower half, for I cannot deny that I partake of multitude; when, on the other hand, he wanted to prove that I am one, he would say that we who are here assembled are seven, and that I am one and partake of the one.

Certainly, said Karsten.

That is how it is, said Rirkrit. I agree with Carsten.

In both instances he proves his case. So again, if a person shows that such things as wood, stones, and the like, being many are also one, we admit that he shows the coexistence of the one and many, but he does not show that the many are one or that the one are many; he is uttering not a paradox but a truism. If, however, as I just now suggested, someone were to abstract simple notions of like, unlike, one, many, rest, motion, and similar ideas, and then to show that these admit of admixture and separation in themselves, I should be very much astonished.

This part of the argument appears to be treated by you, Karsten, in a very spirited manner; but as I was saying, I should be far more amazed if anyone found in the ideas themselves, which are apprehended by reason, the same puzzle and entanglement that you have shown to exist in visible objects.

While Carsten was speaking, Daniel thought that Karsten and Philippe were not altogether pleased at the successive steps of the argument; but still they gave the

closest attention, and often looked at one another, and smiled as if in admiration of him. When he had finished, Carsten expressed their feelings in the following words: Daniel, he said, I admire the bent of your mind toward philosophy; tell me now, was this your own distinction between ideas in themselves and the things that partake of them? and do you think that there is an idea of likeness apart from the likeness that we possess, and of the one and the many, and of the other things Philippe mentioned?

I think that there are such ideas, said Philippe.

The Curious Person silently left the conversation.

Was this out of disagreement? Daniel and his sister looked up as if surprised by the argument. Carsten proceeded: And would you also make absolute ideas of the just and the beautiful and the good, and of all that class?

Yes, Philippe said, I should.

And would you make an idea of man apart from us and from all other human creatures, or of fire and water?

I am often undecided, Carsten, as to whether I ought to include them or not. And would you feel equally undecided, Karsten, about things of which the mention may provoke disgust? I mean such things as hair, mud, dirt, or anything else vile and paltry—would you suppose that each of these has an idea distinct from the actual objects with which we come into contact, or not?

Daniel and his sister, Philippe and Rirkrit, as well as the Curious Person were nowhere to be seen. The conversation continued.

Certainly not, said Karsten; visible things like these are such as they appear to us, and I am afraid that there would be an absurdity in assuming any idea of them, although I sometimes get disturbed, and begin to think that there is nothing without an idea; but then again, when I have taken up this position, I run away, because I am afraid that I may fall into a bottomless pit of nonsense, and perish; and so I return to the ideas of which I was just now speaking, and occupy myself with them.

Yes, Karsten, said Carsten, that is because you are still young. The time will come, if I am not mistaken, when philosophy will have a firmer grasp on you, and then you will not despise even the meanest things. At your age, you are too much disposed to regard the opinions of men. But I should like to know whether you mean that there are certain ideas of which all other things partake, and from which they derive their names—that similars, for example, become similar because they partake of similarity; and great things become great because they partake of greatness; and that just and beautiful things become just and beautiful because they partake of justice and beauty?

And you, Carsten, take part in the idea of Karsten?

Certainly.

Yes, certainly, said Karsten, that is my meaning.

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above: Carsten Höller, Six Sliding Doors, 2019, steel, aluminum, mirrored glass, electric motors, door mechanism, movement detectors, LED lighting, and translucent foil, 95 × 144 × 602 inches (2.4 x 3.7 x 15.3 m).

Installation view, Sunday, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 2019. Photo: Attilio Maranzano artwork © carsten höller

Alexander Wolf explores the economic, social, and methodological concerns of Piero Golia’s art practice, revealing the real-world implications of the artist’s experiments with form and process.

MYTH– MAKER

A

mong the spectacles lacing LA’s Sunset Strip, some have noticed a mysterious glowing orb just above the roof of the Standard Hotel. “Maybe a commuter who drives past it every day will decide that it lights up on sunny days, or on rainy days—it’s a form open to urban legend,” mused Piero Golia when he placed this spherical light on the hotel’s roof ten years ago. 1 It presents as a surprising and elegant diversion, in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) or Golia’s late friend Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008), the chorus of 202 antique streetlights gathered outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But when one learns that Golia’s Luminous Sphere lights up only when he is in Los Angeles, its prime perch and cool openness to interpretation give way to clear motives: a European newcomer’s announcement of his arrival, and his attempt to reach, through sculpture, LA’s urban sprawl.

Golia’s unpredictable corpus—made up of artworks and actions that can seem impossible, and are therefore few and far between—is built on a deliberate process of trial and error, as he cultivates the runoff of one work or life event into another, and then another. His project is utterly generous and inclusive: he is eager to lift fellow artists and to foster the LA art community, even at his own great expense. Golia’s practice also seems influenced by a conviction that in a visualart field where many norms remain to be challenged, it would be impossible to restrict oneself to the parameters of painting, sculpture, and the studio, traditions that he questions, often with a shade of irreverence. Golia does not keep a studio, and quite like the rogue gestures of Duchamp and Burden, his work is predicated on subversive play.

Golia’s tactile art—paintings and sculptures seen in museums and galleries over the past twenty years—is but one aspect of a body of work that has also encompassed targeted actions, epic performances, a self-inf licted disappearance, a nightclub, and the founding of an art school: work that exists and functions in the real world, not on a wall or pedestal, and often not in any place where one would go looking for art. When his work does manifest as a beautifully crafted

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object, that object will often tell of an event that has taken place out in the world. Taken together, these events constitute a constructive critique of art systems, paralleled by Golia’s orchestration of an LA moment and a continuous, rough-hewn international odyssey.

Car Trouble Upon his arrival in Los Angeles in 2002, Golia made and sent personal calling cards bearing only his name to several leading artists. “To me it was the idea that you come to a new place and politely introduce yourself,” he recalls. He soon felt welcome. “LA spoiled me very much because the artists there were incredibly kind.”2 It wasn’t long before Golia made his own local but far-reaching contribution: he and the artists Eric Wesley and Richard Jackson gradually developed a free, barebones, yet ambitious graduate school—no tuition, no degree, but a vigorous curriculum—centered on talks and seminars led by visiting artists and curators. The Mountain School of Arts was born in 2005 in an upstairs nook at the Mountain, a Chinatown bar. Over the past fourteen years, the program has evolved into a forum where hundreds of students have received instruction from guest faculty including the artists Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Simone Forti, Dan Graham, Mark Grotjahn, Pierre Huyghe, Catherine Opie, Jeff Wall, and many others.

The works that Golia produced during his first years in LA can be described as a former engineer’s solutions to real problems, realized as sculpture. (As a twenty-three-year-old studying chemical engineering in Naples, Golia had visited New York for the first time, and the rest is history.)

Following a car accident whose costs were not covered by his insurance, Golia melted down what was left of his 1984 Saab and planned to recast it as a sculpture to be sold. Given the project’s commercial purpose, he embarked on an online deep dive for the most popular sculptural subjects, which prompted him to cast the liquid metal into a glossy black unicorn the size of a pony. Invited to exhibit it in the Statements sector at Art Basel Miami Beach, he imagined that it might attract a pop star who appreciated his take on the fantastical creature, but wasn’t disappointed when it was purchased by a collector who appreciated the

Previous spread: Piero Golia. Photo: Nicole Miller Below: Piero Golia, Untitled (Bus), 2008, crushed public transportation bus, 10 × 20 × 10 feet (3 × 6 × 3 m).

Courtesy Fundación/ Collection Jumex.

Photo: Joshua White, courtesy the artist

story as much as the subject. (In 2011, his first solo exhibition at Gagosian demonstrated a similar resourcefulness with the Concrete Cakes, which were made from a gift of unwanted cake molds.

The Constellation Paintings were made from the debris of yet another car accident, this one intentional, when a taxi driver accelerated his car into Golia’s home following an argument over a fare.)

The first presentation of Golia’s work in his adopted hometown of Los Angeles took place in 2008, when he was invited to take over an entire booth at the Art LA art fair. He acted on his interest “in digging into the idea of the weird space of the art fair itself—in the end, it’s not an exhibition space. I decided to focus on completely filling the booth. It was, in a way, a kind of territorial marking, to define the space with the physicality of a sculpture.” Golia’s initial solution was the purchase of a thirty-five-foot passenger bus. When the booth turned out to be smaller than expected, he enlisted three bulldozers to compact the bus to the dimensions of the ten-by-twenty-foot space.3 The talk of the fair, Golia’s crushed Bus elicited surprise, confusion, and delight.

Between the growing reputation of the Mountain School and the astonishment surrounding Bus, Golia found that he was reaching an audience for the first time. “That’s the moment when you double down and say: now I have a public,” he reflects. Continuing to think in terms of the potential of sculpture to reach and connect people, he soon dreamed up Luminous Sphere. “I think the light on the Standard is the moment when I started to dialogue not only to the people I surround myself with,” says Golia, “but also with others who live in the same place I do.” The work was installed on the hotel’s roof in 2010 and remains there, announcing Golia’s presence or absence to mostly unaware drivers-by.

One afternoon in the fall of 2013, I bumped into Golia at Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery in New York. He gave me a solid silver token and mentioned something about a “chalet” in Los Angeles. I had no LA plans and promptly misplaced the token. In the following months, an artist here, a dealer there, would recall an evening at “the chalet.” I pieced together an image of this temporary and now legendary destination: an incognito jewel box of a nightclub featuring, on any given night, From top to bottom: Piero Golia, The Comedy of Craft, Act I, 2014. Installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White, courtesy the artist Piero Golia, The Comedy of Craft, Act II, 2014.

Installation view. Photo: courtesy the artist Installation view, Piero Golia: Intermission Paintings, Gagosian, Rome, 2015.

Photo: Matteo D’Elleto

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a marching band, dinner by a celebrated chef, a friendly family of alpacas. The sleek space was designed by the architect Edwin Chan and the walls were lined with works by Grotjahn, Wall, and Christopher Williams, as well as an aquarium

by Huyghe. Golia took on the roles of manager, talent agent, electrician, and more. Having devoted years and all of his own savings to the project, he feels it was well worth it. As Golia described his incentive, “In LA you never get to see your friends.

I thought, ‘The place should be so fantastic and special that—finally—people will agree to leave their homes . . . the Chalet is a tool for community-building.”4 Chalet Hollywood was open to all on select evenings for sixteen months. Guests ranged from artists, curators, celebrities, poets, dancers, fashion designers, and bankers to “punks” who came for the free booze.

Comedy of Craft In 2014, Golia was invited to participate in Made in LA, the biennial exhibition at LA’s Hammer Museum. To his mind his contribution needed to be monumental, and he wanted museum visitors to witness its creation. Golia proposed that he and a team of volunteers would carve a to-scale replica of Mount Rushmore from foam. When the impossibility of this plan became clear, he decided to zoom in and approximate the form and scale of one of Rushmore’s more prominent features: George Washington’s nose. Over the course of the nearly-three-month exhibition, Golia and his team carved out an eighteen-by-twenty-one-foot slope from a massive block of styrofoam.

Exemplifying how his works have a tendency to morph and provide a basis for other works, at some point Golia decided that the nose should ultimately be cast in bronze. So, later that year, at the New Orleans art festival Prospect.3, he enlisted a group of art students to make a rubber mold. Viewers witnessed the foam carving that had been created at the Hammer (one local reviewer likened it to a “two-story igloo”)5 and a group of students gradually covering it in liquid rubber. Golia described this as act 2 of a Comedy of Craft (equating his sculptural process with the improvisational, fluid spirit of the Italian Commedia dell’arte performances of old) with Washington’s nose as protagonist: act 1 being the initial

Taken together, these events constitute a constructive critique of art systems, paralleled by Golia’s orchestration of an LA moment and a continuous, rough-hewn international odyssey.

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Opposite: Piero Golia, Untitled (My Gold is Yours), 2013. Presented at the Venice Biennale, 2013. Photo: Laura Einaudi, courtesy the artist Above: Installation view, Piero Golia, Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz, 2017. Photo: Gina Folly, courtesy the artist and Kunsthaus Baselland

carving, and the final bronze casting planned as act 3. “Art,” Golia says, “is like theater.”

At this point, though, Golia’s trilogy met a sudden end. Following Prospect.3, the New Orleans storage facility where the mold was being kept was sold to another storage company, which discarded the mold as trash. Although the first president’s nose wasn’t memorialized in bronze, all was not lost. Following the carving phase, Golia had kept the excess shards of styrofoam, which he coated in a hard, paintable polymer and sprayed with iridescent nanopigments normally used to print currency (an allusion to their being among the only saleable output from his epic Comedy?).

He called them the Intermission Paintings, given their origin as the cutaways from act 1. Exhibited at Gagosian Rome in 2015, these irregular sculptural works evoke magical rock formations but, being foam, are in fact almost weightless. Golia later used additional foam fragments as the basis for the Lamps (2018), asymmetrical tabletop forms fitted with lightbulbs, and as such equal parts sculpture and useful furniture. In a domestic mise-en-scène, Golia showed these works along with geometric

marble Fruit Bowls and paintings he had made from upholstery at Gagosian Beverly Hills in 2018.

The Value of Art Invited to represent Italy at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Golia put forth what at first appears to be a Minimalist 2.5-meter-square concrete cube. On closer look the surface is embedded throughout with threads of bright gold, as though the concrete were protecting a resplendent mass at its core. In fact Golia had mixed two kilograms of gold sand into the much larger amount—thirty-six tons—of concrete. In Venice he invited viewers to mine the gold from the block by whatever means available (keys, pocketknives), leaving the value of the material, not to mention the ultimate appearance of the cube, in the hands of the viewer.

Golia has continued to investigate the sometimes mysterious yet very real monetary value of some ar t, and, with that value, ar t’s ability to resolve pesky financial issues. Whereas many artists make deliberate efforts to isolate questions of commerce from their creative processes, Golia often disrupts that protocol—in the 155

melted-car-turned-unicorn sculpture, for example, candidly made to cover his insurance costs.

In 2017, in response to the art market’s demand for domestically scaled abstract paintings, Golia assembled The Painter, a thirteen-ton piece of machinery, adapted from movie-studio technology, armed with a paintbrush. Visitors who entered the gallery at the Kunsthaus Baselland where it debuted saw a row of paintings in progress and the reprogrammed machine strutting down a fourteen-meter track to greet them. Then it would glide to one of the canvases to apply new gestural brushstrokes that charted the viewers’ movements through the gallery. The paintings were declared finished at the close of the exhibition.

The Chalet soon reincarnated as a special exhibition at Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center, where it produced such events as a Christmas party colored by Paul McCarthy’s grotesque Santa Claus imagery. When the time came for Chalet Dallas to close, it got a grand send-off culminating in fireworks and the drop of a massive curtain bearing the orange-red vortex and cursive “That’s All Folks!” finis from the old Looney Tunes cartoons, all to the live music of a youth mariachi band. After the fact, Golia learned that this band of adolescent musicians had been invited to compete in a prestigious mariachi competition in LA, but did not have the funds for the trip. So he cut the “That’s All Folks!” curtain into twelve large vertical sections and stretched them to create the Mariachi Paintings: fragments of a familiar childhood image that are also vestiges of the Chalet moment, which touched Angelenos and Texans alike. Golia sold the first painting himself for the amount needed to fund the band’s trip to LA, where it placed first in the musical contest.

By 2018, the ambitions of the Mountain School had outpaced its operating budget. Golia resolved that art, not credit, would come to the rescue. He called several artist friends, many of whom had played a role in the school’s life—Huyghe, Williams, Harold Ancart, Frances Stark, Henry Taylor, and others—and asked if they would donate works for the cause. He concealed the works inside piñatas shaped as the numbers 1 through 10, hung them from a balcony in a friend ’s

In response to the art market’s demand for domestically scaled abstract paintings, Golia assembled The Painter, a thirteen-ton piece of machinery, adapted from movie-studio technology, armed with a paintbrush.

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Opposite: Piero Golia, Mariachi Painting #1, 2016, dye sublimation on fabric, 84 × 48 inches (213.4 × 121.9 cm). Photo: Ben Lee Ritchie Handler Right, top: Installation view, Piero Golia: The Chalet Hollywood, May 2013–November 2014.

Photo: Jeremy Bitterman, courtesy the artist Right, below: Piero Golia, Chalet Dallas, 2015–16. Closing performance. Photo: Bret Redman, courtesy the artist and Nasher Sculpture Center Artwork © Piero Golia

backyard, and threw a party at which guests paid $200 per swing of the bat—and posed the conundrum of potentially damaging the art inside the piñatas in order to secure it. Many went home with new artworks, and the Mountain School lived on.

Trial and Error Golia recently attended the opening of Jeff Wall’s first exhibition at Gagosian New York. Among the nine large-format photographs on view, Wall had made a nearly-ten-foot-wide gelatin-silver print showing a hulking weightlifter, the barbell he held at his waist bending under the pressure of the heavy discs at its ends: an analogy for the often solitary, at times seemingly futile process of making art. Golia, who has moved his share of bureaucratic mountains to realize his work, reasoned that an artist’s process can be even more isolated: “When you lift weights, you have a guy who tells you how to do it. When you make art, you have to figure your shit out on your own.”

Back in 2003, as a young artist, Golia was invited to present a work in the vast, centuries-old gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome. His

first proposal was to remove a swath of towering Renaissance-era cypresses, oaks, and pines just long enough for people to register their disappearance, then replant them precisely where they had been (even then Golia derived satisfaction from at least attempting the impossible). What was ultimately staged was a performance that began with the distant rumbles of a drum line, which grew louder as the band approached the audience. Golia had miscalculated by positioning the musicians so far away that the onlookers scattered before they arrived, and he stopped the parade. Fifteen years later, in 2018, Golia and the Villa agreed to revisit the performance. This time the band marched from the point where it had stopped all those years before, reached its audience, and performed the long-pending grand finale—though perhaps “finale” is not the right word. When the music stopped, a forty-foot fireball lit up the night, and three words were formed in the flames: “To be continued.”

1. Piero Golia, quoted in Jori Finkel, “In Los Angeles, Art That’s Worth the Detour,” New York Times, May 1, 2009.

Available online at www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/arts/ design/03fink.html (accessed June 2019).

2. Unless otherwise noted, quotations of Golia in this essay come from a conversation with the author, May 1, 2019.

3. Golia describes Bus and details on the project in an interview with Andrew Berardini, “Artists at Work: Piero Golia,” Afterall, December 15, 2008. Available online at www. afterall.org/online/artists.at.work.piero.golia#.XRKQ1utKhaR (accessed July 25, 2019).

4. Golia, in “Conversation with Piero Golia and Edwin Chan,” an interview on the occasion of Golia’s special exhibition Chalet Dallas at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, in 2015–16, a condensed version of which is published online at www.nashersculpturecenter.org/learn/research/articlespublications/article?id=56 (accessed June 2019).

5. See Doug MacCash, “George Washington’s giant schnoz is a Prospect.3 standout,” Nola.com, October 31, 2014. Available online at www.nola.com/arts/2014/10/george_washingtons_ giant_schno.html (accessed July 25, 2019).

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LOVE is not a Flame Part iII The obvious solution is to stop killing them.

— Dan Flores

Mark Z. Danielewski

— Look at them, Emily!

— You weren’t kidding, Frank. That’s— — Hilarious!

— Frank comes over for the laughs.

— Tony, this is so bizarre!

— They’ve been together like this all summer.

— Tony’s telling the truth. Spot one and the other’s close by.

— Petro roosts in the Trident Tree. Randal too. He makes this shrill sound I recognize now. Wine?

— I’ve never heard of this kind of bonding. Yes, please. I mean odd animal pairing isn’t unheard of but a peacock and a raccoon? What is the world coming to!

— They danced by the light of the moon.

— Tony thinks he’s responsible.

— Is that true, Tony? How? — I’m not sure. Rescuing Randal like we did. I used that aerosol boat horn to scare off the coyote the first time. And then I used it again when four raccoons attacked Randal. Petro was up in the Trident Tree and when he heard that horn he cried louder than ever before. Randal was running away but stopped when he heard Petro. Right at the gate there. Just turned around and looked up. I had no clue what was going on. But I looked up too. And there was Petro!

Coming down! The bird’s enormous! It was like watching a dinosaur fall out of the sky. At first Randal circled Petro like he was going to attack but instead he ended up just sorta butting Petro’s chest with the top of his head. And then he went for the pizza.

— You left pizza out for Randal?

— Guilty as charged.

— At least eating pizza is normal raccoon behavior.

— They shared the pizza.

— Huh. Did Petro spread his feathers?

— I’ve never seen that. I want to. Sometimes his back end twists a little but nothing happens. Like he’s damaged.

— That he’s damaged is obvious. Both of them are.

— If Frank didn’t find them so amusing, he’d be disturbed.

— Wine helps. Note my empty glass.

— You too Emily?

— No thanks, Tony. You know what they say about daylight and drinking.

— I have no idea and I don’t want to know. Tell her not to tell me, Tony.

— Gentlemen, I’m speechless. I’m also curious as hell. Like how long can this pairing possibly last?

Peacocks are not monogamous.

— You think Petro will step out on Randal for some more raccoon action?

— Very funny, Frank. This might be a hilly little tree-thick retreat but it’s still in the middle of one of the country’s largest cities and pretty much cut off from where any other peafowls live.

— There are other raccoons around though.

— True, but Randal seems to have found his mate.

— Or friend.

Cody the Coyote lies slunk beneath a large agave. Cody the Coyote doesn’t care about the twolegger yips below. He keeps eyes fixed on the flash of blue pecking for seed, the claws and stripes digging for nuts and grub. If only Cody the Coyote were closer. If only there were no fence. That the raccoon doesn’t attack the peacock confuses Cody the Coyote. Drool still overwhelms teeth.

Now and then the twoleggers stop their yips to look up at the raccoon and peacock. In case their gaze wanders his way, Cody the Coyote keeps low and still. Not that they would know to look for Cody the Coyote here. He and his pack mostly keep to the opposite hillside, where it’s open, with rats easy to find and a chance at something bigger when a deer happens through.

But Cody the Coyote could not resist the great bird song with the raccoon song always so close by.

It made him curious.

This isn’t his first time over here either. Cody the Coyote once tracked into the jade a raccoon feeble and ill only to find a great bird moments later joined by the twoleggers with a great blare.

So strange was that encounter so many fleeing moons ago the memory still hasn’t faded.

It’s here now with Cody the Coyote, as if crouched alongside him in the blue shadows, calculating with him strategies and distances, over the fence, too much fence, too much distance, too bright as well, any race and leap bound to send the great bird flying, warning the raccoon, sure to stand his own, sharp and strong, while the bird above circled back to attack, memory refusing to divide them, however odd this pack.

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— I like that Emily was as amazed as us. Made me feel less crazy.

— Speak for yourself, Tony.

— You’ve never invited me to your home, Frank, and never to see your paintings.

— I blame the wine.

— I never show anyone a poem until I know it’s finished.

— These aren’t finished. Not even started.

— Oh. I see. They’re blank.

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Even later, light failing, a deeper earthchill seeping into his bones, even after the great bird has gone to sky, perhaps gone with that rambling squeee up in their tree, Cody the Coyote’s curiosity doesn’t fade.

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Something then akin to fear follows oddness, further flattening Cody the Coyote’s haunches, belly too pressing hard against the daywarm earth, hairs moving along his tail, bristling up his back, ears by twitches joining this rising, perhaps trying to catch a little more awareness of what Cody the Coyote keeps failing to understand, what keeps Cody the Coyote coming over here for.

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— As you know, I’m painting my daughter. I just haven’t got very far.

— This is serious.

— Yes. — What, uh, hesitates your brush?

— I don’t want to put her in another cage.

— Is that how you see the canvas?

— Right now, yes. It’s a place where I’ll have to contain her. And that’s the last thing I want for her. You know, when I was getting mugged I was almost glad. I thought they were somehow connected to Emily,

some knuckleheads who heard her old man was loaded. Ha! I thought they might lead me back to her.

— No idea where she is?

— The one thing I wanted for her I failed to give her.

— What you can’t paint?

— I wanted her free of the cage of addiction. Her mother is a functional alcoholic living outside of Boston. My side of the family is also riddled with addicts. My daughter, Emily — — Her name’s Emily? Seriously?

— Seems we both share a name. Your poem “Emily” really got me. Different pain but I suppose the pain that comes out of love is pretty much the same.

— She’s an alcoholic?

— Worse. You know it’s bad when her mother worries. We’ve managed to get Emily into rehabs but it never takes.

She usually escapes. This last time she disappeared. She’s been out of touch for eight, I’m sorry, eight months. She’s either in a coffin or worse. Sometimes I dream she gets thrown in jail. Imagine that! The thought of your child behind bars calming your heart! Because at least she’s in one place. Maybe even getting sober.

— I’m sorry, Frank.

— Well, there you have it: the awful, ugly blank truth.

— You know I can no more tell you what to paint than you can tell me what to write?

— Why do you think I finally invited you over? I had to make sure you Fo rg understood that et yo first.

As the twoleggers move deeper into the den, their yips dim. Cody the Coyote lopes up past spires of cypress, higher still through the blue-moon shadows cast by an enormous cactus, toward a lone eucalyptus.

Stars swing mutely across the valley, while here and there the brighter ones, older ones, hazy in their beyond if still somehow in concert, orient Cody the Coyote to his purpose and place, as if stars could really do that, but they do do that, for Cody the Coyote.

Until later, much later, a distant yip!

What Cody the Coyote realizes he’s been waiting for all along!

Followed by a sudden explosion of yips! Cody the Coyote too, throwing back his head at once, jaws wide enough to snap up the moon, does snap up the moon, for a moment.

Yip!

By the time the moon loses the valley and city, Cody the Coyote’s pack lies all around him, slouched on the hillside, if still awake for anything, scurrying, satiating. There’s even a breeze hinting of deer.

Cody the Coyote relaxes with their alertness, even if his eyes won’t stop darting to the opposite hillside, where he knows that the great bird and raccoon wait, as if waiting for him.

Before dawn, Cody the Coyote stands, trots through the pack, as if they might stand too and this time follow. But Cody the Coyote can’t lead this pack. They just watch him go. They know he’ll be back. Because here is good. Here is high above twolegger dens. Here offers clear views of both sides. Here is but breaths from where water lies clear and deep. Here is plenty to eat too, even without deer. Rats, voles, a skunk. Now and then a dog. Or a bewildered cat.

Cody the Coyote hurries down his hill again, headed for something beyond merely appetite, even if drool again slips teeth, this time followed by a whine, catching the pack off guard, looking his way, yipping his way, then looking around, mystified.

A few stars still piercing the sky seem then to assemble for Cody the Coyote not just the way of the path ahead to the jade but this time another way to the big pine, and more precisely to the base where the great bird when the great bird comes down won’t pass, but where the raccoon must pass, his only way to the ground, where Cody the Coyote will wait.

But even with dawn only just breaking, the plan comes too late, even with Cody the Coyote swiftly slipping across the dry river, to the black fence; skirting blackberries and oleander over to a tumble of mossed stones leading to the big tree, where nearby on brick steps the twolegger already sits, awake, clutching a bowl he now and then lifts to lap from, something sharp always between his fingers, a thick of pale leaves stacked on his knee.

Cody the Coyote darts quick beneath the pink hydrangeas.

Not a moment too soon either, as up over the wisteria-warped pergola comes the raccoon!, surprise! surprise!, not in his tree!, shambling by twolegger with a sniff, then a pause, the twolegger appearing a crust of something the raccoon takes, no wonder he’s so fat!, nibbling on this crescent of crumbs, before ambling on to the pine, and by claw and bark reaching in no time where the tree divides three times, stretching himself across a band of morning fire, before vanishing to higher limbs Cody the Coyote will never know, catching only faintly a sudden flap and blare to tremor

any sky.

— Bwraaaaaaah!

— Good morning, Frank, you just missed them.

— Are their hours even, I dunno, bird-raccoon normal?

— We’ll have to ask Emily.

— Writing?

— Thinking.

— About our favorite neighborhood couple?

— I’ll be frank— — No, I’m Frank. Sorry can’t resist. Call it almost seventy years of not-resisting.

— They scare me.

— Go on.

— Something about what they mean.

— Do they have to mean anything?

— They don’t have to but they clearly mean something to each other. That’s what I’m trying to see.

— Fair.

— Mostly, though, I’m worried, because I’m going away for a few weeks.

— Oh. Soon?

— Later today.

— They’ll be okay.

— I asked Emily to house-sit.

— Are things . . . developing?

— You do the math. She’s here, I’m not here. I’m here, she’s not here.

— They’ll be fine, Tony. If you’re worried about coyotes they stay on my side. You should have heard them last night. Yipping like they were dining on Pomeranian. I was hoping. We live in a place full of owners with toy dogs who love to gossip about our resident poet — you. Must say I feel pretty smug that no one’s muttered a word about Petro and Randal.

— I’m glad. You haven’t forgotten, though, who was here on this side when Randal and Petro met?

— Trust me, Tony, the coyotes stay on my side. Obsess on exceptions and you’re lost.

— Then I’ve lived my life lost.

— Ha! You’re not alone.

— Bwraaaaaaah!

The twoleggers soon separate. One returning back across the ravine, the other disappearing inside his den. Later, he reappears, climbing into wheeled lightless motion. By dusk, a rose-haired twolegger arrives. She looks up the tree for a long while.

But even as night thickens, the raccoon does not reappear nor does the great bird.

Has Cody the Coyote missed them? For the first time, Cody the Coyote doubts his plan, doubts the stars. He’s waited all day for the inevitable and now in night faces an inevitable that might already be lost. Is there a way down other than the trunk? Perhaps a nearby oak branch rises close enough for a leap?

Cody the Coyote can’t resist, trots over to the base, trying to unweave the shadows of limbs above, until a nearing Squeeeeee! races him back beneath the hydrangeas.

The raccoon is finally descending! It takes everything for Cody the Coyote to stay still! He must wait! He must wait! He must wait until the raccoon leaves the security of bark . . .

There! Pine needles snapping!

Cody the Coyote pops up through the stems, pink shatterings left floating the air behind, as back legs drive him skyward, front paws tucked, jaws snap-ready, Cody the Coyote hurling toward the base of that immense pine tree, realizing only then in the clarity of flight just how badly he has mistimed his attack, the raccoon somehow still on the trunk, still high above, as a second realization comes into view, the cause of this mistake.

Something else waits at the tree base.

Already turning to face Cody the Coyote.

A mountain lion.

Jaws agape, one shoulder lowered, the other raised, and already by hiss clearing fangs, releasing a paw struck bright with claws more dangerous than every instructing star. © 2019 Mark Z. Danielewski, All Rights Reserved § Atelier Z: Regina M. Gonzales

164

IN CONVERSATION

The musicia n Robbie Robertson is having quite a year. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fa mer is rolling out a new record, for which he designed all the albu m art; a docu mentar y based on his memoir Testi mon y; a nd the score for Martin Scorsese’s film The Irish ma n.

Derek Blasberg met hi m at his LA studio to talk about how he’s created his music for decades a nd, more recently, his artwork.

Derek Blasberg: Is this

The Band was the first group

old boot and guitar neck a

to be on the cover of Time

Richard Prince sculpture?

just for its music. We were

Robbie Robertson: Yes, yes

as surprised as anybody

it is! Good eye! But it’s all

else.

made in bronze and it weighs a ton.

DB: How does it feel to be on the other side of that half-

DB: When did you get that?

a-century?

RR: Last year maybe? One

RR: Well, there’s good

night, Richard and I had

days . . . [laughter].

discussed doing a piece of art inspired by a guitar,

DB: I’ve spoken to a lot of

and I had a bunch of guitar

people who had a front-row

pieces and things lying

view on art, on music, on

around here so he said, “Just

fashion, and most of them

send me some stuff.” I sent

say when they look back they

a bunch of stuff, including

had no idea how big of a deal

some Fender Stratocaster

something was until they’re

necks. He had an old boot

fifty years away from it.

with paint all over it in

RR: I know what that feels

his studio, so I guess he

like. There’s so much

stuck the neck in the boot

history under the bridge.

and sent me a picture and

I’ve been fortunate to

said, “Do you think this is a

travel such an inspired path

good start?” Did you see the

all these years.

shoe polish inside?

DB: Tell me: what’s the first DB: Yes, I think it’s super

story that comes to mind when

cool. And it’s nice to have

you think about that path?

it in the studio. Normally

RR: Years ago, I was having

music studios are so dark and

a fling with Edie Sedgwick

kind of creepy.

and we lived at the Chelsea

RR: You think so? I love this

Hotel together. I would go

studio. I wish you were here

with her and Andy Warhol

tomorrow because I’m doing

to all these things, all

playback on my new album with

these happenings. It was a

a bunch of friends.

period when music and art and everything was all flowing

DB: I’m excited for the new

together completely. There

album, even though I know

was no separation.

it’s only one of a bunch of things you have coming out

DB: How has it gotten

this year.

different since 1969 at the

RR: Ha. Yeah, I’ve got this

Chelsea Hotel?

album, which I did the art

RR: It’s different, but

for. I can’t wait to show

in ways those connections

you that. And a documentary,

live on forever. For me in

Once Were Brothers, which

particular, those worlds

is named after one of the

still revolve around one

songs on the album. And

another.

then the music that I did for The Irishman, which

DB: What was your

is Scorsese’s new movie.

introduction to the

Then it’s the fiftieth

art world?

anniversary of the album

RR: Playing with Bob Dylan.

The Band, which changed the

I came to New York to live

course of music.

when I was twenty, and that’s when I hooked up with Dylan.

DB: Half a century!

The poets and the music and

That’s wild.

the art world and all these

RR: I know. I can’t

things were swirling around.

even relate. It’s just

I was there the day Warhol

extraordinary. This was

gave a big double Elvis

the invention of Americana.

painting to Bob Dylan. Bob

It’s now a genre, of course,

and I were at our manager’s

but fifty years ago there

apartment in Gramercy Park,

was no Americana! The Band

and Andy came over with a

was also the first group ever

bunch of people carrying

to be on the cover of Time

this big picture. When they

magazine. Did you know that?

unfolded it and showed it

They’d done a cover about the

to Bob, he was like, “Oh.

phenomenon of The Beatles

Okay.” Andy was a little shy

a year or two earlier, but

and uncomfortable about the

165

situation, so he left and Bob said, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?

Am I supposed to put a big

I witnessed two or three musical revolutions. Not many people can say that. And some of it I was very responsible for, so I feel so fortunate in that.

RR: Yeah, I would go with

RR: It wasn’t offensive

Andy and Edie up to Dalí’s

really, but it wasn’t a

penthouse at the St. Regis

compliment either.

hotel. We’d go up there at midnight or one o’clock in

DB: How was writing your

the morning and Salvador

book? Cathartic?

would be entertaining.

RR: It was therapy. It

He was such an amazing

was all of the things you’d

character. We got up there

think it would be. Also,

one night and on the dining

one of the hardest things

room table were a bunch

I’ve ever done in my life.

of incredible drawings of

I wrote every word in it.

horses and other animals.

I had an editor who helped

I said to Edie, “Wow, look

me shorten it, because I

at this!” And she said to

overwrote the hell out

that picture is in The Museum

Salvador, “Is this something

of it, but there were no

of Modern Art. Probably

new?” And he said, “It’s a

other writers. I’d never

worth more than $60 million.

new masterpiece I’m working

done anything like that.

on. And if you notice the

Now I’m deep in on volume

picture of Elvis Presley on my wall? That’s like Chuck Berry putting a picture of Little Richard up on his wall.” So he said to Albert Grossman, his manager, “I don’t want this picture, but I’d like a couch. I just got my own apartment and I need a couch.” He traded Grossman that picture for a couch. Now

DB: Maybe even more.

horses have no heads.”

2. The publisher said to

RR: Maybe even more.

Then Andy said, “Wow, maybe

me, “You can’t write your

I should do a thing with

autobiography and end it

DB: What do you think that

horses.” Salvador turned

when you’re thirty-two.”

couch is worth?

around and said, “Why do

RR: That couch isn’t in great

you need to do a thing with

DB: They’re not wrong!

shape! In fact, it ended up

horses? You have soup cans

RR: I witnessed two or three

out on the curb. That wasn’t

and lady shoes.” Andy said,

musical revolutions. Not

a great trade.

“I think we should go.”

many people can say that.

DB: In your book you mention

DB: You think he was

responsible for, so I feel so

meeting Salvador Dalí.

offended?

fortunate in that.

And some of it I was very

166

Marty [Scorsese] always said, “The picture and the music: There’s no difference.”

DB: Was it easier to write the book, to paint the album drawing, or to do the album?

RR: All of these things, they’re all interwoven. I was working on the music for Scorsese’s new movie, The Irishman, and all of a sudden the songs are reflecting that story. We’re working on the documentary based on my book—Scorsese is the executive producer on that too—and it’s all bleeding together. I’m writing a song, trying to finish a song, I’m doing drawings, I’m coloring, I’m taking pictures, I’m doing all this stuff, and everything starts to become a big year of artistic involvement. Usually people of my generation, at this point, are going the other direction. They’re mellowing out. But I’m just ramping up.

DB: This isn’t the first time you and Scorsese have worked together.

RR: I started working with

DB: You’re working on the

path and you keep following

Scorsese on Raging Bull

artwork for the album that

this thing. You put all your

[1980], and I’ve done music

comes out in the fall. Have

trust in it and sometimes

for most of his movies over

you ever done any artwork

you come out the other end

the years since. Every

before?

with something you love and

time, I say to myself, “Oh

RR: I’ve been doing artwork

sometimes you come out the

my god, I don’t know if I

all my life, but I’ve only

other end with something that

can do this.” Every. Time.

done it for things that were

you think, “Ehh, nice try.”

But then, of course, I love working with him.

personal. It was never, like, in a show. Each song

DB: Bob Dylan plays and

that I wrote for this record,

paints.

DB: What’s that creative

I saw a picture. I saw an

RR: He did the cover for The

process like?

image. I’d do drawings and

Band’s first album! I asked

RR: It’s different every

photographs and integrate

him to because years ago he

time and that’s why it’s

them sometimes. It’s very

gave me a cool painting of an

much mixed media. At the same

American Indian guy, close

time, there’s something very

up, and in the background was

classic and primitive in

an Indian girl on the back

there too. It’s kind of like

of a horse with a white man,

my music.

riding away. I thought it was so terrific. I thought,

DB: That was going to be

“Wow, this is really telling

my next question: is your

a story like our songs do.”

process of making music

So I asked him if he wanted

similar to your process of

to do a painting for the

working on art?

cover of Music from Big Pink.

RR: It is. You have a blank

He said, “Alright, let me see

canvas and then you have a

what I can do.” So he went

germ of a small idea and you

off and a little while later

put a couple of dabs on the

he came over to my house and

canvas and think, “Oh, this

he had this picture and he

is giving me an idea.” It’s

said, “Does this work?” It

the same thing with writing

was hilarious. And cool. And

a composition. You sit down

unusual. And nobody had had

with a guitar or a piano and

an album cover, ever, that

have no idea; then you put

looked like that. He still

your fingers on the strings

has that painting, by the

or the keys and think, “I’m

way. I heard he wants a lot

feeling something in this.”

of money for it. Maybe he’s

It’s like some kind of a

getting back for that Andy

silent vibration starts to

Warhol thing, I’m telling

happen. It leads you down the

you [laughter]!

167

challenging. It’s fun, and we go into most of these things with a blank canvas.

It’s like, “What the hell does this movie sound like?

What are we going to do this time?” Sometimes I see a script or clips, but it’s always a different process.

The score for The Irishman goes back to the French gangster movies of the early ’50s, which gave me a sound I could start with. Marty always said, “The picture and the music: there’s no difference. They’re all the same.” Sometimes I’m just choosing songs that will play in a certain scene.

Sometimes I’m choosing a piece of classical music.

Sometimes I’m making the music. Sometimes it’s all of the above.

DB: What other artists do you like?

RR: Yeah, I like Grotjahn.

Mark is a friend of mine. I like Thomas Houseago. I like Koons. I’ve spent some time with Jeff and he’s explained to me how some of those pieces come together, like in his Hulk sculptures. He showed me in the back of one of the sculptures how there’s

You Paint Houses,” which is

say “I’m Irish,” and then

a little hole there and a

a duet with Van Morrison.

they’d say “What are you?”

certain key goes in that hole

Here’s the piece of art that

I’d say, “Let’s not go

and when you turn the key all

I did for it: a picture of a

into it.”

the pieces come apart.

gun, which I own, placed on top of a close-up pic I did

DB: Did you seek any advice

DB: Let’s talk about the art

of a flower. So all of the

from any of your artist

you’re working on.

color comes from the flower.

friends while you were

RR: I take a lot of pictures.

Opening spread:

It’s just that conflict of

working on your art?

One of my favorites

Robbie Robertson,

niceness and the gun and

RR: Nope [laughter].

is a photograph of the

2019. Photo: David

the hitman.

reflection of my swimming

Jordan Williams

pool up against the glass

DB: Are you excited to have DB: Robbie, where are

some of your art come to

at my house. It’s abstract.

Previous spread,

you from?

light?

Basically, I’m gathering

bottom left:

RR: My mother was born and

RR: Yeah. It’s fun for me to

pics all the time, and then

Robbie Robertson

raised in the Six Nations

pull that rabbit out of the

I’ll draw or paint on top of

during the recording of

Indian Reserve in Canada

hat, you know?

them at home or here in the

The Band album in Sammy

and my father was a Jewish

studio.

Davis Jr.’s studio,

gangster, so between those

1969. Photo: Elliott

two worlds it wasn’t for sure

DB: Do you have the same

Landy/Redferns/Getty

I wasn’t going to end up in

feeling at the end of an

Images

prison for the rest of my life. There’s a song called

amazing painting as you do at the end of an amazing song?

Previous spread, top

“Dead End Kid” that I wrote

It’s the same validation?

right:

about what people like me

RR: Oh yeah. This Scorsese

Robbie Robertson’s

were called back then.

movie, The Irishman, is

Untitled, 2019 DB: Do you ever go back home?

based on a book called I Heard You Paint Houses

Previous spread,

I’m sure there were a lot of

[by Charles Brandt]. In the

bottom right:

kids in a similar situation

mob, when a guy would go to

The cover of Robbie

who ended up as “dead-end

a hitman to knock someone

Robertson’s album

kids.”

off, he’d say, “I heard

Sinematic, 2019

RR: Yeah, a lot of them it didn’t work out for. When

you paint houses.” And the hitman would say, “So what

Above:

I was a kid growing up,

do you need?” For the movie

Robbie Robertson’s

somebody would say “I’m

I wrote a song called “I Hear

Untitled, 2019

Italian,” or someone would

168

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L E O N A R D O DA V I N C I

The year 2019 marks 500 years since the death of Leonardo da Vinci.

Mary Ann Caws takes the opportunity to reflect on the enduring legacy of the polymath, tracking his obsessions and temperament into the present era.

NOTHING GETS COLD

No one seems able to sum up the romantic relation between ourselves, here in 2019, and the genius Leonardo da Vinci, now gone for 500 years, as characteristically as the great Victorian critic Walter Pater did in 1873. Does the past know plenty about the future? Pater meditates on Leonardo in his book The Renaissance: He wasted many days in curious tricks of design, seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices of line and colours. He was smitten with a love of the impossible—the perforation of mountains, changing the course of rivers, raising great buildings, such as the church

of San Giovanni, in the air; all those feats for the performance of which natural magic professed to have the key. Later writers, indeed, see in these efforts an anticipation of modern mechanics; in him they were rather dreams, thrown off by the overwrought and labouring brain. Two ideas were especially fixed in him, as reflexes of things that had touched his brain in childhood beyond the measure of other impressions—the smiling of women and the motion of great waters.1 These ideas still impress themselves on us all these centuries later. In the rushing waters that

we see in Leonardo’s drawings, such as Landscape (1473), Study on the percussion of the water along the bank of a river (1490–92), and the famous Deluge drawings from the last years of his life, we are somewhere relentlessly modern. Look closely and a reflection of our spirit of uncomfortableness and unwillingness to finish any one thing, always rushing on to the next, beams right back to us from so long ago. Writing in The Times Literary Supplement about Walter Isaacson’s 2017 biography of Leonardo, Jonathan Keates describes the artist’s “inability to bring major projects to a satisfactory conclusion, preferring conception to execution.”2 This attitude reminds me of Blaise Pascal, who rarely

Previous spread, left: Leonardo da Vinci, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1483–90 (detail), oil and mixed media on walnut, 40 ½ × 29 inches (102.8 × 73.5 cm). Vatican Museums (Pinacoteca) Previous spread, right: Andy Warhol, Last Supper, 1986, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 40 × 40 inches (101.6 × 101.6 cm).

Private collection. Artwork © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

finished a project once he had fully envisioned it.3 Leonardo, Pascal, and then I think of Luis Buñuel, and how his bourgeois families could never complete their dinners: great eddies and waves of human drama, political theater, and psychological absurdity keep them from their food, and from ever reaching completion. Indeed, this seems precisely modern and applicable to our age; “The master of the unfinished,” Walter Isaacson calls Leonardo in his masterful study of the master. 4 On this topic we might think of an amazing show at New York’s Met Breuer in 2016, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, tracing the development of 172

the non finito from such painters as Rembrandt and Tintoretto toward the present. Along contemporary lines the show included such artists as Janine Antoni, Lygia Clark, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg, who, according to the show’s press release, took “the unfinished in entirely new directions . . . [they] alternately blurred the distinction between making and un-making, extending the boundaries of art into both space and time, and recruited viewers to complete the objects they had begun.”5 Indeed, those boundaries extend far beyond the kind of incompletion we experience in Pascal, Buñuel, and others.

To my delight, of these, the Brazilian Clark is the nearest—and in fact seems surprisingly near—to Leonardo’s what we could call “everywherenesss.”

I recall her 2014 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988; there was for her neither back nor front nor up nor down, no frame and no particular placing. And, in fact, her being called on the audience to participate in the making and unmaking of the very object we would, in principle, be observing. So the work seemed a sort of happening, and this feeling of ongoingness is precisely what we are given with the great Renaissance genius we are celebrating. The

art for Clark is the act—our act, in fact, as much as hers. As the Unfinished catalogue reminds us, her work moves toward participatory art, and has had an enormous influence on various genres of creation, including sculpture, painting, installation art, and performance. That meshes marvelously with Leonardo’s own participation in literary performances at the court of Ludovico Sforza.6 Leonardo enjoyed participating and performing, and his approach remained both scientific and subjective. And can we ever finish what is subjective? It’s not as if a self can ever be finished. Leonardo’s cartoon Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the infant Saint John the Baptist (1499–1500)

may serve as a demonstration piece: Saint Anne’s pointing finger and the teeth of the holy women are sketched, left in reserve, without chiaroscuro.

And in his two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, gestures change; the angel points us to Mary in the Louvre’s version (1483–86), but both hands are hidden in the later painting in the National Gallery, London (1495–1508).

Leonardo was criticized for his inability to finish such projects as the cartoon and lost mural Battle of Anghiari (1505), which was never completed, the artist having expended his strength and having no delight in continuing. The invention was always his point, and he felt no need to picture the final result.

Diligence was not his forte.7 The very fact of finishing details opposed his creativity, standing in the way of what his unencumbered mind could bring to the invention of a composition, his medium being rapid initial sketches or primi pensieri. The point was to sketch quickly and not be concerned with an ultimate finish. His creative energy appears in the sketchiness and the handling of all he did as a work in progress. This continuous workout appeals to us greatly, never forcing us to make a judgment or select a stopping point.

In the cosa mentale that painting was for Leonardo, he would develop his works, writes Daniel Arasse, “like a debate, with each project sustaining

Opposite: Leonardo da Vinci, Manuscript F, folio 20 verso: Water (characteristics), c. 1508–09, pencil and ink on paper, 5 ¾ × 7 ⅞ inches (14.5 × 20 cm). Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Paris. Image © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY Above: Arakawa, Who is It? No. 2, 1970, acrylic, graphite, and marker on canvas, in 2 parts, 72 × 96 inches (182.9 × 243.8 cm) © Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins

the possibility of an alternative and its transformation sometimes taking place on the surface of a work in progress,” so that it often seems unfinished.8 This function, in Leonardo, endears the artist to such readers as the Surrealists, who adopted André Breton’s counsel about leaving behind the already seen, the déjà vu, or the already done, in order to advance toward the not yet seen or done.

Not all of Leonardo’s inventions worked: far from it. See those incompletions and frequent failures: paintings abandoned, investigations into diverting rivers that were never diverted, airplanes that never flew, treatises left aside, so

much unfinished. Something else to be learned, as Isaacson puts it, some more leaps to be taken.

Always curious, always curious—this is the basis of his genius.

I remember how Arakawa would take leaps all over, and in fact his thinking was a leaping thinking, from here to there; the here was always part of the there. And his use of reverse writing, always thinking of the Renaissance Genius he was, was a way to keep the viewer’s mind leaping forward. When Arakawa eventually took his mind to architecture, the spaces were made for incomplete actions, all the better to keep a vitalizing current at work.9

In sailing down Pater’s “great waters,” thinking through what may seem a generative metaphor, we almost forget that the critic was speaking literally: Leonardo was obsessed with the depiction of swirling eddies. Keen to see patterns in everything, eager for so many details about so many things, he was a deeply experimental scientist and artist, fascinated by the small as well as the large, and supremely gifted at drawing those details he coveted knowing about, in their various settings. He could paint motion and its arrest. But perhaps it is really the shape, that golden ratio, that we see in the hypnotic spinning of water coursing. We see 173

174

it too in his depiction of hair—the curly hair of his young lover the little devil Salaì, and in Portrait of a Musician (c. 1486–87), and framing the frowning face of the wonderful Ginevra de’Benci (c. 1474–78).

We find it too in the snail’s shell that motivated the amazing snail stair Scala Cantarini del Bovolo in Venice, up which Pablo Echaurren encouraged me to trudge to see its affinity with Marcel Duchamp.10 Which more presently leads our cosa mentale to the glorious eccentricities of Patricia Highsmith’s snails, which went everywhere with her, including dinners at which she would encourage them to spread or slink out along the table, weaving their snaky and slimy way.

Aside from the “motion of great waters,” Pater points us to the smiling of women. And here we are with the most famous of Leonardo’s artworks, La Gioconda, the Mona Lisa (1503–05/07). The actual painting of La Gioconda lasted a very long time. Recent infrared reflectography reveals great changes, but in every case, the painting and its alterations have been widely influential. Pater’s celebration has always marked our readings: The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world

are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.11 Leonardo’s notebooks show—at great length— his studies of light and how it strikes its target.

So the Mona Lisa provoked pages and pages and drawings and drawings of those strikes, revealing motion and emotion. Vasari tells us that Leonardo brought in musicians to play and sing, and jesters to amuse, thus the smile. His keeping this painting with him his whole life speaks sufficiently to his passionate involvement in the direction of

Opposite: Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of water, c. 1510–12, black chalk, pen, and ink on paper, 11 ½ × 8 inches (29 × 20.2 cm). Royal Collection Trust Above: Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de’Benci, c. 1474–78, oil on panel, 15 × 14 ⅝ inches (38.1 × 37 cm).

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Alisa Mellon Bruce Fund. Image: courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

the mouth and the expression. We think of Andy Warhol’s smiling Marilyns and Elizabeth Taylors, in their glamour and come-on-ness and go-awayness. It comes as no surprise that Warhol was obsessed with Leonardo. Two Last Suppers, Leonardo’s original and Warhol’s many startling homages: mysteries come with glamour and unspoken, deeply felt rhythms.

That passionate involvement and all those competing crosscurrents and interior debates never finishing lead me to Leonardo’s final written words, which break off his geometric musings with a practical detail that mattered greatly. After an “et

cetera” in his notebooks, a line in the same mirror script explains why he is stopping: “Perché la minestra si fredda,” (Because the soup is getting cold). 12 Nothing, nothing about Leonardo or his work gets cold: it is all swept up in the moving passion of the world’s rhythm.

1. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, 1873 (reprint ed. New York: Modern Library, 1953), p. 231.

2. Jonathan Keates, “Mighty Instrument: Two Books ‘in Love with Renaissance Panache,’” The Times Literary Supplement, October 19, 2018, p. 10.

3. Shamelessly, I say, see my Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason (London: Reaktion Books, 2016).

4. Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), p. 324.

5. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible. Exhibition Overview,” 2016. Available online at https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/ unfinished (accessed July 18, 2019).

6. See Isaacson, “Literary Amusements,” in Leonardo da Vinci, pp.

124–26.

7. I am of course referring to Paul Valéry, in his novel Monsieur Teste (1896), saying about Edgar Degas (of course), “La bêtise n’est pas mon fort” (Stupidity is not my strong point).

8. Daniel Arasse, Leonardo da Vinci: The Rhythm of the World, 1997, Eng. trans. Rosetta Translations (Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky & Konecky, 1998), pp. 17–19, 419.

9. See my “Losing Nothing: Arakawa and Madeleine Gins,” Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2018, pp. 118–26.

10. See my Snail Time on the subject (Milan: Postmedia Books, 2018).

11. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 103.

12. See Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 510–11.

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Celebrating London’s architecture: Cumberland Terrace. Photograph: Dan Tobin Smith.

Frieze London & Frieze Masters 3–6 October 2019 Tickets at frieze.com

REPRODUCTION 29.09.2019–13.04.2020

International Art Center

Copenhagen Contemporary copenhagencontemporary.org

Revolving Doors, 2004/2016

Photo: © Rob Mckeever

Photo: © Carsten Höller

Expedition Equipment: Rucksack, 1995/2000

CY TWOMBLY – SCULPTURES The Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture edited by Nicola Del Roscio is now completed

Opening September 30th Cy Twombly sculpture exhibition Gagosian Gallery 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, and book presentation 17 – 19 Davies Street

Cy Twombly: Cat. Rais. of Sculpture Vol. I 1946–1997 350 pages, 160 color plates, hardcover, 24.5 x 34 cm ISBN 978-3-88814-875-0 € 148.00

Cy Twombly: Cat. Rais. of Sculpture Vol. II 1998–2011 ca. 352 pages, 160 color plates, hardcover, 24.5 x 34 cm, ISBN 978-3-8296-0866-4 € 168.00

Books available at Gagosian Gallery · 17 – 19 Davies Street, London Gagosian Shop · 976 Madison Avenue, New York · shop@gagosian.com and SCHIRMER/MOSEL · SCHIRMER/MOSEL · SCHIRMER/MOSEL · SCHIRMER/MOSEL www.schirmer-mosel.com · mail@schirmer-mosel.com · fax +49 89 33 86 95

CY TWOMBLY – HOMES & STUDIOS A life between ancient culture and contemporary art New York, Rome, Bassano, Gaeta, and Lexington

136 photographs by Tacita Dean Nicola Del Roscio Mario Dondero Tatiana Franchetti-Twombly François Halard Horst P. Horst Annabelle d’Huart David Lees Sally Mann Ugo Mulas Werner Schloske David Seidner Deborah Turbeville Bruce Weber and Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly: Homes & Studios, edited by Nicola Del Roscio 264 pages, 136 color plates, hardcover, 24.5 x 34 cm, ISBN 978-3-8296-0791-9 € 58,00

Texts by Nicola Del Roscio and Florian Illies Books available at Gagosian Gallery · 17 – 19 Davies Street, London Gagosian Shop · 976 Madison Avenue, New York · shop@gagosian.com and SCHIRMER/MOSEL · SCHIRMER/MOSEL · SCHIRMER/MOSEL · SCHIRMER/MOSEL www.schirmer-mosel.com · mail@schirmer-mosel.com · fax +49 89 33 86 95

Patricia Piccinini. Litter, 2010. Olbricht Collection Photo: Alexey Narodizkiy © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

Sachen aus Glas, 2002, Acrylic paint and oil on canvas, 209.5 × 301.5 cm.

Courtesy Archive Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin | Paris © Albert Oehlen

Serpentine Galleries Kensington Gardens London W2 3XA United Kingdom

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ALB E RT OEH L EN 2 October 2019 — 12 Januar y 2020

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GAME CHANGER: BETTY PARSONS Each issue we pay homage to a person who influenced the course of contemporary art.

Here is the renowned gallerist and artist Betty Parsons (1900–1982). Text by Wyatt Allgeier.

Betty Parsons wasn’t an extraordinary businessperson. She spent little time thinking about profits: “I’ve always been given the vision to be ahead,” she said. “I never made money because I saw things too far in advance.”1 Asked about this in 1979, three years before her death, Parsons succinctly quipped, “I was interested in creation.”2 The great art dealer Leo Castelli commented, “One couldn’t be a Betty Parsons and at the same time be a good businesswoman. She was much too . . . poetic for that.”3 He added, “It was the beginning of a great moment in American art that started there at Betty Parsons’s. For the first time a great original art movement took place in America.”4 At the Betty Parsons Gallery, the pursuit of financial gain took the back burner to the work of establishing America as a player in the world of art. In notes now housed at the Archives of American Art, Washington, DC, Parsons wrote, “The business of art is a tyranny of forms and finances. I like the creative aspect and the recognition . . . but the business of it is less interesting to me—God knows you must cope with it.”5 And, begrudgingly, she did. In the nearly four decades of the gallery’s existence, from 1946, when she opened her doors with a $5,000 loan from various friends, until 1982, Parsons did sell art. After all, operations on 59th Street had to continue until they couldn’t: “I’ll probably die in my gallery in the middle of hanging a new show.”6 With its innovations in presenting the most vigorous artists across America, the gallery was part of Parsons’s raison d’être. So was her own artwork: sublime sculptures made from driftwood painted in rich patterns, and paintings with an aerial appreciation of expanse.

All of these practices shared their root in passions ignited by Parsons’s visit to the historic Armory Show of 1913, when she herself was thirteen. An origin story as concrete and revelatory as any biographer could dream. For the woman who fostered the careers of Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, Adolph Gottlieb, Forrest Bess, and Agnes Martin (the list continues, but let this sample suffice) to have attended, and at a formative age, the exhibition that debuted the European avant-garde in the United States ties together the narrative strings of Parsons’s life: risk, unremitting commitment to the future, a full-throated defense of a liberatory art, and more. “I felt like those paintings . . .” she would recall. “I couldn’t explain it, but I decided then that this was the world I wanted . . . art.”7 This cornerstone moment in Parsons’s life is joined by another, a near cosmological spark for her championing of an American abstract art. It took place at a rodeo: “I saw all the movement, the noise, the color, the excitement, the passion.

I thought, my God, how can you ever capture this except in an abstract sense?”8 That this vision in the American West receives more attention in her own telling of her life than her time studying sculpture 190

at the Grande Chaumière, Paris, with Alberto Giacometti and Isamu Noguchi, attests to her idiosyncratic focus.

While biographers have these foundations to build on, the sheer grandness and scope of Parsons’s achievements aren’t so easily accounted for.

A consequential exhibition experience as a teen and a visionary scene of bull-riders doesn’t necessarily result, after all, in being able to “construct the center of the art world,” a feat Helen Frankenthaler retrospectively attributed to her.9 Maybe her daring in displaying art denounced at the time as “perverting the public taste,” according to Ken Kelley in People in 1978, maintained its conviction because she had found herself outcast from her early life, as a child of a wealthy New York family, due to her intellect, drive, bisexuality, and

Betty Parsons, 1979. Photo: © Lisl Steiner

independence.10 The credit for her longevity might have been raised in the cradle of humility: “I don’t feel that by doing this that I am carrying a special torch—this freedom of the spirit has always existed, and my devotion to it and presentation of it to the public is a simple human act, and all I am asking of the public is to come.”11 Or perhaps her unquenchable thirst for the unconventional, the misunderstood, the risky grasp toward the unseen, was forged through a recurring abandonment by others. Many of the artists whose careers she cultivated would later abandon her for the greener pastures of some more fiscally secure dealer. (Artists too have bills.) Perhaps her singular ability to discover and foster budding artists was rooted in her

being an artist herself. Or maybe it was as simple as the conversation recounted in Kelley’s profile of her: “A very famous artist once asked me, ‘How do you do it?’ I told him I was born with a great love of the unfamiliar.”12 When a person can’t be sated by what’s known, how much can she discover?

Whatever the sources of her accomplishments, the result remains the same: Betty Parsons transformed what the world conceives of as art. All those who find themselves transfixed before the pulsing colors of Rothko, the symphonic vibrations of Pollock, the mystical unsettlement of Bess, the supremely confident line of Newman, and the quiet security of Martin owe a moment of homage to the incredible woman who, against so many odds and so much hostility, presented their works for anyone brave enough to come. And may we, with as much dedication as we can muster, hope that more like her will break through and fight for so little reward: “These artists are establishing a relationship with the world through their own experience, and I have made a place where their expression can exist. That the strength of this liberation is so important, so vital, in a world where we see freedom being submerged all around us, is adequate compensation for my commitment.”13

1. Betty Parsons, quoted in Grace Glueck, “Betty Parsons the Art Dealer’s Art Dealer,” Ms., February 1976, p. 109.

2. Parsons, quoted in Grace Lichtenstein, “Betty Parsons: Still trying to find the creative world in everything,” Artnews, March 1979, p. 56.

3. Leo Castelli, quoted in Carol Strickland, “Betty Parsons’s 2 Lives: She Was Artist, Too,” New York Times, June 28, 1992. Available online at https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/nyregion/bettyparsons-s-2-lives-she-was-artist-too.html (accessed July 18, 2019).

4. Ibid.

5. Betty Parsons Gallery records and personal papers, c. 1920–91, box 39, folder 5: Artist Biography and Narratives, series 7, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC. Available online at www.aaa.si.edu/collections/betty-parsons-galleryrecords-and-personal-papers-7211/subseries-7-2/box-39-folder-5 (accessed July 22, 2019).

6. Parsons, quoted in Ken Kelley, “Betty Parsons Taught America to Appreciate What It Once Called ‘Trash’: Abstract Art,” People, February 1978, p. 85.

7. Betty Parsons Gallery records and personal papers, c. 1920–91, box 39, folder 5: Artist Biography and Narratives, series 7, Archives of American Art. Available online at www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ betty-parsons-gallery-records-and-personal-papers-7211/ subseries-7-2/box-39-folder-5 (accessed July 22, 2019).

8. Parsons, quoted in Kelley, “Betty Parsons Taught America,” p.

78.

9. Helen Frankenthaler, quoted in Strickland, “Betty Parsons’s 2 Lives.”

10. Kelley, “Betty Parsons Taught America,” p. 76.

11. Parsons, in “Interview over WNYC Art Festival,” October 16, 1951. Betty Parsons Gallery records and personal papers, c.

1920–91, box 39, folder 7: Interview—WNYC (Radio Station) Art Fesitval, October 16, 1951, Archives of American Art. Available online at www.aaa.si.edu/collections/betty-parsons-galleryrecords-and-personal-papers-7211/subseries-7-2/box-39-folder-7 (accessed July 22, 2019).

12. Parsons, quoted in Kelley, “Betty Parsons Taught America,” p.

85.

13. Parsons, in “Interview over WNYC Art Festival.”

Elective Affinities Edmund de Waal at The Frick Collection Through November 17

THE FRICK COLLECTION East 70th and Fifth Avenue, NYC Edmund de Waal (b. 1964), that pause of space, 2019, porcelain, gold, alabaster, aluminum, and plexiglass, on view in the North Hall, © Edmund de Waal. Courtesy the artist and The Frick Collection; photo: Christopher Burke 4