Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2019

Photo credits: Cover: Ellen Gallagher, Afrylic, 2004 (detail), plasticine, ink, and paper on canvas, 96 × 192 inches (243. 8 × 487.7 cm) © Ellen Gallagher. Photo: Rob McKeever Top row, left to right: David Bailey, Jane Birkin, 1969, gelatin silver print, 48 × 50 inches (121.9 × 127 cm), edition of 10 © David Bailey

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David Bailey: The Sixties David Bailey sits down with Derek Blasberg for a far-ranging conversation.

36 Desert Painters of Australia Fred Myers writes on the emergence of Indigenous Australian painters and details the work of ten exemplary artists in the tradition; Steve Martin speaks with Louise Neri about his enthusiasm for paintings by these artists.

54 Richard Wright In an interview with Kay Pallister, Richard Wright explains his relationship to drawing and the importance of time in his site-specific works.

60 Kenwood House Anna Eavis, the curatorial director of English Heritage, traces the history of Kenwood House and details the remarkable collection of paintings that reside there.

Georg Baselitz, Fingermalerei — Akt (Finger Painting — Nude), 1973, oil on canvas, 98 ⅞ × 70 ⅞ inches (251 × 180 cm). Georg Baselitz Treuhandstiftung.

Artwork © Georg Baselitz.

Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin

Bottom row, left to right: Neil Jenney, Admonition and Inexperience, 1969, acrylic and graphite on canvas, in artist’s painted wood frame, 55 ⅝ × 59 ¾ inches (148.9 × 151.8 cm) © Neil Jenney. Photo: Rob McKeever Jeff Wall, Mother of pearl, 2016, inkjet print, 23 ⅝ × 27 ¾ inches (60 × 70.5 cm) © Jeff Wall

66 In Conversation J. Tomilson Hill tells Derek Blasberg about the origins of the Hill Art Foundation, New York, and reminisces about his early days as an art collector.

70 Edmund de Waal: psalm Edmund de Waal speaks with Alison McDonald about the components of psalm, his two-part project taking place in Venice, Italy.

76 Cast of Characters James Lawrence explores the various ways contemporary artists have grappled with the subject of libraries.

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Neil Jenney The artist speaks with Douglas Dreishpoon about his career, his conception of the term “realism,” and he explains why one must discover one’s own rules.

Carlos Valladares explores the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, tracing the developments and lasting influence of the auteur’s singular career.

John Elderfield and Pepe Karmel discuss the concept of the panorama in relation to Helen Frankenthaler’s work.

100 Building a Legacy: Archives

114 Venetian Heritage

Heather Gendron and Jill Sterrett sit down with Rani Singh to talk about artists’ archives.

Peter Marino and Toto Bergamo Rossi tell Jason Ysenburg about the various restoration projects undertaken by the organization Venetian Heritage.

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Baselitz Bildung Richard Calvocoressi uses the momentous occasion of Georg Baselitz’s exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia to track the evolution of the artist’s development.

126 Laws of Motion Catalyzed by a group exhibition pairing artworks from the 1980s with contemporary sculptures, Wyatt Allgeier writes on the convergences and divergences in various artists’ practices with an eye to the economic conditions from which they sprang.

132 The Generative Surface Eileen Costello writes on the ways in which developments in paper production have related to artists’ practices and techniques.

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Jeff Wall Jeff Wall speaks with David Rimanelli about his newest works, the physicality of photography, and the persistence of certain motifs in his career.

140 Love is Not a Flame: Part II A short story by Mark Z. Danielewski

146 Y.Z. Kami: Luminosities Elena Geuna interviews the artist on the subjects of his childhood, his approach to portraiture, and the centrality of light in his practice.

150 Lost Highways Lee Ranaldo speaks with Brett Littman about his work as a writer and a visual artist.

154 Studio Peregalli Sergio Risaliti speaks with Roberto Peregalli and Laura Sartori Rimini, the duo behind the interior design firm Studio Peregalli.

174 Game Changer Michael Cary pays tribute to the colossal life of Sir John Patrick Richardson (1924–2019).

TABLE OF CONTENTS SUMMER 2019

92 104 Pasolini’s Faces Frankenthaler

W

e are thrilled that our covers are graced by details from Ellen Gallagher’s painting Afrylic that are both powerful and poetic.

This summer we focus on Venice.

Georg Baselitz is the first living artist to have a major exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia. The show explores the influence of Italian masters on the German artist. Richard Calvocoressi looks at the insights we can gain into Baselitz’s work by tracing the artist’s early development.

John Elderfield and Pepe Karmel discuss the panoramic works of Helen Frankenthaler, in an exhibition at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani, a site recently restored by the foundation Venetian Heritage. Peter Marino and Toto Bergamo Rossi discuss their firsthand involvement in the foundation’s preservation initiatives.

Edmund de Waal unveils a two-part exhibition in Venice’s Ghetto that includes a carefully selected library: all its books are by authors who have experienced exile.

In a related article, James Lawrence considers the many artists who have incorporated libraries into their practice, as inspiration and symbols but also in material ways.

Leaving Venice behind, a dynamic conversation between Jeff Wall and David Rimanelli focuses on the artist’s newest body of work, on view in New York. We are grateful to J. Tomilson Hill for telling us about his new foundation’s grand exhibition space on New York’s High Line. And we highlight a remarkable historical example of the private art collection at Kenwood House, an English Heritage site in London.

One of my favorite articles in this issue is by Fred Myers, who writes on Indigenous Australian Desert painters, accompanied by a conversation between Steve Martin and Louise Neri about collecting works by these artists.

We close this issue with a dedication to Sir John Richardson, a friend, colleague, and mentor to many at Gagosian, myself included. John’s visionary approach to storytelling and his influence on the art of biography will resonate for generations.

Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

GAGOSIAN QUARTERLY ONLINE Right: Installation view, Arakawa: Diagrams for the Imagination, Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, March 5–April 13, 2019. Artwork © Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins. Photo: Rob McKeever Below, left: Installation view, Katharina Grosse: Mumbling Mud, chi K11 art museum, Shanghai, October 11, 2018–February 24, 2019. Artwork © Katharina Grosse and VG BildKunst, Bonn, 2019

Below, right: Nam June Paik, Fin de Siècle II, 1989 (partially restored, 2018), seven-channel video installation, 207 televisions, sound, 168 × 480 × 60 in. (426.7 × 1219.2 × 152.4 cm) © Nam June Paik Estate. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Laila and Thurston TwiggSmith 93.139. Installation view, Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 28, 2018–April 14, 2019. Photo: Ron Amstutz

Behind the Art: Arakawa Featuring an interview with Gagosian director Ealan Wingate, this video offers a unique look into the diagrammatic works of Arakawa.

Gagosian Quarterly Monthly Newsletter For the latest updates on Gagosian Quarterly online features, including videos, studio visits, artist profiles, and more, sign up for our highlights e-newsletter, delivered to your inbox at the end of every month: www.gagosian.com/subscribe

Artist Interview: Katharina Grosse

Spotlight: Nam June Paik

For a recent exhibition at K11 in Shanghai, Katharina Grosse created an immersive labyrinth that leads viewers through five distinct zones. We take a visual tour through Mumbling Mud and the installation process behind it as the artist discusses the effects of the work’s merging of built and painted space.

Gillian Jakab writes on Paik’s Fin de Siècle II (1989), exploring the choreographic conventions and innovations of this grand work on the occasion of its recent presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

"CAMÉLIA" NECKLACE IN WHITE GOLD, RUBY AND DIAMONDS "CAMÉLIA" RING IN WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS

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CONTRIBUTORS John Elderfield

David Rimanelli

John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and consulting curator at the Princeton University Art Museum, joined Gagosian seven years ago as a senior curator.

David Rimanelli began writing about art in 1988 and has chronicled developments in the New York art world for over two decades. From 1993 to 1999, he was a regular contributor to The New Yorker; since 1997 he has been a contributing editor at Artforum, writing also for Bookforum, Interview, Texte zur Kunst, Vogue Paris, frieze, the New York Times, and Flash Art.

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

Photo: Miro Kuzmanovic

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.

His work has been translated and published throughout the world.

Photo: Nicolas Harvard

Richard Wright Richard Wright is best known for his site-specific yet transient works that unite painting with graphic and typographic elements, charging architectural spaces with a fourth dimension of subtle yet extreme optical complexity and subverting the traditionally static dynamic between painting and viewer. Wright won the Turner Prize in 2009 and is considered one of the key artists in the generation that emerged out of Glasgow in the 1990s, together with Martin Boyce, Douglas Gordon, and Simon Starling. In 2016 Wright was commissioned to make a vast permanent gold-leaf work for the 400th anniversary of the Queen’s House (now part of the Royal Museums Greenwich), designed by Inigo Jones—the first fully neoclassical building in England.

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Kay Pallister Kay Pallister has worked on exhibitions and productions with artists at Gagosian since 1997. After art school in England she attended the postgraduate curatorial course at De Appel in Amsterdam in 1996. She most recently managed the commissioning of major permanent public artworks by Douglas Gordon and Richard Wright for the new Tottenham Court Road station for Crossrail, the new high speed line for London.

Steve Martin As an actor, comedian, author, playwright, screenwriter, producer, and musician, Steve Martin is one of the most diversified performers and acclaimed artists of his generation.

Martin’s work has earned him an Academy Award, five Grammy awards, an Emmy, the Mark Twain Award, an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors. As an author, Martin’s work includes the novel An Object of Beauty, the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a collection of comic pieces, Pure Drivel, a bestselling novella, Shopgirl, and his memoir Born Standing Up. In this issue he speaks with Louise Neri about his passion for the paintings of Indigenous Australian artists.

Fred Myers Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology at NYU, has been doing research with Pintupi-speaking people on their art, their relationships to land, and other matters since 1973. Myers has published two books, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Australian Aborigines (1986) and Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (2002).

Neil Jenney A maverick of twentieth-century American art, Neil Jenney pursues realism as both a style and a philosophy. He strives to return to the classical ideal of truth and to integrate form and content, while eschewing what he has described as the decorative, expressive qualities of modern abstraction.

Photo: Debra Jenney

Louise Neri Louise Neri has been a director at Gagosian since 2006, representing a diversity of artists and working on exhibitions, events, and special projects across the gallery’s global platform.

Edmund de Waal A potter since childhood and an acclaimed writer, Edmund de Waal is best known as an artist for his largescale installations of porcelain vessels, which are informed by his passion for architecture, space, and sound.

Photo: Ben McKee

Douglas Dreishpoon Douglas Dreishpoon, chief curator emeritus at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, is currently director of the catalogue raisonné project at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York. His book, What is Sculpture?, part of the Documents of Twentieth Century Art series, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.

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R A LPH L AUR EN intr od ucing the r l 5 0 h a nd b ag

r a l p h l a u r e n . c o m / t h e r l 5 0 # t h e r l 5 0

David Bailey David Bailey’s bold and iconoclastic style has made him one of the world’s most renowned living portrait photographers, and earned him as much fame as his stellar subjects.

Discarding the rigid rules of a previous generation of portrait and fashion photographers, he has continually channeled and immortalized the energies of London and beyond.

Bailey’s technique of natural portraiture cast models not as stiff mannequins or mere vehicles for fashion, but as subjects in themselves, as people whose personalities could be drawn out through the process of photographing them.

Photo: Fenton Bailey

Sergio Risaliti Sergio Risaliti is an art historian, writer, and curator of exhibitions and interdisciplinary events. He founded the Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, and served as its director until 2002. Since 2014 he has acted as artistic director of projects at the Forte di Belvedere, the Stefano Bardini Museum, the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Piazza della Signoria, Florence.

Photo: Giovanni De Angelis

Y.Z. Kami Y.Z. Kami was born in Tehran and lives in New York. His work reflects a diverse range of interests, from portraiture to architecture, from photography to sacred and literary texts. Kami’s work appears in public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York; the British Museum, London; and many other institutions worldwide.

Photo: Sueraya Shaheen

Elena Geuna Elena Geuna is an independent curator, author, and art advisor. Geuna has curated international exhibitions, including Jeff Koons (Château de Versailles, France, 2008); Fontana: Luce e Colore (Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, Italy, 2008); Rudolf Stingel (Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2013); and many more.

Studio Peregalli Laura Sartori Rimini, architect, and Roberto Peregalli, philosopher, founded Studio Peregalli in Milan in the early 1990s and have created exceptional interiors and architecture for projects around the world, as well as designing theater sets and exhibitions. Both worked for the legendary architect Renzo Mongiardino. Their work has been featured in The World of Interiors, Architectural Digest, Elle Décor, Cabana, and other leading publications. The international press has selected Studio Peregalli as one of the 100 most influential interior design firms in the world. Rimini and Peregalli are the authors of The Invention of the Past (Rizzoli, New York, and Bompiani, Milan, 2011) and Grand Tour (Rizzoli, New York, and La nave di Teseo, Milan, 2018).

Photo: Hugh Findletar

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James Lawrence James Lawrence is a critic and historian of postwar and contemporary art. He is a frequent contributor to The Burlington Magazine and his writings appear in many gallery and museum publications around the world.

Photo: William Davie

Brett Littman

Lee Ranaldo

Brett Littman is the director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Long Island City. He has contributed news and commentary to a wide range of international art publications and critical essays to many exhibition catalogues.

Photo: Mari Juliano

Lee Ranaldo is a founding member of Sonic Youth, and played in the band from their debut in 1981 through 2011, when their activities ceased. He is a musician, composer, visual artist, writer, and producer. His recent albums include The Callas and Lee Ranaldo: Trouble and Desire (Mute, 2018) and Electric Trim (Mute, 2017).

Photo: Tom Bronowski

Heather Gendron

Jill Sterrett

Heather Gendron is Director of the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University and is coauthor of Artists’ Studio Archives: Managing Personal Collections and Creative Legacies, a free online guide for visual artists. Gendron has served Art Libraries Society of North America in several leadership roles, including president and member of the Executive Board.

Jill Sterrett is Deputy Director for Museum Affairs and Strategic Impact at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, and her work focuses on the role of museums in contemporary society. She was previously Director of Collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Sterrett is President of Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA).

Toto Bergamo Rossi

Eileen Costello

Wyatt Allgeier

Toto Bergamo Rossi, a restorer specialized in the conservation of stone, has restored important monuments in Italy and abroad. Since 2010 he has been the director of Venetian Heritage, an international nonprofit organization with offices in New York and Venice, which supports cultural initiatives through restorations, exhibitions, publications, conferences, studies, and research, with the goal of making the world more aware of the immense legacy of the art of Venice. He has led numerous restoration projects, exhibitions, and publications.

Eileen Costello is a historian of modern and contemporary art. A specialist in catalogue raisonné scholarship, she is the editor and project director of Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing (The Menil Collection, 2018), is nearing completion of a catalogue raisonné of Tony Smith’s architecture, and is editing the catalogue raisonné of Arshile Gorky’s complete works.

Wyatt Allgeier is a writer and an editor for Gagosian Quarterly. In this issue he explores the writings of Guy Debord, finding echoes of the theorist’s ideas in artworks from the 1980s and the present.

Peter Marino Peter Marino, FAIA, is the principal of Peter Marino Architect, the 160-person New York firm he founded in 1978. Marino’s work includes award-winning residential, retail, cultural, and hospitality projects worldwide. He is also chairman of Venetian Heritage, a foundation supporting restoration projects in Venice. This spring, in celebration of its twentieth anniversary, Venetian Heritage brought a program of Venetian art and music to cultural institutions in New York City; a concert, an exhibition, and a ball followed in Venice.

Photo: Manolo Yllera

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Derek Blasberg

Carlos Valladares

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.

Photo: Pier Guido Grassano

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

Rani Singh

Michael Cary

Rani Singh is Director of Special Projects at Gagosian, Beverly Hills.

Her work focuses on strategic planning and legacy management for artists, exhibition development, museum outreach, and programming.

Singh initiated the Artists’ Archive and Estates initiative for Gagosian, which has been active since 2018.

Since 1992 she has been the director of the Harry Smith Archives.

Michael Cary organizes exhibitions for Gagosian, including eight Picasso exhibitions in collaboration with John Richardson and members of the Picasso family. He joined Gagosian in 2008 after six years working with the late Kynaston McShine, then Chief Curator at Large at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Photo: Clive Smith

Pepe Karmel

Jason Ysenburg

Richard Calvocoressi

Pepe Karmel teaches in the Department of Art History, New York University.

His book Picasso and the Invention of Cubism was published by Yale University Press in 2003. He has curated or cocurated many exhibitions, including Robert Morris: Felt Works (Grey Art Gallery, 1989), Jackson Pollock (MoMA, 1998), The Age of Picasso (Fundación Botín, 2004), and Conceptual Abstraction (Hunter College Gallery, 2012). He has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and has written for publications including Art in America and the New York Times. His new book Abstract Art: A Global History will be published by Thames & Hudson in 2020.

Jason Ysenburg has been a director at Gagosian for the past four years. He grew up in England. He has worked on a number of projects in Italy, including shows at the Archeological Museum in Naples and exhibitions of the Sonnabend Collection at MADRE in Naples. In this issue he speaks with Peter Marino and Toto Bergamo Rossi about Venetian Heritage.

Richard Calvocoressi is a scholar and art historian. He has been a curator at Tate, London, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and director of the Henry Moore Foundation.

Calvocoressi joined Gagosian in 2015.

Anna Eavis Anna Eavis is curatorial director of English Heritage, with responsibility for the presentation of over four hundred historic sites and their collections. Eavis is a trustee of the Stained Glass Museum, Ely, and of the Leeds Castle Foundation, and is a member of the fabric advisory committees at Salisbury Cathedral and Canterbury Cathedral.

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CHAUMET IN MAJESTY Jewels of Sovereigns Since 1780

EXHIBITION FROM 12 JULY TO 28 AUGUST 2019 AT THE GRIMALDI FORUM, MONACO

Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 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

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Cover Ellen Gallagher

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Contributors Wyatt Allgeier David Bailey Toto Bergamo Rossi Derek Blasberg Richard Calvocoressi Michael Cary Eileen Costello Mark Z. Danielewski Edmund de Waal Douglas Dreishpoon Anna Eavis John Elderfield Heather Gendron Elena Geuna J. Tomilson Hill Neil Jenney Y.Z. Kami Pepe Karmel James Lawrence Brett Littman Peter Marino Steve Martin Alison McDonald Fred Myers Louise Neri Kay Pallister Roberto Peregalli Lee Ranaldo David Rimanelli Sergio Risaliti Laura Sartori Rimini Rani Singh Jill Sterrett Carlos Valladares Jeff Wall Richard Wright Jason Ysenburg

Thanks Julia Arena David Arkin Richard Alwyn Fisher Chloe Barter Elke Baselitz Georg Baselitz Breanne Bradley Annie Cicco Curtis Clarizio Noah Dillon Tyler Drosdeck Victoria Eatough Leeor Engländer Valentina Farace Kate Fernandez-Lupino Lauren Fisher Douglas Flamm Emily Florido Mark Francis Ellen Gallagher Brett Garde Theaster Gates Clare Gidwitz Alice Godwin Darlina Goldak Detlev Gretenkort Andreas Gursky Sarah Hoover Delphine Huisinga Sarah Jones Anselm Kiefer Freya Klein Josh Kline Jeff Koons Tom Lee Alexandra Magnuson Lauren Mahony

Pepi Marchetti Franchi Brice Marden Emily Matson Susannah Maybank Rob McKeever Adele Minardi Olivia Mull Lauren Oliver Sam Orlofsky Kathy Paciello Jaimie Park Elena Pinchiurri Richard Prince Arabella Radford Stefan Ratibor Michele Reverte Alexandra Samaras Sarah Sickles Taryn Simon Courtney Spieker Andie Trainer Kelsey Tyler Kara Vander Weg Ramon Vega Robin Vousden Tabitha Walker Julia Westner Rachel Whiteread Lilias Wigan Eva Wildes Millicent Wilner Ottilie Windsor Sarah Womble Kelso Wyeth Anicka Yi

JEFF WALL The artist speaks with David Rimanelli about his newest works, the physicality of photography, and the persistence of certain motifs throughout his career.

Jeff, do the photographs in this exhibition work together as a group, either thematically or conceptually? You’ve returned throughout your career to subjects that could be labeled as landscapes, interiors, and allegories. How do you characterize this exhibition’s iteration of those modes?

JEFF WALL I don’t make exhibitions as such—each picture is a singular event, I never aim to make a picture that relates to another one in any deliberate way—but sometimes affinities show up later. In this show there could be a few connections. Half of the exhibition, including some of the older pieces we’re including, are exteriors or landscapes. There are The Gardens [2017] and Hillside Sicily, November 2007 [2007], which was done more than ten years ago but has rarely been seen in New York, as well as Daybreak [2011], the picture made in Israel, and the recent picture Recovery [2017–18], which is set in a seaside park in summertime. They’re generically related to each other because of the wide view, the exteriority, the weather, the places, the light.

And then there’s the other group of pictures, some of them interiors, some exteriors but not really landscapes. There’s a little girl lying on the sidewalk in Parent child [2018], and, by coincidence, there’s another picture with a little girl in it. Is that a theme? It almost feels like one in the context of DAVID RIMANELLI

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the show; there are crossings-over that happen, but they weren’t planned.

DR When I look at the images in the show, I start to narrativize them. I think viewers of the exhibition will make connections even if you didn’t intend them. Don’t you think?

JW Yes, it’s inherent in the experience of seeing pictures that one does that.

DR You haven’t used the light box medium for over a decade. Were you tired of it? Was there a desire to make photographs in a more reticent or “traditional” vein?

JW I was tired of the light box, in part for technical reasons. Photographing for that transmission of light has specific requirements that I began to feel were restrictive. I also found that I was becoming less satisfied with the emphatic presence of the work of that kind, especially in relation to other things around it in exhibitions.

DR Some of your earlier work has this somewhat hortatory presence. I’m thinking of Picture for Women [1979], which has an almost peremptory quality of address: “Listen to me. Look at me.” I think this made them very exciting and alive at that time, but I can see how speaking in this kind of stentorian tone could become less interesting for an artist.

JW The images themselves often didn’t do that, but the medium did, or at least it went in that

Previous spread: Jeff Wall, Weightlifter, 2015, gelatin silver print, 94 1⁄8 × 118 3⁄8 inches (239 × 300.5 cm) Above: Jeff Wall, Summer Afternoons, 2013, two parts, LightJet prints, left: 72 × 83 ½ inches (183 × 212.4 cm), right: 78 ¾ × 98 5⁄8 inches (200 × 250.5 cm)

Opposite, below: Jeff Wall, Stereo, 1980, two parts, transparency in light box; silkscreen on Plexiglas, each: 84 × 84 inches (213 × 213 cm). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

direction. I have more than one tone of voice, as you put it, and I wanted to hear what some of the others sounded like. Also, obviously, photography is more expansive than any one type of print could encompass. I began to work in black and white about twenty years ago because I wanted to have a larger repertoire. And then the arrival of inkjet printers around 2000 changed the way color photographs were going to be made—the technology presented an attractive opening for another kind of color photography.

DR So in the last fifteen years your work has moved away from the light box and has become less hortatory. That seems very much the case with the photographs in this exhibition. The one that seems to evoke that earlier phase of your work would be the diptych Summer Afternoons, from 2013. With its high saturation, the nude man, the composition, it reminds me of Stereo [1980]. Could you speak to that a little?

JW That’s interesting—I hadn’t thought of it, but it does resemble Stereo. In general I don’t think the subject matter of my pictures has changed in character all that much. Stereo is a good example, because the reclining man in that photograph— which was made almost forty years ago!—isn’t really much different in mood or composition from the man in Summer Afternoons. I’m older now, so I 31

see things differently, I guess, but aside from that, I’ve always felt that there’s continuity. I don’t know whether I could change—I’m not sure what that would mean, because picture-making is so free but also so highly structured by our tradition that pictures tend to resemble each other when they’re made in certain ways.

Summer Afternoons was based on a couple of personal memories of a particular place, which was a replica of a real place I once lived in. Its character came back to me and that meaning or mood was worth investigating. The nudes came, in a way, out of the bright warmth of that place. The fact that they emerged as a kind of outcome of something else is typical of what I’ve done for a long time. The figures appearing in my photographs are phantoms, in a way, that have emerged out of a set of circumstances that gave rise to that motif. They’re hard to explain but they happen, and sometimes those figures have a kind of emblematic quality.

DR The male figure in particular has a sort of Matissean quality.

JW I wouldn’t have thought of it directly at the time, but yes, Matisse is a big favorite and his color sense is obviously a model for how to do color in painting, color in anything for that matter. The color was also informed by the work of the English interior decorator David Hicks. My wife Jeannette likes his work so much, and she helped me with the decor. She painted that London flat those colors in 1972. I recreated it using our old photographs.

All of those elements are part of a language that engages what I’m trying to do, which is basically to make a picture in our tradition, such as it exists today.

DR I’d like to talk about your black and white pictures. You’ve spoken about the palpable, physical qualities of black and white photography. This characterization is so incredibly powerful and clear in Weightlifter [2015]: there’s the rich gradations of gray, black, silver, the reflection of the metal. It’s very physical. This physicality of the material is echoed in the subject itself. For me, as a viewer of the picture, it’s filled with sexuality. Am I wrong to read it this way?

JW I don’t think you can have a human figure in a picture without that erotic element being present. It’s simply part of the picturing effect, because people do relate to people in pictures as if they were beings. It’s just one of the great pleasures of aesthetic experience—this “as if ” experience of another person. We can never extract that erotic dimension from any aesthetic experience. So, of course, you’re completely right. And it makes no difference what I intended because I’m not sure I really know or even care to know what I really intended, except to make a picture of a weightlifter and do it as well as I could. The rest takes off on its own. As I’ve said many times, the viewer writes the poem that the artist has erased in the process of making the picture. I don’t think eroticism in art has anything to do with erotic subject matter directly.

DR That’s an unconventional idea.

JW Matisse is a great example here as well, where his swirl of color and shape is erotic and exciting on its own, whether it’s a tree or a sky or a face. I think all picture-making has that in it to different degrees.

Back to the question of the physicality of black and white photographs: yes, there’s something luxurious and yet austere about the monochrome element. I feel that the vanishing of color is itself exciting. You know there are colors there 32

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Previous spread, left: Jeff Wall, I giardini / The Gardens, 2017, three parts, top: Appunto / Complaint; center: Disappunto / Denial; bottom: Diffida / Expulsion order, inkjet prints, each: 97 ¾ × 155 7⁄8 inches (248.5 × 395.9 cm) Previous spread, right: Jeff Wall, Appunto / Complaint, 2017 (detail), inkjet print, 97 ¾ × 155 7⁄8 inches (248.5 × 395.9 cm) Above: Jeff Wall, Parent child, 2018, inkjet print, 86 5⁄8 × 108 ¼ inches (220 × 275 cm) Artwork © 2019 Jeff Wall

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but you can’t see them. That’s an excitement that’s always been there in black and white photography.

It creates a real physical effect.

But of course the inkjet print is, in fact, just as physical. My friend Roy Arden says inkjet prints are machine-made pointillist paintings; like Seurat’s pictures, they’re made of dots. The dots are just smaller and made by a machine.

DR When I interviewed you once many years ago, I remember you told me that you weren’t interested in popular culture. It was such a striking thing to say, because it seemed so out of step with what people think contemporary art is supposed to be interested in or about. It struck me as very much like the avant-garde in a way, this refusal, this saying “No. No popular culture. No.” JW I think it’s saying no to conventionality more than to popular culture. That all artists somehow express their relation to the culture they emerged from is obviously true, but the new conventional assumption over the last twenty, thirty years is that all recent artists have emerged from a background primarily shaped by mass culture. That’s not true for me, partly because I’m older. My own childhood and adolescence weren’t marked very much by popular culture; I was interested in high culture, so called, then—novels and paintings and

so on—much more than in popular forms, even though I’m perfectly aware of them. I can’t be that absorbed in popular culture partly because I didn’t have those childhood passions, and also because I’m just more affected by older forms and attitudes that don’t derive from the mass-cultural norm.

DR It wouldn’t be authentic.

JW Yes, so I have a critical view of the conventionality of the attitude toward the relation between popular culture and serious art. It’s become what’s expected of artists—to define themselves in relation to their emergence from popular culture, mass culture, subcultures. This implies that not doing so is somehow an obsolete way of being an artist.

By now, the idea that art essentially or primarily emerges from the artist’s childhood relation with mass-culture forms is so conventional it’s become tiresome.

DR Banal.

JW Yes. Traces of mass-culture forms appear in my pictures because I can’t avoid them. But these elements are part of the actuality, part of the landscape, they needn’t be excised.

DR It’s not the motive of the work.

JW No, but I have to accept the world. I’m a photographer; I have to accept what appears as it appears.

DESERT PAINTERS OF AUSTRALIA Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield’s collection of contemporary Indigenous Australian painting spans three generations of the so-called “Desert Painters,” owing to their remote existence in Central and Western Australia. The exhibition also includes a key loan from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia. Gagosian’s Louise Neri talks with Martin about his collecting passion, with commentary by his friend and longtime aficionado of the Desert artists, Professor Fred Myers.

Text by Fred Myers

Previous spread: George Tjungurrayi, Untitled—Kirrimalunya, 2007, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 96 × 72 inches (244 × 183 cm) Opposite, top: Willy Tjungurrayi, Untitled, 2001, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 59 7⁄8 × 72 inches (152 × 183 cm) Opposite, bottom: Naata Nungurrayi, Untitled, 2010, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 48 × 54 inches (122 × 137 cm)

The works in this exhibition all emanate from a single, basic cultural tradition of image, decoration, and performance, and more specifically from an emergent art movement among Indigenous Australians that has drawn on that tradition.

The show contains paintings from several different Indigenous communities and by speakers of different languages, but their underlying cultural forms are shared. What is called the “Western Desert art movement” began concretely with Indigenous Australian men living in a government-managed Central Australian community known as Papunya. These men developed the practice of painting with acrylics on a two-dimensional surface, eventually Belgian linen, drawing on their own preexisting practices and images, and on their imaginings of ritual and ancestral creative activities in the landscape.

The paintings, I was told very early on, were “true”—that is, they drew their authenticity from the ancestral stories that they continued to represent, and from the places in the landscape in which these stories were primally enacted and which were formed by the ancestral actions.

Places, stories, origins—all these inspired the first generation of painters to put their images into two-dimensional form to show to outsiders.

This transformation—from body and ritual painting, rock art, and sacred objects to two-dimensional forms—was from the beginning a creative invention, a transposing of traditions into different and new forms, striking for their beauty and variety. One would be misled to refer to this work as either traditional or nontraditional; that is quite beside the point. The artists strongly assert that it is drawn from, inspired by, and transmits the authority and truth of ancestral revelations, notwithstanding the human variety of creative mediations and instantiations of “truth.”

Such artworks are part of a history, an aesthetic and conceptual movement that has changed its forms from its beginnings—in 1971, with the men who came together around the opportunity provided by the schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon at Papunya—to the present. This movement has been a surprising and inspiring history of invention, innovation, and novelty that has made its way onto museum and art-gallery walls throughout Australia, Asia, Europe, and the United States—a history all the more compelling for the fact that many of its creators began their lives as hunting and gathering people in one of the world’s most demanding desert environments.

The works in this exhibition belong to what might be seen as a third or fourth wave of innovation. They were painted for the most part after 1990 by men who were middle-aged in the early 1970s, when the movement began; by women of an age at which they might have been married to those original painters but who began painting later, in the 1990s; by men who were young in the early 1970s; and by a still younger generation.

These were the waves of gendered and generationally different engagement that brought new forms into being. This information might be useful when looking at their works as part of a history: the virtuosity of these works cannot be appreciated through their passing parallels with other formal conventions in modern and contemporary art. These are inventions that took place locally, as

Indigenous artists sought to attract broader attention and to communicate what mattered to them through visual art.

The Artists One of the few remaining artists of the first generation, Willy Tjungurrayi was born in 1932 into a family still living in a traditional way. After his early middle age, he lived in various settled Pintupi communities and by virtue of this timing and history was deeply embedded in those communities’ ritual knowledge and the beneficiary of the extensive range of rituals that they knew and practiced. The painting in the exhibition, Untitled, 2001, is from a place with which he was closely identified, the large dry salt lake known in English as Lake MacDonald and in Pintupi as Kaakurutintjinya. The lake has mythological origins in a story in the ancestral Tingarri cycle, which tells of the connected travels of groups of young male novices through the country. This particular story deals with a marsupial cat—Kuninka, an ancestral being—and its punishment of two ceremonial initiates who had neglected to share the meat from a hunt. Kuninka unleashed a hailstorm on these young men, killing them and turning the vegetation of the area into a burned-out area—a dry salt lake. The two initiates turned into water snakes.

Many of the Pintupi painters from the Papunya Tula arts cooperative have painted Kaakurutintjinya; Tjungurrayi’s work is an extraordinary abstraction of it, and of the story about it. The white dots represent the hailstones that fell on the lake, depicting them in all their sheer number, magnitude, and expanse. Tjungurrayi’s hand does not practice the careful, exacting mark-making of some of the younger painters but rather shows the expressiveness with which his generation more typically painted.

The show’s two paintings by Makinti Napanangka (1930–2011) represent the story Kungka Kutjarra (Two women), which takes place at Lupulnga, in the Sir Frederick Range, her father’s country and the place where she grew up. Napanangka didn’t start to paint until she was well past middle age, in the mid-1990s. She had a deep interest in women’s rituals, which in her community were focused on the pair of ancestral women known as Kungka Kutjarra. These women created the rocks at Lupulnga and their activities are reenacted in a women’s-only ritual typically involving dancing with woven strands of string spun of human hair (often cut in mourning). The bold and flowing lines of color in both paintings represent the movement of these fiber strands, which take the form of women’s nyimparra skirt coverings in the ancestral story but are held as strands in the hands of dancers in the ritual. The paintings replicate visually the power identified in the hair strings. Napanangka herself participated vigorously in the ceremonies, reenacting these ancestral events. She found great pleasure in reproducing this ritual engagement in paint on canvas.

After the death of her first husband in the early ’60s, Naata Nungurrayi (born 1932) and her young sons made their way to Papunya at a time when the last remaining Pintupi who were living an independent life were migrating out of the desert. At Papunya, she remarried, and one of her sons—Kenny Williams Tjampitjinpa— became a significant painter before she did. Nungurrayi, like many of the women artists, really began her life as a painter in the mid-1990s, when 39

IN THIS PAINTING THE APPEARANCE OF ABSTRACTION OFFERS THE VIEWER THE EXPERIENCE OF ENGAGING WITH THE RITUAL FORM OF THE PLACE WITHOUT REVEALING THE SPECIFICS OF THE RITUAL, WHICH ARE RESTRICTED OR SECRET. most of the older generation of men had passed away. This new generation of women coming to the practice of painting in acrylic brought a great burst of energy to the art movement: although their paintings remained concerned with the country, its landscape, and its ancestral stories, they introduced new imagery and new organizations of paint. Nungurrayi’s painting Untitled (2010) represents Karilywarranya, in the Pollock Hills in Western Australia, where she grew up.

The painting incorporates the story of the ancestral rock pythons (carpet snakes, kuniya) said to have visited this place. The painting shows the kuniya’s decorative coils along an ascending path at Karilywarra, surrounded by what Nungurrayi conceives as the verdancy of the local vegetation; after rain, water collects in gullies and rockpools, and the area comes alive with vegetation, birds, and animals, as represented in the brightness of color and the rough extravagance of the dotting.

Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri (born c. 1958) is significant as a member of what became known as the “Pintupi Nine,” or the “first contact group,” one of the last Indigenous groups to move into contact with Australian society, in 1984. His work has been shown in such major exhibitions as documenta 13, in Kassel, Germany. Tjapaltjarri started painting in acrylics in 1987, after observing his relatives painting in the remote community of Kiwirrkura, in Western Australia, where the art cooperative known as Papunya Tula (from 40

its origins at Papunya settlement) had become well established with the movement of former Papunya-area residents to the west in the 1980s.

Because of his special status, his earliest paintings were set aside as a distinct and significant collection, which was purchased and donated to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Tjapaltjarri started his career with the acquisition of ritual knowledge and the making of designs in various media as part of the activities of his life before leaving the bush.1 Like the other painters in this exhibition, Tjapaltjarri paints his country, very often Lake Mackay (Wilkinkarra), a huge salt lake, or Marruwa, the more intimate site where his family often lived. Untitled (2015)—probably a painting of Wilkinkarra—is a brilliant example of how he has evolved from his initial deployment of the motifs of circle and line, drawing on an iconography of body decoration and sand-drawing most common in the first generation of painters. Currently, his work involves large canvases of rectilinear forms produced out of lines of dots. These dots have their origin in local practices of male body decoration, especially in the ceremonial performance of stories of the Tingarri cycle (in which performers enact ancestral beings), and rock art. In the acrylic work, though, their use has been elaborated and extended in allover treatments and as the basis of delineating actual forms. The rectilinear patterns themselves are culturally significant for many of the painters in the show: these keylike interlocking forms resonate with incised designs on wooden shields and spear-throwers, as well as with a variety of ritual objects marked by incising or carving rather than paint. Dots, it should also be understood, are themselves forms deriving from the ancestral realm. They have been elaborated in the painting movement, but the word used to refer to them is restrictive, “men-only,” and like the dots themselves is said to be “dangerous.” As the painting movement has developed, women have been allowed to use these forms, which are significant as signs or indices of ancestral power and presence.

In the painting of Wilkinkarra, we can imagine that Tjapaltjarri emphasizes the ancestral power of the place through the optical effects of the dotted figure-ground relationship. In much of Indigenous Australia, the effect of “shimmering” brilliance, as Professor Howard Morphy has called it, is identified with ancestral power. In ritual activity, often at night and by firelight, the movement of dancing figures bearing body painting and decoration produces a kind of shimmer or flash. The painting creates this flash with its own resources, but the form of the design resonates with the designs of sacred objects and emblems that represent the salt lake’s mythological activities. As such, it is a sign of a sign, and by drawing from the signification of the place, it brings forth Tjapaltjarri’s own excited experience of the story and its enactment. In this painting the appearance of abstraction offers the viewer the experience of engaging with the ritual form of the place without revealing the specifics of the ritual, which are restricted or secret.

The ancestral story of Wilkinkarra is often reenacted in teaching initiates about the travels of the Tingarri novices, and the overt features of the story are known to most. Briefly, it involves a group of traveling women who reach a hill where they see two older men. They notice kangaroo meat there, however, which implies that young

Opposite, top: Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Untitled, 2013, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 59 7⁄8 × 72 inches (152 × 183 cm) Opposite, bottom: Makinti Napanangka, Kungka Kutjarra (Two Women), 2001, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 48 × 60 ¼ inches (122 × 153 cm)

Opposite, top: Yukultji Napangati, Ancestral Women at Marrapinti, 2017, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 59 7⁄8 × 72 inches (152 × 183 cm) Opposite, bottom: Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Tarkulnga, 1988, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 60 ¼ × 72 inches (153 × 183 cm)

men are somewhere nearby; they find the young men, have intercourse with them, and are happy to have them as partners, but the older men are angered by this transgression, which interrupts the ritual control of the younger men by the older ones. The old men light fires to burn out the area, killing all the young men and women. The salt lake is the ash from the fire. There are many more features to this story, and to hear Tjapaltjarri tell it is to experience the excitement and intensity packed into his painting—of a mountain exploded and reduced to a f lat plain, the revival of the women from death, and their subsequent travel back to Northwest Australia. To see the painting is to have this experience conveyed through the flashing and shimmering form of the mesmerizing rectilinear design, bringing to the viewer the power of ancestral creativity as well as the artist’s attachment and emotional connection to place.

Ronnie Tjampitjinpa (born 1943) was a young man when the first generation of painters invented “Western Desert acrylic painting,” or “Papunya Tula painting,” as it was initially known and developed in that specific community. Tjampitjinpa came into his own as an artist in the late ’80s as part of a “second wave” of aesthetic development. His painting led the way in its focus on very bold imagery and the accentuation of strobelike figure-ground effects in the design. Rather than emphasizing an iconography directly expressing the activities of ancestral figures in the landscape, and relying on color, iconic features, and their arrangements as the principal aesthetic devices, Tjampitjinpa’s newer work presents optical effects that resonate with the revelation of ancestral body decorations by flickering firelight. It often involves a field of large concentric circles arranged against a dotted background, but with no clear indication of the possible significance of these circles other than their indexical relationship to body decorations. The dots bleed into each other, becoming only vaguely discernible, to hypnotic effect. Some ritual decoration worn by men celebrating Tingarri stories takes the form of concentric circles; a work such as Tarkulnga (1988) abstracts the presence and revelation of these treasured designs, in this case in relation to Tarkulnga, a site in Western Australia. This aesthetic effect performs, rather than narrates, ancestral power and the experience of men like Tjampitjinpa in relation to the places with which they are identified. The emphasis is on the forms of the designs themselves, made bigger and more focused; the dots and the more figurative elements of body and ritual decoration become the subject matter.

Yukultji Napangati (born 1970), a close relative of Tjapaltjarri’s, was one of the group who left their traditional hunting-and-gathering life in 1984. She was only fourteen at the time, and as a younger woman, she began painting later than the older women, such as Nungurrayi and Napanangka. Napangati is quiet and observant, as much an active forager in the environment as a painter, and her paintings reflect her passion for the country. She seems to have begun painting at Kiwirrkura with her husband at the time, Charlie Ward Tjakamarra, and she has developed a style of work involving intense and careful dotting, often luminous, on large canvases. There are few overt features in her paintings, and when she identifies a particular feature, it is constituted of a pattern of dots rather than of direct lines. Her subject matter is the mythological ancestral women whose activities and travels created many places

THIS TRANSFORMATION —FROM BODY AND RITUAL PAINTING, ROCK ART, AND SACRED OBJECTS TO TWO-DIMENSIONAL FORMS—WAS FROM THE BEGINNING A CREATIVE INVENTION, A TRANSPOSING OF TRADITIONS INTO DIFFERENT AND NEW FORMS, STRIKING FOR THEIR BEAUTY AND VARIETY near the community of Kiwirrkura and in other areas of her country. The paintings Ancestral Women at Marrapinti (2017) and Untitled (2017) present two places connected through the travels of these women, locations where they stopped to make marrapinti, bones used to pierce the nasal septum and worn as decoration, a custom derived from the ancestral story and practiced as a kind of rite of passage for young women in historical times. Napangati explains a circular or oblong feature and its extension toward the corner as a cave in the hill at Marrapinti and the path down from the cave, but also as a rock thought to be the nose of an ancestral woman who turned to stone. The flowing lines of meticulous dots that cover the painting, shifting in hue from yellow to orange, mark both the expanse of sand hills that 43

stretch over the desert country and the marrapinti that numerous ancestral women made and used.

For Napangati, the painting expresses her active dwelling in this familiar and known environment, rather than a mere depiction of it.

Tjumpo Tjapanangka (1926–2007) was closely related to most of the Pintupi painters whose works are in the show, although he lived not in Papunya but in the Western Australian community of Balgo. Painting developed at Balgo later than at Papunya, hundreds of miles to the south; in fact it was inspired by the developments there, through visits between relatives inhabiting the two places, but the Balgo painters used brighter pigments, bolder colors, and, often, rougher execution. Tjumpo’s painting in the show, interestingly, is of Wilkinkarra, the same place or story as one of Tjapaltjarri’s large canvases. The two artists shared a relationship to this place. Tjumbo’s painting, however, predates much of Tjapaltjarri’s work, and combines rectilinear and circular forms. Tjumpo’s rendering of Wilkinkarra draws attention to two mythological or ancestral snakes said to have gone into the ground there.

The snakes are marked by two circular forms, and three thick yellow lines appear to indicate pathways connecting to the passage of these ancestral figures. One might assume that the choice of a white background resonates with the color of the salt lake. The story of Wilkinkarra connects Indigenous people over a broad area of the Western Desert, and a number of stories intersect here, so that the activities of the snakes who passed through are adjacent to the areas of the Wilkinkarra story represented in Tjapaltjarri’s citation of the fire that created the lake, following a different line of ancestral beings who traveled through the area. Tjumpo’s painting uses the rectilinear designs associated with some of the men’s ritual activity, as Tjapaltjarri’s does, but does not sustain the optical effect of figure/ground so much as the effect of light on the salt lake.

Named after his beard or whiskers, Bill Whiskey (c. 1920–2008) was a Pitjantjatjarra man, living in the small community near Mount Liebig in the Northern Territory. Whiskey was a renowned ngankari, or healer, and came to painting later in his life. His paintings relate directly, in fact in an almost unmediated way, to drawings that men of his age once made for anthropological interlocutors with crayons on butcher paper. In his painting, Rockholes and Country near the Olgas (2007), circles indicate the rock holes and significant hills of the places he remembers, mapping out “country.” Whiskey’s paintings depict his own country, around the area of Mount Olga and Ayers Rock (Uluru). Although he painted long after most of his contemporaries, his paintings resonate with the work of an earlier generation at Papunya of which he was a part, the generation of Tjungurrayi. with the multilayered dots unevenly applied, noting the flows of water, vegetation, and landforms giving form to his sense of being in place.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910–1996) is the most famous Indigenous Australian artist; her work has been exhibited in Europe and Asia as well as throughout Australia. Emily, as she was known, began painting at a late age in the Alyawarra community of Utopia, and is celebrated for her rapid and systematic exploration of different styles and formal inventions. At Utopia in the late 1980s, Emily and her compatriots adopted the practice of painting with acrylics that had begun at Papunya and spread to other 44

communities in Central Australia. Emily’s paintings identify themselves with women’s ritual activities and with the life force of her region’s vegetation. Often, the painted lines offer the forms of women’s body painting, which is applied to the shoulders, arms, and breasts in broad strokes— ritual activities identified with the creation of the land. Emily’s early dot paintings, which drew on her experience with traditional batik fabric-printing, were remarkable for their differences from the acrylic-painting movement as it was developing elsewhere. Over time, her paintings became more and more gestural, reduced in their detail and thus quite abstracted and liberated in their formal qualities. As far as can be determined, her inspiration was always her country and its ancestral figures, as it is for the other artists in the exhibition, but her expression of this concern evolved into more and more simplified marks. The art historian Terry Smith has argued for understanding her as a modernist painter, placing her abstraction in relationship to her life experience of modernity as the dislocation of traditional life. Smith admires her work as making pictorial space anew.

George Tjungurrayi (born c. 1947), from the Pintupi people, has been represented in solo exhibitions in Australia and included in the Sydney Biennale, where a suite of his paintings was exhibited both flat on the ground and on the wall.

He is invested in the ritual heritage he learned as a young man and particularly in the stories of the Tingarri cycle, so tied to various places in his country, but he has chosen to express his relationship to these places without revealing anything of a secret nature. His paintings, like his own self, are kept tightly controlled and rigorous, and emanate from some intense introspective space. He has been recognized as the originator of a style of pared-back linear composition, painted in single lines (not dots) laid down with careful precision, a style corresponding closely to his way of being. Tjungurrayi’s works are celebrated for their organizations of meticulous designs in rectilinear complexes. The painting in the exhibition identified as Untitled—Kirrimalunya (2007), shows Kirrimalunya, a site that in the stories was created through the activity of two boys with strong healing powers (ngankari) who traveled through the area. At Kirrimalunya they gathered mungilpa seeds, to be ground and roasted in seed cakes.

The place is marked by claypans, shallow depressions where water gathers in the spring and where mungilpa grows in abundance after rain. Looking at Tjungurrayi’s many renderings of it, one can recognize that the shimmer of his lines captures something of the surface of these temporary waters. Like Tjapaltjarri’s paintings, Tjungurrayi’s work forms part of the late, linear wave of the Western Desert Art Movement, and his use of lines rather than dots, producing interfaces of two colors, seems to allow him to paint as if investigating the space and limits of the canvas.

Special thanks to the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, University of Virginia, and D'Lan Davidson, Melbourne, Australia.

1. Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri would have been familiar with incising designs on wooden implements including spearthrowers and sacred objects, making spears, boomerangs, and dishes (mainly with introduced metal tools), the use of ocher and vegetable fiber in ritual body decoration, the manufacture of ephemeral objects out of local materials for ceremonies, and the making of sand drawings as part of storytelling; and he would have seen rock paintings in caves.

Opposite: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Hungry Emus, 1990, acrylic on canvas, 70 ½ × 47 ¼ inches (179.1 × 120 cm).

Collection Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Artwork © Emily Kame Kngwarreye/ Copyright Agency. Licensed

by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2019 Next spread: Bill Whiskey, Rockholes and Country Near the Olgas, 2007, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 80 ¾ × 118 1⁄8 inches (205 × 300 cm) Photos: Rob McKeever

LOUISE NERI Why,

when, and how did you engage with the work of contemporary Indigenous Australian artists?

STEVE MARTIN My first encounter was in 2015.

An article in the arts section of the New York Times presented a photo of an imposing man, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, in front of his paintings, which surprised me, bewildered me, and prompted me to bicycle downtown on a warm summer day to investigate. [My wife] Anne and I were able to acquire one of the paintings, and for three years I didn’t realize it was part of a greater movement. Later, I was struck by a single photo of an Indigenous Australian painting on the Internet. Then, as each click led me further into the field, I became enchanted. I was face to face with an art I had never seen before. I started building a small library on the subject and found the story of Indigenous Australian art compelling. I eventually contacted several of the books’ writers, and they were able to help and guide me to legitimate sources to acquire other works.

LN How did your initial interest develop into a more concerted effort to establish a collection?

SM I really don’t like the term “collection”; “bunch of stuff ” is more accurate. Still, we have assembled about forty paintings by Indigenous Australian painters in a careful effort that seems to have some coherency. It has been a stirring exercise to discover and recognize what our specific interests are in this field. I was excited to discover a sophisticated and fully formed body of art that was new to me and unlike anything I’d ever seen—a 60,000-year-old art history compressed into a mere fifty years—and to see how it had migrated from a specific translation of sacred

46

symbols into an internationally recognized movement that is both emotional and intellectual.

LN D o e s you r c ol l e c t i o n h a ve s p e c i f i c parameters?

SM I realized that the early Indigenous Australian paintings, from the 1970s onward, have been splendidly collected and catalogued by insightful collectors and museums. My interest, piqued by these complex early paintings, made me look at the evolution of the work, and I focused on works made after 1984. I was also struck by the coincidental relevance of these paintings to other contemporary art.

Most of the paintings we own are Western Desert works on canvas. They come from the terrific Papunya Tula art center in Central Australia. Dedicated art centers dotted throughout the region serve the Indigenous Australian community, protecting the artists, cataloguing works, and so on. These are vital for the authentication and provenance of works.

LN Do you have a wish list?

SM Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

LN And with regard to Indigenous Australian art?

SM We own several works by Emily Kame Kngwarreye from different periods, but we don’t have an early “dot” painting of hers. We’re so grateful to the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia for lending Emily’s Hungry Emus [1990] to the exhibition. Emily didn’t start painting until her late seventies and worked feverishly for seven years until her death, changing styles almost every year.

LN How doe s c ontempora r y I nd igenous Aust ra l ia n ar t relate to ot her moder n a nd

contemporary art that you live with?

SM Desert art is isolated. I gathered from my reading that it sprang from thousands of years of tradition, but was disconnected from and uninfluenced by the outside world. Yet it isn’t outsider art.

It has coincidental relationships with other forms of contemporary abstract art, but it differs significantly in that all Indigenous Australian paintings on canvas are stories citing specific events and journeys, and they’re infused with an intense connection to the local landscape. They never participate in the irony that suffuses so much contemporary art.

LN We’re living in a time of rediscovery, cultural accountability, and new appreciation in art and culture, where we’re looking at the overlooked, where restitution is a live issue, and where the global conversation is gradually expanding to include art from many different cultural contexts.

As a recent but impassioned enthusiast, what do you feel might the place be for contemporary indigenous Australian art in the broader context of contemporary international art?

SM I once thought I knew the perfect art show.

One would simply select the best pictures from the canon, and everything would be wonderful.

New discoveries and probing scholarship have unearthed artists who worked under duress and hardship, with little or no public recognition, at an equivalent artistic level to their more famous counterparts. These relatively unknown artists now stand tall among the canonized giants of the art world, and the shift in focus has been quietly revelatory. I believe that Indigenous Australian paintings will eventually hang together with all the great modern and contemporary artists.

NEIL JENNEY’S RULES TO LIVE BY The artist speaks with Douglas Dreishpoon about his career, his conception of the term “realism,” and explains why one must discover one’s own rules.

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DOUGLAS DREISHPOON Neil, you’ve created a list of axioms or rules for how to live life. One that really stood out: Art is a game in which one must discover one’s own rules. You’ve followed that maxim consistently, creating your own rules, haven’t you?

NEIL JENNEY That’s right. When you develop a philosophy of life, you have to find out what’s right and what’s wrong for you. That’s also true in terms of aesthetic taste: it takes a while before you know who you are, you have to confront it and think about it. A good way to approach that whole thing is to learn what’s not right for you. You can have a visceral response and know, yes, that’s not right for me.

DD You were born in Torrington, Connecticut, right?

NJ Yes, in November of 1945. In 1950 we moved to Westfield, Massachusetts. My father worked in a needle factory and they transferred him. He worked at the factory for, I think, thirty-eight years.

I grew up across the road from a chicken farm, which to me was the most interesting place in the world. There weren’t other boys my age where I was, so I spent a lot of time alone or with the two

adults who would tolerate my presence.

DD Given where you were raised, the grounding in nature that’s clear in your work is something that comes naturally, then?

NJ Yes, I was raised country. I worked on farms throughout my formative years.

DD W hen you decided t hat you wanted to go to art school, was it tolerated in that rural environment?

NJ Oh yes. I graduated in 1964. At that time you either went to college or you went to the Vietnam jungle. I was lucky, I was able to get into the Massachusetts College of Art [Mass Art] in Boston.

The artist Truman Egleston was teaching at Boston State College at the time— DD You were already familiar with his work, right?

NJ Well, his parents lived just a few doors away from me. He had gone away to the Korean War and then went to Mass Art on the GI Bill. After that, he went to the California College of the Arts and Crafts, in Oakland, and studied with Peter Voulkos, because he was doing ceramics at the time. I knew his art because his next-door neighbor, Jim

Drummond, who became a close friend of mine, had a lot of his paintings. I got to see these works in in the summer of 1955. It was the first time I’d seen Abstract Expressionism.

DD What was your first response?

NJ I didn’t have a negative reaction but I didn’t understand what was going on. I was open-minded, you know.

DD His paintings at that time were highly gestural?

NJ Yes, he was essentially making action paintings at the time. He eventually moved toward more formalized, hard-edged paintings, and again, his hard-edged work was the first of that technique I ever encountered. He was really in step with the times: if he’d been in Washington, DC, he would have fit right in with Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, but being in Boston is like being nowhere.

He never got to New York because he had a teaching position and that was considered very elite and secure.

DD At a certain point you decided that you wanted to relocate to New York. Was that decision motivated by the situation in Vietnam?

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I loved making art, but the rest of school was ho-hum. I’d slide through with like a D average—I’d already figured out how I could get through all these semesters, though barely. In 1963, with the death of [John F.] Kennedy and all the saber-rattling, suddenly they were talking about the draft and I got totally freaked out. The whole thing was totally fabricated and scary. The Vietnamese had done nothing to us. We hated Hitler, but what, were we going to hate Ho Chi Minh?

So I went to Boston and I visited Egleston and I said, “How do I get into Mass Art?” “Oh,” he says, “Just have lots of stuff. Just keep dragging it out. They love that.” That’s the best advice you could ever give an artist, “Make a lot of art.” So I came home, set up my studio in my cellar, and I started making art as fast as I could. I showed up at Mass Art and everybody else had a portfolio and I walked in with just as much as I could carry. Egleston was right: they all gathered around and sure enough, I got into Mass Art. DD A relief.

NJ But I didn’t have any money. I figured I’d work my way through school, but it turned out NJ

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that Boston was f looded with students every fall and every part-time job was already taken by somebody going to Harvard or Boston College or Simmons or BU. So my thinking was, I’ll make art and maybe get a show on Newbury Street. So I went to Egleston’s and he introduced me to his dealer, Harry Nasse, who said no. He gave me my first rejection. Everybody in Boston rejected me.

DD But in 1966, you got yourself to New York. The scene proved to be a melting pot of any number of possibilities for you. What I find really interesting is the sculptural impulse you seized on so quickly.

Your early work often uses light, and light continues to appear throughout your career; looking at even your newest paintings, they have a quality of light that’s unique. One could say that that interest in light really begins in a sculptural form. What, at that point, did sculpture mean to you?

NJ What happened was, I started as an Abstract Expressionist painter. I’d done a few things with shape paintings, which I’d mount onto other surfaces—I was building stuff. I was a whittler when I was small, and I made bows and arrows and all

kinds of stuff. I was always like that, building stuff, like my father.

DD So when you got to New York, you initially sculpted, but then you turned your energies to painting. Eventually you realized that paintings needed frames, and then you were back in the sculpture business, right?

NJ Yes, which is where I wanted to be. That’s why I do painted sculpture now. It’s really what the whole package is.

DD The frames are very interesting: some have wide portals, and are relatively simple, while others seem weighty, heavy, and almost claustrophobic. I had an emotional response to some of the weightier frames, almost a death response—if there was a soundtrack, I felt, it would be a requiem. Is there any credibility to that?

NJ A lot of people have that funeral reaction.

I can see their point, but what I realized was that the darker frame let your eye feel the color. It presented the color in the painting more crisply; it was more of a quiet zone, less active. It just seemed to be restful somehow, and it let the colors live. I really wasn’t concerned about the whole life-and-death

Previous spread, left: Neil Jenney, North America Divided, 2001–06, oil on wood in artist’s frame, 26 ¼ × 28 ¼ × 2 ¾ inches (66.7 × 71.8 × 7 cm) Previous spread, right: Neil Jenney, North America Divided, 2001–06, oil on wood in artist’s frame, 26 ¼ × 28 ¼ × 2 ¾ inches (66.7 × 71.8 × 7 cm)

Above: Installation view, Neil Jenney: American Realist, New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut, November 2, 2018–March 17, 2019 Following page: Neil Jenney, Girl and Doll, 1969, acrylic on canvas with painted wood frame, 58 1⁄8 × 76 ½ inches (147.5 × 194.5 cm) Artwork © Neil Jenney Photos: Rob McKeever

issue. Once I learned about the ancient Greeks’ system of understanding painting—that you’re looking through a window onto the scene, and that the frame is basically the architectural foreground, the window presenting the illusion—I couldn’t stop drawing frames. I’m still doing it.

DD Does the content of a particular piece warrant a certain kind of frame in your mind?

NJ Yes. DD How do you make the match? Is it empirical, intuitive— NJ Well, I do the frames before the paintings.

I learned that lesson. I made a shaped painting called The Window Series and after building the frame, I just hated it. That’s when I realized that I had to make the sculpture first. They built the cathedral before they did the frescoes.

DD That’s a good point. The word “realism” comes up time and time again in speaking about your work. There are so many possibilities of interpreting that word; you’re not advocating for a photorealism, to be sure, nor is it the magic realism of Peter Blume and Paul Cadmus— NJ No, those are the wild people.

Right. So what are we to understand by the word “realism” in relation to your work?

NJ I’m governed by nature. Anything I do, I want it to feel natural, but I’m dedicated to line. Photographs you can’t use, you have to develop your own linear formations and boundaries. Total unified harmony achieved totally intuitively. I don’t want to be repetitive; I want to search for something exciting. My paintings entitled North America Divided capture my persona. That’s really me, as such. I can’t say I’ve actually witnessed what’s in those paintings, but I’ve been there and I know those things. I’m really committed to witnessing what I do. I go and look at the rocks. I draw in the field. I mix in the field.

DD But you come back and paint in the studio.

There’s a process of transposition: what you see on-site might change when you get back into the studio. Or are you trying to replicate more directly somehow?

NJ You’re always interpreting, because you’re affected by your emotional reactions to whatever the imagery is. But you want to witness what you’re depicting. If you draw it, you’ll understand it. I try DD

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to have in my memory what I’m trying to achieve. I can close my eyes and see what I want.

DD Let’s talk about the terms “Bad Painting,” “Good Painting,” and “Slow Painting,” these adages that have come up in your trajectory. It was probably Marcia Tucker who got this started, right, with the Bad Painting show she organized in 1978.

NJ She came up with the term, yes.

DD And you seized on that; suddenly you yourself are using terms like “Bad Painting,” “Good Drawing,” “Bad Drawing,” “Good Painting,” and then, when you get into oil, “Slow Painting.” What makes the distinctions?

NJ For one, it depends on the materials you use. When I did those early, green “Bad Paintings,” I used acrylics, which dry fast. You can’t paint slowly with them because they dry, and then you get dried strokes over dried strokes. But you want to make it look like it’s done once so it’ll be fresh. That was the essence of that whole period of “Bad Painting.” I kept telling everybody it was “new realism.” I was pointing out that it wasn’t Pop art, that was my whole spiel. I’m not using American symbolism, I’m using an international 52

vocabulary. A little crying girl and a broken doll— any culture could understand it. So that was the separation I had. But when Marcia came up and said, “Bad Painting,” I said, “You’re talking my language.”

DD So you agreed to partake in her exhibition?

NJ Oh, absolutely. Aside from the material aspect, “Bad Painting” isn’t trying to be good. It’s not even trying. It’s about getting the message transmitted rather than the method of depiction.

DD The method of a “Bad Painting” seems gestural, brash, and rather interesting in the end.

NJ Well, the fact that they’re done so fast gives them a freshness. The old-timers used to want to see brushwork with snap, like Frans Hals.

DD Or Franz Kline.

NJ Kline, right. I had a painting called Accident and Argument [1969]—it showed these guys who had just driven their vehicles into each other, and they were by the side of the road, arguing with each other. When I got that idea, I’d just draw it as fast as I could and paint it as fast as I could. Done. As long as you understand it’s Accident and Argument, that’s the whole thing, and whatever it looks like is

good enough for me. It’s getting the point across.

It’s about relationships, which is really the structure of realism—content and narrative and all those other elements play into the development of relationships. I realized I was dealing with something very separate from the whole Pop thing, which was the realism of the ’60s.

DD Would you say that your works are optimistic?

NJ Yes. I believe that you have to make a positive statement if you’re an artist.

DD Why? Some artists might not agree with that.

NJ Masochists [laughter]. There are all kinds of people.

DD I was just thinking that artists, as voices of conscience— NJ Certainly.

DD —may not have an entirely optimistic point of view.

NJ Well, I’m a voice for my conscience. I’ll admit to that. I can’t speak for other people. But I don’t try to do frivolous art. I’m trying to do something that has some significance, if possible. I’m trying to achieve a level of beauty. Naïveté has purity, but you can also have purity in refined sophistication.

judygeib.com Summery superflat hollow flowery necklace, 22K and 18K gold, and silver, 27 inches long. Makes a pretty sound.

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KAY PALLISTER Richard,

when you’re thinking about what kind of work to make for a place, do you think differently about it if it’s a temporary work, as the majority of your wall and ceiling works have been, than you do if it’s to be a permanent piece? Do you feel that the demands are different, and are there differences in your techniques?

RICHARD WRIGHT One of the positive things about temporary work is that there is a degree of forgiveness.

The work disappears and this allows you to take a risk. I think that it’s a little different with a permanent work, with which the imaginary future of the work might have to be considered, both from a technical and an emotive point of view. In this latest show at Gagosian, for example, I’ve painted in gouache on one of the pillars. While gouache can survive, it’s not the ideal material to think about exposing to the environment for a long period of time.

KP Is that because it would fade?

RW Potentially fade, but it’s also a reversible material; contact with moisture will turn it back into what it was. Which I love about it, actually—I love that you can almost literally put it back in the jar.

Gouache has a special quality that’s hard to replicate, but I wouldn’t so readily use it for a permanent commission.

KP And what about the silver you’ve used in this exhibition?

RW Silver is also a material that is subject to mutation. It will oxidize and change, which I find interesting; in fact I would love to see the work do that, to see the silver gradually fade away and become dark. Silver has this special coldness that’s slightly different from a material like palladium, which might be its equivalent. If I were doing a work like this in a more permanent setting, I’d be tempted to use palladium for its stability, but then I would lose out on this specific feel.

KP When you’re invited to make an exhibition, or a work like the one you’ve just finished at Park and 75th, what is it about a space that determines where you’re going to locate a piece?

RW That’s quite a difficult question to answer. I always want to bring some special quality out of the space, so in some ways the work is already there.

Sometimes I might have to look quite hard to find it and there is a sense that ideas appear out of nowhere.

But there is also an accumulation of material that I’m working with at a particular time. I have attractions, ideas that circulate in my mind. I draw every day, and there’s a sense in which I’m actually looking for a place for these thoughts. Sometimes it just happens; two things come together, something that you’re working with and something that is there in the situation. Perhaps one brings out the other. There are other times when it’s more difficult and when you have to make more effort to find some sort of coexistence with the space. For me, this is a material dialogue, between a built world in which the work is placed and a more fragile world of thoughts.

Sometimes it is a sympathy and sometimes it is more antagonistic. In each case thoughts are deflected by the material. You can see it in the piece on the ceiling: the intentions of the work are perhaps more visible on the wall, where it’s flat, than on the more disrupted surface of the ceiling. You think you have an idea but the material has other ideas. In the end the work emerges out of this, so it’s hard to say exactly where that idea starts. Perhaps the idea is really an action.

Considering the space at Park and 75th at the beginning, I immediately thought I would do something with the pillars. Somehow they drew to mind more ancient situations and I began to think about

Opposite: Richard Wright, no title, 2019 (detail), silver leaf on ceiling and walls at Gagosian, Park & 75, New York. Photo: Rob McKeever Right: Richard Wright painting a column with gouache at Gagosian, Park & 75, New York, March 2019

In an interview with Kay Pallister, the artist explains his relationship to drawing and the importance of time in his site-specific works.

RICHARD WRIGHT

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Egyptian architecture and wall painting. I didn’t do so much with them in the end, but perhaps other thoughts came from this beginning…

KP I’ve noticed, when visiting places with you, that you appreciate artists and creators of all kinds on a really sublime level. From architects to stone masons, you’re clearly very moved by the devotion that’s shown by the various makers involved.

RW I think devotion is a very good word, actually.

It’s like Donald Judd said: “We go into the cathedral and we thank God instead of thanking the architect.”

I am interested in touch and how directly working with materials gives the fabric of our situation a presence; it imbues it with affection, with love. Something is drawn to it in this engagement with matter.

Whether that’s just putting some flowers in a vase or whether it’s moving two books together on a table and just feeling that the way that they converse with each other makes you feel more relaxed, or happy, or simply closer to reality. It’s these tiny little things that happen when things speak to each other that bring in this closeness, this proximity of the world. It’s a kind of attention. In architecture, these moments are everywhere. It’s how the floor meets the wall and how the wall meets the ceiling. I’m very much drawn to those points where two elements come together.

It is there, where a conversation has already started, that some sense of meaning begins to appear. Part of the thing is just to become involved in that conversation. The ceiling in this case was just such a situation. Again, it was unusual to see something like that in a gallery space and it just had to be a work really, it had to be, it already was a work. I looked at a lot of different possibilities, some of which were much more aligned with the structure, and wanted to be a grid. But, in the end, I was drawn toward something that slightly resisted, a kind of disruption, a disruptive relationship, it’s like a conflict, even, between the two things. And, of course, then you think,“Was that the right decision?”

KP It’s tremendously complex work that you do, and to deliver it in a specific amount of time is an awful lot of pressure. I’ve heard you say before that time is the most important material—you’ve admitted that quite often you get to the deadline, the opening of the show, for instance, and you say, “If only I had another day.” But what do you think would change in the work if you had this extra time? Or is it a kind of separation anxiety?

RW Time is what the work is made of. Time is all you’ve got, and all you can’t get back when you’ve spent it. I’m acutely aware of that when I’m making things. It is that precious material that’s constantly being used up as you work. In some senses, that situation informs your decisions. This is a live event, time limits what you can do, but that pressure stimulates a kind of necessity and focus. It’s not always fun but it’s where the work comes from. If I had more time I guess I’d probably have to create more pressure, I’d have to do more. It would be a completely different work.

KP In these periods when you’re on-site and you’re working long hours every single day, focused on delivering this idea to that space, your personal commitment to the work is incredibly deep; this idea of devotion is really part of how your work comes out. It couldn’t happen any other way without your 110 percent commitment to the practice. It makes me wonder what remains for future generations to appreciate. Do you ever feel concern that there won’t be very many remains?

RW I think at the beginning I was very attracted to the idea that there wouldn’t be anything left. I think this dematerialization was part of my motivation, 57

Previous spread, left: Richard Wright, no title, 2016, gold leaf on ceiling and walls in the Great Hall at Queens House, Royal Museums Greenwich, London Previous spread, top right: Richard Wright, no title, 2019, silver leaf on ceiling and walls installation view at Gagosian, Park & 75, New York. Photo: Rob McKeever Previous spread, bottom right: Richard Wright, no title, 2017–19, watercolor on paper, 16 5⁄8 × 16 1⁄8 inches (42.2 × 41 cm) This page, top: Richard Wright, no title, 2018, gold leaf on concrete ceiling at Tottenham Court Road Elizabeth Line Station, London This page, bottom: Richard Wright, no title, 2018, gold leaf on concrete ceiling in progress at Tottenham Court Road Elizabeth Line Station, London Artwork © Richard Wright

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really. I quite liked the idea that it was like playing music, which disappears into the air. I still feel that way, but I do have moments sometimes of reflecting that it can’t be done again. But this sense of loss, if you like, is actually connected to heightening the moment of delay, the moment of being here. I’m not sure where that leaves the future.

KP In recent years you’ve won commissions and been invited to do large scale works in public settings that will be as permanent as one might conceive. The Queen’s House in Greenwich, a 400-year-old building by Inigo Jones, and the Tottenham Court Road Crossrail station on the Elizabeth line, a brand-new train station that’s still being built, are both projects meant to remain. Both took many months to prepare.

Aside from the time required to create on-site, they both involved a very long proposal and approval process. Did that change the work?

RW Most definitely. I think in some ways these two particular projects are slightly outside my practice, in a way. The need to negotiate their existence is something quite unique in both cases. It amazes me still that I was allowed to paint on not just a four-hundred-year-old-building but also a building of unique architectural significance, the first classical building in Britain. The fact that they allowed that is incredible, but of course it involved a negotiation. There wasn’t a strict guide given, like “You can’t do this, you can’t do that,” but to a degree I did have to think my way through that, you might say to second-guess that. I was very aware that there was going to be a sense in which I could not destroy the architecture with the work. I think the same thing is true of the train station at Tottenham Court Road. I think that things might have been very different if these two things had been temporary pieces. Perhaps they would have been more abrasive, more difficult. But it’s important to say that these restrictions, if you could even call them that, are like the restrictions of time. They simply focus the attention in a different way. They necessitate a different kind of sympathy with the situation.

KP You make works on paper all the time and in some cases they more clearly relate to various ideas, forms, and motifs that we see come out in wall works.

Yet in other cases, they seem to inhabit an entirely different world or presence. How do those works on paper relate to the works on the wall, if at all?

RW I draw; that’s what my practice is. More and more I realize that drawing is what I do. It might be all I do. Predominantly drawing is an analytical process for me, a process of turning something over and over.

I am not sure what I am looking for and I have no destination. Often this might seem like a fruitless task, where a huge amount of time is spent without much in the way of product. But I feel that this practice changes me. Another way of describing the process might be as a practice of dreaming the material. I may never use the material but the material becomes part of me. In the dream, the material occupies an imaginary place in the world, a place that it may never find.

But I guess that looking for that place might be a link between the practice of drawing in the studio and the practice of painting on the built world.

I might also say that sometimes drawing in the studio is a more synthetic process, where one drawing comes out of another. In the studio there is the possibility to suspend time, to put something away for a year or two, to allow something to grow. This kind of process does seem to have more of an end in sight. There might be a product, which is the drawing. But for me this is not the product; the product is the thought, and I am still looking for a place for that thought.

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Kenwood House stands on the edge of Hampstead Heath, a rambling public park five miles north of central London. A magnificent villa largely created by the great Scottish architect Robert Adam, and surrounded by a landscape designed by Humphrey Repton, it is an extraordinary survival of an eighteenth-century gentleman’s estate. Cared for

by English Heritage, a charity responsible for over 400 historic sites, it is home to a remarkable collection of paintings, including Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles (1665).

Adam began remodeling Kenwood in 1767 for William Murray, the lord chief justice and first earl of Mansfield, who had purchased the house in 1754 as a weekend escape from central London.

Murray instructed Adam to improve its external appearance, modernize the interior, and accommodate his great collection of books. The result— which took fifteen years to deliver—was stunning, much admired by contemporaries and still loved by thousands of Londoners today. Adam paid tribute to his excellent client, who “gave full scope to my ideas.” In return he created for Murray an exceptional house with some of England’s finest eighteenth-century interiors, several of which English Heritage has recently restored.

Most impressive is Kenwood’s library, inspired by classical models, where Murray kept his books and entertained. He and his wife, Lady Elizabeth, were popular hosts; he had “the happy and engaging art of putting the company present in good humour with themselves. . . . they naturally liked him the more for his seeming to like them so well.” The library, restored to Adam’s original color scheme, remains a highlight of a visit to Kenwood— now as in the eighteenth century, the climax of the guest route through the house. The eye is immediately drawn to the vast gilded pier glasses, the white apse columns, the ornamental motifs, and the delicate blues and pinks of the ceiling, in which are set nineteen oil paintings by Antonio Zucchi. Their subjects, which include several references to justice, must have been devised collaboratively by the artist, the architect, and their lawyer client. They include symbolic figures of Theology, Jurisprudence, Mathematics, and Philosophy, and vignettes of Justice embracing Peace, Commerce, Navigation, and Agriculture. The central image is of the demigod Hercules resisting temptation, a subject surely alluding to Murray’s wisdom of judgment.

During the nineteenth century, successive earls of Mansfield became less and less interested in

Anna Eavis, the curatorial director of English Heritage, traces the history of Kenwood House and details the remarkable collection of paintings that reside there.

KENWOOD HOUSE

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Previous spread, left: View of the south front of Kenwood House. Photo: © Historic England Archive Previous spread, right: Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, painted by H.M. Paget. Photo: © Historic England Archive Left: Jan Vermeer, The Guitar Player, c. 1672, oil on canvas, 20 ¼ × 17 ¾ inches (51.4 × 45.1 cm). The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London. Photo: © Historic England Archive Opposite: The library at Kenwood House, designed by Robert Adam. Photo: © Historic England Archive

Kenwood, spending more time at their Scone Palace, their Scottish estate. The sixth earl sold off the house’s contents in 1922, then, in 1925, the house itself and its surrounding parkland. Miraculously a savior was at hand: Kenwood was bought by Edward Cecil Guinness, first earl of Iveagh, a wealthy Irishman who had transformed his family’s brewing business into a global enterprise and had long been assimilated into the highest stratum of London society. Guinness had become fond of Kenwood during the First World War, when he lived nearby, in the village of Hampstead. Not only was he a supremely effective businessman, he also possessed a superlative art collection, and, as he was approaching the end of his life, he was keen to find somewhere to house some of his treasures in perpetuity and for the public good. Guinness selected sixty-three paintings—many by the great British artists of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—to hang at Kenwood, but died in 1927, before his builders had finished their repairs to the house. At his death he was the second-richest man in Britain, and his estate owed considerable death duties to the government (such a large sum, in fact, as to lead to a general income-tax cut). These levies were somewhat modified by a sizeable tax deduction: the bequest of Kenwood and those sixty-three paintings to the British nation. The house and paintings—hung by Sir Charles Holmes, director of the National Gallery—opened to the public on July 18, 1928.

The Iveagh Bequest is undoubtedly the most important collection of old master paintings to be 62

given to Great Britain in the twentieth century. No other gallery in London has on permanent view so many paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, and George Romney. These appear alongside works by Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century such as Rembrandt and Van Dyck, to whom their British heirs looked for inspiration, and by Guardi, Hals, and Vermeer, who were just being rediscovered in the 1880s, when Lord Iveagh was putting together his collection. The rooms at Kenwood are filled with fulllength portraits of the most glamorous women in Georgian England, captivating paintings of children, and a rich collection of Dutch and Flemish landscapes and seascapes. The collection also includes The Guitar Player, one of only thirty-six works in the world to be attributed to Vermeer.

Guinness formed his collection at speed in his early forties, purchasing over 200 pictures between 1887 and 1891, in order to furnish his vast new London residence, 5 Grosvenor Place, at the smart end of Piccadilly. His appetite for acquisition was so great that his dealer, Agnew’s, had sometimes to buy from rival operations. Soon, other clients were complaining that someone was getting first pick of their stock. Guinness liked to buy paintings from hard-up aristocratic families, not only because of the prestige associated with their provenance but because of the greater likelihood of their authenticity. He also preferred pictures that had been recently exhibited—and exposed to the scrutiny of critics—for the same reason. Guinness made many

of his purchases in secret, insisting that the seller and family should be absent when he came to view their pictures. He lent his paintings to exhibitions anonymously and rarely allowed them to be reproduced. He hung them in the rooms in which he lived, and never published the catalogue that William Agnew produced for him in 1891. Guinness’s influence as a collector was significant, his intense buying campaign consolidating market taste and prices. His most expensive purchase was the Rembrandt self-portrait, bought with another painting, then also thought to be by Rembrandt, for £27,500.

This was money well spent, even though the partner painting turned out to be misattributed.

Rembrandt created at least eighty self-portraits over a period of more than forty years. Produced in different forms—paintings, etchings, drawings—for many different reasons, they vary in scale and type, including small studies done in the mirror, historical cameos, and character heads in fancy costume.

In the 1630s and ’40s he depicted himself in poses borrowed from Raphael, Rubens, and Titian, wearing elaborate costumes or fashionable clothes; in the 1650s he more often painted himself as a working artist in studio attire. The Kenwood painting— made in 1665, toward the end of his life—is unlike any of its predecessors but may represent a culmination of them all.

This is the largest of Rembrandt’s self-portraits but for the 1658 painting now in the Frick Collection, New York. The artist appears at work in his studio. He is shown holding the tools of his trade:

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Rembrandt van Rijn, SelfPortrait with Two Circles, c. 1665, oil on canvas, 45 × 37 inches (114.3 × 94 cm). The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London.

Photo: Historic England Archive

a palette, some brushes, and the maulstick used to rest his painting hand. He wears a fur-trimmed robe over a red smock, with a gilt chain tucked into his shirt front. On his head is a simple white linen cap. The canvas on which he is working is barely visible, shown as a tilted sliver to the upper-right edge of the painting. Behind him, sketched on a strangely luminous wall, are sections of the outlines of two circles.

The figure of the artist, pyramidal in form and monumental in scale, dominates the composition. It is rendered with the full range and flourish of Rembrandt’s mature technical virtuosity. The face is the most highly finished area, every tonal variation and sagging imperfection of the painter’s aging flesh being fully realized. The dark, deep-set eyes— one in almost complete shadow—are by contrast painted in with delicate glazes. Their steady gaze is frankly appraising, almost unnerving. Highlights to the nose and hair are captured in impasto. The whiskery moustache and an eyebrow were scored into the wet paint with the wooden tip of the handle of the artist’s brush. The dense brushwork of the face contrasts with the simplicity of the linen cap, which is formed of a few slabs of tinted white paint, made luminous with two or three sparingly applied highlights. For the fabric and golden fur of the smock and tabard, Rembrandt’s technique is different again: the subtle variations in color and texture are built up with soft scumbling. The brushes and maulstick are rapidly drawn, and the hand holding them is evoked only by a bundle of 64

sketch lines. The other hand has disappeared, read by the viewer as being tucked inside a pocket or on the artist’s hip.

These effects, which a post-nineteenth-century eye might view as impressionistic, have also been seen as evidence of incompletion. When Joshua Reynolds saw the painting, in Brussels in 1781, he described it as “very unfinished. . . . his hand, if it may be so called . . . is so slightly touched, that it can scarce be made out to be a hand.” Reynolds was sufficiently impressed, however, to paint his own self-portrait emerging from the shadow in tribute, and this painting Guinness also acquired; today it hangs close to the Rembrandt painting at Kenwood. Iveagh himself had grouped the two paintings at Grosvenor Place, presumably appreciating the juxtaposition.

The circles on the wall behind the figure have also been cited as evidence of an unfinished composition, and scholars have puzzled over their meaning. One theory is that they represent the underdrawing for a representation of a map of the world; another is that they symbolize Rembrandt’s supreme artistry, referring to the famous story of Giotto’s freehand drawing of a perfect circle. The figure of Rembrandt himself has been variously interpreted as an image of a man weakened by misfortune and old age and as an emblem of fortitude, experience, and wisdom. Such assessments are inevitably subjective; what seems unassailable is the monumentality, power, and sheer technical brilliance of the painting. It is unforgettable.

Self-Portrait with Two Circles hangs today in the dining room at Kenwood. Soon after it went on display, in 1928, its custodians noticed a “dangerously active” bloom on the painting, patches on the varnish that appeared and disappeared as the relative humidity changed. The press reported a “varnish disease attacking the paint,” putting Kenwood at the center of early debates about approaches to painting conservation. The painting was moved to a drier environment and unglazed. In the 1930s, an enthusiastic staff member cut holes in the canvas backing to let the painting “breathe.” Nowadays it is glazed and backed and its condition remains stable.

In 1986 Kenwood passed into the care of English Heritage, then a government agency. When, in 2015, English Heritage became an independent charity, it renewed its commitment to ensure that Lord Iveagh’s generous bequest, which has been enjoyed by the public for over ninety years, continues to be a source of delight, study, and reflection.

In this year, the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of Rembrandt, Gagosian joined forces with English Heritage to stage an exhibition at its Mayfair gallery. Rembrandt’s painting was the centerpiece of Visions of the Self: Rembrandt and Now, an exhibition of self-portraits by artists including Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucian Freud, and Pablo Picasso.

Kenwood House is open to visitors almost every day of the year, and is completely free to enter. www.english-heritage.org.uk

IN CONVERSATION

J. Tomilson Hill meets with Derek Blasberg at the newly opened Hill Art Foundation, New York. The two discuss the origins of the foundation, Hill’s approach to collecting, and the unique programming that will take place within the institution’s walls.

66

Derek Blasberg: I’m excited

you don’t see outside of

to talk about all the

commercial buildings. Just

Christopher Wool works in

to get a piece of glass big

this inaugural show, but

enough for a ceiling that

first I think we should start

high—what a nightmare!

with where we are and how we

You’ll have to ask Peter the

got here.

story, but they came from

J. Tomilson Hill: I’d been

Germany and they weren’t

looking for ten years for

easy. I wanted to be able

space for a foundation

to show really big works.

when Peter Marino got

The question with Peter

the commission for this

was, “Okay, how high do you

building. I knew I wanted it

want the ceilings?” So we

in Chelsea because of the

experimented.

High Line—I’m on the board— and because when the Whitney

DB: Did you know that you

[Museum of American Art] came

wanted to launch with a

down here it was the leading

Christopher Wool show?

indicator that this area

JTH: I had no idea. We

was changing. The arrival

collect in a few different

of Hudson Yards cemented

areas: Renaissance bronzes,

it, sort of bookending this

old master paintings, and

area now. So when Peter told

then twelve postwar artists

me that he’d been chosen as

like Christopher—whom we

the architect here, I said,

collect in depth—and then

“Okay. This is really a great

all of these really cool

space. Where do I want to

artists in their thirties

be?” I didn’t want to be on

and forties.

the ground floor because that’s commercial, and

DB: Why did you decide on

then I thought it would be

Wool in the end?

incredible to be on eye level

JTH: You’ve got a section

with the High Line. More than

at the end of your magazine

8 million people get to see

called “Game Changers”—

into this space from there,

Christopher’s a game

and it’s open to the public.

changer. Everyone looks

So we’ll show you the High

at his text paintings and

Line.

says “Oh, they’re literal, those words.” No, they’re

DB: When did you first start

abstractions. People often

working with Peter?

don’t get the joke with

JTH: Oh, wow, maybe in 1983?

Christopher. I have to say,

Peter’s done ten projects

I arrived to the party late—

for us: An apartment in

other people were buying his

Paris, a few apartments

work long before me—but I

here in New York, a house in

made up for lost time. So we

Telluride, and two houses

have the largest collection

in Locust Valley. My wife

of his paintings and

and I are godparents to his

drawings, and this is only 20

daughter. About four years

percent of the Wools that we

ago, Peter said he got the

own.

commission of the old Getty gas station, and I had a good

DB: How did he envision this

feeling. The problem was it

show?

was zoned for residential,

JTH: He said, “I want it

so I had to go through a

really spare.” He chose

whole rezoning process,

these works from all the

and the developer needed

works we own.

capital, but by the end of the process I had these two

DB: Talk to me more about

floors.

the Hill Art Foundation.

What appealed to you about

DB: I love that it’s next to

showing your works?

the High Line and has these

JTH: I’m friendly with Peter

vantages down Tenth Avenue.

Brant; I’m really close to

JTH: I wanted a New York City

Mitch Rales, and I saw what

scene. So you come in and you

he was doing with Glenstone;

say, “Oh, okay, this is New

I’ve known Eli Broad since

York City.” But then I wanted

the 1980s; and I’ve been on a

also, as people came in, to

lot of boards—I was chairman

actually say, “Oh my god,

of the Hirshhorn [Museum

this is really different

and Sculpture Garden,

from New York.” The size of

Washington, DC], I was on

these ceilings is something

the board of the Whitney, and

67

I’m now on the board at the

JTH: Yes. I want people to

Metropolitan [Museum of Art,

feel free to come in.

New York]. Honestly, what I

Honestly, what I like about this place is that if I get an idea I can do it. I don’t have to negotiate with anybody.

—J. Tomilson Hill

any of it, but I got lucky at Harvard in the late ’60s.

In 1967, Andy Warhol would hang out and you could just

like about this place is that

DB: Then it’s like a gift to

if I get an idea I can do it.

New York. You grew up here,

I don’t have to negotiate

didn’t you? What was your

with anybody, I don’t have

first exposure to the art

to do anything other than

world?

say “I want to do it.” And

JTH: Born and raised here,

then, “Do I have the works?”

and I was lucky: I had a

And usually the works that

mother who was an artist.

I bought inspire what I’m

She took me to museums and

going to do. So at some point

it was a part of our life.

I’m going to do a portraiture

And my dad had an interest

show; at some point, I’m

in art, and was a partner

he’d be there at this greasy

going to do a [Francis]

at [the investment company]

spoon with pinball machines

Bacon/Rubens show, because

William A. M. Burden—Bill

going, complete chaos at

we have five Rubens and four

Burden was the president of

midnight, and he didn’t say

Bacons. I get to do whatever

The Museum of Modern Art and

much but he’d just be part

I want.

had one of the most amazing

of the scene. And then I’d

collections. You walked

see him at Studio 54. But I

DB: Now that you’ve opened

into his apartment on Fifth

never dreamed that I would

your foundation, do you

Avenue and the first thing

ever have a whole bunch of

think it will affect the way

you saw was Brancusi’s ‘Bird

Warhols.

you collect art?

in Space.’ And then you saw

JTH: What I’m finding is that

Bacon’s “screaming pope”

DB: I know that you have a

I’m now thinking about works

[‘Study after Velázquez’s

lot of Christopher Wools

in the context of the space.

Portrait of Pope Innocent

here, but you mentioned you

So we just bought a Wool

X,’ 1953], which he gave to

were late to the Wool party.

sculpture that we’re going

his nephew, Carter Burden,

Who were some of the first

to have outside.

as a wedding present, and

artists you collected?

which Carter decided to sell

JTH: I was collecting Dutch

sit around a table. I was writing for the ‘Harvard Lampoon’—that was before Wall Street, when I had a sense of humor [laughter]— Andy would literally be there with a tape recorder and his Polaroid and an entourage. And I’d be coming back from the ‘Lampoon’ and

still lifes in the ’80s,

DB: I know some foundations

when he was running for city-

are by appointment only,

council president. I was

Opening spread:

before I had any money. I’d

but this space is open with

exposed to art really early.

J. Tomilson Hill, 2014.

just gotten married, we

regular business hours,

Never did I think I was ever

Photo: Mike McGregor/Contour

had kids. I’d always had an

right?

going to have a chance to buy

by Getty Images

interest in having art. I

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still have the Neergaards and these Dutch still lifes.

But I guess you’d say it started in seriousness in the mid-’90s, when I bought our first Renaissance bronze. That’s also when I bought our first Warhol, which was a soup can. It was total serendipity: I saw it at Christie’s, my wife and I were there, and I’d wanted a different Warhol, but it went for a price I didn’t like. And I saw this soup can. Irving Blum was a friend and I’d known what he’d done at the Ferus Gallery in LA [where Campbell’s Soup Cans was first shown, in 1962]. I said, “Janine, boy, that soup can looks pretty good.”

So we ended up buying it.

DB: That’s not a bad entry!

JTH: But this was long before I had a systematic program; it was as close to an impulse

broader dialogue that I’m

purchase as you can get in

trying to create.

art collecting. At the time, it was like, “Oh shit,” you

DB: When did that sort of

know. I’d just paid, like,

click for you?

$400,000. In retrospect,

JTH: I’d say about 2002.

it seems like a complete

Before that, it was more, I

bargain.

had a Geiger counter, I was looking for uranium. Then I

DB: You say you have a more

said, “Okay, I’ve got to be

systematic approach to

more systematic.” And then

collecting now—what are some

I said, “If I’m going to

of the qualifiers you’re

collect an artist, I have to

looking for?

know everything about that

JTH: Well, I want to collect

artist.” So I didn’t start

in depth. I don’t want to

collecting Stingel until

have one of each. The only

about three years ago. I

exception is we have two

was way late to that party,

[Pablo] Picassos. We had

but I think he’s an amazing

one [Mark] Rothko, but I

artist.

couldn’t get another three

You don’t wake up and say, “I’m going to become a collector”; you don’t wake up with expertise in any given area or field. You have to read.

You have to look.

You have to see the exhibitions.

And you have to understand what you like.

—J. Tomilson Hill

Rubens? I believe Rubens was a game changer. Why do I have a Pontormo? Because I believe that in mannerism, Pontormo was a game changer.

Sometimes it takes a while for you to figure it out.

I probably should have collected Marcel Duchamp, but I never found his work fitting into the broader dialogue that I was trying to create. Sometimes the artist can be a game changer, but you don’t go there because it doesn’t fit.

DB: In an earlier conversation you mentioned educational programming.

JTH: This table is where the high school kids are going to

so I ended up selling the

DB: It’s like self-

Rothko to buy my third Bacon.

educating.

And then I bought a fourth

JTH: It’s also trial and

Bacon.

error. You don’t wake up and

But it’s not about being

say, “I’m going to become a

didactic, it’s not telling

DB: What else is a qualifier?

collector”; you don’t wake

the world that I’ve figured

JTH: I want to have artists

up with expertise in any

out “Here’s a discovery, and

in a context where they have

given area or field. You

I’m going to impart my wisdom

a dialogue with each other.

have to read. You have to

to you.” That’s all BS. It’s

I used to have Ellsworth

look. You have to go. You

Kelly. I love Ellsworth,

have to see the exhibitions.

Left:

about, what I like, and then

I think he’s an amazing

You have to talk to the

Installation view, ‘Maybe

trying to explain it so that

artist, but you almost need

dealers. You have to talk

Maybe Not: Christopher Wool

others can try to get inside

a whole room of Kelly. And I

to the museum people. And

and the Hill Collection,’

my head. They may say, “I

said, “I want the [Willem]

you have to understand what

Hill Art Foundation,

don’t get it.” Some people

de Koonings to speak to the

you like. If you don’t do

New York, February 9–

look at the Piamontini

Bacons to speak to the Rudy

that, I think you’re into

June 28, 2019. Artwork ©

there, the Ferdinando de’

Stingels to speak to the

decoration rather than

Christopher Wool. Photo:

Medici done in 1700, and say,

Wools.” So I said, “Okay,

really being serious about

Matthew Herrmann © Hill Art

“Why is that in a Christopher

I’m going to eliminate

art. I was mentioning the

Foundation

Wool show? Why is there a

certain artists who don’t

last piece in your magazine,

fit.” The only works I’ve

“Game Changers”—I’ve always

Above:

And I’ll let them try to

sold are those that, over

wanted those artists who I

J. Tomilson Hill. Photo:

figure that out. I’m not

time, haven’t been able to

thought were game changers.

Benjamin Norman/The New York

going to try to explain it. I

fit into the context of the

So Rubens, why do I have five

Times/Redux

just think it’s cool.

sit—I’m excited to make this a place for exploration.

about what I’m passionate

[Robert] Gober downstairs?”

69

EDMUND DE WAAL ÎœPSALM Edmund de Waal speaks with Alison McDonald about the components of psalm, his two-part project taking place in Venice, Italy. He details the influences behind the exhibition and reveals some of his hopes for the project.

Previous spread: Edmund de Waal, London, 2019 This page: A spread from Daniel Bomberg’s Talmud, c. 1520–23 Opposite: Edmund de Waal, psalm I, 2019, porcelain, marble, alabaster, steel, wood, aluminum, and plexiglass, 78 ¾ × 52 3⁄8 × 7 7⁄8 inches (200 × 133 × 20 cm).

Photo: Mike Bruce

Yes, about a hundred and fifty years ago they roofed it over. The roof is extraordinary; it’s like a Louise Bourgeois installation with metal bars and straps going across the top where they hung the tent-like structures during the festival of Sukkot. I wanted to take that feeling of sacred space and pair it with a cityscape-like installation using a series of tall vitrines next to each other, almost one on top of the other. It’s a peaceful vision of what the Ghetto really is: a place of fantastic conversations, music, poetry, and cultural exchange.

AMCD So you’re describing a celebration of life and cultural exchange, but there’s also the element of oppression. Given your work in both art and literature, there’s surely recognition of that in this exhibition?

EDW The Ghetto is obviously a place where there’s an articulation of the people with power and the people with no power. You’re walled in, gates are shut, there’s a curfew, you’re guarded, you’re policed. All these realities are powerfully present.

The Venetian Ghetto is the first ghetto in the world; this is where the word originated.

T here’s an implicit understanding and knowledge of the ghetto as a place of being-apart.

That’s a history that I know well and I’ve explored, particularly in my work at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, but for this exhibition I wanted to do something completely different, which was to look at the ghetto as a place of agency and a place for the generation of ideas, a place where multiple languages are spoken, where poetry is written, music is composed, books are printed, and conversations started. I’m looking at the focus on pain and restriction, but I want to turn it on its head, to have a lyrical rediscovery of these spaces as locations of energy, rather than only as places of melancholy.

If you look at the achievements made possible

by Jewish culture in the Ghetto of Venice, like the printing industry, it’s astounding. The dissemination of ideas across the known world made possible by this place—it’s absolutely incredible. So you see, it’s easy to have one simple take on the Ghetto as a place of disparity, but that’s actually a bit onesided and it doesn’t get to the full truth.

AMCD Speaking of printing, you’ve cited the sixteenth-century Venetian publisher Daniel Bomberg as an inspiration. Understandably, given that you’re presenting in his city, he plays a key role in psalm. How did his work inform the project?

EDW I’ve known Bomberg’s work for a while. I was amazed by his ideas about bringing text, context, subtext, and commentary together in one place in an incredibly sophisticated way. His publications are able to hold different voices together on one page.

It’s incredibly powerful. And of course I’m interested in how text works visually; that’s part of my life as an artist and writer. So looking at Bomberg’s Talmud—all of those incredible pages—I began to see it as an installation. It was something I had to EDW

ALISON MCDONALD Your

exhibition in Venice comprises two presentations in two different venues.

Can you describe this structure?

EDMUND DE WAAL Yes, it’s one project in two parts.

One part is completely grounded in the experience of the Venetian Ghetto. This takes place throughout the Museo Ebraico di Venezia, and a small part is presented alongside the Canton Scuola synagogue, an extraordinary sacred space. It will be a journey through the synagogue up into the sukkah. These are incredibly significant spaces.

This first part comprises a series of installations based around the Psalms. It includes wallhung vitrines, a table piece, a text-based installment, and an element based visually around the tall buildings in the Ghetto Nuovo. Within the exhibition is a piece entitled tehillim, which is Hebrew for Psalms. In sum, this part of the project really takes the idea of the Psalms as songs and poems of exile, and then creates contemporary works to reflect that.

AMCD What does tehillim consist of?

EDW The space has a series of walls, each with elements of gold, porcelain, or marble. The light comes and goes, like a call and response, between these materials. The Psalms are structured in this same manner, the call and the response. To continue this dialogue I added a series of eleven vitrines containing white porcelain, marble, and gold.

AMCD Could you describe the sukkah and the visitor’s journey?

EDW The sukkah is one of the most famous spaces in the Ghetto. It’s been used for celebrations for three hundred years, and it’s the only space in the whole museum where you look down into the square of the Ghetto. You’ve wandered through all of these complicated, tiny, vertiginous little rooms— which is akin to the experience of the Ghetto, of course—and then suddenly you’re in this top room and you can look down into the square with kids playing football and people hanging their laundry and couples sitting together.

AMCD Traditionally in the Jewish faith, the sukkah is a temporary structure in the open air, built as part of the celebration of Sukkot. So the Canton Scuola synagogue must have moved the structure inside and made it a permanent part of their building?

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I wanted to take that feeling of sacred space and pair it with a cityscape-like installation using a series of tall vitrines next to each other, almost one on top of the other. It’s a peaceful vision of what the Ghetto really is: a place of fantastic conversations, music, poetry, and cultural exchange.

73

work with and through and toward. Hence the second part of the exhibition: the library of exile.

AMCD For this second part of psalm—in a different location, the Ateneo Veneto—will the whole installation take place in one room? Or will it include multiple rooms, like the first part?

EDW The library will be constructed in one room.

It’s like a pavilion, a freestanding structure that stands as a library and as a sculpture. As you mentioned, it’ll be housed in the Ateneo Veneto, which is an amazing centuries-old space that has the most extraordinary ceilings. It will hold two thousand books of poetry, each authored by a writer who had been forced into exile. So this space is a new library that reflects a culture of people moving, of migration, of conversations in different languages, of travel, of diaspora. The books themselves are in thirty-two languages from all around the world. I’ve been conscious to include a variety, from Ovid, writing two thousand years ago, all the way through to books published this year by people who have just left Syria.

AMCD You’re including translations, and I understand the importance of that, but will the library also include versions in the original languages?

EDW Yes. AMCD What was the process of selecting the books like?

EDW The process is still unfolding. One of the great joys of this project is that over the last year I’ve spoken with so many people, each with unique suggestions. In my studio in London we see parcels arriving day by day from all around the world.

It’s incredibly moving. What’s happening is that people will say, “Have you read Joseph Brodsky?”

Brodsky was a Russian poet, born in Leningrad, who emigrated, because he was Jewish, to America.

So of course, I must have Brodsky. So I have his text in Russian, but I also have his text in English. But then someone says to me, “Brodsky, amazing. Did you know that he was passionate about Venice and there are amazing Italian translations of Brodsky?”

So now we have three books by Brodsky. And then someone else says, “Okay, you’ve got Brodsky in Italian, did you know that he also translated this other author, who was also exiled from his country and who then went to Paris in . . . ”—and so on.

And the result is this wonderful chain of powerful connections between writers, translators, and publishers. That’s how libraries work. My dream for this project is that wherever you come from in the world you’ll be able to sit down and find books in your language, some of which you already know and others that will be new to you.

There’s something very powerful about the literature of exile, the experience of being away from the place in which you were born. That’s what the Psalms are and that’s what this library will be.

Just as the Ghetto generates an incredible power of cross-cultural conversations, what I’m trying to do with this library is make a really beautiful, intriguing space where different kinds of literature and experiences can talk to each other across time.

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AMCD How does your sculpture enter the library?

There are four installations embedded in the walls of the library as well, each a reflection on Bomberg. And the outside walls of the library are covered in a liquid porcelain slip and gilded with gold. Written on those walls is a new text that I’ve composed to document the history of all the lost libraries of the world, from Nineveh thirty-five hundred years ago all the way through today.

AMCD Let’s talk for a moment about why libraries get lost. Libraries represent knowledge, and people in positions of power who are seeking to eradicate opposition will often purge libraries as a way of eradicating a base of cultural understanding. If I’m not mistaken, your family lost a library as well.

EDW Yes, people in power often try to control literature and books. There have been book burnings and deliberate destructions of libraries throughout much of human history. My grandfather, when the Nazis invaded Vienna in 1938, had his famous library looted. Or think of isis destroying libraries in Timbuktu and Mosul. And in this really difficult, polarizing moment in history, I wanted to make a new library. On the outside of my structure there’s this intricate history of loss, but my hope is that when you walk inside this installation you find the regenerative excitement of books happening across time.

Importantly, on this note, there’s a whole program of events happening in and around the library as part of psalm. There are events for children’s storytelling, conversations between translators, and talks by poets and novelists.

Another detail that excites me is that inside every book there’ll be a bookplate. Anyone who reads a book, or has a response to it, will be able to write in it, resulting in new conversations.

AMCD Will the library evolve over the course of the exhibition?

EDW The structure and installations will stay the same, but as you well know, Alison, nothing ever remains exactly the same. I have every expectation that some books will be borrowed, stolen, or disappear, and I have absolutely no doubt at all that during its life in Venice, people will bring books and give books to the library and have brilliant ideas about the things I’ve missed. It will evolve, and I’m hoping it will become a traveling library in the future as well.

EDW

Above: Visuals for the proposed library installation in the Ateneo Veneto. Image: courtesy the artist Below: Edmund de Waal, sukkah, 2019, porcelain, steel, gold, aluminum, and plexiglass, 72 5⁄8 × 49 5⁄8 × 27 1⁄4 inches (184.5 × 126 × 69 cm). Photo: Mike Bruce Artwork © Edmund de Waal

CAST OF CHARACTERS James Lawrence explores how contemporary artists have grappled with the subject of the library.

The Ateneo Veneto, a scholarly society that has enlivened Venetian life for more than 200 years, has its origins in the quality of mercy. In the mid-fifteenth century, two confraternities based near the church of San Fantin offered medical care. They also became known for accompanying condemned prisoners in their final moments. Over time, the confraternities became a scuola that gained permanent accommodation, lost it to fire in 1562, and gained new accommodation, a handsome Baroque structure near La Fenice. The scuola has passed into history but its building has housed the Ateneo Veneto since the days of Napoleon. The largest room on the ground floor, the Aula Magna, originally served as a chapel. Its splendors include a cycle of paintings by Palma Giovane, depicting Purgatory, that embellishes the coffered ceiling. During this year’s Venice Biennale, the Aula Magna contains a modest chamber very different in mood from the torsion and chiaroscuro of Palma’s cycle. This chamber forms one part of Edmund de Waal’s exhibition psalm. psalm takes inspiration from the history of Venetian Jewish culture, and most of all from the aesthetic legacy of that culture’s spiritual and intellectual traditions. The exhibition and its constituent parts are rooted in the openness of language: its unfolding debates, its shifting translations, and its availability for reconfiguration over time. Part of the exhibition takes place in one of the Venetian Ghetto’s five synagogues, the Scuola Canton, where de Waal has designed an encompassing installation that includes pieces of gilded porcelain in certain rooms. A series of eleven vitrines responds to the building’s gilded windows in a physical and visual allusion to the vocal interplay of cantor and congregation in responsorial psalmody. The act of singing is a prime example of how performance quickens or enhances the latent meaning in objects and information.

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Previous spread: Anselm Kiefer, Volkszählung (Census), 1991, steel, lead, glass, peas, and photographs, 163 3⁄8 × 224 1⁄2 × 315 inches (415 × 570 × 800 cm) © Anselm Kiefer.

Installation view at Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, Germany, 1991. Photo: Will/ ulstein bild via Getty Images Below: Rendering of Edmund de Waal's psalm at the Ateneo Veneto, Venice © Edmund de Waal

The other part of psalm is a chamber that de Waal has constructed in the Ateneo Veneto’s Aula Magna.

He has designed the chamber as a self-contained library with walls of porcelain with inscriptions in gold leaf. Inside the chamber are two thousand books of poetry, mostly in translation, by exiled writers. The chamber, which has the scale of a private library or reading room, invites devotion to the written word rather than bibliographic awe.

Two elements of de Waal’s library give this celebration of literary porosity and expansiveness distinctive contours that testify—sometimes painfully— to the material power of organized words. Inside the porcelain chamber, de Waal has embedded a quartet of vitrines that take their formal cues from Daniel Bomberg’s seminal editio princeps of the Babylonian Talmud, published 1519–23. The exterior of the chamber, however, carries inscriptions of the names of lost libraries, most of them destroyed or stolen because of Jewish contents or Jewish ownership. One of those libraries belonged to Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide in 1940 after failing to escape from German-occupied Europe. Another was the notable private collection that belonged to de Waal’s Viennese great-grandfather, Viktor von Ephrussi, until the Nazis expropriated Palais Ephrussi and its contents in 1938.

Bomberg’s design, which developed out of the elegant arrangement of text, commentary, and glosses that the Jewish printer Joshua Solomon Soncino had established forty years before, remains a model of visual and exegetical clarity. The layout also holds the promise of fecundity: an implicit recognition that through commentary and criticism, meaning expands or unfolds from source to reconfiguration as a new source for further development. That reconfiguration often involves translation into new languages with their own traditions and habits of commentary, such as the art-historical discussion that the monochromatic crispness of de Waal’s vitrines might generate. No matter how far discussion might stray into uncharted areas, however, the source—the specific material that prompts what follows—remains present.

That holds true for literary culture and for art history, even when presence is merely a recollection of something that is no longer intact.

To gauge the significance of libraries as components of a culture, it is sufficient to consider the effects of their elimination. Whereas the loss of a great work of art or architecture is tragic, the loss of a library— specifically, of the accumulated textual material that constitutes one definition of the word—can rend the fabric of understanding and memory that gives any culture its identity. Genocidal regimes routinely seek to eradicate not only populations but also their books.

Less than half a mile from Palais Ephrussi, Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial (2000) stands in mute tribute to the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered by the Third Reich and its accomplices. Mute, because the emotional tenor of Whiteread’s “nameless library” is introspective and unforthcoming: it declines to explain what is terrible beyond words; it denies the comforts of the specifics that might give life and death meaning. Whiteread’s casting technique, which excels

at breaking the spell of spatial overfamiliarity, elevates the memorial’s sepulchral gravitas to a higher plane of allusion where the uniform bookshelves suggest a violation of privacy: the simultaneous loss and forcible exposure of the interior life. Whereas Whiteread’s earlier works cast from bookcases, such as Untitled (Novels) (1999), recorded the physical characteristics and irregularities of real books in their natural habitat— down to the pigments of their bindings—her “nameless library” brings the poignancy of tactile familiarity into the stark, chilling light of existential indifference.

Whiteread’s memorial draws out the anthropomorphic implications of books as individual parts of a communal whole. The very notion of a library as a collection of objects is only meaningful through differentiation; a collection of identical books is not a library but a stockpile. The advent of printing was also the advent of firm authorial (or at least editorial) identity, the enduring association of a book with the person who produced it. A library is a social model, not merely an intellectual, literary, or material one.

Christian Boltanski’s Les Abonnés du téléphone (2000), a work that he continues to recapitulate and adjust for local conditions, presents 3,000 telephone directories in a library setting. As in any library, there is an implicit indeterminacy to this selective demographic record, which captures fixed instances in an ever-evolving body of knowledge. Boltanski’s project hints at the totalizing and static conditions of exhaustive information, but also embodies the limitations— the acknowledged constraints imposed by space and time—that make information meaningful as material for knowledge.

Books, and the libraries that contain them, encourage meandering within physical limits that suggest paths and focal points without requiring strict obedience. We browse; we skip and scan. Something catches our eye and leads us to another path. The spirit of prolific curiosity that inhabits Anselm Kiefer’s work, for example, affects us not simply because it animates Kiefer and his activities but also because it animates us as agents of our own inquiries. For Kiefer, who has made books by hand since childhood, one virtue of a book is its ability to conceal: though it might explain the world, it does so one page at a time. That can make a book intimate and private. It also weakens the grip of linear time and the gravitational pull of a single, swiftly legible message. Kiefer’s handmade books, and his monumental lead-leaved books, are redolent of a bibliographic culture that is obsolete outside the field of artistic creativity: a culture of scriptoria,

Above: Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial (2000) in Vienna, Austria. Photo: Urs Schweitzer, 2009, courtesy Imagno/Getty Images Below: Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Stack), 1999 (detail), plaster, polystyrene, and steel, 93 × 69 ½ × 94 ¾ inches (236.5 × 176.5 × 240.5 cm) © Rachel Whiteread. Photo: Rob McKeever

superseded philosophies, and protoscientific mysticism. In Kiefer’s works as in a library, esoteric or even defunct approaches to the world gain new possibilities—new life—precisely because the search for knowledge and the search for meaning are not always the same thing.

In his short story “The Library of Babel” (1941), Jorge Luis Borges describes the universe as a library of immeasurable scope, where countless hexagonal chambers hold regulation-length books that collectively include every possible permutation of characters from a limited alphabet.1 Inhabitants spend their lifetimes searching for meaningful texts among the volumes of complete nonsense. A handful strive in vain to eliminate the gibberish; others yearn for a messianic figure, the “Man of the Book,” who might have located a volume that holds the key to all the rest. The dream of unlimited knowledge rapidly becomes the nightmare of infinitesimal significance. Meaning, and those who seek it, are reduced to absurdity.

Borges’s story is the foremost example of a topic that took form in the early years of modernism—in Kurd Lasswitz’s mathematically oriented story “Die Universalbibliothek” (The universal library, 1904), for example—and gained traction as an evocative metaphor for postmodern conceptions of how we use text and construct meaning.2 The labyrinthine, nearly inaccessible library at the heart of Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (1980) owes a debt to Borges’s imaginary architecture, a debt that Eco repaid with the character Jorge of Burgos: the éminence grise of the abbey and its celebrated library, the “man of the book” who jealously conceals the sole extant copy of a work by Aristotle that deals with that most human topic, laughter.3 There is something profoundly inhuman, or at least inhumane, about the notion of an exhaustive library. It leaves no room for anything other than permutations of itself. As W. V. Quine pointed out in a playfully concise comment on the “melancholy fantasy” of a universal library, the universe—at least according to present estimates of its size—could only contain a small 79

fraction of Borges’s library. 4 Above all, an exhaustive library leaves no room for creativity: for the processes of defining, limiting, shaping, and reordering that meaning requires. A true library is a model of creativity in process; an open work of collaborative art, regardless of who holds the key. A library with nothing to add is not a library at all.

Eco’s best-known treatment of libraries may be The Name of the Rose, but he also made the mischievously creative use and misuse of libraries crucial to the plot of Baudolino (2000).5 Eco, a renowned semiologist and bibliophile with a sizeable personal library, treated scholarship as a creative performance that takes place in relation to books, among other phenomena, in a heuristic and nonlinear manner: a journey with neither a strict path nor a single destination. This view has particular relevance for the art of our time. In the late 1950s, he noted that the “open” situation of art, “far from being fully accounted for and catalogued,… deploys and poses problems in several dimensions.”6 Much of the appeal of libraries to contemporary artists rests on that recognition of openness, whether understood as a material or as a procedural fact. It is a sensibility that treats art as an ecological field of proliferating meanings, rather than as a catalogue of parts that assert themselves within a cogent whole. The behavior of things—including human participants—becomes more important than the status of things.

Our expectations of libraries tend toward classical aesthetics: wholeness, harmony, geometric balance, and symmetry. Modern libraries are, after all, descendants of an early-modern bibliographic tradition (Gabriel Naudé, who served as Cardinal Richelieu’s personal librarian, published Avis pour dresser une bibliothèque in 1627), and what we might call the mature style of library aesthetics took shape during the Enlightenment. Such libraries offer a reassuring glimpse of a diverse but ordered universe. Candida

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Below: Andreas Gursky, Library, 1999, chromogenic print, face-mounted to acrylic, 78 7⁄8 × 142 1⁄8 inches (200.3 × 361 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee, 1999. Artwork © 2019 Andreas Gursky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Opposite, top: Installation view, Richard Prince: American Prayer, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, March 29–June 26, 2011. Artwork © Richard Prince. Photo: © Todd Eberle Opposite, bottom: Richard Prince, Close and Counter, 2018 (detail), CLT spruce bookcase containing 181 books (1949–84) in clamshell boxes, 261 1⁄2 × 126 × 126 inches (664.2 × 320 × 320 cm) © Richard Prince. Photo: Rob McKeever

Höfer’s photographs of renowned libraries succeed not only because of her mastery of large-format composition but also because interiors such as the Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin, or the now defunct Reading Room at the British Museum, integrate organic variety into architectural organization. As they adapt over time, such libraries develop a picturesque irregularity that translates wonderfully into two-dimensional detail. These full, rich collections of books arrayed in splendor can be hypnotic even as we begin to discern hints of underlying disorder. Andreas Gursky’s Bibliothek (Library, 1999), which shows the arcing bookcases of Gunnar Asplund’s innovative interwar design for the Stockholm library in all their expansive glory, artificially suppresses the rotunda’s ground floor and the mundane public self of the building. All we see is galleries of books with a couple of browsers who seem to be on the verge of dissolving into the bookcases.

In truth, library users are agents of disorder, liable to disrupt arrangements or—in a few instances—to disrupt the fabric of knowledge with publications of their own. Libraries do not come into being by fiat, but through the gradual unfolding of texts, commentary, contradictions, and elaborations. A veneer of rational arrangement conceals the sprawling, organic aggregation of ink and paper. Successful libraries are spatial and aesthetic triumphs over the piecemeal nature of material in space and time. They are composed, developed, and assembled according to rules that adapt to the material they ostensibly govern. In that respect, libraries are creative works that also behave in a creative manner.

Large libraries conceal their sprawling connections behind depersonalized acquisitions and catalogues.

Smaller libraries, particularly those in private hands, more easily retain their identities as tangible evidence of interests, tastes, or preoccupations. For a bibliophile such as Eco or Richard Prince, a personal library is simultaneously an extension of the self and a retreat into the self. Prince’s collection, which ranges from manuscripts by major postwar writers to pulp novels and ephemera from countercultural movements, also serves as inspiration, context, and source for his

works and exhibitions. The centerpiece of his exhibition American Prayer, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, in 2011, for example, was the series American/English, which presents American first editions alongside their British counterparts. The differences, often modest, reveal a great deal about how one society interprets another. Books contain not only printed marks but also encoded cultural symptoms that reveal values and points of view. As cultural artifacts, books encapsulate characteristics and behaviors that can spread as far as the books travel.

The role of behavior as a material in its own right, although crucial to open works of art of the kinds that have proliferated since the days of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, remains difficult to assimilate into conventions of artistic judgment. The formal and disciplinary latitude that contemporary artists enjoy, however, provides considerable scope for situations or investigations that focus on the way we simultaneously conserve and exploit informative materials. In 2013, Theaster Gates bought a dilapidated neoclassical building in Chicago for one dollar. Gates and his Rebuild Foundation renovated the building, which originally belonged to the long-defunct Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank, and turned it into a library and archive called Stony Island Arts Bank. Along with books and periodicals, the Arts Bank includes sixty thousand lantern slides that once belonged to the University of Chicago; racist artifacts that a local banker accumulated in order to keep offensive stereotypes out of circulation; and four thousand vinyl records that belonged to Frankie Knuckles, a pioneer of Chicago house music, until his death in 2014.

Preserving superseded media and sensitive material is not merely an act of historical understanding and community service, but also an acknowledgment that historical understanding and community service require the tangibility of real places, real objects, and real encounters with places and things. Beyond that valuable service, however, Gates’s Arts Bank also shapes the intangible but heightened aesthetic consciousness that certain designated spaces—libraries,

galleries, and museums in particular—engender through a blend of physical conditions and social conventions. In such places, we are predisposed to behave as aesthetically aware—and self-aware—participants in a cultural ritual. In that respect, the preexisting aesthetic culture of the library provides artists with an audience inclined toward certain ways of thinking and feeling.

The possibility that works of art and those who engage with them can be conditioned, or even determined, by the aesthetic culture of the library is an intriguing aspect of Taryn Simon’s Picture Collection (2013). Simon delved into one of the more remarkable visual resources available to the public of New York City—the Picture Collection on the third floor of the New York Public Library—and made forty-four prints derived from a tiny fraction of the collection’s approximately 12,000 subject folders. The folders contain all manner of prints, photographs, and ephemera that have reached the Picture Collection, sometimes uninvited, since its inception in 1915. As there is neither a firmly established taxonomy for images, nor an agreed-on method of cataloguing a collection with so many exceptions to so many rules, the Picture Collection developed its own idiosyncratic, ad hoc system to deal with the glut of pictures that came its way.

Joseph Cornell used to send material anonymously to the Picture Collection; Diego Rivera used its holdings while he was painting his unfinished mural Man at the Crossroads (1933, destroyed 1934); and Andy Warhol, who used the collection regularly, died in possession of a late-1940s Coca-Cola advertisement that he found in the folder “Advertising—Soft drinks.”

These snippets of twentieth-century art history are intriguing for viewers who are conditioned by conventions of style and lineage to register connections among moments of inspiration. Similar moments are so thoroughly embedded in the nature of libraries, however, that we take for granted the diffuse nature of literary influence on writers and scholars. Simon’s project reveals, among its many other insights, the gulf that exists between our mastery of text and our confusion over images.

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That confusion is partly a consequence of our faith in systems. Simon’s exploration of the Picture Collection shows how the dominant condition of organized information is not order but disorder; or, more precisely, the endless shaping and reshaping of whatever order we inherit. The way we assemble categories determines the way we assemble objects in space.

That, in turn, guides the way we engage with those objects, how we think of them in relation to other objects, and how we use those objects to create new objects.

For the exhibition The Old Reading Room (1999), Ilya and Emilia Kabakov placed book cabinets and display cases laden with old books in the library of the University of Amsterdam. The cabinets and cases were arranged in an emulation of disorder and disregard, as though they had been declared obsolete, dragged into a seldom used room, and forgotten. A ventilation and lighting system made curtains flutter and the room seem to flicker as dramatic music played.

The interplay of material objects and intangible forces dramatized a question that a text panel posed to visitors as they approached the room: “Is it possible that the computer has really conquered everything?”

Around the turn of the millennium, the utopian fantasy of an unbounded library coalesced with the equally utopian assumption that high-technological systems offered an unprecedented level of transparency. The early years of mass Internet use prompted enthusiasm for dematerialized surrogates: hypertext instead of laborious cross-referencing; scanned copies of books, easily stored and distributed; ever expanding electronic storage in ever smaller physical objects; and decentralized terminals instead of buildings full of books. Perhaps El Lissitzky, who in 1923 used the term “electro-library” to encapsulate a drastic rethinking of the topography of the printed word, might have appreciated the capacity of technology to transcend— as he proposed—the spatiotemporal constraints of ink on paper.7 Whatever faith in the wonders of electronic dematerialization we might have had twenty years ago, however, has dwindled as our recognition of the Internet’s terminal indifference has increased. The realm of electronic storage and communication is a field of behavior, not an institution that takes shape.

It lacks, much as Borges’s library lacks, the quality of mercy.

The communicative power of information technology gives us superb tools and poor surrogates.

Above: Theaster Gates, Johnson Publishing Archives + Collections at Stony Island Arts Bank © Theaster Gates.

Photo: Tom Harris, courtesy Rebuild Foundation Below: Taryn Simon, The Picture Collection: Folder: Costume—Veil, 2012, archival inkjet print, 47 × 62 inches (119.4 × 157.5 cm), edition of 5 © Taryn Simon

Its dedication to exactitude, and its reductive nature, remain at the level of a sophisticated but inherently amoral catalogue. Benjamin described his own library as “a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order,” and noted that “if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.” He also offered a paraphrase of Anatole France’s view that basic information about the date and format of a book provides “the only exact knowledge there is.”8 That observation comes from France’s story “The Shirt” (1909), which describes a librarian who “lives catalogically,” happy in his completely unified ignorance and lack of self-awareness.9 When artists use libraries as sites, as scenarios, or as subject matter, they invoke our capacity to form an expanding set of associations for ourselves. As Simon’s Picture Collection demonstrates, libraries thrive on the kind of managed disorder that habit turns into an adequate system rather than a strictly logical one. Even the most rigorously ordered libraries remain what they always were: arenas for creative disobedience, dependent on refusal to accept that what we find is all there is. Whether we find ourselves within the porous, social exchanges that de Waal and Gates have established or outside Whiteread’s surrogates for unknowable and curtailed biographies, we intuitively grasp that “living catalogically” is a living death.

1. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” 1941, in Borges, Collected Fictions (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), pp. 112–18.

2. Kurd Lasswitz, “Die Universalbibliothek,” 1904, Eng. trans. in Clifton Fadiman, ed., Fantasia Mathematica (New York: Springer, 1997), pp. 237–43.

3. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, 1980, Eng. trans. William Weaver (Wilmington, Mass.: Mariner, 2014).

4. W. V. Quine, “Universal Library,” in Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 223–24.

5. Eco, Baudolino, 2000, Eng. trans. William Weaver (Orlando, Austin, New York: Harcourt, a Harvest Book, 2003).

6. Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 65.

7. El Lissitzky, “Topographie der typographie,” Merz no. 4 (July 1923):47.

8. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 1931, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 60.

9. Anatole France, “The Shirt,” 1909, in The Seven Wives of Bluebeard and Other Marvellous Tales, trans. D. B. Stewart (London: John Lane, 1920), pp. 157–58.

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On the occasion of Georg Baselitz’s career-spanning exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Richard Calvocoressi tracks the evolution of the artist’s development from his early education in East Germany to his revelatory trip to Florence, in 1965, and beyond.

BASELITZ BILDUNG

“Bildung” is a useful German word meaning a gradual process of self-cultivation, intellectually and aesthetically as well as morally (in the sense of character formation). It came to mind when I viewed Georg Baselitz’s exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Containing nearly 100 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, this unforgettable exhibition—the first by a living artist in the Accademia—focuses on the works Baselitz made before and after the formative months he spent in Florence in 1965 on a Villa Romana fellowship, the oldest German visual-arts prize. The title of the show, Baselitz Academy (coined by the artist as a sort of pun on “Accademia”), alludes to the difference between self-education and formal or academic teaching but also to the role that the latter can play in the former. It is a happy coincidence that the galleries devoted to the exhibition were once occupied by the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, the art school where the Venetian abstract painter Emilio Vedova, one of Baselitz’s heroes, taught from 1975 to 1986.

You have to remember that the venue is an academy, in Venice, during the Biennale . . . you can’t show up with anything slipshod.

The Gallerie dell’Accademia is not the German Pavilion, where contemporary work is shown; here it’s about history, as a rule. . . . For me, the Gallerie dell’Accademia is a chance to show things that have been important in my life, but have not been so clearly appreciated as yet—the portraits, the early nudes, the negative pictures.1 The three larger galleries in the show are dedicated to a spectacular display of portraits and nudes from two especially vibrant and productive periods of Baselitz’s oeuvre: 1969–77, the first “upside-down” decade; and 2004–12, including the series of “negative” pictures that Baselitz mentions above in his interview with the exhibition’s curator, Kosme de Barañano. In the four smaller rooms and in the corridor leading up to the entrance, Baselitz’s long and fruitful engagement with Italian art is explored in depth, largely through works on paper.

Baselitz’s first introduction to art history came in 1955, when, as an ill-prepared seventeen-year-old in Kamenz, East Germany, he and the rest of his school were taken to Dresden, sixty kilometers to the southwest, to welcome home the old master collection of the city’s Gemäldegalerie alte Meister on its return from a decade of forced exile in the Soviet Union. The following year he took lessons in drawing at his local community college (Volkshochschule) before applying to the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte Kunst (Academy of Fine and Applied Arts) in East Berlin. His uncle Wilhelm, a Dresden priest, had earlier encouraged the young Baselitz to paint by arranging for him to be given paints, brushes, and a palette and by introducing him to the paintings of the nineteenth-century Saxon realist Ferdinand von Rayski. Baselitz also recalled recently his excitement at discovering a book on Italian Futurism when he was fifteen or sixteen:

I was in the library that I often visited in my town, Kamenz, which had been purged of all such art and literature by the Nazis and then the Communists. You couldn’t find anything 86

Previous spread, left: Georg Baselitz, Ohne Titel (nach Pontormo) (Untitled [after Pontormo]), 1961, watercolor on paper, 12 1⁄8 × 8 5⁄8 inches (30.7 × 21.8 cm) Previous spread, right: Pontormo, Madonna and Child with Saint Anne and Other Saints, 1527–28, oil on wood, 89 ¾ × 69 3⁄8 inches (228 × 176 cm).

Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York This page, top: Georg Baselitz, Großer Kopf (Large Head), 1966, woodcut in black over brown and green ink, printed from two blocks on light gray primed paper, image: 18 ¾ × 15 7⁄8 inches (47.6 × 40.4 cm); paper: 25 × 19 1⁄8 inches (63.5 × 48.4 cm) This page, bottom: Georg Baselitz, LR, 1966, woodcut in black over blue-gray ink, printed from two blocks on paper, image: 16 ¾ × 12 7⁄8 inches (42.4 × 32.8 cm); paper: 17 1⁄8 × 13 3⁄8 inches (43.5 × 34 cm)

there anymore that disturbed, that was controversial. But still, I found a book, which I remember was called Il Futurismo . . . , with some black-and-white reproductions in it.

I had never seen anything like that before, and because it was all in black and white, I was only able to picture some of it. Yet I immediately started working in this fashion, with drawings, very large drawings, and I thought—and this is the strange thing about it—that now I was up to date, that I was a modern artist.

Now I know that I was mistaken.2

This page, top: Hans-Georg Kern (Georg Baselitz) standing in front of his own tachist paintings, Hann Trier’s class, Hochschule für bildende Künste, Berlin, c. 1957–58.

Photo: Courtesy Archiv Georg Baselitz This page, bottom: Georg Baselitz in his studio with Der nackte Mann (The Naked Man, 1962), Berlin, 1962. Photo: Elke Baselitz

In East Berlin, Baselitz studied painting under Walter Womacka and Herbert Behrens-Hangeler, the former a Socialist Realist to his fingertips, the latter a modernist who was out of favor with the Communist regime and was restricted to teaching painting technique and color theory. Baselitz remembers it as good training, even though he survived only two semesters of a sixyear course before being expelled for “socio-political immaturity.” In addition to painting, life drawing, and still life drawing, there were classes in wall painting, calligraphy, art history, and political history (i.e., Marxism-Leninism), the latter compulsory. Art history began with the nineteenth-century realist Adolph von Menzel, on the grounds that he had painted workers and industrial subjects and was therefore a forerunner of Socialist Realism. As an eighteen-year-old from the provinces, Baselitz knew no better. In the art-school library he found books on Pablo Picasso published in Czechoslovakia, but when he tried to paint like Picasso he was reprimanded by his teachers.

Baselitz’s move to West Berlin in 1957, to continue his studies under the tachist painter Hann Trier at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (Academy of Fine Arts), must have dealt him a profound shock. He not only had to unlearn much of what he had been taught in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) but his knowledge of twentieth-century art movements—Die Brücke, der Blaue Reiter, Bauhaus, and so on— was nonexistent: At the age of eighteen, I was completely ignorant, I had no information, I basically knew nothing. I literally lacked any knowledge of contemporary art or of the past. …At the academy in West Berlin, I was an abstract, informalist painter, as one was supposed to be, like my teacher.3 Wasting no time in making up for such cultural deprivation, Baselitz began a crash course in European art. He started to visit the old master collection in West Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie.

Guided by Trier, he read the writings of abstract or nonobjective artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Vasily Kandinsky, Willi Baumeister, and Ernst Wilhelm Nay, many of whose theories (e.g., concerning pictorial harmony) he would reject. In 1958, at the art school where he was a student, he saw The New American Painting, a traveling exhibition of seventeen Abstract Expressionists, organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, shown together with a small retrospective of Jackson Pollock, who had died a couple of years previously. The two exhibitions were a revelation but their impact on Baselitz was also confusing: 87

This page, top: Georg Baselitz, Fingermalerei – Weiblicher Akt (Finger Painting – Female Nude), 1972, oil on canvas, 98 ½ × 70 7⁄8 inches (250 × 180 cm). Photo: Friedrich Rosenstiel, Cologne This page, bottom: Georg Baselitz, Fingermalerei – Akt (Finger Painting – Nude), 1972, oil on canvas, 98 ½ × 70 7⁄8 inches (250 × 180 cm)

I had just come from the GDR and I had a picture model in my head of how art and society existed together. In my mind, the picture was not free; the picture served a function in society. …And then I saw Pollock, [Willem] de Kooning, Sam Francis, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and others in terms of freedom.

The effect was overwhelming, but at the same time, you couldn’t breathe anymore. . . . And so I looked for someone who offered a bridge, and the one with whom I found it . . . was de Kooning. At least he had the artistic foundation of Picasso. . . . And yet, in the works that I made then, you cannot find any trace of de Kooning. 4 The following year, Baselitz visited the second documenta, the exhibition that more than any other proclaimed the ascendancy of abstraction in the West. In 1960 he traveled to Amsterdam, where he admired paintings by Rembrandt and Soutine, and in 1961 he visited Paris. He made drawings based on Pontormo’s Madonna and Child with Saint Anne and Four Saints in the Louvre—the first stirrings of his love of Mannerism—and started to take an interest in the work of artists and writers outside the mainstream: the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, for example, the poet Isidore Ducasse (the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont), and more-contemporary figures such as Jean Dubuffet and Antonin Artaud (originator of the Theatre of Cruelty, and a victim of schizophrenia). The angry, nihilistic “Pandemonium Manifestos” that Baselitz and fellow artist Eugen Schönebeck issued in Berlin in 1961 and 1962 clearly show the influence of Artaud’s writings and drawings. In the same period, Baselitz also discovered Hans Prinzhorn’s classic 1922 book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill ), on the art of psychiatric patients.

It confirmed him in his intuition that it was the tragically human but uninhibited language of madness and irrationality that would reinvigorate painting—a new kind of painting that would transcend the dichotomy between abstract and representational art, uniting elements of both: “the complete reinvention of the world, and of course of the picture. To no longer imitate nature but to paint a reality.”5 The connection between the imagination of madness and the unnatural, anticlassical forms of Mannerism was made in a book by Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth (The world as labyrinth), first published in 1957. It prepared Baselitz for his stay in Florence in 1965. In Florence he was attracted to sixteenth-century Mannerism and was inspired to buy prints from this unfashionable period, especially chiaroscuro woodcuts. Their distorted forms, dramatic light effects, and heightened color contrasts influenced his own monumental figurative style.

This is evident in the ironically titled “Hero” and “New Type” images that Baselitz made on his return to Berlin, works evoking childhood memories of war, destruction, and social breakdown in the rural part of eastern Germany where he grew up.

You could say that in Florence I began to study art history, as an autodidact. There’s the famous German Kunsthistorisches Institut there. . . . the people were very kind. . . . I was allowed to look at everything. And I have 88

This page, top: Georg Baselitz, Ankunft (Arrival), 2018, oil on canvas, 173 ¼ × 118 1⁄8 inches (440 × 300 cm) This page, bottom: Georg Baselitz, Ankunft (nackte Ankunft, Piazzale Roma, Venezia) (Arrival [Naked Arrival, Piazzale Roma, Venezia]), 2018, oil on canvas, 173 ¼ × 118 1⁄8 inches (440 × 300 cm)

to say, that was a great period of education for me. If you find your own way and don’t have it mapped out for you, it’s better. …[After] I had exhausted the entire Institute, so to speak, [I] began collecting prints. …The art history of Italy, art history of Germany—that was what interested me. . . .

But when an artist does art history, he doesn’t do it objectively. He asks himself: What can I take from this? What interests me? What do I need? 6 For Baselitz, studying art history in this private way, visiting the Uffizi, making drawings back in his studio from reproductions, reinterpreting old master paintings, helped him mature as a person. In Berlin he had been, by his own admission, “a very aggressive type . . . a naïve, oafish young man.”7

I was in a very poor state, completely adrift and disorientated. I had no religion, and no ideology. And I did not have what the École de Paris had, for example, what was referred to as “existentialism.” I simply reacted in a very violent and angry manner. The general thrust of my reaction was ugliness. …I found everything so lousy and I tried to show it. . . . This is why I painted the P.D. pictures. I did not paint them as a masochist or as an onanist; I painted them as someone who desperately wanted to be seen.8 It was the P.D. (Pandemonium) paintings, and related canvases such as Die Große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain) of 1962–63, that caused a scandal and got Baselitz and his dealers into trouble with the law. Die Große Nacht im Eimer shows a male figure whose body appears to be decomposing, dressed only in shorts, masturbating his disproportionately large penis—a gesture symbolizing futility and alienation that is found in other works by Baselitz of the earlyto-mid-1960s. A couple of paintings were confiscated by the police, the legal process dragged on for two years, and Baselitz did not get the works back until 1965, when he was in Florence. He was bruised by the whole experience: “I felt a fairly strong social pressure. That induced me to seek a substitute. And that substitute was art history in museums.” 9 Initially, the subjects of Baselitz’s pictures had no source in reality; they were nothing to do with nature or illusion but were, in the artist’s own word, “inventions”: “You reject the model, the portrait model, the nude model, the landscape model.”10 But all this was to change in 1969.

Beginning with the [first upside-down] portraits there was a model, and I had photos. I thought to myself: You can forget drawing in this realism sense. That’s no use, others have done it better. So I took Polaroid photos and used them like Pop art, like [Andy] Warhol.

And then I painted these photos. I didn’t print them, or screen them. . . . I simply painted them.11 The Accademia includes a striking series of eight of these half-length upside-down portraits of Baselitz’s friends (all 162 × 130 cm, or 63 ¾ × 51 ¼ inches), executed in a naturalistic idiom but with an expressive painterly touch. As “demonstrations of absurdity” (the artist’s phrase), they 89

This page, top: Georg Baselitz, Porträt D. Hildebrand – Kopfbild (Portrait of D. Hildebrand – Head Painting), 1969, synthetic resin, silver paint, and charcoal on canvas, 63 ¾ × 51 ¼ inches (162 × 130 cm).

Photo: Rob McKeever This page, bottom: Georg Baselitz, Porträt H. M. Werner (Portrait of H. M. Werner), 1969, synthetic resin paint on canvas, 63 ¾ × 51 ¼ inches (162 × 130 cm) Artwork © Georg Baselitz All photography by Jochen Littkemann unless otherwise noted

occupy an important place in Baselitz’s oeuvre in that they are the first paintings to draw attention to the autonomy of art—to the painting as a self-contained object—without completely jettisoning tradition. 12 His ambition to deconstruct f igurative painting is further developed in the full-length nude self-portraits and nude portraits of his wife, Elke, that followed in the 1970s, also well represented in the Accademia show. Baselitz painted some of these with his fingers: “I . . . scoured the canvas, so that it would become as cold as possible. For the background I took a large amount of white, and then worked with cold colours.” 13 A similar alienation effect (to use Bertolt Brecht’s celebrated term) characterizes the “negative” paintings from 2004 onward, the first of which was based on a computer printout of a photograph of Elke with the colors reversed. In addition to portraits, Baselitz applied this technique to reproductions of Socialist Realist paintings from books on Soviet art that he had been brought up with in the GDR. A coda or climax to the exhibition is provided by a pair of recent canvases that Baselitz showed me in his studio in Bavaria this winter, enormous full-length naked portraits, over fourteen feet high, of the artist and Elke, both titled Ankunft (Arrival). In each painting a figure is seen tentatively descending a staircase (echoes of Marcel Duchamp) against a black background. Here the distancing device is one of flatness, a complete absence of modeling in the way the figures are constructed. Since the early 1990s Baselitz has painted on unstretched canvas laid out on the floor. He uses stencils or templates to achieve sharp contours and to stop the paint from running, and thins the paint often with a mixture of turpentine and linseed oil. Consequently the figures seem to float, shadowless and almost transparent, like ghosts. As poignant reflections on the frailty and vulnerability of old age, these two recent portraits can also be said to conform to the concept of Bildung, which includes a crucial element of self-awareness.

My thanks to Georg and Elke Baselitz for their replies to my questions in conversation (Ammersee, January 15, 2019) and to Detlev Gretenkort, Julia Westner, and Leeor Engländer of the Baselitz Archive and Studio in Munich.

1. Georg Baselitz, in “Georg Baselitz in conversation with Kosme de Barañano,” Baselitz Academy, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian, 2019), p. 252.

2. Baselitz, in “Georg Baselitz and Okwui Enwezor in conversation,”Jumping Over My Shadow, exh. cat.(New York: Gagosian, 2016), p. 53.

3. Ibid., pp. 53, 54.

4. Ibid., pp. 54–55.

5. Ibid., p. 56.

6. Baselitz, in “Georg Baselitz in conversation with Kosme de Barañano,” pp. 242, 244.

7. Ibid., p. 243.

8. Baselitz, in “Georg Baselitz and Okwui Enwezor in conversation,” p. 56.

9. Baselitz, in “Georg Baselitz in conversation with Kosme de Barañano,” p. 244.

10. Baselitz, in “Georg Baselitz and Okwui Enwezor in conversation,” p. 55.

11. Baselitz, in “Georg Baselitz in conversation with Kosme de Barañano,” p. 252.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., p. 253.

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Ed Ruscha, I Remembered to Forget to Remember, 1984. Artwork Š Ed Ruscha.

Marciano Art Foundation Los Angeles California Artists in the Marciano Collection

Free Reservations marcianoartfoundation.org

Carlos Valladares explores the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, tracking the developments and lasting influence of the auteur’s singular career.

PASOLINI’S FACES

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Death lies not in not being able to communicate but in no longer being understood.

—Pier Paolo Pasolini, “A Desperate Vitality,” 1964 The type of people I love the most, by far, are perhaps the people who never even reached fourth grade. Very plain and simple people— and those aren’t just empty words on my part.

I say this because the culture of the petit bourgeoisie always brings corruption and impurity along with it, while the illiterate, or those who barely finish first grade, always have a certain grace, which is lost as they’re exposed to culture. Then it’s found once again at a very high level of culture. But conventional culture always corrupts.

—Pier Paolo Pasolini, TV interview, 1971 In the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the human experiment finds its redemption in the face.

What an eye for faces he had: chapped, imperfectly curving lips, burnt or curly hair, dark skin tones, pupils staring off at some off-screen miracle. Pasolini approaches his faces tenderly, with a quivering camera that suggests the mortal body hoisting it from behind, in distance-melting close-ups unhampered by stylish cuts. The face of a lover, or of martyrs or radicals caught in the throes of heady poetic talk: one is enlivened looking into the eyes of Pasolini‘s queer outsiders, whose faces will be projected in their proper, iconic, original size at New York’s Metrograph cinema from May to July 2019, as part of a comprehensive retrospective of the director’s feature films. Whether it’s Anna Magnani in a fit of pietà agony (Accattone, 1961), the blind and blank-faced seer Tiresias (Oedipus Rex, 1967), or the naked boy who raises his fist and cock in freedom before being gunned down by four sadistic neofascists (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975), in Pasolini the face is where one rediscovers humanity’s beauty, the awful truths and the Edenic innocence lost in the countless Falls over time—and the countless Falls to come.

The main draw in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964; the best film about the life

of Jesus Christ) is not the cinéma vérité look, which treats the miracles and the Crucifixion like events caught on the fly by the documentary camera of Albert and David Maysles, but the simple choice to lavish so much adoring, fetishistic attention on the becalmed face of Jesus. He is played by Enrique Irazoqui, a nineteen-year-old Spanish Marxist and economics major who probably never realized how toweringly mythic his features were until Pasolini picked him out, almost at random.

There’s his narrow, collapsing-inward jawline, a nose with the contours of an unexplored canyon, a scary blank-lizard stare stuck in permanent sermonizing mode, a soothing and rational harmony in the arrangement of nose-eyes-lips in stark contrast to the character’s antirational, revolutionary words. One of Pasolini’s many inspired moves is to offset this pristine, virginal face with an unexpectedly booming male voice (dubbed in by a different actor, Enrico Maria Salerno), the voice of a martyr at birth who has endured a hundred lives’ worth of trauma, sin, and suffering.

Christ’s tirades against the money changers and the Romans are convincing in Pasolini’s rendition precisely because Pasolini nails one of the key Christian dialectics: cool, everyday love for the lowest of the low and weakest of the weak (Irazoqui’s face beams like Chaplin’s Little Tramp at a group of leprosy-addled kids) and hot, righteous anger at the ruling class’s hatefully antihuman policies (Salerno’s hell-raising voice, coarse like gravel and sure of what it’s saying: “It is written: My temple shall be a house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves!”). Especially when Irazoqui meditates unblinkingly with his disciples in pauses that seem to stretch for minutes, his default mode of intensity never relaxes or dissolves. Pasolini lets his Christ writhe and breathe. His Jesus, saddled with the vigor of a teen idol, is at core a genuine being whose extraordinariness is downplayed by the roving documentary camera. This dynamic performance could only be born out of the mangy, choppy, true-to-life rhythm that Pasolini cultivated in his entire oeuvre, from Accattone to Salò.

While the Christ of Matthew has his grace Frankensteined from a fussy mashup of exterior effects, the face of Anne Wiazemsky’s Odetta in Teorema (1968; the peak of Pasolini’s freakishly mannered late-’60s allegories, from The Hawks and the Sparrows [1966] to Medea [1969]) is unforced, natural, serene. Her protection against Pasolini’s grotesque late-capitalist world is her face—hard, smooth, ungiving, like a marble bust of Diana, Greek goddess of the hunt. Odetta’s face shows no real belief in the conventions of heterosexual courtship that she’s been encouraged (forced) to recite, with boys, by her prigs of parents: an industrialist father, Paolo (Massimo Girotti) obsessed with the pure act of Owning, and a housewife (Silvana Mangano, a Pasolini regular) who stares at the same sentence in highfalutin books over and over again, never advancing a page forward.

Wiazemsky is one of the five members of an uptight, repressed bourgeois family—mother, father, daughter, son, and the maid—who each find their release, both sexual and metaphysical, with a mysterious Visitor (Terence Stamp). When The Visitor leaves the family, each of its members goes mad in some irredeemable way: the son becomes a lonely abstract painter who can’t express what he really feels on the canvas, the mother starts picking up hustlers on the street to have sex with, the father strips naked in a train station and wanders in a desert screaming agonized to God (who does not respond), and the maid becomes a levitating, fasting legend in her rural village. Except for this latter punk saint from the lower classes, the family is cursed with awareness of their own inadequacy and spiritual malaise, which they can’t do anything to change. The only one who seems to be redeemed is Wiazemsky’s Odetta, who is awakened to the world’s sensuality—though under the most unusual circumstances. Shunning the bourgeois patriarchy that makes her useful only for procreation and looking content, she embarks on a vow of silence. She does not eat. She stays staring at the ceiling, her fist clenched as if ready to strike. (It is reductive to read her condition as an unwilled catatonic

Previous spread: Portrait of Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1971. Photo: Sandro Becchetti.

Courtesy Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images Opposite: Silvana Mangano in Teorema, 1968, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Photo: Angelo Novi/ Aetos/Kobal/Shutterstock This page: Anne Wiazemsky in Teorema, 1968, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

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IN PASOLINI THE FACE IS WHERE ONE REDISCOVERS HUMANITY’S BEAUTY, THE AWFUL TRUTHS AND THE EDENIC INNOCENCE LOST IN THE COUNTLESS FALLS OVER TIME—AND THE COUNTLESS FALLS TO COME.

state, as many critics and viewers have.) The parents eventually cart her off to a mental institution, thinking her insane. She is anything but. This is the only morally valid path Odetta finds out of the home. She saves herself from her hellish destiny of being no more than the pretty progeny of Das Daddy Kapital (Girotti).

Wiazemsky’s monklike grace is shaped by the heavy, sculptural presence of her face in all of her scenes—a counterpart to the JeanLuc Godard films in which, like most of his female actors, she recedes into a body no longer hers to control, drifting above Godard’s chunks of poetry-puns-theory like some papier-mâché plaything. In Teorema she does not become useful in the way Italy’s patriarchal family order demands of her: that is, as a passive vessel to be pawned off to an equally middle-class, equally pretty, equally dull male suitor. Rejecting her destiny of rotting in the high-operatic manner of her mother, Wiazemsky retreats within her face, into her mind. Pasolini lights her crazily to show this dramatic metamorphosis: in one unforgettably spiritualized close-up, she becomes Mary the Mother of God, Jeanne Falconetti’s Joan of Arc, a Vermeer woman lost in thought, and William Eggleston’s two Memphis hippie gals with the waterfalling hair all rolled into one.

While the brother turns into a pontificating, pissing-on-the-canvas abstractionist (Pasolini projecting his worst vision of himself?) who can’t voice his unquenching desire for The Visitor, Wiazemsky takes the silent route cleared

by Susan Sontag the year before Teorema, in 1967: So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric.”

Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from

ser vile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.1 Pasolini, who was obsessed, tormented, by linguistics and the boundaries of power marked out by language, would have renounced all he possessed to attain the defiant purity of Wiazemsky in Teorema. 2 Her performance is the ultimate “fuck you” to the mad world, from which she retreats while still confounding its arbitrary order. She declares herself a monument of sheer existence, nothing more. Reduction of her being becomes impossible. And the actor’s silently expressive face manages to express itself (pure Being) without Expressing itself (Being, mangled in translation by so many feel-good or antagonistic words, so many distorted signs).

One feels the surge of life pulsing through Pasolini’s uncensored faces. One feels in them what André Bazin saw in Carl Dreyer’s and Falconetti’s Joan of Arc, of 1928: “The movement of a wrinkle, the pursing of a lip are seismic shocks and the flow of tides, the flux and reflux of this human epidermis.”3 These faces obsessed and delighted the man who framed them. You’d be hard pressed to find a more philosophically demanding director in the history of modern cinema: Pasolini was an artist who resisted (and continues to resist) all attempts to whip his life into a conventional biographic shape. Understanding that to talk about him is a messy, atemporal affair, the Metrograph is running its Pasolini retrospective in backward order. It started in January with his last films, his best-known period, which includes his “Trilogy of Life”— his mystical, sexed-up romps through Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Arabian Nights, made between 1971 and 1974—as well as Salò, his premature final work, and his most perfectly pitched howl of rage at the collapse of modern morality in the age of late capitalism. (It’s also the most upsetting viewing experience I can bear to handle.) The next few months, May and June and July, will illuminate canonical

Opposite: Laura Betti in Teorema, 1968, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Photo: Aetos/ Kobal/Shutterstock This page: Franco Citti in Oedipus Rex, 1967, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Photo: Aetos/ Kobal/Shutterstock

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masterworks—Accattone, The Gospel, Teorema—along with little-known but essential Pasolini films such as his pain-wracked, gorgeous 1967 adaptation of Oedipus Rex, the knockabout, scum-caked satire The Hawks and the Sparrows (the closest Pasolini ever came to slapstick comedy, with a talking-crow sidekick who spouts Marxist sayings to boot), and the vox populi documentary Love Meetings (1964), in which Pasolini takes to the streets to confront the Italian people on their progressive and regressive views of modern love: sex, homosexuality, machismo, prostitution, birth control, and more.

To think one has grasped Pasolini through one of these films, however—even when one has seen all of them—is like the blind man struggling to describe the elephant. One struggles to keep up with the lines of verse he feeds to his actors, the poetic found locations that seem to exist beyond civilization at the edges of the world, the shaky camera movements, and the lingerings on oddball details (Girotti’s bare feet, say, as he is purified Ivan Ilych–style in the train station) that any sane editor would have mercilessly pared down or cut entirely.

The films give but one way into the man, just as his faces give but one way into his films.

Pasolini was always more than a director—a fact that often gets forgotten, especially in the United States, where his films are still far more known than the rest of the work he churned out steadily in a variety of media: the man was also a poet (first and foremost), a translator, a journalist, a composer, a painter, a dramatist, a linguist, a film theoretician, and a scrittore scomodo—that is, a writer who makes his readers uncomfortable. As a gay Catholic Marxist public intellectual who refused to subscribe fully to the dogma of any major institution, he was at any given point in time (and sometimes all at once) a thorn in the sides of the Fascists, the Christian Democrats, the Church, gay-rights parties in 1970s Italy, and the Communist Party. As a self-trained linguist who thought with his gut, he believed that reality is its own language and that cinema is “the written language of reality,” and

therefore the closest thing to a universal sign system (what he called an “image-system”).4 Perhaps this explains his ardor in adapting canonical Western texts from different ancient languages: the Book of Matthew (Greek), Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Middle English), Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Euripides’s Medea (classical Greek), Boccaccio’s Decameron (the Florentine dialect of Tuscan Italian), The Thousand and One Nights (Arabic), and Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (French).

Pasolini tried to bridge the linguistic, textual, temporal gaps that separated these works by bringing them under the umbrella of his oddball, off-center compositions, and by revitalizing their poetry through a stream of unforgettable faces and voices.

A true history of Pasolini’s life would have to be either written in verse or shot in moving images. In the case of the latter, in order to capture even a sliver of Pasolini’s overwhelming thought process, his lightning-fast changes in style and in attitude toward what the cinema could do, one would need to use every conceivable film technique in the book: shardlike flashbacks, from the president’s daughter eating nails in bread in Salò to the haughtyand-she-knows-it teen girl demanding sexual respect from a flock of bashful, grinning, dumb boys on the beach in Love Meetings (1964), in which the joys of sex are theorized and then, much later (a flash-forward), put into explicit practice in The Canterbury Tales; double flashbacks; and false flash-forwards à la Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968), to suggest paths never taken, or storylines fruitfully developed over years (the “Trilogy of Life”) and then, just when the plot threads near a logical finale, suddenly dropped without warning (Pasolini’s 1975 repudiation of the “Trilogy of Life” in favor of Salò’s bleak vision).

Pasolini would not want us to hew to a linear reading of his life that would suggest that after the despondency of Salò, whose Italian release he did not live to see, he had nowhere to go. A grisly murder may have prematurely ended his working process, but the work itself continues to sound off its outrageous, radical overtones.5 Fifty years on, his faces—unbroken

by postwar life and late capitalist misery— have lost none of their beauty.

Perhaps the most apt intuition of the meaning of Pasolini’s life, of how he saw himself, comes in the finale of Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus (Franco Citti), blinded after realizing he has slept with his mother, walks out of the Ancient Greek past and into the Italy of 1967.

Struggling to walk, he needs to be led around by more virile youth, a young servant named Angelo (Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini’s lover and curly-haired muse). His beard is scraggly, his stare into the camera (at us) upsettingly blank. His voice is cracked and hoarse from overuse; all he can shout is ”Angelo! Angelo!”

His lips eke out a pathetic tune on a shrill flute, while the people of the metropolis—in their snappy business suits, on their tandem bikes—peter on around him, ignoring his song against the degraded modern state. In Pasolini’s translation of the Sophocles play to modern times, Oedipus has become a contemporary Tiresias, crawling with knowledge of the world’s evils (all of which are set and known in advance) yet blind and ignored, his only sound a pained, animalistic shriek. He howls almost in vain, but nevertheless he howls—in the hope that, some day, a crowd will arise, eager to understand the pain in his eyes, to hear what he has to say.

1. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” 1967, in Styles of Radical Will, 1969 (reprint ed. New York: Picador USA, 2002), p. 6.

2. See Pier Paolo Pasolini, “New Linguistic Questions,” 1964, in Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, ed. and trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2005).

3. André Bazin, ’Theatre and Cinema—Part Two,’ in What Is Cinema? Part Two, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 110.

4. Pasolini, “Quips on the Cinema,” 1967, in Heretical Empiricism, pp. 223–32.

5. Pasolini was found beaten to death with a nail-studded board and run over by his own car on November 2, 1975.

Multiple bones were broken and his testicles were crushed with what appears to have been a giant metal bar. His body had been partly burned with gasoline after death. He was fifty-three. For a cogent summation of the theories that surround Pasolini’s suspicious murder and its motivation, see Stephen Sartarelli, “Introduction,” n. 82, in Pasolini, The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Sartarelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 54–56.

Otello Sestilli and Enrique Irazoqui in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Photo: Aetos/Kobal/ Shutterstock

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This is the second installment in the Building a Legacy series, which aims to provide practical information related to artists’ estates and creative legacies. In this issue Heather Gendron and Jill Sterrett sit down with Gagosian’s Rani Singh to talk about artists’ archives.

They discuss strategies for managing a studio archive, the types of documentation it might contain, and considerations for making archival materials accessible to researchers, scholars, and those who steward the artist’s work in private and public collections. Gendron is director of the Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University and coauthor of the guide Artists’ Studio Archives: Managing Personal Collections and Creative Legacies. Sterrett is deputy director of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and former cirector of collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where she led research initiatives related to the conservation and presentation of collection works.

RANI SINGH The three of us have such diverse experi-

ences working with artists and archives, and as we know, every scenario presents its own set of considerations. So let’s jump in and start with the basics: I’ve found that there is often confusion about what an artist’s archive consists of. Has that come up for you?

HEATHER GENDRON That’s a great question. When we were conducting research interviews for the “Artists’ Studio Archives” workbook, artists we spoke with often referred to parts of their studio as “the archive”—maybe because that word has become part of our everyday language, in the way that everything seems to be “archived” now. But that term worked well for us as a tool in conveying to artists what to keep and steward in their studios in the long term. Later, when we were doing workshops related to the workbook, I noticed that artists 100

who were completely unknown, or who were very early in their career, would sometimes be a little intimidated by the word, but in general we found it useful and meaningful because it’s connected to legacy, history, documentation—all the ideas we want to impress on people when we’re talking about studio archives.

JILL STERRETT Yes, it’s valuable to look closely at the word “archive”—to understand what it has meant historically and what we all think it means now, in the context of the studio, because everybody has a different idea of what “archive” means. In a collecting institution, there is typically an archive in an institution that holds certain records, and this is different from the object files—the files that contain the information about the artworks in the collection. In many museums there is also an archive of artist materials that doesn’t belong in either one.

So how would you describe to an artist what their archive consists of?

HG In the workbook, we list the types of things that might be found in an artist’s archive, whether it’s in a studio or an institution: not only records, ephemera such as correspondence, invitations and announcements, and financial papers, but also sketchbooks, writings, objects and materials used to create work, notes and photos documenting process, inventories of artworks created by the artist, and so on. But we distinguish between an institutional archive and a studio archive in terms of their purpose: the entire purpose of a studio archive is to serve the day-to-day needs of the artist. It has an eye to legacy, but the important thing is that it serve the artist.

In practical terms, too, the list is not meant to be prescriptive or exhaustive, because in the RS

workbook we were trying to reach an audience ranging from artists who really don’t have the resources to have a studio assistant to people who have teams of assistants. So we were trying to be inclusive of all of those different scenarios, and to think about what would be reasonable and not totally overwhelming for the individual.

RS How do you explain to artists the purpose of a studio archive and how it feeds their legacy? What are the various roles that the archive plays in benefiting and shaping that legacy?

JS I start with what the artist needs, rather than with how their archive should be structured—I’m interested in thinking about their practice, the scholarly applications of everything they have.

HG Right. Because the things that artists create day-to-day, the records and the documentation they create—those are the very things we would want to collect in an archive. Anything from personal correspondence, to correspondence with a curator putting together an exhibition, to some kind of registry or inventory of their work, to their library, or their materials—all those things. Organizing it can seem like a lot to tackle, though, so in the workshops we didn’t start with the whole, we tried to break down the challenge into manageable tasks: “Pick one thing you’d like to do in your studio to get it organized, and then plan it out so that it’s actually do-able.” If you don’t keep good records, you’re not going to be as well prepared to promote yourself and your work, and to get others to know about you.

RS Jill, I’m interested in hearing more about archives of artists’ materials. How did the archive at SFMOMA come about, and how is it useful to the staff members who work with the artworks in the collection?

JS It came about because we had been hosting artists in the conservation studio at SFMOMA for many years, and inevitably during the projects we worked on with them we accumulated materials that helped us to understand their practices—Jay DeFeo’s painting trowel, Katharina Fritsch’s pigments. We were keeping these materials in our desk drawers, we had no other structure in place, and at a certain point we admitted how uncomfortable we felt about that. Because everybody had been keeping these materials, we were able to gather them together and create an artist-materials archive. We weren’t trying to make a formal archive; we were trying to understand what this group of materials meant, not just to us but to the institution, and what we could be doing with it.

One of the very early commitments we made was that we wouldn’t treat these materials like an accessioned collection, with all of the rigors of traditional collection management. They were materials that had been lived with; they allowed us to understand materiality in a way that you only can when you’re able to touch them. So the artist-materials archive has as one of its foundational principles that you can touch everything. It functions to animate works of art in a different way.

RS Can you give us an example of how the artist-materials archive has been used?

JS When we were preparing for the Eva Hesse retrospective that opened in 2002, we had the mold for Hesse’s work Sans II, a series of resin boxes that hang horizontally on the wall in a long row. We knew Doug Johns, who had helped her make that piece, and then it turned out that we knew where she’d bought the resins on Canal Street. We went to that shop, and the young man who had sold Hesse the resins had bought the company. He was able to

help us approximate the resin formula she used, so we decided to mock up a section of Sans II. The section we made—Hesse had talked about “nothingness,” and when you saw the transparency of the resin pieces we made, you could understand that nothingness in a different way than by looking at the actual work, which has aged to an amber color.

RS What did you do with that mock-up?

JS We kept it, but it was designated as a mock-up and catalogued in the artist-materials archive.

When Sol LeWitt’s team came to create the wall drawing Loopy Doopy at the museum, we collected all the tools they used to create it. There are wire samples from Ruth Asawa, Robert Gober’s wax prototypes for some of his sculptures. . . .

RS Would it be valuable for artists to document their materials and processes as part of their studio records? Is this something they could be thinking about as part of their archive?

JS I have no doubt that it would be useful, absolutely. The question is, on what occasion are you doing that? What makes it happen? On the occasion of an exhibition is a really good time to think about it. The next challenge is how you collect all of the materials and what you do with them once you have them.

HG My advice to artists would be, Just do your best. If you feel like documenting a process, document it because you yourself are getting something out of documenting it, and you have the time and the resources to do it. If you can, save some of the material you used to make the work, or document an ephemeral piece you’ve made with photography or video—leave some clues behind.

RS Can I ask both of you to talk about the role of oral histories, and how you feel they play into an understanding of artists’ intentions and illuminate the archive?

HG It’s something we try to do in archives held by institutions, but you often need to find somebody who has been trained in creating oral histories in order to do it well. It’s not to say that you can’t interview somebody and have it be meaningful without training, but often we try to be very formal about it. It can be part of the process of taking someone’s records into the archives, where an archivist interviews the person about their life’s work and history to put together a timeline, so that when they’re processing the papers they better understand how to organize the collection to make things findable. So these types of interviews serve a practical purpose.

RS Jill, you’re on the board of directors of the organization Voices in Contemporary Art [VoCA], which conducts artist-interview workshops, among many other things. Could you tell us about that, and about the role of oral histories in the work you do?

JS Yes, the VoCA program came about because we recognized that for most of us who have trained in some kind of research, conversations with artists have never really been part of the methodology; typically you don’t receive the same kind of formal training that you would for, say, conducting research in archives. Whether you call them oral histories or not—because sometimes that term is used to mean something very specific, as Heather just described—it has to do with understanding how you test a hunch, how you develop rapport, how you understand the contours of memory, how you frame a conversation so that you continue to draw out the ideas that each of you is interested in in that conversation. These are things that some people do naturally, but you can learn them in the

The things that artists create day-to-day, the records and the documentation they create—those are the very things we would want to collect in an archive. Anything from personal correspondence, to correspondence with a curator putting together an exhibition, to some kind of registry or inventory of their work, to their library, or their materials— all those things.

—Heather Gendron

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My advice to artists would be, Just do your best. If you feel like documenting a process, document it because you yourself are getting something out of documenting it, and you have the time and the resources to do it. If you can, save some of the material you used to make the work, or document an ephemeral piece you’ve made with photography or video—leave some clues behind.

—Heather Gendron

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same way that you can learn how to do archival research.

RS Born-digital materials are on the mind of many artists. What kind of advice would you give to artists about preserving digital materials as part of their archive?

HG When it comes to digital records, e-mails, websites, and things like that, we have a refrain that’s fairly common in libraries and archives: locks, or “Lots of copies keep stuff safe.” Basically that’s a good rule of thumb. Some artists like to make printouts of important e-mails. E-mail accounts: make sure you keep them alive, and that you dump your data if you’re going to close them.

Digital records are quite fugitive—they can have something called bit rot, and the material on which that data sits can degrade. So typically you want to migrate the data every so often. For example, I have an external hard drive on which I kept all of my work on the workbook, and I have the date on which I bought it and I know that I need to change it out and to migrate that data after about three years, just to be on the safe side. You might decide to keep an old laptop, but store it somewhere where it’s dry and kind of cool, because later on technologists might be able to salvage some of the records on it.

The idea is to keep it alive.

At Yale we just received a grant, jointly funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to fund work to create emulation as a service. That’s a process in which native software is collected and then used to help access digital records from a long time ago. It’s really important, because it means that the integrity of the original is retained—if you’re looking at a record from 1998, for example, you’re experiencing that 1998 look and feel, it doesn’t change. Obviously that’s essential for digital artworks, but it can also be important for records, because looking at something as it was created is still, I think, really important to researchers—to experience the actual records that were created, and to have a sense of the time and place.

RS In terms of making an artist’s archive publicly accessible—by placing it with an organization or institution, for example—what are some considerations to keep in mind?

JS I would say in some ideal world, keeping all of the materials and records together might make sense. Realistically, though, that is almost unattainable for most people. Keeping it all together and maintaining it in a way that would allow you to provide access is a really costly venture.

HG I’m trying to think of an example of something that gets close to that, and the one that comes to mind is the Nam June Paik Archive at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. That was an enormous undertaking.

JS Yes, it’s a fantastic example. There are other models as well. I recall one instance when a number of museums were invited to an artist’s house and studio to look at the materials he left behind when he passed away. One of the institutions collected his pigments, which suited their artist-materials holdings. Another collected materials fashioned around practice—his in-process drawings, his painting tools, the jigs he used to make his frames—to accompany their collection of his paintings. And I realized then that the materials were placed where they would find a useful life. I really appreciated that, and I think it was a good outcome.

HG Those are interesting examples, because those types of materials aren’t traditionally considered part of an archive in an institution, so I think

it goes back to your point earlier about having a very broad definition of what a studio archive includes.

I think there’s another piece to this, too, where artists might not see themselves in an archive because they’re lesser known, or because they’re from a marginalized community—any number of reasons. We try to explain that archival institutions collect a range of materials, and when you’re thinking about placing your records with an institution, you might try to think of places that have like collections. At Yale, for instance, we have a big LGBTQ collection. There just might be options for artists that aren’t so obvious. I hear it over and over again: “Well, my university didn’t want my records because they don’t collect artists’ archives.”

RS Yes, there are numerous benefits of collections being housed in context with other archives.

HG I think it’s exciting, too, when an artist’s records end up in an archive at an institution such as a university or a museum while the artist is still alive, because then the records become accessible and the artist might have more exposure—a researcher may learn about them serendipitously in an archive.

RS Do you have any advice for artists in terms of building their archive now so that it feeds into their legacy later?

JS Some estate-planning advice I saw recently comes to mind: break a large task into its parts— here’s what you might think about doing in your thirties, here’s what you might think about doing in your forties, and so on. In other words, you don’t have to go all in at the age of thirty, but just think about a trajectory. Maybe that’s a less intimidating way for artists to approach their own work.

HG Yes, I think it’s back to motivation, and taking the time to think about what’s important to you at that moment, and being able to carve out enough time to think about legacy. Maybe there were a couple of pieces that you created a couple of years ago that you didn’t document well, so you carve out a little time to do that. Or you decide that the correspondence is really important for this one project you did for the city, a public-art project, and you want to retain those records, so you take the time to make printouts, or to migrate that e-mail correspondence to some other medium to keep it over time.

People often want to look forward or live in the moment, and they’re so busy doing what they’re doing that they don’t want to look back, but I do think it’s essential that people take the time. It could be monthly, it could be annually, it could be weekly, depending on where you are at your stage of life or career: it’s a gift to yourself to take the time and space to care for your studio archive.

Resources “Artists’ Studio Archives: Managing Personal Collections and Creative Legacies,” by Neal Ambrose-Smith, Joan E. Beaudoin, Heather Gendron, and Eumie Imm Stroukoff, available online at www.arlisna.org/publications/arlis-na-research-reports/1013artists-studio-archives.

“Career Documentation for the Visual Artist: An Archive Planning Workbook and Resource Guide,” by the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) initiative, available online at http://callresources.org.

Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA) Artist Interview Workshops, available online at www.voca.network/programs/voca-workshops/.

henry moore drawings the art of seeing 3 APRIL â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 27 OCTOBER 2019 Book online at www.henry-moore.org HENRY MOORE STUDIOS & GARDENS Perry Green, Herts, SG10 6EE

FRANKENTHALER

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On the occasion of the exhibition Pittura/Panorama: Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952–1992, at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice, Italy, art historians John Elderfield and Pepe Karmel discuss the concept of the panorama in relation to the artist’s work. Their conversation traces developments in Frankenthaler’s approach to composition, the boundaries and conventions of abstraction, and how, in many ways, her career continually challenged established theories of art history.

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Previous spread: Helen Frankenthaler, Riverhead, 1963 (detail), acrylic on canvas, 82 ¼ × 143 inches (208.9 × 363.2 cm)

Above: Helen Frankenthaler, New Paths, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 54 ¾ × 109 inches (139 × 276.9 cm) Opposite: Helen Frankenthaler, Brother Angel, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 66 ¼ × 117 inches (168.3 × 297.2 cm)

In the initial stages of planning for the Palazzo Grimani exhibition, and through looking at Helen’s work, particularly the very horizontal works from the 1970s, I became interested in the idea of panorama painting and the differences between that and mural or frieze painting. Panoramas are understood to be spatialized images, unlike mural paintings or friezes, which are both meant to read as flat. My thinking about this developed through an encounter with works by Puvis de Chavannes—I was struck by how flat his pictures are. It’s this quality, I believe, that makes people think of them as mural paintings. Puvis was enormously influential in his time, precisely because his paintings are so flat and murallike. The author Willa Cather was a great admirer of Puvis. Her wonderful book Death Comes for the Archbishop, from 1927, is organized in chapters, and the same characters appear in each chapter, but there isn’t a lot of narrative connection. She liked Puvis’s work because of the way subjects are stretched out across the plane, each separately conceived. There’s a couple of people embracing on one side, and then there’s something else occurring on the other; there’s no attempt to unify them. She liked that flat affect, free of any impulse toward comprehensive unification, and that’s how she wrote as well.

JOHN ELDERFIELD

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PEPE KARMEL Everything is so gray in Puvis’s work,

so middle value with very few shadows, a quality that tends to accentuate flatness. Added to this is a sense of stasis among the figures, as if they’re posing for eternity, never interacting.

Thomas Hart Benton, in his 1926 essay “Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting,” argued that once a composition got to be long enough, you could no longer create a single unified scene. He said a work must have a series of vertical axes, with groups organized around each axis.

Among these groups there is no particular relationship. This point is often invoked apropos Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles [1952].

What do you think distinguishes something as a panorama? What are the characteristics that led you to associate that term with Frankenthaler?

It’s certainly more nuanced than the simple fact that the works have very long horizontal dimensions. You’ve mentioned their spatiality— JE The progression into a panoramic spatiality relates in part to her treatment of the canvas.

At the end of the 1950s, Frankenthaler starts to paint on primed rather than unprimed canvas, in part because she could get more vivid color with a strong white ground. That said, by the time she gets into the 1970s, and certainly by the mid-1970s,

something else is happening: there really is a sense of the canvas being one material and the paint being another. This differs significantly from the way the soak-stain paintings are often written about, including by me: these works, as well as the works of Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, are often discussed in terms of the staining becoming one with the canvas. Of course we could argue the opposite as well.

With a painting like For E.M. [1981] Frankenthaler is certainly pushing the way soak-stain paintings are understood. By this point you see the paint film as a unit. In a way, it’s a lot like a traditional picture plane. In the Palazzo Grimani exhibition, For E.M. will share a room with Riverhead [1963], which, in retrospect, seems anticipatory of what she would do later on.

PK Speaking of Riverhead, and the question you raised of whether it all merges as one thing or whether the paint stands out from the canvas, I’ve been looking carefully at that work, and it’s striking the way the passages of bare canvas work as colors on par with the parts that are actually painted. You have to get quite close to tell what’s painted and what’s not because they’re so fully integrated. It’s remarkable. Italian Beach [1960] is a work that’s primed, and it’s striking how the paint stands up

I’ve been looking carefully at [Riverhead], and it’s striking the way the passages of bare canvas work as colors on par with the parts that are actually painted. You have to get quite close to tell what’s painted and what’s not because they’re so fully integrated. It’s remarkable.

Pepe Karmel on that work. It’s brilliantly colored; it seems to leap off the canvas.

JE And when it gets thin, it doesn’t stain. It’s a wash.

PK It is, aggressively, a brush-painted picture. It feels quite different from the stained pictures.

JE Yes, and New Paths from 1973 is interesting in that the white area is almost like a pretend stain.

PK Definitely. In the lower part of the picture, where the white paint goes over the black paint, it feels like it’s stained into it, but it’s just been thinned and is running over.

JE The appearance of dark grounds in her work is I think really fascinating.

PK Oh yes. Do you remember the 2013–1 4 Georges Braque retrospective in Paris and Houston?

One of the things that the show reinforced was my awareness of Braque’s use of colors on dark grounds. We’re all conditioned by Impressionism to think that white makes colors brighter; I don’t think that’s always right—white makes paintings brighter, but it actually evens out the colors a little because there’s so much light coming through them. Braque figured out that to make the chroma more powerful, you put the color on top of a dark ground and then the actual hue leaps out at you. And of course what Frankenthaler’s done in New Paths

is make white into a hue. Paradoxically, it looks whiter on black than it looks on white.

JE Well, in the early 1970s she made paintings where she started by tinting whole canvases with one color. This was a new technique for her at the time. She left slivers of the bare canvas exposed, so the canvas works as a color along with the painted areas. There’s been a lot written about white canvas starting to become common in Impressionism, but less has been written about the use of colored grounds. Degas used colored grounds, and he had his pupils each work from a ground of a different color—“You get blue, you get red, you get yellow.”

PK That was standard old master practice. Once you get to the sixteenth century, people work on a mid-value ground. Often it’s a brown, but it can be other colors. You think of drawings on red paper, drawings on blue paper. The idea is you already have a color and then you work up to the lights and down to the shadows. So what we’re seeing is a rediscovery of that for modern art.

JE Cézanne was using dark grounds in the 1860s and he eventually—really because of Camille Pissarro, I think—stopped using them. It’s interesting that Frankenthaler is engaging in various ways, across her career, with these different approaches to the ground of her paintings.

In the late 1970s and the ’80s she reengages with Titian, Édouard Manet, and a series of old masters; she begins to use their techniques to make abstract paintings. This is often done with an oblique reference to a motif that she’s borrowed, which, in her process, disappears and becomes an abstraction. Thinking about this, it astonishes me, because our canonical history of abstraction has no room for this kind of thing. If you go from Clement Greenberg to Michael Fried and so forth, it’s all about flatness, purity, and some idea of what the picture plane supposedly demands. The richness and sophistication of Frankenthaler’s later work goes way beyond that very limited discourse. I think it’s been hard for critics to deal with it.

JE Yes, because people think of it as traditional.

And it is, but— PK But it’s not traditional for abstract painting. It’s radically innovative for abstract painting.

Another tenet of Greenberg’s that Frankenthaler’s work brings into question is opticality. There’s this narrative arc that goes from the putative opticality of Pollock to the even greater opticality of Frankenthaler and then Noland and Louis, but where, really, is the opticality in those works? I mean, Pollock is intensely material. If you get within five or six feet of the surface, you see how incredibly gnarled PK

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and material they are. That opticality argument, I think, is untrue to the actual experience of looking at a Pollock, because you don’t just stand back and look. You stand back and then you move close.

JE Yes. PK There’s typically a long interaction where you confront the material quality and then you back away from it. And much the same thing happens when looking at these paintings by Frankenthaler.

JE Yes, I think it’s the same. The contrast of proximate and distant viewing has long been a matter of critical interest, producing the famous 1877 critic’s joke about Pissarro’s landscapes: “Seen up close they are incomprehensible and hideous; seen from a distance they are hideous and incomprehensible.” More recently: have you ever been to Willem de Kooning’s studio on Long Island? The chair from which he looked at his paintings was at a distance where you couldn’t possibly see the materiality of the pictures. He would sit and see them as nonmaterial things, then walk up to them, do something, and then go back.

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That doesn’t mean, however, that he wanted to dematerialize them.

JE No. I think he wanted both.

PK You need to get pretty far back to see a whole composition. In looking at these Frankenthalers, I’ve been acutely aware of this debate. I’m hypnotically drawn to get up close and look at details, but then to find out what the whole picture looks like, I have to go back ten or fifteen feet and really see the effect.

JE And even if going back means you lose some sense of the relief quality of the painterliness, the form of the painterliness tells you that it’s in relief.

PK Plus you remember it. Fried argued that the best possible abstract painting was one that you could take in instantly; for him a perfect work didn’t require protracted examination. Perhaps that’s true for Noland at a certain moment, but it’s not true for lots of other artists. It’s certainly not true for Frankenthaler. You want to look at the paintings over a long period of time.

JE It’s not true for Rembrandt.

PK

No, exactly. In some ways I see Frankenthaler as an artist who has the freedom to take all of art history as her model for making abstraction. She’s reopening and reappropriating everything that was there before, which is a glorious approach.

JE The availability of the past is something one hears more about from representational artists, of course. When I went to art school, one of my teachers said, “You know, it’s all one art school, really.” This was someone who had studied with Walter Sickert, who had been a pupil of Degas, and Degas had admired Ingres, and on. He would say, “You’re all part of that.” I remember thinking, “Oh no. Does that mean I’m supposed to learn to draw like Ingres? I’ll never achieve that.” But that sense of availability, where one can take from history whatever one needs—I agree with you, there seems to be an unwillingness to allow that in abstract art. And it’s therefore been customary to explain away things that could be thought to be making use of traditional forms.

PK Since the ’90s, abstract artists, to some extent PK

Below: Helen Frankenthaler, Maelstrom, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 46 ½ × 107 ½ inches (118.1 × 272.9 cm) Following spread, top: Giorgione, The Tempest, c. 1506–08, 30 ¾ × 28 ½ inches (82 × 73 cm). Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia, Italy Following spread, bottom: Helen Frankenthaler, Open Wall, 1953, oil on unsized, unprimed canvas, 53 ¾ × 131 inches (136.5 × 332.7 cm)

following in Frankenthaler’s path, have gone back toward complexity and reference. I organized a show some years back with Valerie Jaudon, Peter Halley, David Reed, and a whole group of painters for whom abstraction was about life and the world and experience. The critic and curator Katy Siegel pointed out recently how a contemporary painter like Mary Weatherford can look back to Frankenthaler with an openness to the past, a willingness to say, “I’m going to take something and make it new, make it my own,” which is very much a hallmark of abstraction in our time.

Let’s turn to the question of abstraction and figuration, which I think also brings us back to the idea of the panorama. In describing this group of Frankenthaler paintings selected for Venice as panoramas, you’ve spoken of their spatiality. This comes very close to suggesting that they’re allied to representational landscapes. Do I understand this correctly?

JE Well, there’s a good argument to be made that any pictorial imagery that uses cursive forms is

bound to be allusive. This is a long-standing argument that I don’t think we can settle, but Cecily Brown, for example, has made the argument that you can’t paint a curved line without triggering some memory of a shoulder or a thigh or whatever. In some way we’re programmed to respond to human imagery, and we’ll see it wherever we can find it. In terms of paint spread in a spatialized way, the work’s going to have some kind of reference to the natural world. It just seems inevitable; we look at landscapes, we look at skies, we look at water, and we, I think, are programmed to see these things even in abstract representations.

PK How do we get from the kind of mark that evokes the human figure to the kind of mark that evokes a landscape? Is it a different kind of mark? Is it a different way of putting those marks together?

JE Well, one good example is New Paths. The marking is extremely graphic, linear, and therefore more descriptive of a body than of a landscape.

On the other hand, because it spans space, and because of the way it describes space as it goes

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back around, it definitely invokes landscape associations. There’s the sense of space moving from the foreground to the background, which is similar to our perception of landscape spaces.

PK Okay, so let’s discuss those two formal qualities that point to landscape. The more obvious one seems to be that it sprawls out sideways, which human beings don’t do unless they’re lying down.

But you’ve also just brought up another point, which is that the internal structure of the lines and colors suggests a recession into space. There’s a spatiality that’s different from what you see in the human figure, which is more parallel to the picture frame.

JE It doesn’t have to be only a movement from foreground to background, either; with a work like For E.M., the spatiality moves in and out through the composition. It’s ambiguous in terms of how one would read it. For instance, it’s possible to hold an image where the dark is distant, but then it’s equally plausible to see that dark area as being in front of other parts of the composition.

I believe that Frankenthaler was fully interested in pushing and pulling the space in that way.

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When she was a student of Hans Hofmann very early on, that push-pull thing was already there.

PK It’s fascinating that you chose For E.M. as an example. I was struck by the fact that it does indeed feel like a landscape, even though we know that the inspiration for it was a still life—Manet’s painting of a carp [1864]. As a landscape, it reminds me, for instance, of Martin Johnson Heade’s Approaching Thunder Storm [1859]. That band of darkness at the top of For E.M.: in a still life I can simply read that as darkness behind the table, or a distant wall somewhere, but in a landscape context it becomes a dark sky against a brightly lit patch of ground in the foreground. When the natural relationship of light sky over a darker earth gets reversed and you have a dark sky over a lighter earth, there’s a sense of drama and a little frisson of terror. It’s exciting, it’s scary, and it’s a landscape experience.

JE Last year I was working on various Cézanne projects and it got me thinking about landscape, and specifically about the basic modes that get repeated throughout art history. While the manner of painting can be changed radically, as it was in Cézanne’s work, in many cases he’s using

conventional forms and techniques that had been used since the sixteenth century. It’s as if certain of these things are just wired into artists’ minds, whether they’re aware of it or not. For instance, repoussoir remains present across landscape paintings. Kenneth Clark’s Landscape into Art from 1949 was crucial in my thinking on this. One of his eureka moments is Giorgione’s Tempest [c. 1506–08], where Giorgione had this bright idea of pulling the composition apart, placing the view onto the landscape at the center. The figures got moved apart as well, of course. Later compositions tend to have a repoussoir only on one side, usually the left, but Giorgone’s double-repoussoir composition lies somewhere behind Frankenthaler’s Open Wall [1953].

PK Yes, of course. It struck me that the warm colors seem to have been painted first in that work— the salmon-colored flume rising upward, and then the pink one next to it, and then the ocher shade at the extreme right. The blues between them are clearly painted later. Try to imagine the painting without that section of blue: it would have had an opening in the middle. It wouldn’t be that

old-fashioned perspective, but as you’re suggesting, it would open up and yield into the distance in the near-middle.

It’s helpful to look at the difference between Open Wall and New Paths. Open Wall has a series of vertical forms that certainly keep the canvas from receding at the top. It doesn’t go back into the distance except in that blue passage just right of center. It’s very frontal. It even has a somewhat friezelike quality, to go back to a term we used before. New Paths, to my eye, with the dark band at top and bottom, brings back that feeling of a landscape, as it’s got a dark sky over a dark ground with a band of white sky or openness in the middle, which opens to a kind of indefinite distance.

The lines do suggest things moving back in space toward the kind of green splotch just below the black. There’s a sense of openness and recession quite different from the flatness of Open Wall.

JE Frankenthaler had six of her paintings included in the 1966 Venice Biennale, and the catalogue includes a short essay by William Rubin.

He talks about the early work having veiled poetic allusions to landscape and organic forms that,

though never literally represented, “lurked naturally” in the metrics of the more draftsmanly pictures. What does the adverb “naturally” mean here?

PK I think he means inevitably, though it’s fun to think of something lurking unnaturally.

JE Exactly. Anyhow, “lurking” doesn’t seem quite the way to put this— PK Well, it speaks to a persistent unease that people felt about this question between 1955 and 1970. Remember there was that show in 1958 at the Whitney called Nature in Abstraction; we’re not the first people to see nature in this kind of painting. I think the New York art world was divided between people who were happy to find nature in abstraction and others who were radically upset, who felt that the claim to true abstraction—the claim to critical validity—depended on banishing all forms of reference. Some of that tension might be registered in Rubin’s use of the word “lurking.” It may be there, but it’s bad.

JE Yes, exactly.

PK In Françoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso [1964], there’s an anecdote that has Picasso pointing out a

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squirrel in one of Braque’s paintings. Braque kept trying to paint it out, but it took him weeks to get rid of it. He would repaint the picture and the squirrel would still be there and he’d have to rework it all over again. And Cubism seems like a useful point of reference for this conversation, not formally— though Frankenthaler’s very much aware of Cubism—but in that sense of suspended reference. In the sense that, okay, maybe there’s a woman with a mandolin or a table with bottles and wine glasses or a guitar in there somewhere, but that’s not the point of the picture. If you get too worked up trying to identify the objects, you’re not looking properly at the picture. On the one hand, Picasso and Braque tease us with their titles or little clues, but Cubism is a paradigm for the picture that’s suspended between figuration and nonfiguration. It’s deliberately not totally abstract, but it’s also no longer figurative in any conventional way. There’s that peculiar, particular pleasure of feeling the presence of the real world without quite being able to see it.

JE This makes me think of all the Cézannes that include brushstrokes, placed on the surface, with no representational function. Nonetheless, they have a semantic function; they’re part of the meaning of the picture.

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In his painting there’s also continual transition. So in, say, Turning Road at Montgeroult [1898] at MoMA, the houses up top are completely sharp and legible, like a Pissarro, but then the landscape, the hillside, and the vegetation just dissolve into pure brushwork in the lower part of the picture, which is gorgeous. You know that they generically represent bushes or trees, but it’s also just the sensation. That is a touchstone of modernist experience; we want to have a sensation of the real world without being burdened with a particular image of it. Perhaps this looks forward to a certain kind of French literature of the 1940s and ’50s—the Nouveau Roman, or even Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea [1938] and Nathalie Sarraute—with its attempts to capture the phenomenology of lived life while bracketing out the real world, or narrative, or character, or any of those things you usually find in fiction. What’s the texture? What’s the sensation of being alive? That’s an important theme at a certain moment in modern literature; it also seems like a theme in these paintings by Frankenthaler.

They have a tremendous sense of lived experience, a phenomenological experience, you could say, without having a fixed, recognizable image behind it.

PK

Above: Helen Frankenthaler, Overture, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 70 × 94 inches (177.8 × 238.8 cm) Helen Frankenthaler artwork © 2019 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photos: Rob McKeever unless otherwise noted

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VENE T IAN HERI TA G E 115

JASON YSENBURG Toto, could you briefly tell me about

the origins of Venetian Heritage?

TOTO BERGAMO ROSSI Venetian Heritage was founded

by Larry Lovett. He had served for decades as a distinguished member, in various capacities, of New York’s Metropolitan Opera Guild, experience that made him uniquely capable in fund-raising for the arts. He moved to Venice in the ’70s and rented the Palazzetto Pisani. His relocation coincided with the development of Save Venice, and in 1986 he became chairman of the organization. His efforts propelled the organization forward. Larry was able to bring the international jet set on board to fund the organization’s projects. He really was the first to import the system of American-style charity into Italy—you know, the big ball that you pay to attend? It had never existed before in our country.

Larry left Save Venice at the end of the ’90s; Venetian Heritage was officially born in 1998, with its unique mission.

Larry began calling all his good friends to start up new projects.

Like you, Peter.

JY Yes, that was going to be my next question. Peter, is that how you remember becoming involved w it h Venet ia n Heritage?

PETER MARINO Exactly, Larr y Lovett called me. He was interested in buying the Palazzo Sernagiotto and he was curious what I thought. It’s one of only a few nineteenth-century palazzos on the Grand Canal, and it has two distinct features: a terrace on the canal, which is very rare—all the rest go straight into the water—and a garden in the back. So I told him I thought it was a dream, and he committed to buying it. I was brought in as the architect on the project and it was a learning experience for me. I had a lot of experience doing restoration work, but my first submission proposal to the city had every element mimicking nineteenth-century conventions. Interestingly, the response was, “We don’t want fake nineteenth century. What you’re adding as new should be contemporary.” You never know what landmark people really want. Some groups would have wanted complete fake nineteenth century. It felt more intelligent to me to just make it new.

JY Was that the first time you visited Venice?

PM No, I had been there before. Europe on 5 Dollars a Day had been my guide when I was first visiting, as a college student. I won’t tell you when that was, but I honestly kept a record of my expenditures and if it was over $5, I knew the next night I couldn’t eat.

JY Was Venice one of your favorite places on that trip?

PM It was. Venice for me was always magical. It aligns in a unique way with one of my main obsessions: light. I want light in all of my work, and the

light on the water in the canals made me absolutely crazy with joy; I could spend the rest of my life sitting there looking at it.

One of the interesting things about working on Sernagiotto with Larry was the strange color of the Venetian light. We would work together in New York to pick the colors, and then we’d go back to Venice and they were all wrong. You see that in Venetian paintings, there’s a very different sense. I know why they have their alizarin and their crimsons—their reds are very different from Tuscan reds and their greens are completely different, and I understand why. This aqua-colored water changes everything. You really can’t do a normal yellow or it

the lagoon and saved themselves there. So it’s a city completely built from nothing, and it’s one of the few cities in Italy without a Roman background. So we don’t have archaeological things; we never reuse things from under the ground. If we need marble for a project, we have to source it from around the Mediterranean and bring it back to Venice, because we are without quarry stones. That’s just one of many examples.

JY Venetian Heritage has taken on varied campaigns of restoration, returning churches, palazzos, and individual works of art throughout Venice and elsewhere to their former glory. How are the subjects of restoration chosen? What’s the criterion?

TBR Projects are selected in an almost romantic way; it’s always about falling in love with them. This is the case with one of our cur rent endeavors, Antonio Rizzo’s statues of Mars, Adam, and Eve. Now I know that Peter loves sculpture and that he has an amazing collection of bronzes and statues, so I say to Peter, “All right, Peter, we have three monumental marble sculptures from the early Renaissance in really bad shape.”

For many years I was a n a r t re s torer, sp e c i a l i zing in stone. My godmother, Maria Teresa Rubin de Cervin A l br i z z i , w a s t he he a d of unesco in Venice, so I grew up in this field; it’s been with me my entire life. And, importantly, I love to study, I’m an eternal student, so for me, each new project is an excuse to go somewhere new—to inspect something, study it closely, and see if restoration is needed or not.

Though normally you can see that immediately.

JY Peter, do you find that some projects Toto proposes are more worthwhile than others?

PM For me it’s also an excitem e nt a b ou t l e a r n i n g . For instance, when we restored two Veronese paintings, I ran home and read a biography of Veronese. I’m a bit of an eternal student too, and whatever Toto brings us gives me studies.

Clearly I’m fascinated by architectural projects, but I don’t think any one project is more valuable than the next. Venice needs our help and support, and anything that Toto brings us is always worthy of study.

JY With that in mind, could you speak about the Palazzo Grimani, which recently reopened after major restoration work? It would be great to know more about the background of the building and what steps were taken in restoring it.

TBR That’s an interesting story. Have you ever seen the movie Don’t Look Now, directed by Nicolas Roeg in 1973, with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland? The last ten minutes of the film take place at Palazzo Grimani. The film was made over forty years ago, at which time the palazzo was abandoned; you can see it falling apart in that film. The

V EN ETI A N HER I TAGE , A PH I LA N T H RO PI C O RG A N I Z AT I O N DEDICATED TO THE R ESTOR AT ION A N D PR E S E RVAT ION OF V E N I C E ’ S C U LT U R A L T R E A S U R E S , H A S PU R SU E D I TS M I SSION FOR TWO DECADES. HERE, THE ARCHITECT PETER MARINO, THE ORGA N IZATION ’ S CH A I RM A N , J O I N S TO TO B E RG A M O ROSSI, DIR ECTOR OF THE V ENICE OFFICE , TO TELL GAGOSIAN D I R E C TO R JA S O N Y S E N B U RG ABOU T THE HISTORY A N D FUTUR E OF VENETIAN HER ITAGE A N D I T S PRO G R A M F O R T H E VENICE BIENNALE.

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will turn brown. It’s a tricky place to do decor, shall we say.

JY What are some of the obstacles that Venice faces in maintaining its architecture, artifacts, and history? I know this is a question that could keep us here all afternoon.

PM Well, think of this: if you need a box of nails, you need a boat. Everything’s brought in, meaning it’s really tough to do construction in Venice.

TBR Yes, it’s one of the few completely invented cities. Venice was built on the beds of little rivers. The builders were people from Roman cities around Venice who were escaping barbarian invasion; people from Padua, Verona, Vicenza, went to

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Italian state bought the palazzo in the 1980s and belongs, as the rooms are still equipped with the PM We also have conductor William Christie takspent eighteen years renovating it. When it reo- bases, the niches, the pieces of marble to prop up ing part in the celebrations. He’s going to be playpened, nine years ago, it was a revelation for all of the sculptures, and so forth. So I investigated, we ing early Monteverdi. I have a particular love for us because it’s the only, let’s call it Roman Renais- started to raise money, and now we’re going to that period in music. sance house in Venice. You know, Venice was a sec- do it.

JY What else are you planning for the twentieth ular state. Catholicism was prevalent, of course, but The palazzo will have the collection back anniversary of Venetian Heritage? they were accepting of all religions. Compared to for two years. We’re also hosting an exhibition of TBR Every two years, to align with the Biennale, the rest of Europe, it was a free place to be.

Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings on the second we do a benefit week, where our friends particiPM Wel l, ever y few yea rs t hey wou ld get floor of the palazzo during the Biennale. pate in creating a nice program of collateral events. excommunicated.

PM In addition, because we try, as Toto says, to This year, Peter said to me, “It’s the twentieth anniTBR Yes, we were excommunicated many times spotlight all aspects of Venetian culture, our cel- versary, we have to do something special.” As you for different reasons. But when know, Venice is not very big. the Grimani family built the So I was thinking about where palazzo, it was unprecedented we could have the party, a locathat one of the major rich famtion we hadn’t already used in ilies of Venice should use this the past, and it occurred to me to talk with the director of RAI Roman Mannerist style. They [Italy’s national public broadhad an interest in Rome—a lot casting company] about the of cardinals in the family line, Palazzo Labia to see what he wh ich was unusua l a mong Venetian families. At the beginthought. Wonderfully, he said, ning of the sixteenth century, “Well, I know the activity of Venetian Heritage, and I really Cardinal Domenico Grimani, like what you’re doing for the who was the son of the Doge city, so the palazzo’s for you.”

Antonio Grimani, decided to PM It was important to have build a house in Rome. When a balance, so we’ve scheduled they started to dig the foundation, they found, as always, t wo days i n New York a nd some Roman classical busts three days in Venice to mark a nd sculpt ures, wh ich was the occasion. We’ve been fortunate in being able to involve the beginning of the Grimani important cultural institutions collection. Then Domenico’s in New York. We have a beginnephew, Giovanni Grimani, ning event at the Frick Collecpatriarch of Aquileia, decided tion on Sunday, April 7, a lecto renovate his family’s palazzo in Venice. It had been just ture on the Tiepolo frescoes in the Palazzo Labia. And then a straight Venetian house; he Monday night we have a contransformed it into a square courtyard with lodges. This had cert of Vivaldi music at the Mornever existed in Venice. Giogan Library. vanni called on a pupil of Raph So we start with the ael, Giovanni da Udine, to make Tiepolo lecture at the Frick, the frescoes and the stuccos in then end in Venice with the Tiethe house. It was the first time in polo Ball at the Palazzo Labia, Venice we had the wide stuccos in what I consider to be the best and all the grotesques, like the painted rooms ever made by loggia of the Vatican. He conGiambattista and Giandomentinued to buy art, gems, and, ico Tiepolo, father and son.

JY Fa nta st ic. A nd just one importantly, something like la st quest ion: i f readers of four hundred statues, including busts, heads, and full-figthis ar ticle want to become ure works. He renovated the more involved with Venetian Heritage— entire decoration of the house to accommodate the collection.

TBR They just have to call Peter.

The last room, which we call the JY 1-800-marino [laughter]. tribuna, was designed specifiPM Toto constantly gives me cally for the palazzo’s masterprojects and I always go, Well, Opening spread: The Tribuna, c. 1560, Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice. Photo: courtesy of Polo Museale del Veneto piece sculpture, an anonymous what will it cost? And the supartist’s Abduction of Ganymede, port we garner fascinates me.

Previous spread: Detail of the laser cleaning of Antonio Rizzo’s Adam, 1472, marble, Palazzo Ducale, Venice. Photo: Matteo De Fina which hangs from the rafters.

We get one-time donors, com The problem is that now, mitted donors—we had a wonAbove: Paolo Veronese, St. Agatha in Prison, 1566, Church of San Pietro Martire, Murano, Venice. Photo: Matteo De Fina with the palazzo open to the derful couple of gentlemen from public, it doesn’t actually house Las Vegas who suddenly said, this collection anymore. Most of the collection ebrations this year—it’s the twentieth anniversary “We would love to support that project.” It’s very moved to the Biblioteca Marciana; some pieces of Venetian Heritage—will feature Venetian music, far-reaching and wonderfully surprising how many went to Paris, because Napoleon was, as always— which is wonderful and largely unknown. We people realize, in our world, how special Venice is.

PM Borrowing things. Like he borrowed a third have the Haydn Society playing in New York at the I’m very proud to say that many of my clients have of the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

Morgan Library. They’re going to be playing very provided support. Dior really stepped up to the TBR Exactly, yes [laughter]. So I heard, by chance, early Vivaldi, which very few people are familiar plate and said it would support the ball financially that the Biblioteca Marciana was going to close to with. Remember, at that point it was Counter-Ref- to a huge extent. Louis Vuitton is publishing a book the public for two years. It occurred to me that ormation music. The Venetians wanted to show on our twenty years, and we have Helen Frankenthis was the perfect occasion to return the collec- Mr. Luther and all the northerners that in fact they thaler Foundation in collaboration with Gagosian tion to the house, some four centuries later. We didn’t mind sexuality at all [laughter]. cosponsoring the projects at the Palazzo Grimani. know exactly where in the palazzo each work JY Thank God. The support is incomparable.

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SUNDAY CARSTEN HÖLLER 29 MAR. — 30 JUN. 2019

Double Neon Elevator, 2016.

Foto: Attilio Maranzano. © Carsten Höller

TAMAYO

DAVID BAILEY: THE SIXTIES

On the occasion of an exhibition of portraits

by David Bailey from the 1960s, the photographer sat down with Derek Blasberg to talk about his process, his peeves, and his experiences with Jean Shrimpton, Anjelica Huston, Freddie Mercury, and more.

Previous spread: David Bailey, Jean Shrimpton, 1965, gelatin silver print, 48 × 50 inches (121.9 × 127 cm), edition of 10 Opposite: David Bailey, Catherine Deneuve, 1966, digital pigment print on Ilford Galerie, 53 ½ × 43 inches (136 × 109 cm), edition of 10 Following spread: David Bailey, The Kray Brothers, 1965, platinum palladium print, 30 × 42 ½ inches (76.2 × 108 cm), edition of 10 Artwork © David Bailey

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Do you remember the first time we met? It was years ago, and I was the stylist on a magazine shoot with Daphne Guinness. I was terrified because I’d been told you hated pushy Americans and stylists and I was there to be both.

DAVID BAILEY Yes, I remember that shoot. You were all right, but it was her boyfriend who got on my nerves.

I told him to disappear, I think.

DBL Yes, you did! Which was a huge relief to me.

DBA I guess I didn’t take to him [laughs]. He was standing behind me and trying to direct her in the pictures, which was awful, but she was nice.

DBL Do you miss shooting for so many fashion magazines?

DBA I never see any of the magazines I used to shoot for anymore.

DBL They’re all hurting with budgets nowadays.

DBA None of them were ever really rich. English Vogue? Forget it, they never had big budgets. French Vogue? Nothing. Italy: nothing. It was only American Vogue that did. I remember once [former American Vogue editor Diana] Vreeland phoned me and said, “You’ll give me hell but we’ve got to watch the money.” She spoke for an hour on that call—a long-distance call, which in those days cost a fortune—and she was on for about an hour and a half rattling away. Then she phones me the next day and goes, “Will you go to India to photograph a white tiger?” [laughs] After telling me to cut budgets she sends me to India to photograph a white tiger! He was in a zoo anyway! Vreeland was one of the most extraordinary women I’ve ever met.

DBL It’s fascinating how Diana Vreeland has remained such an icon in fashion.

DBA Well, she was really fantastic. She was clever, and one of the most interesting women I’ve ever met, in a funny sort of way.

DBL She was the inspiration for Kay Thompson’s character in the film Funny Face [1957], which starred Audrey Hepburn.

DBA That was a great film. I saw that film when I was an assistant to the photographer John French.

DBL It’s got that great opening number, “Think Pink.”

DBA Yeah, that Diana Vreeland statement. She was the one who said “Pink is the navy blue of India.”

That’s as good as Andy Warhol’s line about everyone being famous for fifteen minutes. But I wonder if that media writer— DBL Marshall McLuhan?

DBA Yeah, the one who said the image is the message. He said all sorts of catchy things. I wonder if Warhol got a lot of quotes from him.

DBL I know you started taking pictures after you were called up for the National Service, the British equivalent of America’s military draft, but before that did you ever think you’d be in the fashion world? In magazines and media and photographs?

DBA Never gave it a thought. I liked photography but I didn’t think about fashion. In fact, it was an accident really: I used to play trumpet, I wanted to be Chet Baker, but, luckily, someone stole my trumpet [laughs].

DBL When?

DBA When I was in the Air Force. An officer took it and there was nothing I could do about it. He said, “Can I borrow your trumpet to draw?” I said, “Yeah,” and then he said, “Sorry to tell you this, but someone’s stolen it.” He was an officer and I was just a private, so I couldn’t do anything about it.

DBL That might have been the best thing that ever happened to you.

DBA Yeah, probably! I would have been a very bad Chet Baker [laughter].

DBL And that’s when you worked with John French, right?

DEREK BLASBERG

Yes, for about eleven months. John was a great guy. And then I went to Vogue.

DBL You were quite young and—how can I put this?—not the typical kind of photographer Vogue used at the time. At that point Vogue was looking for people who were quite polished.

DBA Honestly, I don’t know how I got into Vogue with my accent. Americans may not know this, but it wasn’t readily accepted in England to have an accent like mine. There were very beautiful girls in the 1960s with accents like mine and we weren’t allowed to work with them. I always thought, “Well, what’s her accent got to do with a photograph? We’re not making a movie!” But they wouldn’t have anything to do with anyone they thought was “common.”

That was the way it was until the ’70s, really.

DBL Why did they let you in?

DBA I don’t know why. I think the art director was an outsider and maybe he thought I was an outsider too. He was gay, and at that time being gay was actually against the law. I was an outsider in a different way, so we had something in common.

DBL You were against society, and the magazines liked nice, upper-middle-class people like Cecil Beaton.

DBA Cecil hated not being posh. He would have liked to have been a count or a lord or whatever bollocks. They made him a sir in the end, so at least he sort of got it.

DBL You helped usher in a new era of photography that was very post–Cecil Beaton in style.

DBA He had a way of making people comfortable.

They were great pictures because he would shoot people in a fancy chair and make them look as if they’d always been in that fancy chair.

DBL You took people out of fancy chairs, though.

When you came to Vogue, were you aware that you were introducing a unique style?

DBA No. I never thought about it, to be honest. It just seemed like common sense. I don’t even think people realized the photographs were good back when I did them . . . but we didn’t know anything back then.

DBL There’s this great quote of yours: “About 2,000 people had fun in the Swinging ’60s.”

DBA Yeah, they weren’t much fun if you were a coal miner or a fisherman or something like that. It was only a few thousand people that had fun in the ’60s and it was a working-class thing. It was the first time they had a voice. I think the reason it happened was there were too many of us. There was Michael Caine, Terence Stamp, Albert Finney. If you watch English movies from the ’50s, they were all middle-class people playing cockneys. You can tell by their accent that they weren’t really from the East End. Finally, we were like, what’s this?

DBL Do you use a digital camera nowadays? Or an iPhone?

DBA No, I don’t usually shoot digital because I still don’t like it. I usually use a 5-by-4 camera in the studio.

DBL Wow, you’re probably one of the last photographers still using film.

DBA One good thing about film is that I don’t have to take a lot of frames. I take about ten shots and I’m done [laughter]. But when I’m taking pictures in the street, I’ll use a digital Leica. That’s the best camera for street photography.

DBL I’ve noticed on shoots that you spend a few hours talking with someone and then you bang out the picture in a few minutes.

DBA Yeah, I’ll talk with them for a couple of hours if I can before I shoot them. Then it only takes ten minutes. But think about it: how can you shoot someone you don’t know? It’s all right if I’ve already met DBA

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and know them, if I’ve known them for years, like Jack [Nicholson] or somebody, but if some stranger comes in and I don’t know who they are, how do I know when I have the right shot?

DBL If I could say that tomorrow you could shoot anybody you want, who would it be?

DBA Nobody, really. Probably twenty years ago it would have been Fidel Castro. [Magazine editor] Tina Brown wanted to do that, and we tried a couple of times, but they’d say, “Can you go and spend six weeks there, but they’re not sure if you’ll get it.”

So I said, “I can’t spend six weeks in Cuba!” Eventually they sent [Herb] Ritts, and he was there for two weeks and left. He got fed up as well. Honestly, I don’t think the Cubans were that interested.

DBL One question I get a lot, especially with people who are into photography, is, How does one start a photography collection? What are you looking for when you’re taking pictures? What’s an important picture to you?

DBA I never talk to people about that shit! [laughter] Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve only collected two photographers in my life: one’s Irving Penn and the other is Manuel Álvarez Bravo. I’ve probably got about twenty pictures by each of them.

DBL Do you ever display your own pictures?

DBA No, never. On my walls? No. I don’t want my pictures in my house.

DBL There’s a picture of Georgia O’Keeffe in the loo.

DBA That’s by Bruce Weber.

DBL Oh, right.

DBA They’re mostly Bruce in the loo. Ha! I bet he’d love that.

DBL D o you h a ve a c om r a de r y w i t h o t he r photographers?

DBA No. I did with Helmut [Newton] and with Bruce—I’m trying to think of who else. I knew Irving Penn quite well. He used to let me rent his studio.

DBL Talk to me about models. Who do you like?

DBA Easy: I think the two greatest models are Jean Shrimpton and Kate Moss.

DBL Some of your most famous early pictures are with the Shrimp, but then she quit fashion entirely and moved off the grid. Right?

DBA Well, she didn’t like it. Jean hated it. Kate loves it. That’s the difference. Kate’s fantastic. She comes here sometimes and she’ll leave at about four in the morning. I just took a nice new picture of her. I’d do anything for Kate.

DBL I’m happy to hear you say that because I think oftentimes, photographers such as yourself have such little patience for fashion people.

DBA I stopped doing fashion years ago. It was too much. In 1971, I did 800 pages at Condé Nast all in one year, and it was just too much.

DBL Wow, 800 of anything is too much.

DBA I thought, “Shit, I’ve got to stop working like this. I’ll turn into a frock if I’m not careful!” [Laughter] I never really liked fashion anyway. I like the girls but I was never really good for the business.

I like Yves Saint Laurent, I suppose. In fact, I went to see his first collection and I was with Catherine Deneuve and I said, “Catherine, you’ve got to stop wearing whatever you’ve got on and you’ve got to get on this Yves Saint Laurent.”

DBL Really? YSL and Deneuve became lifelong friends and muses.

DBA I was the one who introduced her to Yves. After that, Pierre Bergé was my best friend for the rest of his life.

DBL Does your process of taking pictures today differ at all from when you took the Michael Caine portraits in the 1960s?

DBA No, I take them all the same way. I’ve never

really changed. I’m lucky in a way, because my pictures don’t seem to date. If I did fashion pictures now, I’d avoid hair and shoes. I never did too much hair or shoes because those two things, the book stands of fashion, age more than anything else. I always crop stuff. I always got into trouble with Vogue, like “Oh, we can’t see the feet.” And I would say, “Well, you know what feet look like” [laughs]. I like to do my own styling. I don’t want to do funny stuff. I want to take the picture and get on with it. Less is always more.

DBL When you see the pictures of Mick Jagger, the pictures we had on view in the gallery, do they still feel fresh to you?

DBA At first I wasn’t overwhelmed with doing an exhibition of the ’60s photographs—I thought, “Ugh, the 60s again.” And I hate that term “Swinging ’60s” and all that, it’s so cliché. But here they felt fresh.

DBL But we’re all so drunk on nostalgia. I mean, Freddie Mercury is the hottest name in Hollywood and he’s been dead for decades.

DBA Oh yeah, I saw that movie, Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s good, he’s good.

DBL Did you know Freddie?

DBA Freddie stuck his tongue down my throat!

DBL Didn’t you date Anjelica Huston?

DBA Yes, I was with her before Nicholson. She was great, Anjelica. She’s a fantastic mimic. She can mimic anybody. I did a book on her.

DBL You dated Shrimpton too.

DBA I did.

DBL I heard she runs a bed-and-breakfast down by the sea now.

DBA It’s better than a bed-and-breakfast! It’s a bit like Fawlty Towers. Last time I stayed with her we both got locked out at 8 o’clock in the evening and couldn’t get back in because nobody knew where the fucking key was. There was nobody at reception. It’s a sweet hotel.

There aren’t too many charming hotels in St. Ives.

DBL So you’re still friends with her?

DBA Yeah! I’m friends with all my ex-girlfriends except Marie Helvin. I never see her.

DBL Are you friends with people you’ve worked with throughout the years?

DBA Oh yeah. Everyone. I like working with the same women for fifteen years. Vogue got fed up with that but I’ve worked with [my wife] Catherine for forty years.

DBL It must be validating to have people still turning out to see fifty-year-old pictures in a gallery, right?

DBA I think they’re older than that. How old am I? Eighty. Yeah, they’re older than that. They’re from the early ’60s.

DBL I was being polite and cut a few years off.

DBA No, no, I’m very old [laughter].

DBL Last question: Who was the first person you were excited to take a picture of?

DBA Somerset Maugham. He wrote Of Human Bondage. They made a movie of it and it was about a girl gang. He did lots of good books and he understood women more than any straight guy.

DBL That was the first celebrity portrait?

DBA First famous person, yeah. I thought, “Shit, if they’re all like this it’s going to be great.” He couldn’t have been nicer and he died a couple of years later.

He told me, “Don’t give away everything.” My camera strap was a piece of string [laughs] and I didn’t have a lot of cash at the time, which he noticed. He said, “Oh good, you’re poor. Don’t give away anything. Keep something back.”

DBL That’s sage advice.

DBA I got on great with him. He was very old— DBL How old?

DBA Shit, he must have been seventy-three or something, which is younger than I am now. But don’t you ask me for any advice.

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T

he series of theses that make up Guy Debord’s seminal book La Société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle), published in 1967, update the economic analysis performed by Karl Marx exactly 100 years prior in Das Kapital. Debord’s polemic carries Marxian terms—alienation, commodity, surplus value, labor—onto new ground, updating them for an era of media interfaces, advertising, and calculated marketing; he was playing catch-up with techniques of capitalism that were becoming ever more sophisticated and totalizing. This was the 1960s, the decade of Madison Avenue admen. By the beginning of that decade, 90 percent of American households had a television beaming commercials and narratives of well-functioning consumer-subjects into their inhabitants’ brains. Andy Warhol would soon be depicting this advance logic of spectacular capital with his repetitions of Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes, artworks as much a result of the circumstances from which they were born as prophetic of an intensification just around the corner. For if there is one tenet that both Marx and Debord held as true, it was that capital doesn’t slow down in its quest for ever greater reach, ever greater profits, ever more control of societal ecologies.

The health of the capitalist system depends on expansion.

What La Société du spectacle succeeds in is demystifying the functions of power undergirding this ceaseless expansion—an expansion into the creation of semiological meaning, into the deification and abstraction of commodity forms, and into our minds. When Debord writes of the commodity in the world of the spectacle, he is not writing of a product-simple; the commodity is not the lipstick in your hands at the glass counter at Macy’s, but the idea of lipstick that made you pick up the case in the first place. The commodity is the apex of a mountain of marketing, an apparatus of meaning-making that successively defines products within matrices of aspiration, morality, and success. As Debord writes in his sixty-seventh thesis, The satisfaction that the commodity in its abundance can no longer supply by virtue of its use value is now sought in an acknowledgment of its value qua commodity. A use of the commodity arises that is sufficient unto itself; what this means for the consumer is an outpouring of religious zeal in honor of the commodity’s sovereign freedom.

Waves of enthusiasm for particular products, fueled and boosted by

the communications media, are propagated with lightning speed. A film sparks a fashion craze, or a magazine launches a chain of clubs that in turn spins off a line of products. The sheer fad item perfectly expresses the fact that, as the mass of commodities become more and more absurd, absurdity becomes a commodity in its own right. . . . Following in the footsteps of the old religious fetishism, with its transported convulsionaries and miraculous cures, the fetishism of the commodity also achieves its moment of acute fervor. The only use still in evidence here, meanwhile, is the basic use of submission.1 As consumers we submit to the commodity, and our submission allows capitalism to continue its growth. Every item consumed is a service to the machinations that are. Consumption may be our most important labor.

Capital cannot lie idle; it is ruled by what Marx called “laws of motion,” economic propulsions toward profit and increased production that we are trained to keep oiled with our labor and our desire for more commodities.

Here the “new” takes on a singular role, made clear through the language of advertising: the “latest,” the “innovative,” the “groundbreaking,” the “trailblazing,” and, a particular favorite of late, “the revolutionary.” That a day doesn’t go by in 2019 without some new “disruptor”—a word we’re meant to consume as meaning exciting, positive, possibly erotic—entering the economic arena speaks to the ingenuity of the spectacle’s use of language: in the logic of capitalism, “new” must mean “good,” even when the vocabulary clothing it is explicitly hostile.

That artworks would have a unique stake in these semiotic systems is hardly surprising, for art, with rare exceptions, lives entirely under the optical regime. It is traditionally a domain of creating meaning in physical form, carried on in an attempt to communicate with the world through the eye. Debord’s eighteenth thesis states, “Since the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen . . . it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by touch; the most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adaptable to present-day society’s generalized abstraction.”2 So it happens that art lands smackdab in the complexity of capitalism’s strategies of mystification.

Twenty years after Debord made his case against the spectacle, Jeff Koons presented an exhibition at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los

L aw s of MOT ION Catalyzed by Laws of Motion—a group exhibition, curated by Sam Orlofsky, pairing artworks from the 1980s on by Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jeff Wall with contemporary sculptures by Josh Kline and Anicka Yi—Wyatt Allgeier discusses the convergences and divergences in these artists’ practices with an eye to the economic worlds from which they spring.

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Angeles, entitled The New: Encased Works. The exhibition comprised a series of works, collectively known as The New, that consists of various models of floor cleaners. These vacuums, polishers, and carpet cleaners are encased like marvelous artifacts in Plexiglas boxes and lit by rows of fluorescent lights, the better for you to see them in all their glorious, shiny newness. Koons has spoken of these and various later works in tones of religious adoration. The vacuums in particular, which work to make one’s environment hygenic, are indeed idols for the spectacular world we live in, where our faces and homes are always in need of some new item to clean and beautify them. Recall Debord’s understanding of the commodity as “following in the footsteps of the old religious fetishism, with its transported convulsionaries and miraculous cures.” For Koons, wonderfully, this understanding is not necessarily a critique—all we know as viewers is that in the presence of these exalted products we feel a twinge of awe. That the Hoovers are now outdated in both function and aesthetic couldn’t be more perfectly to the point: here again, the relentless thrust forward of capitalism.

Other artists of the 1980s grappled with commodity fetishization in other ways; the bending of marketing’s techniques to different ends was a powerful current in the art of the time. Jeff Wall presented his photographs as backlit transparencies in light boxes, the same devices used to catch our attention in groceries and department stores. Projected light, such a powerful tool in selling products (perhaps most famously in Times Square), became a technique that Wall recontextualized to present his simultaneously cerebral and beguiling photographs. Jenny Holzer co-opted the typography of advertising to make sure that her critical aphorisms were read by viewers conditioned by billboards, magazine ads, and quick television spots. Cady Noland utilized mass-produced commodities, items that, by the time she engaged with them, were relegated to trash: Budweiser cans, cigarettes, tabloids. These now useless commodities were the raw materials for Noland’s potent critiques of American violence, greed, and rotten masculinity. Rosemarie Trockel’s 1980s work opened up questions of gender and labor by presenting belittled forms of craft—knitting and cooking—in the forms and venues of high culture. The forceful Untitled (1987), for example, repurposes a stove’s electric burners as formal, minimal sculptural objects. Trockel similarly used industrialized knitting machines to adapt the crafts of

Installation view, Laws of Motion, Gagosian, Hong Kong, November 20–December 21, 2018.

Artwork, left to right: © Jeff Wall; © Josh Kline

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Th at K o ons m a k e s us a s k ou r s e lv e s, “I s a vac u u m c l e a n e r or a b a s k e t b a l l a s wor t h y of a du l at ion a s a Be r n i n i s c u l p t u r e ?” i s a t houg h ti n duc i ng e v e n t. S ay i ng y e s or no t o t h at qu e s t ion — i t d oe s n’t m at t e r w h ic h — r e s u lt s i n a c onc at e n at ion of f u r t h e r qu e s t ions, s k i l l f u l ly di sru p t i ng t h e e a s y f l ow of u nc h e c k e d g row t h.

garment-making, with their gendered connotations, to graphic “knitting pictures” as exquisite as the much-admired creations of male minimalists from Piet Mondrian to Frank Stella. Richard Prince, beginning in the late 1970s, was rephotographing advertisements, a gesture that twisted the task of commodity elevation into an object playing itself.

His Untitled (jewels, watch and pocketbook) (1979) no longer propels the selling of those jewels, watches, and pocketbooks; it is no longer a set of abstracted signs of luxury, meant to be understood subconsciously.

What possibilities for freedom can be found through commercial strategies when there is no commodity being sold? What discoveries can the eye uncover when it is momentarily loosed from the demands of self-branding and mass consumption?

If only it were so simple. That art is sold, that it is marketed as an abstract commodity in itself, makes us question the efficacy of its critiques. In the best-case scenario it can and should be said that an artwork has the power to unveil and articulate concepts, systems, and techniques of power. That Holzer’s punchy declaratives can force viewers to reanalyze the messages they are constantly presented with better equips them for a more nuanced and critical experience of being-inthe-world. That Koons makes us ask ourselves, “Is a vacuum cleaner or a basketball as worthy of adulation as a Bernini sculpture?” is a thought-inducing event. Saying yes or no to that question—it doesn’t matter which—results in a concatenation of further questions, skillfully disrupting the easy flow of unchecked growth.

Here, in 2019, the spectacle, naturally, is even more unwieldy and present than in the 1980s. The television was child’s play compared to the all-in-one interface of the Internet, a virtual, abstracted arena where consumption is the rule. A “place” where you can order a shirt that is pure image until it arrives at your doorstep: you’ve consumed based solely on the idea of the shirt, free of its objecthood, its sensations, its being-such. Debord would have been floored. And as we hurtle along, a whole society pushing the limits of meaning and being, economic parity continues to crumble exponentially. As one large labor force devotes itself to amassing Instagram likes—pure absurdity as social capital—another dons yellow vests in the streets of Paris because it can’t afford a dignified life. Meanwhile, metropolitan subjects widely

Opening spread: Josh Kline, Skittles, 2014, commercial fridge, light box, and blended liquids in bottles, 86 ½ × 127 ½ × 41 inches (219.7 × 323.9 × 104.1 cm) © Josh Kline. Photo: © Timothy Schenck Above: Jeff Koons, New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, 1980, two shampoo polishers, acrylic, and fluorescent lights, 56 × 22 × 15 inches (142.2 × 55.9 × 38.1 cm) © Jeff Koons

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Installation view, Laws of Motion, Gagosian, San Francisco, January 14–March 9, 2019. Photos: Glen Cheriton Above, left to right: © Rosemarie Trockel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; © Anicka Yi; © Jeff Koons. Below, left to right: © Jeff Wall; © Anicka Yi

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Tw e n t y-f i r s t- c e n t u r y a r t i s t s wor k i ng i n t h i s ac c e l e r at e d, pr e c a r ious, c h i m e r ic a l r e a l i t y, w h e r e t r a di t ion a l l i n e s of l a b or, c om modi t y, a n d c l a s s - c ons c ious n e s s c ons ta n t ly r e f or m u l at e , a r e u n de r du r e s s t o c om e u p w i t h n e w qu e s t ions i n way s b o t h s i m i l a r t o a n d r a dic a l ly di f f e r e n t f rom t h e i r pr e de c e s s or s i n t h e 1980 s.

resort to devices that make the labor of being-desirable, as worker, sex object, and consumer, more efficient (the gym: $300-a-month memberships; the juice cleanse: $15 for eight ounces of vegetables) as they work toward producing the ultimate commodity, their selves. And meanwhile again, automation results in the layoff of factory workers in industries around the world. As new technologies—necessary by-products of economic vitality under capitalism—continue to accrue, we can be certain that more jobs will be outmoded, rendered moot by a robot, an algorithm, or simply by the fact that not enough consumers want the product anymore.

Twenty-first-century artists working in this accelerated, precarious, chimerical reality, where traditional lines of labor, commodity, and class-consciousness constantly reformulate, are under duress to come up with new questions in ways both similar to and radically different from their predecessors in the 1980s. Josh Kline’s Skittles (2014) approaches critique on a formal level in a way reminiscent of many of the Pictures Generation’s experiments in appropriation and subversion. The sculpture, exhibited in the 2014–15 exhibition Archeo on the New York High Line, comprises a beverage case containing various “juices”—aesthetically akin in their packaging and well-lit presentation to Juice Press drinks, which promise positive vibes, revitalization, unfailing health, and other qualities essential to our New Age lives as well-balanced consumers—but containing ingredients given on the medium list as, e.g., Mr. Clean, money order, medical scrubs, french fries, toilet paper, phone card, latex gloves, pennies. This concoction is named Minimum Wage. As Andrea K. Scott wrote in The New Yorker, “Think of Skittles as Duchamp’s Bottle Rack, updated for the age of aspirational marketing, when even a smoothie can be spun as a status symbol. The case is locked and the bottles are beyond reach, but you can press your nose to the glass.”3 If Marcel Duchamp aimed for a philosophical probing of the definition of art, I’d say Kline’s Skittles undergoes an experiment more akin to Koons’s vacuums and Wall’s light boxes: the viewer is confronted with a familiar-looking commodity, and in a quotidian presentation, that through considered alteration nevertheless asks viewers to reconsider their relationship to the item outside of the buy-sell continuum.

Kline’s work has since evolved. “Before 2014,” he remarked in a recent interview, “I was making work that was about an extreme present—distilling out aspects of our time that are different from the past and different, perhaps, from the future. I was trying to talk about the future through the present, talking about things like posthuman or nonhuman or transhuman states that are coming into being via certain kinds of precarious labor conditions.”4 Since then, Kline has begun his Unemployment and Civil War series, which attempt the visionary—as in seeing-into-the-future—work of sketching possible results of the current state of wealth inequality and technological obsolescence. A work such as Sighs of the Times (2017) presents the viewer with gray piles of discarded objects—once shiny and new, like a Hoover floor polisher, now inert, broken, and possible ammunition in a riot. Kline’s work in the Civil War series demands a reckoning with the unchecked growth and abstraction of a now virtual capitalism, and in so doing carves a niche in which art might powerfully serve a society grasping for alternatives to a regime indifferent—by definition and design—to inequality and undignified human life.

Anicka Yi is another artist offering flight routes or escape hatches from the prevailing logic of branding, commerce, self-improvement, and mediated life. Her multisensory experiments utilize senses of smell and touch—both anathema to the optical primacy of the Debordian spectacle—to propose biological, microbial, and ephemeral ways of being-inthe-world. “I’m coming from the perspective of the decentered human, of challenging human exceptionalism,” Yi explains, “which is why I work with bacteria, why I work with organic matter.”5 In using the unseen as a way to challenge humanity’s prevailing sense of its uniqueness, Yi diversifies our understanding of ecosystems, forcing a line of questioning that leads to a realization about the permeability of the self. The fragility of the individual punctures holes in capitalism’s techniques of making its commodities seem essential add-ons if we are to be “whole.”

Faced with the totality of a necessarily dispassionate and ruthless economy, artists have sought to disarm, recontextualize, slow down, satirize, praise, and foretell the always expanding progress of capitalism. These responses show clearly that the system allows no “outside”; the only interactions possible take place within this intricate complex of mediated, global, economic existence. Faced with the unremitting technological advancements of the twenty-first century, both Yi and Kline point toward potentials for the future—which, granted, is still not so rosy. Thinking through the dissolution of human-centered civilization under the unchecked proliferation of capital, Yi states, At first I was worried about that dismantling, but this is also part of evolution. The rise of automation, for example—to me it’s part of a larger system; it’s not the end of evolution, because you can’t destroy nature; nature always wins. However, what’s interesting is that we’re now open to the idea that consciousness is decoupled from intelligence. Consciousness has been at the apex in terms of rights. Who has rights? Those who have consciousness. And yet with artificial intelligence we’re increasingly outsourcing our viability; this intelligence decoupled from consciousness is actually probably going to usurp us all.6 Could there be a more perfect ending? For what is the ultimate dream of the spectacle other than a world in which tricky, complicated humans are eliminated from the equation altogether (we’re so inefficient), and in which commodities are able to buy commodities. An Amazon Alexa will order an Amazon Alexa to handle the necessary work of ordering more Amazon Alexas. The only remaining question: What happens to us?

1. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 2012), pp. 43–44.

2. Ibid., p. 17.

3. Andrea K. Scott, “Parklife,” The New Yorker, June 9, 2014. Available online at www. newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/09/parklife (accessed March 18, 2019).

4. Josh Kline, in an interview with Sam Orlofsky, 2019, in “Fiction or Future,” Gagosian Quarterly, January 24, 2019. Available online at https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2019/01/24/ interview-josh-kline-anicka-yi/ (accessed March 18, 2019).

5. Anicka Yi, in an interview with Orlofsky, 2019, in ibid.

6. Ibid.

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Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2011, acrylic over intaglio on paper mounted on Fred Siegenthaler “confetti” paper, 11 ¾ × 7 ¾ inches (29.8 × 19.7 cm) © 2019 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy the Menil Collection, Houston

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G E N E R AT I V E SU R FAC E

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The sheet on which a drawing is made is rarely a neutral ground; it can often convey as much meaning and purpose as the marks on it. Artists’ choices of substrate can tell us a lot about their creative process, revealing their working practices and reflecting their awareness of their materials—what media will work best on a particular surface, how the support will respond to certain colors, how it can be manipulated, its strength or fragility, resilience or tactility. The properties of a support may also encourage experimentation and innovation, initiating a change of course or direction in an artist’s development. Almost all artists will sometimes work on whatever type of paper is at hand, be it the back of an envelope, a scrap of wrapping paper, or a sheet torn from a spiral notebook. More often than not, though, the choice of substrate has been carefully considered.

Yet the substrates of contemporary drawings are often overlooked, as if they were subordinate to what’s on them. As the paper conservator Margaret Holben Ellis has noted, exhibition-catalogue entries for drawings for the most part make no mention of paper, even if it has something unusual about it. In fact, informative descriptions of paper are rarely found in the literature of art.1 This is not to say that art historians should engage in a pedantic compulsion for exact description or a kind of fetishization; if we’re in need of technical exactitude we can turn to conservation specialists. But the general public often feels a certain fascination with an artist’s methods, materials, and techniques, and since a substrate can be central to a work’s composition, it’s often rewarding to pause and consider the way in which the tone, texture, and weight of a drawing’s surface generate different kinds of visual effects, or to recognize the paper’s role in the work’s making.

I’m by no means a paper expert but I’m still often curious about a substrate: Is the paper made by hand or by machine? Is it vintage, a stock supply, or specially made for the artist? Where does it come from, what type of fibers went into it, and how do they affect the qualities of its surface? All of these questions can lead to a richer understanding of an artwork. For me this has particularly been the case with the drawings of Jasper Johns, whose work I’ve studied in depth for close to a decade and continue to learn more about. I will share here some of the discoveries I made while working on the recently completed catalogue raisonné of Johns’s drawings, but first, some historical background.

Paper made specifically for drawing did not appear until sometime after the mid-1400s, following the invention of the printing press and, with its arrival, the expansion of paper manufacturing. While still not inexpensive, paper became more readily available, enabling artists to work more freely and experimentally and stimulating creative thought and new ideas. In fact, it could be argued that paper contributed as much to the emergence of Renaissance art as the development of one-point perspective and the study of classical sculpture. Leonardo left behind over four thousand drawings, in the process establishing drawing as a distinct discipline. Not having a lot of options, he worked mainly with chalk or pen and ink on medium-weight white paper made from hemp or linen—a durable fiber, which is one of the reasons why so many of his drawings have survived. In the early sixteenth century, blue paper made from indigo-dyed rags came to characterize Venetian drawing, largely because Titian exploited the potential of the blue ground to enhance the tonal values of dark ink and white gouache. Albrecht Dürer completed a number of tonal drawings on Venetian blue paper when he traveled to Venice in 1505, and once back in Nuremberg, having exhausted his supply of Venetian paper, he made his own by coating a sheet’s surface with a bluish ground to produce some of his most celebrated drawings, including Praying Hands (1508). Lessons learned from drawing on blue paper also influenced his approach to working on a white ground.

Up until 1757, all paper was handmade and had a ribbed surface of parallel horizontal (laid) lines and vertical (chain) lines resulting from the paper mold’s wire frame. James Whatman the Elder eliminated this distinct surface texture with his manufacture of wove paper, which, it could be said, launched the golden age of British watercolor and established watercolor as an independent art form. The paper historian Peter Bower has shown how technical innovations in the development of wove papers led to the production of medium-specific papers, which transformed J. M. W. Turner’s techniques over the course of his artistic career.2 While Turner experimented with a variety of surfaces, it was a thick bright-white paper, prepared with a water-resistant sizing (a gelatin coating), that gave his watercolors their jewellike luminosity.

With the invention of the mechanized Fourdrinier paper-maker in 1807, and with it the evolution of mechanized paper-making, specialty drawing papers of all types, colors, and finishes began to enter the market, each tailored to suit unique characteristics of drawing media. The availability of these different types of paper increased the allure of drawings as valuable collectibles to be signed, framed, and exhibited in private homes and museums. Artists became increasingly aware of these papers, whether by word of mouth or from art periodicals’ announcements of the introduction of new products. Some of them inspired artists to experiment and at least one led to a new drawing medium. In the early 1880s, a number of the Impressionists, including Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet, began to work on a thick, stiff paper manufactured by Charles Gillot, originally intended for use in photomechanical reproduction.

This paper was coated in white pigment over a layer of black clay, with black lines printed vertically and embossed horizontally across its surface. Artists found that they could scratch into the white coating with etching tools or a knife to produce drawings that resembled etchings.

A unique work by Georges Seurat on Gillot paper, Café Singer (1887–88), is thought to have instigated his use of white gouache, white chalk, and pastel to create the effect of an artificially lit stage in his café-concerts drawings. With Café Singer, Seurat first drew on the commercially prepared Gillot paper with a black crayon, pressing more than one layer of the waxy medium into the sheet. He then scraped and scratched into the drawing’s black surface in select areas to expose the underlying coat of white pigment. Areas of cross-hatching etched into the waxy medium suggest atmosphere and convey tonal effects, but the areas 134

Mary Cassatt, Adaline Havemeyer in a White Hat, c. 1898, pastel on wove paper, mounted on canvas, 25 ½ × 20 inches (64.8 × 50.8 cm). Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Source: Art Resource, New York

Brice Marden, Couplet Painting Study III, 1988, ink on paper, 22 ½ × 10 ½ inches (57.1 × 26.6 cm) © 2019 Brice Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

in which he scraped away the crayon entirely read as bright light. The luminosity that he achieved in Café Singer clearly intrigued him and he would continue to experiment with dramatic contrasts between light and dark areas, but through the application of white medium rather than the scraping away of black crayon.

Of course the pointillist effect that Seurat achieved in his conté crayon drawings was utterly reliant on the Michallet paper that he used as a support, a high-quality rag paper with a conspicuous watermark—a form of copyright and advertising. (Curiously, as Karl Buchberg has pointed out, the origin of Seurat’s Michallet paper is unknown.)3 The paper’s prominent chain and laid lines enabled Seurat to exploit the ridged surface with black conté crayon to produce extraordinarily luminous effects. As Jodi Hauptman has noted, in recording an artist’s medium we typically refer primarily to the mark-making material, but for Seurat, the medium is conté crayon and Michallet paper together. 4 In the 1870s, Seurat’s near-contemporary Mary Cassatt was a catalyst for the resurgence of pastel, which she so fully mastered that her pastel drawings are perhaps even more highly regarded than her paintings.

Cassatt favored tinted paper (most of which has now faded to a warm brown) and left large areas of her drawings bare—“non-fini”— so as to reveal the colored sheet below, thus actively engaging the substrate as a chromatic element within the composition rather than a passive pictorial ground. Around 1900, Cassatt’s colleague Edgar Degas also became heavily engaged with pastels, but he opted for tracing paper as his principal support—a counterintuitive choice since it has no “tooth,” or texture, for catching the oil crayon’s pigment. But the translucent support allowed Degas to trace over motifs from earlier drawings, usually of ballet dancers, transferring and varying the images to create new configurations as he developed a theme, a feature of his later pastels.

In the United States, artists largely relied on paper imported from European mills. John J. Audubon, in competition with a group of ornithologist illustrators to represent all of the birds of America in their actual size and scale, achieved his goal only because of the Whatman paper mill, which at that time produced the largest-sized paper calibrated for the medium of watercolor, double-elephant-size sheets measuring 40 by 26 ¾ inches. A review of Arshile Gorky’s 1930s ink-and-graphite drawings from his Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia series reveals a wide variety of relatively expensive papers from European mills, including Michallet, Ingres d’Arches, Bristol, Schoeller-Shammer, and Ingres/Canson/Montgolfier. These were the lean years of the Depression and the artist’s economic situation was poor, yet he remained committed to purchasing only the finest drawing materials. The variety of surfaces indicates that this was a period of intense experimentation for Gorky; the drawings represent a compendium of mark-making techniques—hatching and crosshatching, stippling and scribbling, concise lines and large areas of tonal density. In some instances he washed, scraped, or rubbed the surface of the otherwise completed drawing. His selection of fine papers for this series underscores the significance that these drawings held for him, and indeed, they represent a key moment in his evolution from representational forms to the fully abstract.

Although generally speaking less labor intensive than painting, and involving less expensive materials, drawing still involves an investment of valuable studio time and artistic energy and one might assume that any artist devoted to it would be picky about the paper he or she chose to work on. But this isn’t always the case, as the paper conservator Judith C. Walsh discovered when she undertook an in-depth survey of the papers that Georgia O’Keeffe used throughout her lifetime. Walsh had expected to find that O’Keeffe worked on a variety of different papers, but after reviewing more than a thousand drawings, she realized that the artist was quite consistent in her choice of unremarkable paper, noting that the sheets were “stunning for their simplicity” and that “they tend to be almost invisible to the viewer.”5 In fact, Walsh reports that O’Keeffe sold a stack of vintage Whatman paper that she had in her studio to a Santa Fe art-supply store in the 1970s.

Perhaps due to the ubiquity of machine-made paper, many artists were attracted to working on handmade papers, which, unique themselves, inspired some unique projects. A stack of Japanese rice paper that Tony Smith gave to Jackson Pollock in late 1950 led to the pivotal set of ink drawings that were a catalyst for Pollock’s intensely dramatic 1951–53 black-and-white paintings—drawinglike paintings in which he reintroduced figuration, made solely in black enamel paint on unprimed canvas.

In the early 1950s Douglass Morse Howell resurrected hand papermaking in America and began to supply artists such as Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Anne Ryan with unique papers made from linen and flax, which, in their texture, color, and weight, enhanced both drawing and printmaking.

The interest in handmade paper increased in the 1960s and ’70s largely as a result of the printmaking explosion that was taking place at that time in the United States. Kenneth Noland, for example, opened his own paper mill in Vermont, and Robert Rauschenberg tested his papermaking skills at the fourteenth-century mill Moulin à Papier Richard de Bas in Ambert, France. The result was Pages and Fuses (1974), an inventive series of editions in which Rauschenberg transformed pressed paper pulp into sculpture.

By the early 1980s, hand papermaking had taken on a new role as an independent medium, generating new forms of sculpture and three-dimensional constructions. Of course many artists still embraced its more traditional use. Brice Marden used twigs to make ink drawings, often on handmade paper, which dictated the character of the lines as the ink-dipped stick responded to the paper’s rough and bumpy surface.

Marden’s drawings display the physical engagement involved in making them as much as the intellectual one, and the support that he selects for them can be as elegant and expressive as his mark-making. In the 1980s, for an important group of four ink-and-gouache drawings, Couplet Painting Study I–IV (1987–88), he used sheets of Twinrocker handmade paper that have feathery deckled edges, which echo the triangular glyphs that appear in these transitional works.

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In 1990, when asked about his preferences in specialty papers, Johns responded, “My interest is limited to whatever is made available to me.”6 The Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing, which documents drawings by Johns dating from 1954, the year he marks as the start of his practice, through 2014, reveals that this would remain his approach for another twenty-five years. Johns’s first extant drawings, from 1954—the only two surviving from that year—display remarkable virtuosity, but the rather plain sheets of now off-white wove paper on which they were made reflect a young artist’s humble beginnings.7 Throughout the 1950s, in fact, Johns seems often to have used what was at hand, including letter-size envelopes, blank pages pillaged from college yearbooks that bear a sorority’s insignia, and Japanese poem cards, or shikishi (in which paper is mounted on a metallic foil-edged board), which he purchased as a US soldier stationed in Japan in the early 1950s. There are highly finished drawings done on sketchbook paper, one edge fringed from the torn perforations, and on tracing paper, which, in one instance, he used to trace a reproduction of his 1955 painting Target with Four Faces when it appeared on the cover of the January 1958 issue of Artnews magazine.

Some of Johns’s best-known early drawings are made on supports not typically associated with fine-art drawing. Out the Window, Device Circle (both 1960), and 0 through 9 (1961) were made on different sizes of slightly textured drafting paper manufactured by Keuffel & Esser, a firm that specialized in architectural and engineering tools and paper. Their retail outlet was on Fulton Street, not far from Johns’s Front Street studio, and just a block down from an art-supply store that he frequented, Fezandie and Sperrle, at 205 Fulton Street. At that time, 0 through 9, at 54 by 41 inches, was Johns’s largest drawing, and one wonders if it was the paper that invited the drawing rather than Johns setting out to find a support large enough to accommodate a drawing he had in mind. At about this time he also made his four charcoal-and-oil Study for Skin drawings (1962), also on drafting paper, in this case manufactured by the Frederick Post Company. The paper’s smooth, anonymous surface was the ideal support on which to make these body impressions. Notably, this engineers’ paper had a preprinted title block in the lower-right corner that Johns incorporated into the work by inscribing his name in it, as well as the day, month, and year of the drawing’s making. This was the first time he’d inscribed the full date and signature in a drawing, and it may have been the title block that initiated a practice that would occur more frequently in Johns’s work beginning in 1973. It was also at this time that Johns came upon some translucent plastic sheets in an art-and-drafting-supply store in Charleston, South Carolina, which inspired him to make his first ink-on-plastic drawing, Disappearance II (1962). Johns liked the way the ink puddled when applied to the nonabsorbent surface and the unpredictable patterns it produced once it dried. He has since made close to two hundred drawings on plastic of varying types, in a variety of both wet and dry media.

In 1960, Johns met Tatyana Grosman, the founder of the ULAE (Universal Limited Art Editions) print workshop on Long Island, and he began what would turn into a lifelong engagement with printmaking. Like all printmakers, Grosman knew that paper is as integral to a print as the material used to make it, and her adventurous spirit led her to seek out unconventional papers, or to commission special papers for individual projects. Johns would recall that his first project at ULAE, the 0–9 lithographs begun in 1960, was kept on hold for three years until they found the ideal paper. Printmaking may have sparked Johns’s interest in working with unfamiliar surfaces: as he ventured into different printmaking techniques, he began to use more traditional artists’ papers in his drawing practice, including Arches, Fabriano, and BFK Rives. He has also worked with handmade papers by Jeff Goodman, Douglass Morse Howell, and Fred Siegenthaler. Some of these handmade papers were made specifically for him, and bear either a “JJ” or “Jasper Johns” watermark. Vintage sheets of James Whatman paper from the 1950s and ’60s also stand out among Johns’s paper selections. One of the most uniquely beautiful supports in Johns’s drawing oeuvre is an exquisite sheet of handmade India paper on which he made Dancers on a Plane (1982), a crosshatch pattern fluidly rendered in graphite wash. Perhaps the most unusual substrate is Shrinky Dinks, a plastic sheet that shrinks to a fraction (about a third) of its size when heated in an oven, on which he has made four ink drawings ranging in size from 2 by 1 ¾ inches to about 4 by 3 inches.

In distinguishing drawing from painting, Johns once said, “The best drawings tend to seem more succinct, more austere, more schematic, more naked, closer to thought, closer to the force from which they arise.”8 This is all true, but to this I would add that a drawing begins as a surface with which an artist interacts. It’s where the work of art takes place. And it is within the collaborative process between medium and surface that one finds the power of a drawing.

1. Margaret Holben Ellis, “‘Paper Is Part of the Picture,’” in Ellis, ed., Historical Perspectives in the Conservation of Works of Art on Paper (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2014), p. 159.

2. Peter Bower, Turner’s Papers: A Study of the Manufacture, Selection and Use of His Drawing Papers 1787–1820 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990).

3. Karl D. Buchberg, “Seurat: Materials and Techniques,” in Jodi Hauptman, Georges Seurat: The Drawings, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), p. 33, n. 5.

4. Hauptman, “Introduction,” in ibid., p. 11.

5. Judith C. Walsh, “Paper Survey,” in Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia

O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; and Albuquerque, N.Mex.: Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 1999), p. 25.

6. Jasper Johns, in Ruth Fine and Nan Rosenthal, “Interview with Jasper Johns,” in The Drawings of Jasper Johns, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990), p. 80.

7. Eileen Costello, Kate Ganz, and Bernice Rose, Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing (Houston: The Menil Collection, 2018), pp. 2–5.

8. Johns, in “Flicker in the Work: Jasper Johns in Conversation with Richard Shiff,” Master Drawings 44, no. 3 (2006):278–79.

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Jackson Pollock, Untitled, c. 1951, black and colored inks on Japanese mulberry paper, 24 ⅜ × 34 ⅜ inches (61.9 × 87.3 cm) © 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. The Joan and Lester Avnet Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

Jasper Johns, Study for Skin I, 1962, charcoal and oil on Frederick Post Company drafting paper printed in black ink, 22 × 34 inches (55.9 × 86.4 cm) © 2019 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Photo: courtesy of the Menil Collection, Houston

LOVE is not a Flame Part iI . . . fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Henry Beston

Mark Z. Danielewski

Randal the Raccoon steps out of the cage, wobbles at once on the patio pavers, jerks from the grass-not-grass, before wobbling forward again, this time careful to step over the grass-notgrass, free of the cage, free to amble off, if still swiveling a look back, sight giving him pause.

— Emily, what if he wants to stay?

— He might.

— Sorry I’m late.

— Hi Frank. You remember Emily.

— The vet who makes house calls. So old-fashioned.

— Old-fashioned with an app.

— You saved Randal. Tony’s grateful.

— Tony did most of the work.

— No, I didn’t. I fed him. I gave him water. You gave him the shots he needed to survive.

— You’re looking better, Frank. Bruises almost gone. How do you feel?

— Getting a gun helped. And a shotgun. Maybe now I can get that big bird in my oven.

— Not on my property. Sanctuary state here.

— They find the ones who got you?

— No. The detectives used to call. Then I started calling. Then no one returned anyone’s calls.

Did Randal forget how to walk?

— I imagine he’s not used to the artificial turf.

— Raccoons, Frank, have very sensitive hands and feet.

— Thanks, Tony. Now our resident raccoon expert. Did you tell Emily about Petro standing guard?

— He did. I suspect just a coincidence. No question Randal had zero idea about a peacock nearby.

He was just too sick.

Randal the Raccoon wants nothing to do with the rose-hair twolegger, who bit him with silver teeth until the heat that flooded head and belly left, which he knows only as a flash of silver, a shiver

and surge of sweat. Randal the Raccoon’s glad to reach the stairs, climbing steadily up toward the gate, above which waits a steep hill, thick with springtime flowers and ferns.

But Randal the Raccoon can’t quite push beyond the gate, the deep distance of jade up there provoking less a shiver, more a shudder, enough to amble him back again toward the Tony twolegger who would bring him water and bring him food again and again and again.

— Yeah, I thought that might happen.

— Emily, what do I do?

— Look at the size of that tail!

— Give him to Frank.

— Very funny. A funny vet that makes house calls.

— Emily, Frank is a painter. He only paints people. Frank, you should paint Emily.

— Has he written you poems?

— It’s how I paid her for looking after Randal.

— You write poems?

— Here you go, Randal.

Randal the Raccoon ambles faster for the first whiff of meaty stink, fingers already around his blue plate, tongue pulling away thick gulps of liver, no teeth needed.

lt

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. . e .

Randal the Raccoon licks his blue plate clean before lifting his nose to the dusk breeze, tree branches jaggeding up

The f

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ow G ra c e . .

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. . .

— Let’s get inside, boys.

— What if he wants to get inside too?

— Hurry up.

— What if a coyote comes to get him?

— He’s a wild adult raccoon, Tony. He knows how to live out here.

— Stop being old, Tony. Listen to her.

e

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the sky, something already soft and bright and welcoming in the rush of pine and nearby grub. Randal the Raccoon returns to the steps, the gate, swivels around like before, but this time the patio is deserted, twoleggers gone within their den.

Randal the Raccoon slowly climbs the hill. He could veer for paths for other dens with their blue and black bins easily spilled, rummaged through, for diaper

treats, abandoned fishy cans, and other belly-biging deliciousness. But Randal the Raccoon doesn’t veer, keeps rambling up past gardenias and pea plants, until he’s at the jade, following there his own muscular path back to a place he hates, enough to sweat for, again, and shudder for, again, when — snap! coyote! — twists Randal aside, if for no more than a thought, his senses already certifying no coyote here, just this familiar clearing of broken jade, something else of also green too, a memory, like the carrying green that took him down the hill, only brighter . . . who had answered him, whose call had brought the twoleggers, Tony and Frank, especially Tony, who drove the snapping coyote away.

Randal the Raccoon rises on hind legs, teeth bared, pawfingers trying to clutch the night air, what’s not there, not on his tongue, not at the back of his throat, eyes clear, nose keen, pawfingers trying to round out of nothing a shape like an acorn, greater than an acorn, like a pine cone, greater than a pine cone, as if out of some colossal emptiness that not even nothing can hold, a feeling mattering most might materialize enough to hold, and eat, what can’t materialize, and will deny every eating, a wave of green, a rush of air, bluer than any sky, here among the jade, and then after too, day after day, night after night, crying for him — his peacock!

Randal the Raccoon shambles down from the jade, an avalanching gray scree upon the earthy slope, flustering petals, catching roots, swinging head back and forth, and if still alert for coyotes, and always food, gazing at the Tony den, quiet now but for a block of red rock spilling smoke.

Randal the Raccoon stops level with the den top, listening for that daily cry, that nightly cry.

Then settles back, patient at once between two gardenias, patient before night’s solemness, patient before a stillness set throughout, as if stillness itself might uphold all.

On the other side of the ravine erupts a sudden round of yips. The coyote pack surrounding prey, a dog, cat, maybe a deer. Randal the Raccoon sniffs the air, looking for pizza. Now that’s something to yip about. Love is a crust of pizza.

—Bwraaaaaaah!

Randal the Raccoon’s chest heaves, some prevailing order in that vascular rush heaving him high on hind legs, pawfingers again trying to round the air into something none can ever hold.

—Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

—Bwraaaaaaah!

—Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

—Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Only farther away.

—Bwraaaaaaah!

Farther still.

—Bwraaaaaaah!

— What happened to Randal?

— Hi Frank. He’s around. I find my trash bin turned over now and then. Emily told me not to but I still leave pizza out for him. One slice. It’s usually gone by morning.

— Are you still in touch with Emily?

— You dirty old man. Not like that. Cute meet, though, right? Ailing animal, fireside romance.

Will you paint her?

— I’m painting my daughter. Trying to.

— Have I seen her around?

— Not likely. That’s the problem.

— I’m sorry.

— Actually, I wanted to say I bought your book. Was wondering if you’d sign it?

— Of course! I’d have given you a copy gratis.

— I like the one about Emily. I guess Emily the vet really doesn’t have a chance.

— The coincidence of a name.

— Cancer?

— You say cancer, I say Ohio.

— You mean that? You really blame Ohio for your wife’s— — I don’t blame anyone. Not even myself anymore.

— I’ve never met a poet before who’s just a poet. In fact, I’ve never met a poet.

— I’m a CPA, Frank. I just happened to have published something lyrical ten years ago.

— What’s next?

— Checking out my neighbor’s paintings. Have you seen Petro lately?

— I hear his call from time to time. He seems all over the place.

— Ever fearless in his search for a mate.

— He’ll never find one. Not around here.

— Ostentation.

— How’s that?

— What you call a group of peacocks. An ostentation, not a colony. And a gaze is what you call a group of raccoons.

I looked it up after I saw Randal getting squealed off by a group of his own kind. I left out two slices that night.

Randal the Raccoon smells the crusty dough, no swivel and seek needed, knows exactly where to head, shambling away from a thick bramble of roots and slugs, loping straight to where twolegger Tony always leaves it, down through the gate, across the grass-not-grass to his blue plate.

Love is a pizza!

Three big pieces tonight!

Randal the Raccoon keeps hurrying ahead even as he hears other squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees also arriving. Randal the Raccoon has met these four before. Always by the black and blue bins. Never here. This is Randal the Raccoon’s range. This is his blue plate.

Randal the Raccoon pops up on his hind legs, bares his teeth, then just as fast drops down to circle the plate, as the four raccoons close in. They are about his size except for the one that matters, already dragging away one piece of pizza. Randal the Raccoon lunges, snaps air. His challenger stands too, easily three times as heavy as Randal, and faster, a billow of lunging gray, snapping back, tearing free a tuft of Randal’s fur.

Two others snap at Randal’s backside, while the fourth swipes at his flank, digging up more than fur, even as Randal the Raccoon, by a twist, escapes the deepness that bleeds.

The biggest one then shuffles aside to offer Randal the Raccoon the gate. If Randal will just forget the pizza, he can escape. But Randal the Raccoon can’t forget the pizza, or the Tony den, or the strange call that had watched over him as he swam through a fever too strange to recall as anything other than this place now replaced by this place now inhabited by a sense that more than appetite binds the world.

Go! Escape to the hill! What all of Randal the Raccoon keeps urging all of Randal the Raccoon to heed, even as he keeps circling in a battle he should quit, because all that is all is not all.

More snaps. More slashes. Each evaded with twitches and leaps too fast to recognize, until finally Randal the Raccoon slows, finally scrambling back into a corner, an exhausted final retreat, his long tail finding first the walls, up which Randal the Raccoon will never scramble.

The four close in with squeeeeeeeeeeeeees of fury.

Bwwwaah!

—Bwwwaah!

The four scatter. Randal the Raccoon scatters too. Heart an impossible mess. For a moment, he even runs with his attackers. Randal the Raccoon even sees twolegger Tony standing on the pavers, a green can with a strange green beak in his hand. But neither twolegger Tony nor even abandoned pizza can arrest Randal the Raccoon’s flight.

The four disappear around the Tony den. Randal the Raccoon reaches the gate a moment later, through which he should race, gallop up the hill, hide among the jade, where the darker greens and quiets he knows by heart will calm his heart, were he not then also called to halt, called back, because there is one song that will always turn him around, this one, unstilling the sky, toppling trunk and roots, toppling sky, all skies, air bright with the only call to ever shape his heart.

Twolegger Tony looks up too to see the great black shadow descending from the great trident tree, a wide circle, slowly arcing above the patio, a lazy comet of occasionally embered green, capped in the brightest blue, as if this night now were suddenly a day in bloom, alive with joy, Petro the Peacock flying down for Randal the Raccoon.

—Bwraaaaaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaah!

—Bwraaaaaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah!

—Bwraaaaaaah!

Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah! © 2019 Mark Z. Danielewski, All Rights Reserved § Atelier Z: Regina M. Gonzales

I remember first seeing your work at Deitch Projects in New York in the late ’90s— an installation entitled Dry Land, which coupled photographic works with painted portraits. And I remember first having a sense of discovering, of being taken by your work a few years later, in 2006, at the exhibition Without Boundary at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I was mesmerized by the sheer monumentality of the sitters—one male and one female—in the paintings, which were juxtaposed with a small screen by Bill Viola. To me, their spirituality was palpable, as if emanating from the work itself.

Y.Z. KAMI This was the first time I painted figures with their eyes closed or completely lowered. It was a very new experience for me. I had always painted faces with eyes looking directly at the viewer—this was the first time the gaze was not there. It was absent. You see, when the eyes look outward, they become the center of the painting. With the eyes closed, the whole surface of the face is the focal point.

EG What is it about the human face that makes you want to paint it?

YZK For me, to paint is essentially to paint faces.

Although I also do other things, no subject matter captivates me as much as the human face does.

EG There is something arresting about your portraits. One can’t help but be transfixed by them. Do you remember when you first became interested in painting portraits?

YZK As far as I remember, my only interest was to paint faces and to paint them with oil. I started to paint from an early age, around five or six years old. My mother had been a painter and her studio was in the family home in Tehran. Sometimes I would paint there with her. Her style was sort of academic—portraiture, landscapes, still lives, and also copies of the old masters. I have several of her works—they are very well painted. For a number of years, she worked at Ali Mohammad Heydarian’s [1896–1990] studio, painting under his guidance. I recall accompanying her there as a child and ELENA GEUNA

hanging out for hours. By that time, he was an old man. I was fascinated with the number of paintings on the floor leaning against the wall. He came from a generation of Persian painters who traveled to Europe in the 1920s and ’30s to look at old master paintings in European museums. He painted in a very nineteenth-century academic style, occasionally with Persian subject matters.

EG Copying artworks, especially old master paintings, was part of your formative experience.

Do you remember which was the first?

YZK I think it was Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. I copied it from a small photograph in an art history book. Years later, I saw the real painting at the National Gallery in London. It is an exquisite painting—the shape of the body and the color of the skin are amazing. The lightness of the brushstrokes, the way the feathers on Cupid’s wings are painted . . .

EG I understand that you went to Paris to study philosophy after finishing high school in Iran.

YZK When I left Iran, I didn’t want to become a painter. Painting was the past—it was my mother!

I was very much drawn toward literature and the humanities. Paris was very interesting in those fields in the mid- to late ’70s. I remember attending Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy classes at the Sorbonne. Henry Corbin was at l’École des Hautes Études, where he gave seminars on Sohravardi, the twelfth-century Persian philosopher and mystic.

Roland Barthes and Lévi-Strauss were giving lectures at the Collège de France. I remember one year in the late ’70s following Barthes’s talks on Proust and photography. It was a very interesting era. But, after several years, I realized that I didn’t want to teach, and I cannot write really. . . . For a couple of years, I also studied film, and I saw that film is a collective work and I am a solitary person. So finally, after several years, I went back to painting.

EG It is interesting how you have bridged Western traditions and aspects of your Persian heritage.

YZK Since childhood, I was exposed to both Western and Near Eastern influences. I was very connected to Persian poetry and also architecture at

Y.Z. KAMI: LUMINOSITIES Elena Geuna interviews the artist on the subjects of his childhood, his approach to portraiture, and the centrality of light in his practice.

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the time—less so to the visual arts or Persian miniatures, though. My interest in painting was with the European masters, which I guess most probably came from my passion for oil paint, and oil paint was invented in Europe.

EG Who are your favorite Persian poets?

YZK Hafez and Rumi are my favorites, although there are other great poets. I always read their poetry and read them in Persian—for me Hafez gets totally destroyed in translation. I don’t know how Goethe loved him so much, given he only read translations—unless one can say that great poets are able to communicate on different levels!

EG Speaking of old masters, I would like to talk about Piero della Francesca’s Madonna della Misericordia, in which the Virgin is portrayed with her head and gaze directed downward.

YZK The gaze is downward and the head of the Virgin is almost a perfect circle. The balance, the geometry, the stillness . . . the silence in his work is incredible. Also, his Madonna del Parto . . . It might seem a little bizarre but I somehow sense similarities between Piero and Morandi!

EG How did you come to the name Y.Z. Kami?

YZK Kami is my nickname and I have always loved names with initials in them, like those of some of my favorite poets, C. P. Cavafy, the Greek poet of Alexandria, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot . . . Y.Z. stands for Youssefzadeh.

EG And this came about after you arrived in New York, in 1984. It was in the years following your arrival, after a trip back to Iran, that you began to work on the Self-Portrait as a Child series.

YZK On that trip, I came across a photograph of myself as a child. I must have been around ten years old or so when the picture was taken. I brought it back to New York with me. For several years, I worked on a series of drawings and paintings based on that photograph.

EG Most of the Self-Portrait as a Child series consists solely of the image of you as a child. However,

148

in one of the paintings from the series—the one in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum—your image is somehow inserted into a setting with other people, which is quite intriguing. Three women are sitting around a table, in what looks like a formal setting, with your image painted over part of the painting.

YZK It seems like the women are having tea. . . . It could be the setting of a Chekhov play.

EG After this series of self-portraits, there have not been any until recently.

YZK Yes. EG In fact, I have seen the self-portrait that was recently exhibited at Gagosian in Paris. I found it quite haunting. Did you paint it in your studio in New York City or in your studios upstate in Garrison, New York, in the countryside?

YZK I painted it in Garrison. It is the only portrait that I’ve done of myself as an adult. I always felt a bit camera-shy and somehow too inhibited to paint myself. Then last year, all of a sudden, I started to paint this self-portrait. It became very fuzzy . . . sort of strange. But when I saw it installed in the show in Paris, I actually liked it.

EG Seeing your studios in Garrison was a fascinating experience. There was so much light. And it felt so intimate at the same time. Maybe in Garrison you encounter less intrusion on your privacy than in New York, where people often visit.

YZK In the countryside one is less interrupted.

Especially where I have my studio, which is far removed from everything and in the middle of nature.

EG I remember discussing self-portraiture with you when we went to the Metropolitan Museum together the last time I was in New York. We were looking at the Rembrandts.

YZK T hey a re ex t raord ina r y—t he late sel fportraits.

EG Regarding the evolution of your work in the late ’90s, you did a piece that comprises a series of

paintings. It is called Untitled (16 Portraits) and now belongs to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Who were the sitters?

YZK A group of ordinary people . . . friends and strangers that I asked to sit for me. Just human beings.

EG Is anonymity an important component?

YZK Yes, it could be important in this work. It does have a vague reference to Fayum portraits. You know, the Fayums were painted of specific people for a specific purpose, but, with the passage of time, they have become anonymous.

EG When did you first become aware of Fayum portraits?

YZK I saw them for the first time at the Louvre when I was a student in Paris. I was about twenty years old. The Louvre has a great collection of Fayum paintings. I was very taken in. Ever since, I continue to look at them. There are also beautiful ones at the Metropolitan Museum, at the Pushkin in Moscow, and at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

EG I recently saw some fantastic ones at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is interesting to look at these portraits knowing they were made when the subjects were alive but were meant to be used after they passed away.

YZK They were meant to be for eternity—that’s why they were made with encaustic. They were buried with the body. The eyes are very stylized, very large. . . . They are the most important part and the center point of the painting.

EG Prior to Untitled (16 Portraits), you had done another large work called Untitled (18 Portraits).

YZK The sitters of the Untitled (18 Portraits) are all men, rather young men. The work has a funerary mood, and is a direct reference to the Fayum paintings. The portraits were painted around 1994–95, at the height of aids in New York. So many young men were dying. It was devastating. There has been a misconception that the sitters in this work had the disease but this is completely incorrect. There

wasn’t anything biographical about the sitters at all. For me, the work is an elegy for that time.

EG After this work, you started to concentrate on individual portraits rather than group portraits. If we look at portraiture throughout history, it is one of the oldest and most significant art forms. Each era has approached it in its own unique way. Today, for example, digital devices hold a monopoly on portraiture. Your portraits, on the other hand, seem to look back on a previous era. What does portraiture mean to you, especially today?

YZK The human face is an endless subject for painting. Portraiture, before the invention of photography, was different. In the nineteenth century, we started to have the influence of photography, even on Ingres and later on Degas. I think there is a “before photography” and an “after photography.” Then the digital age, as you said, has come, with Photoshop and the use of technology in the manipulation of images.

EG Your portraits seem to present the inner subject. There is a sense of truthfulness that goes beyond the face toward the soul, the aura.

YZK That’s what you see! I hope you’re right, though I cannot generalize. I think when one starts to paint, one is just carried away with the work. I don’t start a painting with any strategy or plan in mind. The painting takes me where it wants to go.

EG I cannot forget the first time I saw In Jerusalem in your studio; you were working on it at the time.

It was a very powerful experience. Could you tell me about the work?

YZK On the morning of March 31, 2005, I opened the New York Times and saw a picture of a gathering in Jerusalem of clerics from the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The purpose of the gathering was to prevent the gay festival from happening there. I was so shocked that at the height of the Iraq war and when so many horrible things were happening in that part of the world, these clerics should come together just to

prevent a gay festival from taking place! Intolerance is something that they all agreed upon and shared. I remember that as I saw the picture in the newspaper, I saw a painting . . .

EG The interesting thing is that you didn’t create a single painting but separate canvases. You also worked on a preparatory sketch.

YZK Yes. After I saw the newspaper, I first worked on a preparatory sketch. I decided to choose different canvases of different sizes for each of the figures. The result was a painting in five pieces.

EG Works of this kind are quite unique; it is something that came about because of the image you saw in the New York Times.

YZK Yes, that’s right.

EG In the Endless Prayers series, different sacred sources are being represented.

YZK The composition in the Endless Prayers series, and in the Dome paintings, comes from the concentric forms of domes that I had first seen in Persian architecture as a teenager, and later saw in Byzantine churches and basilicas. The dome is like a metaphor for the heavens . . . the idea of temple and contemplation. . . . The texts used in Endless Prayers are sacred texts from different traditions and languages of the Near East, like Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. Also poetry, especially Rumi.

Each individual Endless Prayer piece follows just one text—one, for instance, is a poem by Rumi; another, a Hebrew prayer; and yet another, the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, the language of Jesus . . .

EG Yet, in your Dome paintings, there isn’t any text or inscription.

YZK No, there isn’t. Initially there was just white paint, a circular geometry made out of white painted brick shapes that constituted a sort of mandala with a white center—as if light were coming out of there.

EG The luminosity of the white in the Domes is truly incredible.

YZK In a sense, that is what the white Domes refer to—the experience of white light.

EG

There is a feeling of serenity and contemplation when one is in front of your Dome paintings—it is as if they asked you to spend some time in order to perceive them. The colors you use for the Domes—white, black, blue, and now gold making a fourth—each have their own kind of permanence.

YZK In the Dome paintings, there is a kind of alchemical process, a kind of reference to alchemy.

You see, in different alchemical traditions from both the East and West, there is a process of transformation, which starts with black, nigredo. This is a black that alchemists call “black that is blacker than black.” This is where my Black Dome paintings come from. The goal is ultimately to achieve the inner gold; however, to get there, you have to go through the long process of washing and cleansing, which is the whiteness, albedo. From this place is the journey to that inner gold. Gold has always been used in sacred art.

EG How about the blue?

YZK The blue in those paintings is the blue of the heavens. I have seen this particular blue in certain elements in sacred architecture.

EG I would like to ask you about the significance of hands in your work. In recent years, you have made several paintings of hands in prayer.

YZK Maybe because it is a physical gesture of faith. You see, hands in prayer is a common gesture used in different religious traditions of the East—in Sanskrit, it’s called anjali. This posture of prayer is also common in Christianity. As you know, there is a small drawing by Dürer in the Albertina that is just two hands in prayer; it’s a marvelous drawing.

I have painted hands as individual paintings—just by themselves—since as long as I can remember.

I think it was Pascal who said that—and I’m paraphrasing—“the hands carry the soul.”

Interview originally published in the 2019 monograph Y.Z. Kami, co-published by Gagosian and Skira.

Previous spread: Y.Z. Kami, Gold Dome, 2017, gold leaf on linen, 63 × 70 inches (160 × 177.8 cm).

Mr. and Mrs. David Su Collection. Photo: Rob McKeever Left: Y.Z. Kami, Self-Portrait as a Child, 1990, oil on canvas, 81 × 132 inches (205.7 × 335 cm). Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Photo: Rob McKeever Right: Y.Z. Kami, Untitled (18 Portraits), 1994–95, oil on linen, in 18 parts, overall: 96 × 121 inches (243.8 × 307.3 cm). Photo: © Zindman/Fremont Artwork © Y.Z. Kami Text © Elena Geuna and Y.Z. Kami

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Lee, I wanted to start off with your relationship to writing. You’ve published several books of poetry and essays about art, music, and film over the years. When did you start to write?

LEE RANALDO Well, I think I got interested in writing when I was very young, because I was an avid reader as a kid. I tried to write my first book at six or seven years old. I still have it somewhere in a box, with a cardboard cover, six or eight pages, a little tiny story with some illustrations. When I was a bit older, I went into a heavy science fiction phase and read Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick. But it was probably reading Beat literature in my late teens that really turned me on to writing. Jack Kerouac opened the door to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and all those other Beat writers. Their works sparked my interest in poetry, language, its sound, its texture, and what it could express. As well, listening to and reading rock ’n’ roll lyrics by people like Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Patti Smith, who were consciously citing poetic references in their songs, made reading poetry more interesting to me.

BL What made the Beat writers so important to you? Was it the kind of self-expression they represented, the stream-of-consciousness egoless writing, or just the musicality of their writing?

LR I think it was all of those things that excited me. After high school, I spent the entire summer with my closest friend at the time traveling across the country in a beat-up old Volkswagen Bug. We had $300 each to our name and we went for two and a half months. It was unbelievable that you could do something like that then. We circled the entire BRETT LITTMAN

country and spent a lot of time in California. So On the Road really knocked me out because I’d just seen all those American landscapes on my road trip and he totally captured that experience in his flow of the language.

BL At some point you became friends with Ginsberg. How did that come about?

LR Allen’s work was also very important to me, it just took me longer to appreciate how seminal he was to that whole scene. He was the survivor in that group—he lived a long life, never burned out, never stopped being a creative force and an intellectual giant. When I came to New York in the ’80s I had a chance at some point to meet him because I’d gotten involved with the Kerouac estate and had coproduced a record of Kerouac’s recordings. One of the things we found was a twenty-five-minute tape of Jack reading On the Road. It was amazing. Also, at some point I was the host of a Kerouac event in New York and I got to meet Ginsberg, Corso, and Ferlinghetti. I also did some performances with him. One memorable one was at St. Mark’s Church—I did a large ensemble version of his “Wichita Vortex Sutra” with Arto Lindsay, Philip Glass, and Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth.

My other tangential connection to Ginsberg was that my wife, Leah Singer, actually lived in Allen’s old apartment, at 206 East 7th Street between Avenue B and C. This was the apartment where Ginsberg lived in the ’50s and where lots of photos he took of Kerouac and William Burroughs horsing around took place. It was also the site where Ginsberg shot the famous photo of Kerouac on the fire escape, with a brakeman’s manual in his pocket because he was working on the railroad at the time. The back cover of my first book,

Road Movies [1994], shows me in that same position, standing on the fire escape just like him.

BL Did you ever get Ginsberg to come and visit you at the apartment? I would imagine that would have brought back a lot of memories for him.

LR When we first started to see Allen, we told him that Leah lived in this apartment. We kept trying to make plans for him to visit but we just never managed to put it together. There’s a funny video that Thurston Moore once sent me from a documentary on Allen that he filmed off his TV. In the documentary, Allen and Peter Orlovsky are standing in front of the building on East 7th Street and are buzzing the bell, saying, “We’re here to see Leah Singer and Lee Ranaldo.” Of course we’d moved out of that place several years before.

BL Did you talk to Allen about writing?

LR I did. At one point we got to talking about the language that he was using and he went into this long elucidation of the words and imagery in some of the poems. It was pretty insightful just to be next to him and have him explaining some of the ways in which he came to the language that he used. Also, he once asked to see my poems. I gave him a large sheath of the poems I was working on at the time. I know from others that he took a red pencil to them and marked them up, but sadly I never got them back. They’re among his papers, I guess.

BL So what prompted you to start publishing your own writing?

LR In the early ’80s, right at the same time that Sonic Youth started playing and touring, someone gave me a very early version of a laptop computer. It was this thing called the Tandy 102; it was marketed by Radio Shack and was the size and

Lee Ranaldo changed music forever when he, Kim Gordon, and Thurston Moore started Sonic Youth, in 1981. Here he speaks with Brett Littman, the director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, about his work as a writer and a visual artist.

LOST HIGHWAYS 150

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shape of a modern PowerBook. The only problem was it could only hold 32K of memory so it filled up quickly and then you had to offload what you wrote onto cassettes. When we were on the road I would sit in the van day and night and just write.

Some people in the East Village saw some of these early things and this guy named Sander Hicks was starting this “punk publishing company” called Soft Skull and he asked me if he could publish me.

That request made me get much more serious about my writing.

BL Your poetry is pretty conceptual, maybe a bit surrealist—you use lots of found text and e-mail spam as source material. How did that come about?

LR I don’t know if you saw these e-mails but for a while, starting maybe six or seven years ago, my inbox would fill with these fake e-mails that were either for diet pills or penis enlargement. They slipped past the filters because they had reams of words at the bottom, as if a dictionary had exploded.

Or there were excerpts from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century copyright-free books—weird paragraphs about pirates and islands. I started collecting these e-mails because every five lines there’d be three words that were just like, “Wow, that’s as good as anything I’m coming up with right now.” So I began to cull these phrases and put them next to my own words and just started building these poems. They ended up seeming a bit surrealistic or free associative in their imagery. What I liked about this way of working was that I had an anonymous collaborator; the Internet was supplying me with reams and reams of this stuff. In some cases I even took some of it and just printed it out.

One poem, “All the Stars in the Sky,” is all made from Internet words. I also started to use these texts in performative situations when I did solo things with my guitar but wanted to read, not sing.

BL On Electric Trim, your new record, you collaborated with the author Jonathan Lethem to

cowrite the lyrics for the songs. What inspired you to do that?

LR I guess recently I was thinking about the period when Bob Dylan was writing that record Desire and he had Jacques Levy, a theater guy, cowrite lyrics. I thought, Who needs less help writing lyrics than Bob Dylan? Yet Dylan wrote a whole record in collaboration with this guy. It opened up his lyric writing to this whole other point of view.

The other thing that inspired me to do this was my long-time interest in the Grateful Dead. I don’t know if you’re aware, but a guy named Robert Hunter wrote the lyrics for the great classic Dead songs. Hunter was a guy that Garcia had played bluegrass music with before the Dead started. He was more of a poet than Garcia so he became the in-house lyricist and was listed on the early records as a member of the band.

The collaboration with Jonathan began when I was working on Electric Trim, which was produced by Raül Fernandez. I’d known Jonathan for a while through a mutual friend, and in 2017 he was coming to New York, so I asked him if we could meet to discuss the idea of collaborating on lyrics.

He was immediately keen on the idea so we began to work on the lyrics for this record.

BL What was the process like? Was it like a game of exquisite corpse, or did you use some other kind of method to collaborate?

LR The writing process with Jonathan took all different forms. I started sending him instrumental music and said, “Here’s some of the stuff we’re working on. There’s no lyrics at all yet.” Then I’d send him stuff where I was like, “Okay, here’s a song, I need forty lines and I’ve got four.” The next day he’d send me an e-mail with the blanks filled in. One day he sent me a four-line couplet based on Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Purloined Letter” that he’d had in his drawer for about twenty years and didn’t know what to do with. I was Previous spread: Lee Ranaldo, Berlin, 2017.

Photo: Max Zerrahn Left: Lee Ranaldo, Black Noise: Mini C, 2017, drypoint on vinyl record, 12 1⁄8 × 9 5⁄8 inches (31 × 24 cm)

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in the studio with Raül when that e-mail came in and those four lines immediately became the chorus of a song we were working on.

There was one song in particular where I needed the last word for a lyric. We had a word but I didn’t really like it. He suggested three other words which then prompted a long discussion: how do you know when a word is the right word, is there a right word here or can any of these words work here. It led us down all these avenues of ways to talk about language and how people write and make sense of the language they’re constructing.

It was a pretty interesting dialogue.

In the end, some of the songs are dominated

by Jonathan’s texts, some are dominated by mine, and some are totally collaborative.

BL How did lyric writing work with Sonic Youth?

I imagine it was a very different kind of process from the way you worked with Jonathan?

LR Sonic Youth was very collective in the way it operated in terms of our music composition. When it came to lyrics, Kim, Thurston, and I all wrote our own lyrics for songs—although from time to time we occasionally crossed over and helped each other with lyrics and composing songs. Sonic Youth was a four-way democracy and we were all credited as songwriters because that’s the way we saw it.

BL I’ve been listening to Electric Trim and I really hear it as a singer/songwriter album, like the kind that Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen used to put out.

LR I’ve been solo for about seven years now since Sonic Youth stopped playing, touring, and recording. That’s allowed me to get more serious about songwriting on my own. I guess originally, I was looking back at singer/songwriters, these lone wolves, and they became much more valuable to me when I saw myself as a solo artist. This way of working, as opposed to being one person in a four-person band, has pushed me to move out of my comfort zone—I feel I’m restructuring how I work, and having a kind of renaissance and a new vision of what the future can hold. I want to do things from here on out that are more individualistic and less like everything else that’s out there, because that’s always what Sonic Youth was. We were like the sore thumb. We were not like anybody else.

BL Can we talk about the collaborative work you’ve done with Leah?

LR After my first book, Road Movies, came out, Leah and I did a few books together. We were always really big fans of and have quite a collection of books that marry image and text, like Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message [1967], where the pages are full-bleed pictures with text in weird fonts. We wanted to do a book like that ourselves. We did one in particular with a really small press called Bookstore. It’s Leah’s images for the most part, and my text, and we played with the text on the page and the way the text and the image met and bounced off each other.

BL So the first collaborations you did weren’t musical, they were more in the realm of visual art.

It sounds like you two were really thinking about images and texts in book form?

LR Yes, that’s true, but Leah at that time was also using these analytical projectors and playing with improvisers in the East Village. Her film strips would have all these different things going on in them: pictures of flowers, Vegas lights, billboards.

It was a bit like what DJs were doing with records.

With those projectors she could freeze the image and “scratch” it, going superfast or very slowly, forward and backward. She would string ten of these short film clips together with black leader

in between them, and each one of them would be a five- or ten-minute segment of visuals. Since she was also performing these films with other musicians when we met, it seemed only natural that we would work together. I think at first we just started by throwing something together—we were both fans of the idea that when you’re listening to a record and have the TV on with the sound down, there’s always pleasurable juxtapositions. So we started from that. We’ve now been doing these kinds of performances for a long time, and have really honed them down—no more analytical projectors, we work with video now—we had to get rid of those after lugging them across Europe on tour one too many times.

BL Lee, can we talk about your own forays in visual art? I know you draw, are a printmaker, and also have made films. What do you find interesting about these mediums?

LR Since the time I was really young, and to be honest it’s taken me a long time to figure this out, there were always three things that interested me: language, images, and music. I never really let go of any of those things, so they all kind of stayed in the mix in terms of what I do. Song lyrics, poems, and essays help me to explore language. I’m a printmaker, draftsman, painter, and filmmaker to satisfy my interest in image-making. I play guitar and perform because I love making music.

BL How did the Lost Highway drawings come about?

LR I was studying printmaking with Linda Sokolowski, a real master printer, at Binghamton. At one point we were learning the process of color printmaking and I needed to come up with imagery. A couple of months earlier I’d taken a road trip with a good buddy of mine and we drove down to Florida in a van that I had at the time. It was a late-’70s hippie road trip, you know, two-guysin-a-van-dropping-acid-in-the-Keys kind of trip. I started sketching in the car when we were driving and I made this drawing in Georgia called Route 95 Georgia. That ended up becoming the study drawing for this three-color print.

Later, when I was on tour, I got a bit tired of writing journals so I started sketching more and it just led to this explosion of drawings. I drew all the time when I traveled and I started thinking about them in a diaristic way. I was in Europe, Texas, Iowa, India, and I was sitting in the front seat of the van drawing what I saw. This really sparked something in me and I became obsessed with this process. I made tons of these Lost Highway drawings in black and white with markers and pencils. I started carrying more and more drawing materials with me on the road. Some of them were sketchier and some of them were more resolved. I really liked this idea of the highway imagery because every musician has a road song. From Hank Williams on forward you’re always hearing about the lost highway.

I was thinking about this idea of the musician’s lot and the road being a poetic image for a musician and for a writer.

BL You’ve also continued to make prints. I particularly like the Black Noise Record prints. How did you come up with the idea to use the record surface as a printing plate?

LR After school, I didn’t have much chance to do printmaking because I was an etcher and you needed all that equipment to make a print. In 2007, Leah and I got invited to go to this small museum outside of Paris called Cneai. They had a great printmaking studio but since I hadn’t done printmaking in a long time, they wanted me to start off

Right: Lee Ranaldo, Lost Highway: 022418 to Tourcoing #3, 2018, colored pencil on paper, 12 × 9 inches (30.5 × 22.8 cm) Artwork © Lee Ranaldo

working on Plexiglas rather than on plates. The first summer we were there I was working a lot with newspaper imagery. Both Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman had died on the same day.

I was ripping a lot of pictures out of papers and making paintings and drawings from them and reproducing the type and the texts. Later I ended up making small scratched Plexiglas plates with images of Bergman and Antonioni.

After doing that I started to think about how vinyl records could serve the same function as Plexiglas so I just transferred to that medium instead. This led to this whole exploration of making prints on vinyl records. I found a bunch of sixteen-inch records that had been distributed to radio stations in the ’50s and ’60s. I also printed using twelve-inch, ten-inch, and those little sixinch records for kids. These are small editions because the vinyl doesn’t hold up for too long as a printing surface.

BL Lee, I hope you don’t mind, but to end this interview I want to talk about some serious personal Sonic Youth nostalgia. In 1986, when I was in high school, my friend Tae Won Yu gave me a tape of Walls Have Ears. I don’t think I’d ever heard sounds like that. The performances were totally raw and the feedback loops and droning are totally hypnotic. I know that was a bootleg—what was the story behind that?

LR In its original incarnation it was a double album. It was a bootleg done by Paul Smith, our label guy in England, who was really responsible for bringing us to a wider public in Europe. At some point in 1985 we arrived in England to tour and Paul proudly showed us the records. He was like, “I

made this bootleg for you.” We were unhappy. We freaked out. We were like, “You didn’t ask us, you didn’t tell us, you didn’t consult us on what’s on it.”

Of course, in the end he was doing it with the best intentions and out of utter love.

One disc has Bob Bert on drums and one disc has Steve Shelley on drums, so it spans that divide in the band. At that time, we still felt like gorillas in a room. We were still very anarchistic. Everywhere we went outside of New York, people were just flabbergasted by our performances—they didn’t know anything like this existed. There was a brief period, and Walls Have Ears documents it, where we knew we were the most radical thing that people had ever seen. It was kind of amazing to us because people were freaking out at what we were doing. We were surprised because to us it was like that New York noise thing that we were all involved with. It was all no big deal. Everybody was experimenting, everybody was doing weirdo shit. You had the old guard like La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Glenn Branca, and a new generation of people like Arto Lindsay and DNA.

Today that bootleg has become such a revered aspect of our catalog that recently we’ve been talking about doing a reissue of it because so many people love it and so few people actually heard the original or saw those shows—I mean we were playing to audiences of seventy-five people on the beach in Brighton, UK. BL That would be amazing. I hope you do rerelease Walls Have Ears, I’m sure that it would be a huge revelation. Everyone should hear those early performances. I know they were life changing for me!

153

STUDIO PEREGALLI Art historian and curator Sergio Risaliti speaks with Roberto Peregalli and Laura Sartori Rimini, the duo behind the interior design firm Studio Peregalli, about their philosophical approach to design, the cinematic quality of their rooms, and the publication of their latest monograph, Grand Tour: The Worldly Projects of Studio Peregalli.

156

Previous spread: The dining room, lined with an early nineteenth-century papier peint and featuring a large crystal chandelier in the center, seen from the library.

SERGIO

Your Opposite: architectu­ral and View of the living room with the impluvium, illuminated decorative intervent­ by a skylight, and the i o n s both pose and columns painted in faux cipolin. resolve a series of problems: the relationship between the present, for example, and the past, which you make real again without lapsing into academic reproduction or empty stylistic quotation. I feel as if I were experiencing a perceptual condition like being half asleep, somewhere between dream and waking and belonging to both those dimensions: your houses are inhabited by living people, here and now, but also by parts of the past, or rather of past lives and lost civilizations that today survive only as fragments and ruins.

ROBERTO PEREGALLI AND LAURA SARTORI RIMINI We don’t think the present can exclude the past. It’s a past that is dreamed of, rediscovered through fragments and reinterpretations. Our work is a question not of reproducing but of reinventing—think of it as archaeological, as rediscovering traces of vanished worlds behind the skin of the walls. It’s not just about nostalgia. Looking back, as Rilke said, has a value in some way based on a future to which we don’t yet belong.

SR Your work puts back together the debris that Walter Benjamin writes about in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where he describes a famous watercolor by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus.

RP & LSR That’s exactly what we’re looking for—we’re trying to rediscover a harmony in the contradictions and dissonances of the present.

SR How do you avoid conflict with each other—how do you maintain a dialogue, bring together heterogeneous elements that are also elements of your characters, of your singular sensibilities? The results are a perfect harmony of perhaps quite different ideas, tastes, and preferences, just as your predispositions and personal talents are different.

RP & LSR We do have different departure points, different approaches to life and to work, but it’s these differences that have allowed us a fertile dialogue over all these years of working together (twenty-six now!).

There are conflicts sometimes but it’s always positive in the end, because we have shared goals: a love of beauty, a sense of the power of details, an attention to the nuances of time.

SR How do you develop a project? How do you relate to the client? Do you need carte blanche? Do you construct the work step by step with the client, or do you prefer to surprise them, to catch them off-guard?

RP & LSR After the site itself, the client is the most important element in a project. Carte blanche does not exist, because you always have to establish a dialogue with the people you’re working for, and it’s important that they be happy with the result as well as that we are. We make a journey with the client.

There can be moments of being caught off-guard, moments of surprise, but these later get put back together so as to end up with a shared outcome at the journey’s end.

SR According to Walter Pater and then Edmond de Goncourt, a house is an expansion of the body of the person who lives in it, in the same way that the body in turn is a projection, an expansion, of the soul.

RISALITI

Robert de Montesquiou used to compare the house one lives in to a state of mind. Do you agree with the ideas of these great literary figures?

RP & LSR In the end, a house, if successful, certainly reflects the soul of its inhabitant. Heidegger said that to dwell is to take care of the world. For us, discovering and accommodating the soul of both house and client is obligatory. Our houses aim not to be “period rooms” but containers where a place’s previous life and the people who now live there merge.

SR Your new Rizzoli book, Grand Tour, covers various locations: you start in Milan, move on to Tangier and Tel Aviv, then pass the Strait of Gibraltar to New York. It’s a journey in space and time, encountering not only different civilizations, languages, and customs but different materials, techniques, and tools.

RP & LSR That’s what we’re trying to do in the book— to show the beauty of the ties and resonances that every place and every civilization has, and at the same time to respect them and let them be experienced. In a world where everything is assimilated and aesthetic differences are often smoothed over, we try to revive those differences and understand what they can give us.

SR You are in harmony with the great civilizations of the distant past, the recent past, and the present, and you keep alive earlier generations, belying the sacred scripture that tells us “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

OUR WORK ISN’T SO MUCH AN ECLECTICISM LIKE THAT OF THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, BUT MORE A LEAP INTO A TIME PAST, REVISITED, AS YOU SAY, AS IF IN A DREAM.

RP & LSR

Dialogue with the past makes it possible to create a bridge toward the future.

SR In New York you designed a new home for two extra­o r­d i­n ary artists, John Currin and Rachel Fein­ stein—two artists distinguished by their refined interpretations of the history of art and taste, which they treat with irony and countless subtleties.

RP & LSR That was a stimulating project. Their house dated from the early 1900s; it had been reworked a good deal, but still preserved an aura.

John and Rachel have very strong personalities, and at the same time, being artists, they know how to listen. To go on a journey with them allowed us to reconsider the importance of art in our lives. We wanted their work to stand in dialogue with ours: the idea that art has to have a context that resembles it seems reductive to us. A strong work can exist perfectly well in an environment that has its own autonomy.

SR In the book, Currin says that irony assuages both nostalgia for the past and disgust for the present. Do you see yourself in this statement, which seems to suggest someone who detests mediocrity and admires the sublime, which he perceives in feelings and ideas that were part of great art in the past?

RP & LSR Yes, in a way. But even as Currin makes this provocative statement, he repudiates it through his work. All his work as an artist is both a search for a dream tied to the past and a critique of the present.

In this sense our own path, while different from his, has strong similarities to it.

SR Another significant passage that helps us to understand your work is the one in which Currin and Feinstein sing the praises of Italian craftsmanship: only in Italy, they say, can they satisfy their desire for perfection. What they find there is not superficial reproduction but ancient knowledge, inherited quality.

RP & LSR We appreciate this compliment, because it’s true that our projects would remain unrealized dreams if it weren’t for the team of craftspeople we work with.

SR Leafing through the book, with an excellent layout by Luca Stoppini, it’s as if we were looking at a film, a cinematic series of images passing before our eyes. The book is more than a document of a body of work that explores the feelings and emotions woven into places, spaces, ways of being and loving; it’s like a film with framed highlights, bringing to mind Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist [1970], Luchino Visconti’s Senso [1954], and Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi Continis [1970]. Your methodology recalls the various disciplines of architecture, philosophy, interior design, restoration, lighting—the lighting design in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon [1975], for example. In your spaces, in other words, dream is reality and reality is the projection of a dream.

RP & LSR The comparison with cinema is right, because our houses are like series of images, room following room in a perspectival enfilade that should be read in its totality. Every detail, from the furnishings to the texture of the walls in sunlight, contributes to this harmony. Like a film director, we have to manage different groups of people who must coexist over a timespan sometimes even longer than that of a film.

157

Below: The living room, its door open on the enfilade of rooms, lined in a faux damask hand-painted canvas and with ceiling moldings and bas-relief doors in ivory and gold.

Photos: Roberto Peregalli

Your works layer not only times and civilizations but feelings and perceptions. Every detail, every color and form, germinates new faculties by which the individual, in a vague yet sure way (as when halfasleep), perceives things that exceed the actual capabilities that are intended and felt. This seems to me to imply an incredible expansion of time, an expansion of the emotional and cognitive life of the inhabitant, experiencing thousands of suggestions and perceptions, subtleties and fantasies, memories and reminiscences. Your interiors allow a possibility of being removed from the superficial, dehumanizing haste of contemporary life.

RP & LSR Time, patience, patina, care, detail, feeling— these are important words for us, as are the stratifications that a place ends up having. Its soul is precisely what is revived in the people who inhabit it. Our work isn’t so much an eclecticism like that of the late nineteenth century, but more a leap into a time past, revisited, as you say, as if in a dream. For us our work has a quality of rupture, constituting a new way of reflecting on the present and at the same time interpreting signs of the future.

SR

CARE, DETAIL, FEELING— THESE ARE IMPORTANT WORDS FOR US, 158

AS ARE THE STRATIFICATIONS THAT A PLACE ENDS UP HAVING.

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Installation view of Robert Therrien's No title (table and six chairs), 2003, part of the exhibition ON BOARD THE SHIPS AT SEA ARE WE at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2019. Photography by Steven Probert.

9th Floor

ON BOARD THE SHIPS AT SEA ARE WE 545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor New York, NY 10001 Wednesday - Saturday, 11AM - 5PM July & August: Tuesday -Friday, 11AM-5PM Free Admission www.flagartfoundation.org

Robert Therrien, Lawrence Weiner, Rachel Whiteread February 23 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 16, 2019

Jenny Saville. Thread, 2017 – 2018. Charcoal on raw linen, 90 1/2 x 112 5/8 x 2 inches (229.9 x 286.1 x 5.1 cm) © Jenny Saville. Photo: Mike Bruce. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.

10th Floor

Drawn Together Again Featuring 121 artists, this survey of contemporary drawing times with the release of The FLAG Art Foundation's 10th Anniversary Catalogue and is inspired by one of its

545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor

earliest exhibitions in 2008, Drawn Together.

Wednesday - Saturday, 11AM - 5PM

February 23 – May 18, 2019

www.flagartfoundation.org

New York, NY 10001 Free Admission

Douglas Gordon, Psycho Hitchhiker, 1993, black and white photograph © Douglas Gordon/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2019

Hey Psycho!

Douglas Gordon Florian Süssmayr _________ ARSENALE INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION Castello 1430/A Riva dei Sette Martiri 30122 Venice Italy (at Forgia Marinarezza, between the Arsenale and the Giardini) May 9 to November 24, 2019 opening May 8, 5:30 pm open by appointment www.arsenale.com frontdesk@arsenale.com presented by Wolfgang Scheppe & Mark Francis

Thomas Houseago Courtyard Installation Summer Exhibition 2019 at the Royal Academy of Arts, London 10 June â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 12 August royalacademy.org.uk Sponsored by

Piccadilly London W1

Serpent, 2008 — Tuf-cal, chanvre, barre de fer, Oilbar, mine de plomb, bois. 244 × 155 × 120 cm Collection Baron Guillaume Kervyn de Volkaersbeke © Thomas Houseago. Photo : Fredrik Nilsen Studio. © Adagp, Paris, 2019

Photo by Patrick Crawford/Blackletter

Lunch Monday–Saturday 12–3pm Dinner Monday–Saturday 6–11pm 976 Madison Avenue, New York T. 212 906 7141 reservation@kappomasanyc.com

SIR JOHN PATRICK RICHARDSON 1924–2019 Text by Michael Cary John Richardson’s portrait was painted by some of the greatest artists of his time, artists such as Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, and Jenny Saville, who also happened to be personal friends.

Meanwhile John’s own portrait of another friend, his multivolume biography of Pablo Picasso, redefined the art of that literary form. Awe, profound respect, and genuine love led John to write A Life of Picasso. Its arrival in the 1990s was something like the moment when a black-and-white Kansan Dorothy opens the door to a glorious Technicolor landscape in The Wizard of Oz. There had been earlier Picasso biographies, by Roland Penrose (1958), Pierre Cabanne (1975), and Pierre Daix (1986), but the granular detail in John’s account had a depth and richness of texture that truly altered how we see what we thought we already knew—the ubiquitous, iconic work of the most famous artist of the twentieth century. John’s book will remain a monumental achievement in every sense.

John first became aware of Picasso’s work in 1937, as a thirteen-year-old schoolboy at Stowe, a boarding school in Buckinghamshire, England, where his art teachers gave him access to the current French art journals Verve and Minotaure. Soon after, he begged his mother for the £50 needed to buy Picasso’s greatest etching, Minotauromachie (1935), from Zwemmer’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road. She refused and berated Mr. Zwemmer for trying to swindle little boys. (A Minotauromachie sold for $2.6 million at auction in 2016.)

Minotauromachie is a densely complex work, full of narrative drama, allusion to ancient myth, and hints of catastrophe brewing in Picasso’s personal life. It ignited a passion in young John to grasp the meaning in Picasso’s imagery, to decode his syntax, to acquire a piece of his magic. John was hooked, and at seventeen he enrolled at London’s Slade School of Fine Art to study painting. World War II brought the necessity of serving in the Irish Guards, but John was dismissed from service after contracting rheumatic fever. He spent the rest of the war as an air raid warden and fireman, watching the night skies over Hyde Park when he wasn’t carousing in wartime London’s subterranean bars with Freud, who would become a lifelong friend.

After the war, John met Francis Bacon and, fatefully, the collector and critic Douglas Cooper.

In 1949, he and Cooper began a love affair that brought John to Picasso’s Paris studio for the first time. Cooper had amassed one of the greatest private collections of Cubism and had befriended Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Fernand Léger. The friendships deepened when Cooper and John settled in the South of France for much of the 1950s, restoring the Château de Castille, near Uzès, visiting Picasso in Vallauris and Cannes, and attending bullfights with Jean Cocteau. John became especially close to the new woman in Picasso’s life, Jacqueline Roque, for they were about the same age. When his relationship with Cooper began to sour, both Jacqueline and Picasso implored the couple to stay together. On 174

a trip to New York, John had tasted a bit of freedom and wide-open American independence. He knew he no longer wanted to live with Cooper in France, but returned especially to visit Picasso: he was planning to write a study of Picasso’s portraits and spent hours with the artist poring over reproductions of his works. As Picasso spoke about the complexities of his pictorial thinking—pointing out, for example, that a portrait of Dora Maar might also contain elements of her romantic predecessor Marie-Thérèse Walter and her successor Françoise Gilot—John began to believe that a detailed biographical treatment of Picasso’s portraiture could be both fascinating and necessary to close a gap in Picasso scholarship. Decades later he would sit down in earnest to write it.

John left his life with Cooper at the end of 1960 and settled permanently in New York. His wit, intelligence, dashing good looks, and stories of

Sir John Richardson, 2007. Photo: © David Bailey

the luminaries of the School of Paris made him equally welcome in the dining rooms of Park Avenue and the artists’ bars in the Village. A couple of years after his arrival, John used his clout to organize an exhibition celebrating Picasso across nine commercial galleries simultaneously. He opened the New York branch of Christie’s auction house, decamped to work for M. Knoedler & Co., then became the managing director of the innovative art-investment fund Artemis. Finally, after twenty years in the business, he put dealing aside to focus on writing full-time and, in collaboration with his research partner, Marilyn McCully, began work on what would become A Life of Picasso. The first volume was published in 1991, and won the Whitbread Prize. The second, dedicated to Picasso’s Cubist years, followed in 1995. John often contributed articles to The New York Review of Books, The Burlington Magazine, and Vanity Fair—characteristically high and low, uptown and downtown. He published a memoir that recounted his life with

Cooper, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in 1999, and volume 3 of the Picasso biography, covering the years 1917 to 1932, was published in 2007.

At the age of eighty-four, John began to collaborate on an exhibition with Picasso’s grandson Bernard, reaching out and securing the participation of Picasso’s son Claude, daughters Paloma and Maya, and granddaughter Diana to mount Picasso Mosqueteros at Gagosian in 2009. The exhibition celebrated Picasso’s extraordinary last years and helped to change the critical conversation surrounding the vitality of his late work. It also allowed John to embark on his own great late phase—as a curator—and Gagosian was, very gratefully, the beneficiary of his enormous talent and generosity. His unparalleled knowledge of Picasso’s art allowed him to create, over the next decade, a series of six exhibitions unlike any others.

John detested minimalism in any form and the “white box” of galleries and museums especially.

He imagined works of art as residing in inhabited rooms—as lived-with among other art (and furniture, lamps, objets, potted plants, pets, etc.)—so he always sought to disrupt the commercial space of the gallery. He worked with architects, graphic designers, and even a Broadway stage designer to achieve his vision of an exhibition, and the initial conversations would often end with wide eyes and gulps all around. John set up some pretty daring problems to solve—like choosing an ostensibly insane color for the walls, or wanting an installation to feel like being caught in a labyrinth or trapped in the center of a bullring with the bull staring you down. Because he knew and understood the drama in Picasso’s life and work so intimately, he could create installations that revealed or enhanced that drama in unforeseen ways. He relished the nuts-and-bolts physicality of working on exhibitions, and was proud of his knack for hanging pictures in a way that was dramatic yet at the same time unfussy and unprecious. It was a unique sensibility, born from John’s experiences of art in seemingly incongruous situations; the radical Cubist paintings he lived with in the crumbling eighteenth-century château he shared with Cooper, the unpretentious coziness of the private apartments in his friend’s stately country homes, the total chaos of Picasso’s valuable work lying around every which way in the artist’s Cannes villa, La Californie. For John, art in a sterile environment was what was incongruous.

When I began to work with John, here at Gagosian in 2009, he often joked about his advanced age but insisted he just wanted to live to see 2017: his grandfather had been born in 1817, and he liked the easy accounting of two generations spanning two centuries. He was still at work finishing the fourth installment of A Life of Picasso when he died peacefully at home, on March 12, 2019, at the age of ninety-five. A life well lived is the best revenge, and the life of an artist well told, and with singular passion, is a lasting gift to us all. John opened our eyes, challenged us, and taught us. For everyone at Gagosian, it has been the privilege of a lifetime to work with him, and he will be dearly missed.

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